Complicated John Tyler and his brief presidency

JOHN TYLER: THE ACCIDENTAL PRESIDENT

By Edward P. Crapol

University of North Carolina Press, $37.50, 344 pages

REVIEWED BY MICHAEL P. RICCARDS

No American political slogan is more remembered than one from the 1840 presidential campaign —”Tippecanoe and Tyler, too.” Edward Crapol of the College of William and Mary has written “John Tyler: The Accidental President,” a fascinating and comprehensive study of half that brief team.

Tyler of Virginia ran on a Whig ticket with an old war hero, but he was by background and inclination a Jeffersonian, limited-government, states-rights Democrat. This study shows that after he assumed the presidency (upon Harrison’s untimely death in office), Tyler became a strong president and a strong nationalist. He believed he could solve the problems of sectionalism and slavery by expanding the United States geographically. Slavery would dissipate like fish in the sea.

Tyler immediately began taking control of the presidential apparatus, the cabinet and the White House, refusing to be seen as an “Acting President.” Mail addressed to the “Acting President” was returned. Tyler’s insistence was an important precedent for the office and for future vice presidents who became president.

Tyler really cared less about traditional Whig priorities: internal improvements, high tariffs and a strong, controlling legislative branch. Checked in domestic policies by Whigs in Congress led by Henry Clay, he took an extraordinarily expansive view of his role in foreign policy.

Tyler even sent secret agents to Europe and to Asia to support his agenda of expansion and trade, and he used discretionary funds to pay these agents — and to influence newspapers in New England on a treaty dispute.

Mr. Crapol presents a very different sort of early presidency from what the nation was used to, and some of his findings are obviously relevant to the critics of the imperial presidency today. Tyler’s interests extended beyond the American continent to fostering ties with China and Japan — no easy tasks in those days. For a president with no Navy, Tyler still seemed to the British a wily, deceitful foreign policy player.

Tyler insisted that Thomas Jefferson and James Madison influenced him, but if so he was more of a nationalist than many of the figures of the Virginia dynasty.

He desperately wanted to run for election on his own, but he could not — for he was a man without a party. The Whigs saw him as betraying their ticket’s platform, and the Democrats never welcomed him in any way. He tried to use patronage positions to build a coalition, but it was too little, too late.

His second preoccupation was annexing the independent republic of Texas. He could not get a treaty to that end through the Senate, so he proposed a joint resolution in the House and the Senate, and when it passed, he welcomed Texas with cheers and champagne.

It was a brilliant and unorthodox initiative for a 19th-century president. If he had stayed in the White House, he would have moved to take over California and New Mexico, exactly what his successor, Jacksonian Democrat James K. Polk, ended up doing.

Mr. Crapol tries to explain Tyler’s complex personality and contradictory beliefs, but has a difficult time. How did a Democrat run as a Whig? How did a man of limited-government ideals become so assertive an executive?

And most troubling, how did a strong nationalist, with a philosophy bordering on manifest destiny, end up elected to the Confederate Congress and advocating breaking up the Union he tried to expand? It is the sadness of history that he became, in the popular eye, “the traitor” among the ex-presidents. The usually polite Abraham Lincoln did not even acknowledge Tyler’s death.

As a young man Tyler criticized slavery, even though he lived off the institution’s labor as Jefferson and Madison had. He was physically repulsed, like young Lincoln, by the sale of black men and women in the marketplace. But in the end, one man supported disunion and the other became the Great Emancipator.

Tyler came from good stock. His father was a devotee of the Revolution and a fine role model. He socialized easily with the great Founding Fathers and attended Virginia’s premier college of the time. But in the end, breeding isn’t enough. It does not teach wisdom or judgment. So we remember Tyler today by a fine jingle.

Michael P. Riccards is the author of a two-volume history of the presidency, “The Ferocious Engine of Democracy.”