President Without a Party: The Life of John Tyler

I picked President Without a Party: The Life of John Tyler by Christopher J Leahy for my book on our 10th president because I knew nothing about John Tyler and it was a top offering. I came away with a great deal of respect for Tyler and ranking him my own number 1 pick for president, above John Adams and John Quincy Adams. So what made him so special?

John Tyler was born on March 29, 1790 at Greenway Plantation in Charles City County, VA. He was heavily influenced by his father, Judge John Tyler, developing his sense of right and wrong at his father’s knee. Judge Tyler had done his part during the revolution, he fought with the Continental Army and served in the continental congress and was actually against Virginia joining the Union; however once the Constitution was ratified, he became a strict constitutionalist, inline with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. All of this funneled down to Tyler as he grew up, so that he too became a strict Constitutionalist.

Tyler was a pretty bright kid, he was accepted to the College of William and Mary at 14, graduated at 17, and qualified for the Bar in Virginia at 19, which was technically two years too young, but since he passed, he was allowed to start building his practice, and shortly became fairly well known as a lawyer in his own right, and not just because his father was Judge John Tyler.

But where his dad ultimately became a federal judge, Tyler himself went in to politics, which he genuinely enjoyed, becoming a member of the house of representatives in 1816 when he was 26 years old, serving until 1821 when he took a mini retirement due to stress induced health issues.

Just before he joined the political class, he married his first wife, Leticia Christian Tyler, and they ultimately had 8 children that survived to adulthood, which is astounding, given that he was not good with money. Which is ironic, because his fiscal policy as president was sound. He personally was just bad with money. At one point he did end up having to sell some slaves in order to finance his travel to Washington to actually do the job for which he was elected.

Politically, he was highly principled. He firmly believed in states rights and was against a national bank, ideals he held and supported throughout his entire career. He was a logically consistent man, and when he was voted into the House of Representatives, one of the first things he did was vote to repeal a measure Congress had just passed, giving themselves a pay raise. This measure had been decried by their constituents, and Tyler agreed with the constituents. You work for the people when you work in Congress. Wild crazy thoughts here.

In 1821 he set about rebuilding his law practice, which he had abandoned when he joined Congress. Then in 1825 he was voted in as governor of Virginia, serving two, one-year terms as Governor, after which he was appointed Senator from Virginia. He served as Senator from 1827 until 1836 when he resigned on principal. Now, the principal upon which he resigned has to do with Andrew Jackson’s censuring by the Senate. Now, Tyler hated the concept of a National Bank, believing to his core this was against the Constitution. And he believed Jackson’s handling of the matter was appalling and a violation of the executive mandates as set forth in the constitution. And so, he voted for the Censuring of Jackson following Jackson’s handling of the banking situation in 1834.

And a few years later when the Senate looked to remove that censuring from the books, Tyler disagreed, believed the censure was correct and proper. However, his constituents, the good people of the state of Virginia, insisted that he vote to overturn the censure. And as Tyler had made such a big deal of elected officials work for the people who elected them, he opted to do the absolutely honorable thing: rather than overturn the censure, he resigned as Senator.

I mean, he could have stood his ground and said no. But this would have had him labeled a hypocrite by his critics, who had managed to back him into a corner over this one. He could have betrayed his own belief in the justice of the censure by voting to overturn as his constituents demanded. Instead, he opted to resign.

This was in 1836, and he fully intended to resign from politics, and so he moved his family to Williamsburg, VA, intending to reopen his law practice, and spend his days lawyering from now on. And that’s where he’s at and what he’s doing when he’s tapped by the Whig party to run as Vice President on the ticket with William Henry Harrison. And he was a good pick for VP, due to his unquestionable and now unimpeachable moral path.

The 1840 campaign kicks off, with Tippecanoe and Tyler Too running a log cabin and hard cider campaign, and of course winning the election, with Tyler being sworn in as Vice President on March 4, 1841, after which he immediately returned to Williamsburg, because at this point in history, the Vice President’s ONE JOB is to cast the tie breaking vote in the Senate, should the need arise. And since the Senate was currently in recess, he had nothing else to do. So, he went home to his family.

So, he’s asleep at home in Williamsburg at 4:30am on the morning of April 5, 1841 when he was woken up by an urgent messenger from DC, advising him that William Henry Harrison had died, and he was needed immediately in DC to take the place of acting president.

Now, this is very important. With William Henry Harrison being the first to die in office, there was no protocol in place. This was unchartered territory.  No one knew what would happen next, and I daresay Tyler’s swift action, combined with his reputation for being a strict constitutionalist, is what made his actions essentially policy over the next one hundred and twenty-six years until the passage of the 25th amendment actually codified it into constitutional law.

But the constitution as written in 1787 does NOT specify that the Vice President shall become President on the President’s death. That didn’t codify until 1967. The constitution allows their election at the same time. But nothing else. So, Tyler’s interpretation of the Constitution is what held the day at this time. I genuinely believe that Tyler’s strict constructionist perspective is what allowed him to get away with this with no push back from the Senate. So, when he received this wake-up call, he traveled straight to DC where he immediately took the oath of office as President of the United States, then presented a Fait Accompli to the still assembling senate.

The first thing Tyler does once his presidency is affirmed by Congress is to piss off the members of his cabinet. This cabinet was inherited from Harrison, and he wasn’t planning on kicking any of them out. However, the cabinet tried to convince Tyler that Harrison had agreed to rule by consensus. And Tyler flat rejected that proposition.

He then continued that trend by pissing off his political party, by refusing to sign into law the bank bill they kept trying to pass. The same bank bill he was absolutely against as Senator under Jackson, they were now trying to get him to sign! Instead, he vetoed it twice. Henry Clay, the leader of the Whig party, lost his ever loving mind over this refusal and veto. And by the end of 1841, the Whigs had kicked John Tyler out of the party.

And he had no political party for the remainder of his time in office. The rest of his cabinet resigned, and he served the remainder of his time without political backing. This, incidentally, is a solid path to conflict and hell. It was not an easy three years in office.

He TRIED to work with the Whigs, presenting an exchequer bill which was ultimately the forerunner of the Federal Reserve. Tyler wanted to create a centralized government agency that would regulate the circulation of currency, which is what the Fed is supposed to do…not that it does, but it’s supposed to. So a quote from the book on this “Paradoxically however, Tyler’s contention that people should not rely on the government for their financial well being and that instead industriousness and frugality, not the circulation of paper money, were the keys to prosperity, reflects the views of some 21st century opponents of the Fed.”

And it gets so much better. He inherited a country in financial crises, not just from Harrison, but from Martin van Buren, who oversaw the panic of 1837. He recognized the country was running at an extreme deficit. But for all that, he pushed back against Congress wanting to raise the tariff, suggesting instead that Congress cut spending. This did not win him any friends.

In 1842, about a year after he is sworn in, Thomas Wilson Dorr of Rhode Island was trying to overhaul the state charter, which is used instead of a states’ Constitution. They were running off the states original 1633 royal charter. The charter decreed that you had to own land in the state, and most of that state’s population did not own land. So Dorr steps in and tries to change this. And the landed gentry flipped their shit. Dorr set up his own Constitutional Convention, and the existing governor William King, starts pushing back.

Both sides were sending messengers to the White House asking for the backing of the President. And Tyler agreed with King as this was logically consistent with his strict Constitutionalist mentality. Each state creates their own Constitution, Rhode Island didn’t but they didn’t have to, this is not a federal problem. However, while he agreed with King, also acknowledge that Dorr was acting well within his Constitutional rights as laid out in the US Constitution.

So when King came to Tyler and argued that Dorr was fomenting rebellion and insurrection, Tyler basically asked Have they ACTUALLY rebelled? Then stop bugging me. This is an internal Rhode Island matter. Fix your own shit.

So domestically Tyler was not much liked. Foreign policy management was better, proving he had some pretty solid diplomatic chops. He was pretty good with people face to face. For example, thirty years after the War of 1812 ended, which was in 1816, the territories in the north were still in dispute, having never been resolved with Britain and the boundaries were still unsettled. Thirty years later, Tyler and his Secretary of State Daniel Webster managed to negotiate treaties with Great Britain, settling these land disputes and fixing the location of our northern border at Canada. 

September 10, 1842, Leticia Tyler died, having been sick for his entire tenure in the White House. She suffered a stroke in 1839, which left her unable to be the White House hostess, and this job was handled by her daughter in law Priscilla. But they’d been married for 29 years and he mourned her loss for about five months. Which seems dreadfully short, but I don’t doubt that he loved her. Portraits show she was a genuinely beautiful woman, but she’d been really sick for three years prior to her death. Modern day medicine can have a tremendous impact on stroke survivability and post stroke quality of life. They did not have that in 1839.

So, Leticia dies in September 1842, and he met Julia Gardner in December of 1842. And he was quite taken with Julia, proposing marriage in March 1843, which she initially rejected. However, he continued to court her for the next year. Julia was also quite beautiful. But she was 30 years younger than Tyler. This was not a scandal, in the mid-19th century. And by all accounts, this was very much a love match between the two of them. She ultimately accepted his proposal in 1844 and they were married secretly on June 26, 1844.  Which was no mean feat. He was still president, and she was a New York Debutante, and was the well-known heiress of a New York socialite family.

 In 1844, he decided not to run again, this was it, he was definitely retiring from politics this time, and he referred all his political friends, and family members to vote for democratic candidate James K. Polk. But during his last year in office, all the way to the bitter end, Tyler was working on annexing Texas, he really wanted that to be his legacy. And Texas was more than willing to be annexed.

It was a hard sell, because the northern states saw this as one giant slave territory coming on board, which could possibly be broken into five individual slave owning states. Through heavy negotiations, the first steps towards annexation were completed, and ultimately Texas joined the union as One State, NOT five, which annexation was negotiated by then Secretary of State, former vice president and senator from South Carolina, John Calhoun. Who also tried to claim this annexation as his legacy. But Tyler is the ultimate force behind this.

March 4, 1845, Tyler left the White House and retired to his farm, which he called Sherwood Forest, in Virginia. He and Julia proceeded to have seven more children. I believe with 15 living children, and I don’t even know how many grandchildren, he is the most prolific progenitor the White House has seen.

By all accounts he was quite content in his retirement, he stuck to the family plantation, where yes he had slaves, which is certainly a huge mark against him in the favorite president position, but…. it’s really disingenuous to judge a man 160 years posthumously for the times he lived in.

He and Julia lived, laughed, and loved, enjoying life tremendously, until November 6, 1860, when Abraham Lincoln was elected president, a month later South Carolina secedes, followed shortly by Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas.

Tyler proposed at that point having a convention of the border states, i.e. Maryland, Kentucky, Delaware, etc., just to see if they could come up with a working option with the Deep South and Northern Industrial States. However, word of the idea got out, and all the states, except for those that had seceded, sent representatives. And as Tyler feared, this became a giant shouting match, and nothing was accomplished.

Tyler sought a meeting with Abraham Lincoln, which was granted; however, Tyler came away from the meeting believing that Lincoln would rather have war than allow slavery to continue. And so Tyler, being as logically consistent as he was, voted in favor of states rights, including the right of secession.

Which is truly awful, because he was such a staunch defender of the Constitution, and that’s all he was doing, defending the Constitution. And at this point in time, nowhere in the Constitution was secession directly addressed. Insurrection is, sure, but direct secession in case of political unhappiness is not addressed.

Tyler, at this point, took a half step back into politics. He was voted to serve in the provisional Confederate Congress in 1861. However, on January 18, 1862, just before congress met, he died at the age of 71, possibly of a stroke.

And is remembered eternally as The Traitor President.

This book was initially reviewed on YouTube on January 30, 2022, but is now available on Rumble and PodBean.