Contents
TYLER, John
(1790–1862), tenth president of the U.S. (1841–45);
he was the first vice-president to succeed to the office on the
death of a president. Tyler was an independent who refused to compromise
on principles to please political allies.
The son of John Tyler (1747–1813), an American Revolution
patriot who served three terms as governor of Virginia, Tyler was
born in Charles City Co., Va., on March 29, 1790. After completing
his legal studies, he entered politics, devoted to Thomas Jefferson’s
principles of states’ rights and strictly limited power
for the federal government. At the age of 21 he was elected to the
Virginia legislature and in 1816 was chosen for the U.S. House of
Representatives, serving there for four years. After returning to
the state legislature for a brief stint, Tyler followed in his father’s
footsteps, becoming governor of Virginia in 1825. Two years later
he was elected to the U.S. Senate. Although a Democrat, he opposed
his party’s leader, President Andrew Jackson, when Jackson
forced South Carolina to accept a federal tariff in 1832, and he
voted to censure the president for removing deposits from the Bank
of the United States in 1834. Two years later he resigned from the
Senate rather than succumb to party pressure to reverse himself
on the censure. The Whig party, hoping to broaden William Henry
Harrison’s running mate in the presidential election of
1840. Adding to Tyler’s appeal to the Whigs was his known
admiration of Henry Clay, the Whig leader in the Senate.
When the victorious Harrison died a month after his inauguration, and
Tyler succeeded him, Clay assumed that the new president would cooperate
in passing legislation favored by the Whigs. He and the Whig leadership
were therefore infuriated when Tyler vetoed two successive Whig-sponsored
bills that would have allowed a national bank to open branches in
the states without state consent. Because he was the first person
to occupy the presidency without having been elected to the office,
they began to refer to him contemptuously as “His Accidency” and
contended that he was only an acting president. The strong-minded
Tyler, however, insisted that he was president in the full sense
of the word; an attempt to impeach him failed to win the necessary
votes. When the members of his cabinet—most of whom were
Clay supporters—quit their positions, Tyler replaced them
with men of his own choosing. The one holdover was Daniel Webster,
who, as secretary of state, negotiated the Webster-Ashburton Treaty
with Great Britain in 1842, resolving a dispute between the U.S.
and Canada. The most significant domestic measure of Tyler’s
single term was the Preemption Act of 1841, which gave squatters
on government lands the right to buy 160 acres (about 65 ha) at
the minimum auction price, without competitive bidding. He actually had
little to do with the passage of this law. Literally a man without
a party, his last act as president was to sign the bill providing
for the annexation of Texas.
Some Democrats nominated Tyler for reelection in 1844, but he
stepped aside for James K. Polk, the official party candidate. In
his later years Tyler remained a strong advocate of states’ rights.
A member of the Virginia convention elected to consider secession
on the eve of the American Civil War, he voted for withdrawal from
the Union and served briefly in the Confederate Congress before
he died in Richmond on Jan. 18, 1862.