John Tyler

Tyler was born into a prominent slaveholding Virginia family. He became a national figure at a time of political upheaval. In the 1820s, the Democratic-Republican Party, at the time the nation's only political party, split into several factions. Initially a Democrat, Tyler opposed President Andrew Jackson during the nullification crisis as he saw Jackson's actions as infringing on states' rights and criticized Jackson's expansion of executive power during the Bank War. This led Tyler to ally with the Whig Party. He served as a Virginia state legislator and governor, U.S. representative, and U.S. senator. Tyler was a regional Whig vice-presidential nominee in the 1836 presidential election; they lost. He was the sole nominee on the 1840 Whig presidential ticket as William Henry Harrison's running mate. Under the campaign slogan "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too", the Harrison–Tyler ticket defeated incumbent president Martin Van Buren.


President Harrison died just one month after taking office, and Tyler became the first vice president to succeed to the presidency. Amid uncertainty as to whether a vice president succeeded a deceased president, or merely took on his duties, Tyler immediately took the presidential oath of office, setting a lasting precedent. He signed into law some of the Whig-controlled Congress's bills, but he was a strict constructionist and vetoed the party's bills to create a national bank and raise tariff rates. He believed that the president, rather than Congress, should set policy, and he sought to bypass the Whig establishment led by Senator Henry Clay. Most of Tyler's cabinet resigned shortly into his term and the Whigs expelled him from the party, dubbing him "His Accidency". Tyler was the first president to have his veto of legislation overridden by Congress. He faced a stalemate on domestic policy, although he had several foreign-policy achievements, including the Webster–Ashburton Treaty with Britain and the Treaty of Wanghia with China. Tyler firmly believed in manifest destiny and saw the annexation of Texas as economically advantageous to the United States, signing a bill to offer Texas statehood just before leaving office and returning to his plantation.


When the American Civil War began in 1861, Tyler at first supported the Peace Conference. When it failed, he sided with the Confederacy. He presided over the opening of the Virginia Secession Convention and served as a member of the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States. Tyler subsequently won election to the Confederate House of Representatives but died before it assembled. Some scholars have praised Tyler's political resolve, but historians have generally given his presidency a low ranking. Tyler did make progress in combining the American and British navies to stop oceanic African slave trafficking under the Webster–Ashburton Treaty. That treaty also peacefully settled the border between Maine and Canada. Today, Tyler is seldom remembered in comparison to other presidents and maintains only a limited presence in American cultural memory.^[1]

Early life and education

John Tyler was born on March 29, 1790, to a slave-owning Virginia family. Tyler hailed from Charles City County, Virginia, and was descended from the First Families of Virginia.^[2][3] The Tyler family traced its lineage to English settlers and 17th-century colonial Williamsburg. His father, 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, William's father. The elder Tyler served four years as Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates before becoming a state court judge and later governor of Virginia and a judge on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia at Richmond. His wife, Mary Marot (Armistead), was the daughter of prominent New Kent County plantation owner and one-term delegate, Robert Booth Armistead. She died of a stroke in 1797 when her son John was seven years old.^[4]


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.^[b] Enslaved labor tended various crops, including wheat, corn and tobacco.^[5] Judge Tyler paid high wages for tutors who challenged his children academically.^[6] Tyler was of frail health, thin and prone to diarrhea.^[7] At age 12, he continued a Tyler family tradition and entered the preparatory branch of the College of William and Mary. Tyler graduated from the school's collegiate branch in 1807, at age 17. Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations helped form his economic views, and he acquired a lifelong love of William Shakespeare. Bishop James Madison, the college's president, served as a second father and mentor to Tyler.^[8]


After graduation, Tyler read the law with his father, then a state judge, and later with Edmund Randolph, former United States Attorney General.^[9]