The American Vice Presidency (19 page)

Tyler pointedly distinguished his opposition: it was not to a state’s right to secede from the Union but to South Carolina’s attempt at nullification: “I disclaim the policy adopted by her; all here know I did not approve of her course. I will not join in the denunciations which have been so loudly thundered against her, nor will I deny that she has much cause of complaint.” Rather, he said of Jackson’s response, “His proclamation has swept away all the barriers of the Constitution and given us in place of the Federal government, under which we had fondly believed we were living, a consolidated military despotism.”
¹⁰

Thereafter Tyler became a political ally of the Whig leader Henry Clay in opposing Jackson, voting with the Senate majority in 1834 to censure the president over his refusal to inform Congress about his removal of federal deposits from the national bank. Striking the King Andrew lament, Tyler declared, “The presidential office swallows up all power, and the president becomes every inch a king.”
¹¹
When the Virginia legislature
“instructed” Tyler to withdraw his censure vote, he refused but decided he had to resign from the Senate.

While still a Democrat, Tyler now found himself in league with the emerging Whig Party, with Clay as its most prominent presidential aspirant. In 1836, the still disorganized Whigs decided not to hold a national nominating convention and instead left the participating states to choose their own methods to select a standard-bearer. In the resulting hodge-podge, four separate Whig candidates ran against Jackson’s handpicked choice to succeed him, Vice President Martin Van Buren, in a strategy designed to deny Van Buren an electoral college majority and to put the election into the House of Representatives.

For vice president, Tyler was offered as a running mate with one or the other of the Whigs, but Democrat Van Buren was elected, and in the separate race for vice president Tyler finished third behind the Democrat Richard M. Johnson and the Whig Francis Granger. None of the three, however, received a majority, throwing the choice to the Senate between the top two finishers, leaving Tyler out. Johnson won easily over Granger on the first ballot.
¹²

Out of all public office now, Tyler was elected president of the Virginia Colonization Society, an organization to rid the state of freed former slaves by encouraging their emigration to a colony on the west coast of Africa. He saw the scheme as “a dream of philanthropy” creating all-Negro colonies that would “be to Africa what Jamestown and Plymouth have been to America.”
¹³

In 1838, when Tyler was again seeking a seat in the Virginia House of Delegates, he ran as a Whig, was elected and chosen unanimously to be its Speaker, but was stymied in a subsequent bid to return to the U.S. Senate. Tyler’s political career soon took a surprising and unexpected turn, however, at the Whig nominating convention at Harrisburg in December 1839, when Clay entered with a clear plurality of the delegates but short of the majority needed. In opposition to Clay, the party leaders Thurlow Weed of New York and Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania engineered approval of a unit rule for voting whereby each state would cast all its votes for its leading candidate. They argued that Clay could not carry their key states and others critical to winning the 1840 presidential election. At the end of the day, Clay was overtaken by William Henry Harrison and lost the nomination
to him. The convention strategists believed that as a military hero with no particularly objectionable political views, Harrison could beat Van Buren this time by simply tapping into the broad anti-incumbent sentiment in a land gripped by deep economic woes.

Turning to the matter of Harrison’s running mate, Weed and Stevens agreed the position should go to a prominent Clay supporter from the South. After three others had rejected the nomination, it was finally offered to Tyler, as a sop to Clay and as a slaveholder in a pitch to the South.
¹⁴
It seemed to have been done without much thought to whether this former Jacksonian Democrat had really bought into the Whig philosophy and agenda of nationalism.

Tyler’s nomination inevitably stirred speculation of promises made or deals struck on his part. Then and later he stoutly denied any. Daniel Webster, for one, came to his defense. “When Harrison and Tyler were nominated,” he declared later, “their opinions on public questions were generally known.” Subsequently, Tyler himself said, “I have no recollection of having opened my lips in that body on any subject whatever.”
¹⁵
As for Harrison, all he offered was a flat statement that if elected he would “under no circumstances” consent to be a candidate for a second term.
¹⁶
If Tyler had any thoughts of the presidency in his future, this statement was probably what gave him hope of that prospect, as it still did for Clay.

In the 1840 campaign, Tyler was pretty much in the shadows as the now more organized Whigs, seizing on Harrison’s credentials as an old Indian fighter, greatly embellished his image as a rough-hewn man of the frontier, belying his history and actual status as a wealthy country gentleman in Ohio. In all this, Tyler was reduced to an appendage and found a place in history as part of one of the most famous and oft-repeated campaign slogans: “Tippecanoe and Tyler too.” His stature as a nonentity was also immortalized in a Whig campaign rhyme: “We will vote for Tyler therefore, without a why or wherefore,” which in turn led Philip Hone to observe, “There was rhyme but no reason in it.”
¹⁷

Pressured repeatedly to take a position on the bank question, Tyler artfully dodged, taking safe ground and giving no offense, despite his earlier open opposition to a national bank. When asked where he stood on the subject of the protective tariff, he replied, “I am in favor of what General Harrison and Mr. Clay are in favor of; I am in favor of preserving the
compromise bill as it now stands; between General Harrison, Mr. Clay and myself, there is no difference of opinion on this subject.”
¹⁸

With little surprise, Harrison won overwhelmingly in the electoral college and brought Tyler in with him, although the popular vote was much closer—only six percentage points separating the old general from the former Democratic president, who struggled under the campaign taunts “Martin Van Ruin” and “Van, Van, he’s a used-up man.”

Harrison’s death only a month into his presidency and Tyler’s sudden elevation to the office after having just recently been sworn in as vice president shocked Whig regulars. So did his swift action in taking the presidential oath and his flat declaration to his cabinet that he meant to be the nation’s chief executive in both title and reality. If Clay had expected he would have a free hand in implementing the major features of his American System—restoration of a national bank, protective tariffs, and internal transportation projects linking the states into a more homogeneous federal entity—he was soon disappointed. Tyler revealed himself as devoted as ever to the defense and protection of states’ rights and to the sovereignty he had held prior to quitting the Democratic Party of Jackson and Van Buren. Clay furthermore now saw Tyler as another barrier to his own crumbling presidential ambitions.

When Congress met in a special session in late May 1841, Representative John McKeon of New York questioned whether Tyler was entitled to be addressed as president. A resolution of affirmation was quickly passed without a formal vote. While Tyler was now recognized as the legal president, he did not automatically become the head of the Whig Party. Henry Clay remained the recognized leader, and he had no intention of surrendering that role in advancing his view of the Whig agenda, especially to a former Jacksonian. When in the special session Clay pressed Tyler to seek another national bank, a prime Whig objective, the new president told him he would wait until the next regular session starting in December.

Finally Clay offered a compromise on a bank bill, but Tyler vetoed it, and still another passed by Congress, on the grounds that it was an unconstitutional infringement on the rights of the individual states. As the special session was winding up, Clay, in the hope of forcing Tyler out, led a protest in which all members of the cabinet resigned, with the exception of Secretary of State Daniel Webster. Tyler responded by sending the Senate
new cabinet nominations, which the senators quickly confirmed and then adjourned until the next regular session.

Later that day, about sixty Whigs gathered on the Capitol plaza and adopted a statement dissociating themselves from Tyler, leaving him without a party. A drawn-out battle between the president and the Senate ensued, in which many of Tyler’s subsequent other appointments requiring confirmation were rejected.
¹⁹

Clay, more determined now than ever to wrest the presidency from “His Accidency,” resigned from the Senate in March 1842 to prepare for his candidacy in 1844. Meanwhile, Tyler continued to wield his veto pen against the Whig majority in Congress, using it ten times in his four years as president. As presidents often have done, Tyler looked to foreign policy to make his mark, achieving the Webster-Ashburton Treaty, which settled certain land and territorial disputes with the British, and executing the historic annexation of Texas into the Union. He justified the latter in part as a vehicle for providing more living space for slaves and thereby preserving the “peculiar institution.”

Tyler became the first president not to seek a second term. Long widowed, he remarried in 1845, with Julia Gardiner, in the first White House wedding, and had another seven children with her. As a former president, in 1861 he was the chairman of a Washington conference that sought but failed to avert the Civil War. He subsequently served at the Virginia convention that voted to secede from the Union and was elected to the provisional Congress of the Confederacy. But he died in 1862 before he could take his seat. Nevertheless, on the basis of that election,
The Smithsonian Book of Presidential Trivia
mentions Tyler as “the only president to commit a public act of treason against the U.S. government,” the Confederacy at the time of his death being at war with the Union he had once led.
²⁰

The unanticipated presidency of John Tyler was riddled from its start to its end with controversy and strife. This one-time staunch Jeffersonian Democrat sought to sustain his Virginia countryman’s “republican principles” in the Whig Party, which chose him to be its vice president and lived to regret it. In the end, nothing so became John Tyler as the manner in which he embarked on his presidency. By swiftly and resolutely declaring its legitimacy and firmly using the power bestowed by it, he cemented a peaceful, orderly, and constitutional succession that has stood the test of time.

GEORGE M. DALLAS

OF PENNSYLVANIA

U
nusual circumstances in the political careers of President James K. Polk and his vice president, George Mifflin Dallas, saw the one who actively sought the second office in 1844 winding up in the first, and the man who showed little interest in the second nonetheless landing it. Polk, a former governor of Tennessee twice defeated for reelection, calculated that his chances for the presidency were over and the best he could hope to achieve was the vice presidency. Dallas, much less distinguished as a Philadelphia party leader and an appointed U.S. senator with little ambition for national office, nevertheless found himself elected as vice president.

The man who became the eleventh vice president of the United States was born in Philadelphia on July 10, 1792. He was the second of the six children of Alexander Dallas, a local lawyer and later a secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, a recorder of U.S. Supreme Court opinions, President James Madison’s secretary of the treasury in 1814, and subsequently an acting secretary of war, before dying at the age of fifty-nine.

The son, George, graduated with highest honors from the College of New Jersey (Princeton) in 1810 and was admitted to the Pennsylvania bar three years later at age twenty. He became the personal secretary to the former treasury secretary Albert Gallatin and traveled with him on diplomatic missions to St. Petersburg and London. In August 1814, when the British
were setting fire to the U.S. Capitol and the White House, young Dallas brought a draft of British peace terms in the War of 1812 to Washington.

In 1816 he moved back to Philadelphia, where he married the daughter of a prominent Federalist family and had eight children with her. Taking to an aristocratic lifestyle and dress, he acquired expensive tastes that kept him constantly in debt, a circumstance that obliged him to reject a number of government posts, though he did become counsel to the Second Bank of the United States. He also wrote poetry and spoke fluent French, which left a surface impression of erudition.

In 1817 Dallas became deputy attorney general of Philadelphia, but he lacked the drive of the ambitious politician and a willingness to engage in the competitive world of elective politics. His one term in the U.S. Senate was by appointment of the state legislature, as were all his other government offices, until in 1844 he was elected as vice president.