Don’t you wish sometimes that we could have sound effects for use in real-life? Like when you throw something out of sight, wouldn’t it be nice to hear a cat yelp in indignation? Or a muted scream?
Right now, I would love to hear the sound of a record screeching to stop mid-song, complete with awkward silence afterwards. The reason that I could totally use this sound effect is due to my rather abrupt change of tactics when dealing with John Tyler. Here’s what happened…I was excited to discover a genuine, grown-up-sized John Tyler bio at my local library. It was called John Tyler: The Accidental President written by Edward Crapol and seemed a perfect fit for my exacting tastes. But I didn’t get one chapter into the book when I realized that this would never do—this book was only about John Tyler’s presidency and nothing else. Now you know how much I hate that. I want to read books about the lives of the presidents, not strictly their presidential years. (Not to mention, The Accidental President was written like a PhD dissertation so it wasn’t exactly light reading material. Besides you could just tell that Crapol really liked John Tyler, which sent me into a horrible flashback of James Monroe’s biographer.)
Well this demanded action. I wasn’t about to read this book since it didn’t fit the criteria anyway so I got online and found a John Tyler book that was part of the American Presidents Series. Now I have to be honest here—The American Presidents Series, bless its heart—is slowly becoming My Best Friend Ever. I’ve noticed a trend with these books—as succinctly as possible, they write about the presidents’ lives, including all the pertinent information and leaving out everything else. I have to say that I’m loving the stuff that they put out. For some obscure reason though my library doesn’t have their John Tyler book, which means (grrrr!) that I have to head to Amazon once more (sigh) and by it.
So let me introduce you to John Tyler by Gary May (New York: Times Books, 2008).
John Tyler was born to a prominent Virginian family on March 29, 1790 and was one of eight children. He grew up with his sisters and brothers on Greenway Plantation in the midst of the Virginia dynasty of the Presidents of the United States. “For the Tylers, Virginia was paramount. Not only was it the wealthiest, most populous, and most influential colony and then state, its sons led the fight for independence, wrote its most sacred documents, then dominated the new federal government. John Tyler grew up with a collection of heroes unsurpassed in America’s history—Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe; George Wythe, who taught Jefferson the law and signed the Declaration of Independence; Patrick Henry, the revolutionary firebrand, governor of Virginia, and Tyler family friend; Edmund Randolph, George Washington’s attorney general and secretary of state. Four of the nation’s first five presidents and Chief Justice John Marshall were Virginians” (p. 12).
At the ambitious age of 12, John went to William and Mary, where he was noted for being sickly and silent. He excelled in “ancient history, poetry, and the works of William Shakespeare” (p. 13) and eventually graduated in 1807. He proceeded to study law under the famed Edmund Randolph but he was never really excited about that line of work. He felt called to be a politician, like his father, and so in 1811, John ran and was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates.
The War of 1812 soon intervened in John’s life and a number of things happened to him around this time. First of all, his beloved father died of pneumonia. Then on John’s 23rd birthday, he married the girl next door, Letitia Christian of the Cedar Grove plantation. Finally, with the advent of the British in the area, he joined the Charles County Rifles as a captain but never actually saw any action. Through all this he continued to win election after election back into the Virginia House of Delegates. In 1815, though, he was finally elected onto a bigger stage when he became a Virginia congressman to the House of Representatives.
He became known as a fervent states rights man, voting against the Bank of the United States and Henry Clay’s American System. He also was fervidly pro-slavery. “Despite his efforts to mitigate its brutality Tyler, like other slave masters, could not prosper let alone survive without slavery” (p. 23). John ended up resigning from Congress due to a number of reasons: financial (he was broke), familial (he already had 3 small children at home), physical (he was always sickly), and futility (he felt like he wasn’t contributing to the government).
To enhance his economic status, Tyler went back to practicing law but it again did not thrill him. He even got into a fistfight in court with a witness for the other side (p. 27)! And sooner rather than later, he allowed himself to be pulled back into politics by being elected to the Virginia legislature in 1823. By 1825, he was elected governor of Virginia and by 1827, he was back in Washington as a senator. (To finance his way to Washington, Tyler sold an old family slave, “which would mean that Tyler began his Senate career with monies generated by the sale of a human being” (p. 30).)
As a senator, perhaps his greatest achievement was being the only one to vote against Andrew Jackson’s Force Bill. But in this, John Tyler was happy to do it—he couldn’t stand Andrew Jackson. In fact, when Jackson was censured by Congress and then made to expunge the record, Tyler resigned in lofty indignation. “In his formal letter of resignation, Tyler explained that he could not subscribe to such an unconstitutional resolution” (p. 46).
His retirement was again short-lived. In the 1836 election, he was nominated as a vice presidential candidate by the Whig party but lost to Richard Johnson of Kentucky who joined Van Buren on the presidential ticket. By the 1840 election, though, he was back in the game but this time paired with William Henry Harrison, the hero of Tippecanoe. With an Indianan running for president, it made sense to the Whigs to have a Virginian run with him. The campaign for Old Tippecanoe and Tyler Too was an amazing achievement for the fledgling Whig party and William Henry Harrison won by a pretty large amount.
No one could really have foreseen what happened next—one month after the inauguration, William Henry Harrison died; thus creating a political black hole for the United States. At this time in our history, no other president had died and since the Constitution was remarkably mum about the matter, no one really knew what would happen to the vice president. Tyler merely took over all the presidential duties, including the oath of office, and decided that he was, indeed, president of the United States. “By explicitly stating that he had inherited the office, Tyler undercut those who believed that he was only the ‘acting’ president. Although a few legislators raised questions about Tyler’s legitimacy, both the House and the Senate later formerly recognized his lawful right to the office” (p. 63).
So now we have John Tyler inadvertenly becoming the 10th President of the United States by default, while things soon began to spiral downward and out of his control. He had been added to the Whig ticket because of his hatred of Andrew Jackson but at heart he was really a Democrat. Thus, after his accession to the presidency, this partiality soon surfaced and it had the entire Whig party in an uproar. For instance, the Whigs (& previously John Tyler) had bemoaned the fact that Jackson took an almost monarchical pleasure as he vetoed bill after bill. As a reaction, the Whigs proposed a president who was more laissez-faire about the matter, which Tyler had agreed with also. However, as president, Tyler began to veto bills left and right, regardless of whether they were Whig or Democrat. “So frequent and regular were Tyler’s vetoes that this one was called ‘his veto of the month’” (p. 79). The Whigs formally disowned him and hatred for Tyler grew around the country. Threats were made against the President and his family until Tyler begged Congress for some sort of bodyguard.
His problems had only begun though. Soon, Tyler’s wife, Letitia, died, leaving him a single father over 8 children. In 1843, Tyler’s attorney general died suddenly. Then, on board the Princeton, for a celebratory event, one of the canons exploded, killing several members of the President’s coterie, including his secretary of state, Abel Upshur and the father of his future wife.
Not everything was terrible for John Tyler however. He spent most of his energy on foreign policy and was able to conclude a remarkable treaty with England, the Webster-Ashburton Treaty that cleared up some boundary disputes in New England (and kept them from going to war.) Also John met and fell in love with a 22-year old socialite named Julia Gardiner. On June 24, 1844, they wed, even though there was a considerable span of years between them.
Tyler toyed with the idea of running for president in the 1844 election but nobody really liked him. Thus, he threw all his support behind James K Polk, which allowed that gentleman to become the next president. Before Polk was inaugurated, though, Tyler decided to act on behalf of Texas and on March 1st, 3 days before he left office, he signed the annexation of Texas into law. Most people decided that Polk should have had the recognition for annexing Texas (it was through his support that Congress agreed to it) but even as he began his presidency, Tyler would leave on a controversial note.
He and Julia retired to their Virginian estate to farm and to raise the seven children that they would have. John kept abreast of all that happened in the political world and even tried to get back into politics a time or two. He couldn’t have known that the next time he would be elected to anything it would be to the Congress of the Confederate States of America. Initially, Tyler did everything in his power as a former president to avert the civil war that seemed to be looming on the horizon. However, when it was made clear to him that it was war or abolition, he threw his support behind Virginia’s secession from the Union, earning himself the hatred of many thereafter. He died of a “bilious attack, united with bronchitis” (p. 144) on January 18, 1862 while he was in Richmond as a congressman. In the North, he was not mourned.
No comments:
Post a Comment