I did know that John Tyler had been president. Why? Because of that very early campaign slogan, ‘Tippiecanoe and Tyler, too.’ Look it up, if it is unknown. I knew he succeeded Harrison, but that is all I knew. Yet when I read Borneman’s biography of Polk’s emergence and election, Tyler seemed an interesting if remote figure.
He is widely regarded as a failure, no doubt in part because he did not win an election in his own right.
So…..
Decided to read about Tyler after seeing him in the distance in the Polk biography.
In sum, during the Tyler administration:
1. Maine boundary settled with Great Britain. Daniel Webster did the hard work when he was Secretary of State, but Tyler stuck with it.
2. He annexed Texas with a joint Congressional resolution as a way around lack of 2/3 support for a treaty in the Senate.
3. Promoted and signed first commercial and missionary treaty with China so as to deny Great Britain sole rights after the last Opium War.
4. Instituted joint naval patrols with Great Britain to stop slave trade from Africa, and he long opposed the slave trade (even as a novice congressman he had moved to ban it in Washington DC), paradoxically while affirming slavery. Go figure.
5. Financed oceanographic surveys like mapping all of West Coast of North America, and founded the Naval Observatory (where the VP now has official residence).
6. Because his practical science interests were known, he received many gifts which he passed onto to the nascent Smithsonian.
7. His second, young, wife started the practice of introducing him with ‘Hail to the Chief’ played by the Marine Band, which is still the practice.
8. He assumed the office in a masterful fashion on the death of General Harrison. It was by no means obvious at the time that the VP became president, and that was not stipulated until a constitutional amendment in 1968. Many thought he was to remain Vice President and defer to Congress (see reference to big egos below).
9. He used press agents to win acceptance of the Maine boundary treaty in Maine, generally to win public opinion to Texas entering the Union, and to pave the way for his second wife into Washington society.
He alienated Whigs in many ways. Democrats had already disowned him for being on the Whig ticket. So he had no party which ended his hopes for re-election though he occasionally wished otherwise.
That seems more than enough for three years and eleven months, and some of it innovative. The longest presidency of an incumbent not elected to the office.
He went South with secession and was elected to the Confederate Congress, but died before it sat. He chaired a failed peace conference in early 1861 in Washington DC. An effort that satisfied no one. Too little and too late.
He was caught in the crossfire among the giant egos of his day: Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun.
The book itself has too much vernacular in it for me. It is repetitive as though the author could not quite organize the material. I wondered about anachronisms when I read about ‘passports’ and ’10 Downing Street.’ According to Wikipedia from 1834 to 1877 10 Downing Street was empty and only occasionally used for meetings. The history of passports is far less clear, but they only entered common practice after World War I, it seems.
As a study only of his presidency it says not a word about how a lifelong Democrat got on the winning Whig ticket in 1840. Not clear what the source is for some of the assertions.
Dunmore’s Ethiopian regiment was news to me. Look it up.
I never quite understand the argument attributed to one of James Madison’s Federalist Papers that republican institutions were best safe guarded by territorial expansion. But that played into Manifest Destiny.
Tyler’s view was that slavery would be diffused and diluted (given that the slave trade stopped) with territorial expansion like Texas. There would be fewer blacks per square mile and per white person and they would be less and less valuable. And so it would in time extinguish itself. Nonsense and misses entirely the immorality of enslavement.