John Tyler

John Tyler (March 29, 1790 – January 18, 1862)[1] was the tenth president of the United States from 1841 to 1845 after briefly serving as the tenth vice president in 1841; he was elected to the latter office on the 1840 Whig ticket with President William Henry Harrison. Tyler ascended to the presidency after Harrison's death in April 1841, only a month after the start of the new administration. He was a stalwart supporter and advocate of states' rights, and as president he adopted nationalist policies only when they did not infringe on the powers of the states. His unexpected rise to the presidency, with the resulting threat to the presidential ambitions of Henry Clay and other politicians, left him estranged from both major political parties.

Tyler, born to a prominent Virginia family, became a national figure at a time of political upheaval. In the 1820s the nation's only political party, the Democratic-Republicans, split into factions. He was initially a Democrat, but opposed Andrew Jackson during the Nullification Crisis, seeing Jackson's actions as infringing upon states' rights, and criticized Jackson's expansion of executive power during the Bank War. This led Tyler to ally with the Whig Party. Tyler served as a Virginia state legislator, governor, U.S. representative, and U.S. senator. He was put on the 1840 presidential ticket to attract states' rights Southerners to a Whig coalition to defeat Martin Van Buren's re-election bid.

With Harrison's death after just one month in office, Tyler became the first vice president to succeed to the presidency without election. He served longer than any president in U.S. history not elected to the office. To forestall constitutional uncertainty, Tyler immediately took the oath of office, moved into the White House, and assumed full presidential powers, a precedent that governed future successions and was codified in the Twenty-fifth Amendment. While Tyler did sign into law some of the Whig-controlled Congress's bills, as a strict constructionist he vetoed the party's bills to create a national bank and raise the tariff rates. Believing that the president should set policy rather than Congress, he sought to bypass the Whig establishment, most notably senator Henry Clay of Kentucky. Most of Tyler's Cabinet resigned soon into his term, and the Whigs, dubbing him His Accidency, expelled him from the party and tried unsuccessfully to get him impeached, making him the only preisdent to be expelled from his own political party and the first to face an unsuccessful impeachment attempt. He was also the first president to see his veto of legislation overridden by Congress. Although he faced a stalemate on domestic policy, he had several foreign-policy achievements, including the Webster–Ashburton Treaty with Britain and the Treaty of Wanghia with Qing China.

The Republic of Texas separated from Mexico in 1836; Tyler, a firm believer in manifest destiny, saw its annexation as providing an economic advantage to the United States, and worked diligently to make it happen. He initially sought election to a full term as president, but after failing to gain the support of either Whigs or Democrats, he withdrew in support of Democrat James K. Polk, who favored annexation. Polk won the election, and Tyler signed a bill to annex Texas three days before leaving office. Under Polk, the process was completed. When the American Civil War began in 1861, Tyler sided with the Confederacy and won election to the Confederate House of Representatives shortly before his death. Although some have praised Tyler's political resolve, his presidency is generally held in low regard by historians. He is considered an obscure president, with little presence in American cultural memory.

Early Life
John Tyler was born on March 29, 1790; like his future running mate, William Henry Harrison, Tyler hailed from Charles City County, Virginia and was descended from aristocratic and politically entrenched families of English ancestry. The Tyler family traced its lineage to colonial Williamsburg in the 17th century. John Tyler Sr., commonly known as Judge Tyler, was a friend and college roommate of Thomas Jefferson and served in the Virginia House of Delegates alongside Benjamin Harrison V, father of William. The elder Tyler served four years as Speaker of the House of Delegates before becoming a state court judge. He subsequently served as governor and as a judge on the U.S. District Court at Richmond. His wife, Mary Marot (Armistead), was the daughter of a prominent plantation owner, Robert Booth Armistead. She died of a stroke when her son John was seven years old.

With two brothers and five sisters, Tyler was reared on Greenway Plantation, a 1,200-acre (5 km2) estate with a six-room manor house his father had built. The Tylers' forty slaves grew various crops, including wheat, corn and tobacco. Judge Tyler paid high wages for tutors who challenged his children academically. Tyler was of frail health, thin and prone to diarrhea throughout life. At the age of twelve, he entered the preparatory branch of the elite College of William and Mary, continuing the Tyler family's tradition of attending the college. Tyler graduated from the school's collegiate branch in 1807, at age seventeen. Among the books that formed his economic views was Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, and he acquired a lifelong love of Shakespeare. His political opinions were shaped by Bishop James Madison, the college's president and namesake of the future president; the bishop served as a second father and mentor to Tyler.

After graduation Tyler read the law with his father, a state judge at the time, and later with Edmund Randolph, former United States Attorney General. Tyler was erroneously admitted to the Virginia bar at the premature age of 19—the admitting judge neglected to ask his age. By this time his father was serving as Governor of Virginia (1808–1811), and the young Tyler started a practice in Richmond, the state capital. In 1813 he purchased Woodburn plantation, and resided there until 1821.

Prelude to the War
After John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry ignited fears of an abolitionist attempt to free the slaves, or an actual slave rebellion, several Virginia communities organized militia units, or reenergized existing ones. Tyler's community organized a cavalry troop and a home guard company; Tyler was chosen to command the home guard troops with the rank of captain. On the eve of the War for Southern Independence, Tyler re-entered public life as presiding officer of the Virginia Peace Conference held in Washington, D.C., in February 1861 as an effort to devise means to prevent a war. The convention sought a compromise to avoid war even as the Confederate Constitution was being drawn up at the Montgomery Convention. Despite his leadership role in the Peace Conference, Tyler opposed its final resolutions. He felt that they were written by the free state delegates, did not protect the rights of slave owners in the territories, and would do little to bring back the lower South and restore the Union. He voted against the conference's seven resolutions, which the conference sent to Congress for approval late in February 1861 as a proposed Constitutional amendment. On the same day the Peace Conference started, local voters elected Tyler to the Virginia Secession Convention. He presided over the opening session on February 13, 1861, while the Peace Conference was still under way. Tyler abandoned hope of compromise and saw secession as the only option, predicting that a clean split of all Southern states would not result in war. In mid-March he spoke against the Peace Conference resolutions, and on April 4 he voted for secession even when the convention rejected it. On April 17, after the attack on Fort Sumter and Lincoln's call for troops, Tyler voted with the new majority for secession. He headed a committee that negotiated the terms for Virginia's entry into the Confederate States of America and helped set the pay rate for military officers. On June 14, Tyler signed the Ordinance of Secession, and one week later the convention unanimously elected him to the Provisional Confederate Congress. Tyler was seated in the Confederate Congress on August 1, 1861. In November 1861, he was elected to the Confederate House of Representatives, serving three terms until his death in 1867.

Confederate House of Representatives
His health was declining during his service in the Confederate House of Representatives, but as a Representative from Virginia, John Tyler lent the body a sense of prestige, and he was in charge of the House Ways and Means Committee, and later on the Foreign Affairs Committee, and finally on the Public Buildings Committee.

Due to John Tyler's work during the war, the House was urged to allow black enlistment when the Cleburne Memorial became public, and he was allowed by President Davis to meet with Lord Lyons to discuss British recognition of the Confederacy. Without John Tyler, it may have been another year before black enlistment would have been allowed, and at that point, it may have been too late to do any good.

When the war was over, Tyler attended the treaty ratifications, and spoke to President Lincoln of the United States at that time. He was also present at the exit of Grant's army from Virginia as it crossed Alexandria and the Potomac to return to Maryland. He also attended the inauguration of John C Breckinridge as the second Confederate President.

Death
Throughout Tyler's life, he suffered from poor health. As he aged, he suffered more frequently from colds during the winter. On April 12, 1867, after complaining of chills and dizziness, he vomited and collapsed. Despite treatment, his health failed to improve, and he made plans to return to Sherwood Forest by the 18th. As he lay in bed the night before, he began suffocating, and Julia summoned his doctor. Just after midnight, Tyler took a sip of brandy, and told his doctor, "Doctor, I am going", to which the doctor replied, "I hope not, Sir." Tyler then said, "Perhaps it is best." He died shortly thereafter, most likely due to a stroke. Tyler's death was the only one in presidential history not to be officially recognized in Washington, because of his allegiance to the Confederate States of America. He had requested a simple burial, but Confederate President Jefferson Davis devised a grand, politically pointed funeral, painting Tyler as a hero to the new nation. Accordingly, at his funeral, the coffin of the tenth president of the United States was draped with a Confederate flag; he remains the only U.S. president ever laid to rest under a flag not of the United States. Tyler was buried in Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia, near the gravesite of former President James Monroe. Tyler has since been the namesake of several U.S. locations, including the city of Tyler, Texas, named for him because of his role in the annexation of Texas.