Who was John Tyler?
John Tyler was a Virginia planter who enslaved people. He served as governor and as a senator for Virginia. He was a states' rights Democrat who fell out with Andrew Jackson, then joined the Whigs and became vice president in 1841. When William Henry Harrison died a month into office, Tyler claimed the presidency itself and not just its duties, which set the pattern for later successions. He vetoed the Whig plan for a national bank, and the party threw him out. His government settled the Maine border with Britain, opened trade talks with China and brought the Second Seminole War to a close. In his last days he signed the resolution annexing Texas.
Political views
- He took the presidential oath when Harrison died. Mail addressed to the 'Acting President' went back unopened. That showed a successor holds the whole office.Source: millercenter.org
- In 1841 he vetoed two Whig bills for a new national bank. Every cabinet member but Daniel Webster then resigned.Source: millercenter.org
- Defending the power of Southern planters, he was against a big standing army, against protective tariffs and against votes for men who owned no property.Source: millercenter.org
- In 1842 he vetoed two bills raising tariffs and then signed one whose wording he accepted, while Whigs began impeachment moves against him.Source: millercenter.org
- He backed the 1842 Webster-Ashburton Treaty, which fixed the Maine boundary, and dispatched the mission that began formal relations with China.Source: millercenter.org
- He worked to annex Texas as a slave state. When the Senate rejected a treaty, he got it done in 1845 through a joint resolution of Congress.Source: millercenter.org
Legacy
Tyler's best-known mark is a constitutional precedent. He insisted that he was president in full, so later vice presidents could take over smoothly, and the 25th Amendment finally wrote that rule down. Some historians also praise the foreign policy of his years, though Secretary of State Daniel Webster did much of that work. Most scholars who rank presidents call his term divided and weak. Without a party, he used the veto against the very programme that had put him in office. His Texas drive was bound up with spreading slavery, and he enslaved people until he died. When the 1861 Peace Convention failed to reach a deal, he supported Virginia's secession. Voters chose him for the Confederate House, but he died before it sat.