CHAPTER 4
I am under Providence made the instrument of a new test which is for the first time to be applied to our institutions.
—JOHN TYLER
Tyler ~ Fillmore ~ Pierce ~ Van Buren ~ Lincoln
Vice President John Tyler was at home in Virginia, on his knees playing marbles with his young sons, when two messengers arrived at his door. President William Henry Harrison had died, thirty-one days after assuming office. Tyler hastily prepared himself and his family and by 5:30 that evening was on his way to Washington, departing on a train from Richmond reserved specially for that purpose. In the predawn hours of April 6, 1841, he took the oath of office at Brown’s Indian Queen.
Harrison was the first president to die at his post; seven others would join him over time. The swift and unquestioned transfer of power and continuity of government are now taken for granted. It is much to the credit of John Tyler, the first to confront this problem. The Constitution, as originally written, provides that “In case of removal of the President from office, or of his death, resignation, or inability to discharge the powers and duties of said office, the same shall devolve on the Vice President.” At a minimum, there is ambiguity as to the title, if not the responsibilities of the office. Was Tyler “President,” “Acting President,” still “Vice President?” Some would even argue that a special election was required to complete Harrison’s term.
In the hours after his swearing in, Tyler called a meeting of the cabinet. Daniel Webster, the prominent former senator and now secretary of state, argued that Harrison had intended to govern through his department heads, submitting questions for consensus approval, with the president serving as but one vote among the group. “I beg your pardon, gentlemen,” Tyler responded. “I am very glad to have in my cabinet such able statesmen as you have proved yourselves to be. And I shall be pleased to avail myself of your counsel and advice. But I can never consent to being dictated to as to what I shall or shall not do. I, as President, shall be responsible for my administration. I hope to have your hearty co-operations in carrying out its measures. So long as you see fit to do this, I shall be glad to have you with me. When you think otherwise, your resignations will be accepted.”
Having moved to consolidate his position in Washington, Tyler published an address to the nation on April 9. Congressional recognition of him as president was soon to follow, despite a spirited fight from former president John Quincy Adams.
President John Tyler’s next challenge came from an unexpected quarter: Henry Clay, with whom he had worked so closely on the Compromise Tariff, whom he had stood behind through the Bank Wars, and whose presidential hopes at the 1839 Whig Convention he had so strongly supported. Tyler’s very presence on the Harrison ticket, after all, was in part a consolation to the defeated Clay faction. For Clay, who had already accomplished more than most American presidents, all feelings were subservient to his desire for the nation’s highest office. Tyler was now the tenth president, and at age fifty-one, the youngest, replacing Harrison, sixty-eight, the oldest.* Only three of Tyler’s predecessors had not won re-election. None had been denied re-nomination by their own party. Harrison had pledged in his inaugural to serve but one term, and now Tyler was very much in Clay’s way. No previous feelings of comity could compensate for that.
* Harrison would hold this record until Ronald Reagan’s inauguration in 1981.
Despite their familiarity, Clay badly misjudged his opponent, whose tenure he thought “will be in the nature of a regency.” Congress, which usually convened in the December following the presidential inauguration, would gather on May 31, in response to a call by President Harrison. Taking office suddenly and under unprecedented conditions, Tyler would now have to deal with Congress far earlier than most of his predecessors.
With Van Buren gone and financial affairs in disarray, many Whigs wanted to move forward in creating a new national bank. Their new president, however, had come to the Whigs over states’ rights and in response to Jackson’s executive overreaches. He did not then and had never in the past favored a national bank. But Tyler was not eager for a frontal assault on his party’s cherished objective. And while he believed many aspects of a national bank unconstitutional, he could support the idea of a bank in the District of Columbia, chartered pursuant to Congress’s general legislative power over the capital, empowered to set up branches in states that agreed. The Whigs in Congress were similarly disinclined to take on their new president. But Clay, its most powerful member, was determined to force the issue.
A week before the opening of the special session, Clay went to see the president. Tyler asked that the issue be continued until December, with the regular meeting of Congress. Tempers and voices were raised and Clay would not yield. “Then, sir,” the president said, “I wish you to understand this—that you and I were born in the same district [Virginia]; that we have fed upon the same food, and have breathed the same natal air. Go you now, then, Mr. Clay, to your end of the avenue, where stands the Capitol, and there perform your duty to the country as you shall think proper. So help me God, I shall do mine at this end of it as I shall think proper.”
Clay proceeded to push a bill that he knew the president would not accept. According to one biographer, Clay “almost single-handedly shattered his own party by his obsessive desire to fashion a third national bank.” And before long Tyler would find a bill to re-charter the national bank on his desk.
Daniel Webster recalled that every member of the cabinet “earnestly recommended” Tyler sign it into law. But on August 16, the president issued his veto. The Whigs were deflated. “Egad,” said one Democrat, “he has found one of old Jackson’s pens.”
Tyler was serenaded by a mob outside the White House, banging drums and blowing trumpets while firing blunderbusses, shouting “Huzza for Clay!” “A Bank! A Bank! Down with the Veto!” Through windows the president watched himself burned in effigy.
But the break was not permanent. A delegation of Whigs visited the White House in search of a compromise. Tyler was glad to receive them and explained the kind of bank he could approve, dropping all of his objections, except for the power of banks to discount notes* without state concurrence. But Tyler, motivated by presidential concerns of his own, began to reconsider the plan that he had agreed to. Perhaps his fortunes lay not with the Whigs, but with the Democrats.
* “Discounting notes” is the process by which central banks loan money to local banks at favorable, or discounted, rates. In effect, it gives the central bank the power to control the money supply and thus to dictate monetary policy.
Less than a month later, Tyler would veto a second bill to incorporate a national bank. Two days later, the White House was a funereal scene. Letter after letter arrived from the cabinet, the first at 12:30 p.m., the last at 5:30, announcing their resignations. All but Webster had signaled their intentions. Later in the day he came in person to the White House.
“Where am I to go, Mr. President?” Webster asked.
“You must decide that for yourself, Mr. Webster.”
“If you leave it to me, Mr. President, I will stay where I am.” Webster had vied with Clay for leadership of the Whigs and shared his overwhelming desire to be president. Rather than return to the Congress where Clay was ascendant, the less distasteful option was to stay where he was.
Rising and extending his arm, the president said, “Give me your hand on that, and now I will say to you that Henry Clay is a doomed man.” Tyler moved quickly to fill his cabinet, choosing Whigs who had fallen out with Jackson for the same reasons as himself.
On September 13, 1841, fifty Whig members of Congress stood on Capitol Square and formally kicked Tyler out of the Whig Party. Their published address “created a great sensation throughout the country,” Fillmore wrote. “I have heard of but two Tyler men in this city . . . I need not add that both of these are applicants for office.”
Six months into his presidency, Tyler may be fairly said to have had as little party support as anyone in his position. Tyler’s son, who served as his father’s personal secretary, attempted to arrange train travel for the president.* The railroad superintendent, a strong Whig, refused, saying that he was not presently running any special cars for presidents. “Did you not furnish a special train for the funeral of General Harrison?” Tyler asked. “Yes,” said the superintendent, “and if you will only bring your father here in that shape you shall have the best train on the road.”
* This story comes to us from President Abraham Lincoln, who repeated it to memorable effect while planning his first train trip in office.
In February, Franklin Pierce resigned from the Senate, pledged to give up alcohol, and returned to New Hampshire and his family. Jane—who hated politics, despised Washington, and regretted prolonged absences from her husband—would finally get her wish. As a thirty-seven-year-old senator embarked on an unlikely retirement, a sixty-year-old former president was energetically resisting the same.
On June 16, 1842, Martin Van Buren was on a western campaign tour, building support for another presidential bid, when muddy roads stranded him for the night in Rochester, Illinois. Despite the setback, Democrats were determined to show their guest a good time. This meant inviting a humorous and interesting dinner guest of the opposite party, a state legislator and lawyer named Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln did not disappoint, with “a constant supply” of entertaining stories, “each more irresistible than its predecessor.” Van Buren had many stories of his own, of old New York politics in the days of Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, and from his tumultuous life in government. The group stayed together until after midnight. Van Buren admitted that his sides were sore from laughter for days afterward. Upon parting, Van Buren promised that he would never forget that night. (Nearly twenty years later, at a critical moment for Lincoln and the country, he would prove that he never did.) Lincoln—who from his impoverished childhood “was just awful hungry to be somebody,” and was dubbed by his law partner “the most ambitious man in the world”—was no doubt affected by his first meeting with a president. Lincoln had more than kept up with his distinguished visitor, and could not have helped but come away from that experience believing his grand ambitions were not so unrealistic after all.
Meanwhile in Washington, a familiar fight over the tariff was about to heat up. Fillmore ran for Speaker of the House, losing in the Whig Caucus to John White of Tennessee. As the runner-up, by tradition, Fillmore was appointed chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee. In this capacity Fillmore had several successes, requiring departments to reconcile their estimated spending with congressional authorizations to stay within their budgets, a practice continued to the present day. As he had in the New York legislature, he backed a successful bankruptcy bill. Fillmore was also critical in securing a $30,000 appropriation for Samuel Morse to lay the first telegraph line from Washington to Baltimore, a feat that proved the feasibility of this revolutionary new technology. But his greatest task would be reducing the runaway budget deficit. Fillmore had authored two tariff bills that were vetoed by Tyler over the issue of sharing the proceeds of public land sales with the states. Under Fillmore’s third proposal, the revenue sharing was dropped, the average tariff would be 30 percent, higher for products that competed directly with American-made goods, and preferential tax treatment would be given to the cargo of American versus foreign ships. Arguing for his plan, Fillmore was a “plain, matter of fact debater,” aiming at logic but not emotion, in the words of one reporter. On August 30, 1842, President Tyler signed Fillmore’s tariff. By January 1, Fillmore was able to report the deficit had become a surplus of five million dollars. Satisfied with this and other important victories, Fillmore resolved to leave the field to others, writing his “utmost ambition has been satisfied . . . I aspire to nothing more, and shall retire from the exciting scenes of politics strife to the quiet enjoyments of my own family and fireside.”
As Fillmore headed for home, President Tyler confronted a crisis that set an important precedent for his successors. The state of Rhode Island was still using the constitution designed by King Charles II in 1663, one that severely restricted voting rights. A convention of the disaffected met and declared themselves the lawful representatives of the state. Fearful of the upstarts, the ironically named Governor Samuel King wrote President Tyler for help. Tyler responded “however painful the duty, I have to assure your excellency that, if resistance is made to the execution of the laws of Rhode Island by such force as the civil posse shall be unable to overcome, it will be the duty of this government to enforce the constitutional guaranty.” At the same time, Tyler advised the governor to call a convention to address these matters and to pardon the leaders of the convention. Tyler sent the secretary of war to Rhode Island when he became aware that the convention was armed and planning an overthrow. In that event, he was to call out the Massachusetts and Connecticut militia to defend the state government. The breakaway faction backed down, and a convention was called by the state that met and amended the constitution to increase voting rights.
John Tyler, as other presidents dealing with a difficult Congress, would turn his attention to foreign policy, where he could act decisively. His efforts led to the first trade treaty with China and the settlement of a number of disputes with Great Britain. But his foreign policy focus would not be overseas. The Republic of Texas, largely populated by American emigrants, had effectively won its independence from Mexico in 1836. Talk of annexation was immediate on both sides of the Sabine River. On the last day of his presidency, Jackson sent a diplomat to the Republic, giving them official recognition. Van Buren had struggled with the complexities of the issue; northern states were concerned about new slave territory, while Mexico, who refused to acknowledge that Texas was independent, threatened war. For Tyler, not only was union with Texas the right thing to do, but it captured the American imagination, and just might propel him to another term as president. In December 1843, Tyler’s message to Congress reviewed annexation’s advantages. Privately he enlisted Andrew Jackson to lobby Texas president Sam Houston, a protégé of the former president, who had been burned by Van Buren’s snubbing of Texas’s overtures. Webster, who opposed the addition of Texas, left the cabinet—a decision that preserved whatever chance he retained to be president and may have saved his life.
As Tyler moved to acquire Texas, the man dubbed “the Accidental President” was about to see his personal and political fortunes upended by another twist of fate. On February 28, 1844, the leading men and women of Washington boarded the USS Princeton to watch the firing of what was billed the most powerful cannon in the world. As Tyler headed to watch the display from the deck, he was detained below by a woman who wished to give him a toast, causing him to miss the demonstration. It did not go as planned. The gun exploded, killing the secretary of state, secretary of the navy, and six others, injuring many more. Congressman John Hardin, who had defeated his fellow Whig Abraham Lincoln the year before, remembered “the ghostly countenances of the dead, the shattered limbs, the gashes in the wounded and the mournful moaning” that “can neither be described or imagined.” Julia Gardiner, a young heiress from New York, had been traveling with her family, first throughout Europe, then to Washington, for a fateful appointment aboard the Princeton. Hearing of her father’s death, she collapsed in the arms of John Tyler.
Tyler replaced the cabinet vacancies with Democrats, a clear signal that he hoped to be their nominee in 1844. His new secretary of state, John C. Calhoun, was determined to acquire Texas for the United States, and would ultimately devise a successful strategy when all appeared lost. Tyler had brought the question to the fore. The opinions of all presidential aspirants were sought. Clay believed that annexation meant war with Mexico, maybe even war backed by a European power. Van Buren penned a thoughtful, nuanced letter, explaining his opposition to immediate annexation. In so doing he took a major detour from the royal road he had been traversing back to the presidency. Clay and Van Buren had put themselves on the wrong side of popular opinion in an ambitious young country.
April was a month of courtship, personal and political, for John Tyler. Calhoun quickly concluded negotiations with Texas, and on April 22 a treaty of annexation was sent to the Senate. There it was defeated, by the lopsided margin of 16–35. With more success, Tyler, who had been widowed eighteen months earlier, asked Julia Gardiner’s mother for her daughter’s hand in marriage. That June, Tyler would become the first president to wed while in office. Tyler, fifty-four, and Julia, twenty-four, went on a month-long honeymoon in July.
Tyler knew that his best chance to retain the presidency lay as the nominee of a major political party. The Whig bridge had been burned. The Democratic Party seemed a real possibility. But he would have to find his way around Martin Van Buren. As the election year dawned, twelve state party conventions had endorsed Van Buren, while four of the remaining six did not commit to any candidate. Through a mutual friend, Tyler offered his opponent a seat on the Supreme Court, an appointment rejected by Van Buren. But being the front-runner for the Democratic nomination was a mixed blessing, both for Van Buren and those who followed. The difficulty stemmed from the “2/3 Rule” of the Democratic Party, requiring a supermajority for nomination, perhaps the most consequential rule in American history to be so little remembered. On the first ballot at the May convention, Van Buren won roughly 55 percent of the vote, 146 out of 266 delegates. Though the clear preference of a strong majority of Democrats, he was forced to withdraw after nine ballots. It appears he would have easily achieved the nomination but for his position on Texas. The 2/3 Rule produced the first “dark horse” nominee for president, James K. Polk of Tennessee, the former Speaker of the House, protégé of Jackson, and a strong supporter of Texas annexation.
Unable to force Van Buren from the field, Tyler chose not to participate in the convention, realizing that losing there meant he would be bound to support the nominee. In May, an independent “Tyler Convention” met in Baltimore and nominated him for another term. In accepting their endorsement, he wrote “I do not feel myself at liberty to decline the nomination tendered me under such circumstances. There is much in the present condition of the country which would forbid my doing so.” Throughout the summer pressure built for Tyler to retire from the general election. There were growing fears that he would split the pro-Texas vote and allow Henry Clay to win the presidency. Jackson wrote, “Mr. Tyler’s withdrawal at once would unite all the Democrats into one family without distinction. This would render our victory easy and certain.” Eventually, reluctantly, Tyler came to realize this as well, and withdrew. Clay and others had achieved their wish of making him a one-term president, but at their own expense. Tyler—with just a few months left in office—would return to the Texas question with all of his might, armed with a creative solution from Calhoun. In his final address to Congress, he proposed a bill to bring Texas into the Union as a state, requiring a simple majority, rather than relying on a formal treaty such as the one the Senate had rejected. As his presidency drew to a close, Tyler proudly put his signature to the bill admitting Texas to the Union. All that remained to achieve was for Texas to give her consent.
Julia Tyler’s time as first lady was both short and energetic.* Jackson and Van Buren had been widowers, while Tyler’s first wife Letitia had been sick for much of his presidency. In these cases the duties of first lady had devolved to others. Now for the first time in many years the president’s wife fulfilled the role. Opening the White House for one final gala, the Tylers found many callers, prompting the first lady to tell her husband that he could no longer be called “a President without a party.” Addressing his guests, Tyler said, “when called from the plow by an act of Divine Providence, to assume the high and responsible duties which devolved upon him, he knew he was leaving a bed of down to repose upon a bed of thorns—and was happy that he was about to return from this bed of thorns to one of down.” People’s eyes were filled with tears. Julia remembered, “His voice was more musical than ever; it rose, and fell, and trembled, and rose again.”
* At Julia Tyler’s request, “Hail to the Chief” was first played for a president on official occasions.
Tyler’s “bed of down” could be found on the James River in Charles City County, thirty-five miles from Richmond, an estate he had bought during his presidency. Tyler named it Sherwood Forest, after the wooded residence of Robin Hood, a facetious nod to his outlaw status after his expulsion from the Whigs. Julia Tyler witnessed her new Virginia home “with a feeling of pleasurable excitement and agreeable surprise. The house had been opened by their slaves, and everything appeared neat and beautiful.” The twelve-hundred-acre plantation was maintained by sixty to ninety slaves living in twenty cabins on the property. Furniture was coming from the White House by ship, to be joined by furnishings from her home state of New York, including “rugs, a chandelier, French mirrors,” and an assortment of other necessities.
Tyler’s public life seemingly behind him. “Everything he desired in the future was to have his motives and actions properly vindicated,” his son remembered. But his legacy would haunt him even in his secluded retirement, as “Nearly every neighbor, and most of his countrymen were Whigs and followers of Clay, and who had learned to hate Tyler as a traitor, a renegade, and everything that was esteemed bad in their party creed.” Neighbors refused to visit him, a courtesy due even a stranger. One day the clerk of the court interrupted the isolation at Sherwood Forest to announce that Tyler’s neighbors had voted him overseer of roads. Even the newspapers noted that it had been done to insult Tyler, who would have to pay a fine if he declined, which they fully expected him to do. Instead, the former president expressed his honor at this favor, and promised to fulfill his duty as faithfully as he had all of his other offices.
His son noted, “Mr. Tyler commenced his duties with the same faithful purpose as had ever characterized him. The road being very undulating, he resolved to cut down the hills, fill up the ravines, and make it an example to the state. He summoned to all the hands in the township. Day by day he applied himself to his work, the law of Virginia specifying no limited time for working on the roads.” His one power to meet his responsibilities was the ability to requisition his neighbors’ slaves at his discretion. “The effect of his diligence was seen, not only on the road, but in the mournful silence that prevailed on the various plantations, which were chiefly owned by the Whigs.” When the harvest was ready to be picked, “The hands were all upon the road. The smiles that lately illuminated the countenances of the Whigs turned to dismay.” Finally, Tyler’s neighbors graced him with their presence at Sherwood Forest, commending his work and asking him to let someone else have a chance. Tyler declined, citing a solemn obligation to continue his duty.
And so it was John Tyler—as he had time and again before—who had the last laugh at the expense of his antagonists.