John Tyler

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John Tyler (March 29, 1790 – January 18, 1862) was the tenth president of the United States, serving from 1841 to 1845, after briefly serving as the tenth vice president in 1841. Since Harrison's death 31 days after taking office, he was named vice president on the 1840 Whig ticket with President William Harrison. Tyler, a long-servant backer and promoter of state's rights, including slavery, was a champion of slavery, and he only became president after the states did not abuse their jurisdiction. His unexpected ascension to the presidency put Henry Clay and other Whig politicians in jeopardy, leaving Tyler alienated from both of the country's major political parties at the time.

Tyler was born in a prominent slaveholding Virginia family. He became a national figure during a period of national uncertainty. The country's only political party, the Democratic-Republican Party, split into factions in the 1820s. Tyler was originally a Democrat, but he opposed President Andrew Jackson during the Nullification Crisis because he saw Jackson's activities as infringing on states' rights and condemned Jackson's expansion of executive power during the Bank War. This led Tyler to his ally with the Whig Party. He served as both governor of Virginia and governor, president of the United States, and senator from the United States Senate. In the 1836 presidential election, he was one of the regional Whig vice presidents, but they lost. He was William Henry Harrison's running mate on the 1840 Whig presidential ticket. The Harrison-Tyler ticket defeated incumbent President Martin Van Buren under the campaign tag "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too."

President Harrison died just one month after taking office, and Tyler became the first vice president to serve as president. Tyler took the presidential oath of office immediately after being in a limbo over whether a vice president succeeded a deceased president or simply assumed his duties. Tyler accepted some of the Whig-controlled Congress's bills, but he was a strict builder and vetoed the party's most critical bills, including the establishment of a national bank and raising tariff rates. He believed that the president rather than Congress should make policy, and that he wanted to defy the Whig establishment ruled by Senator Henry Clay. Tyler's cabinet members resigned shortly after his term, and the Whigs barred him from the party, dubbed him "His Accidence." Tyler was the first president to have his veto of legislation overridden by Congress. He faced a deadlock on domestic policy, but he did have some international-policy triumphs, including the Webster-Ashburton Treaty with the United Kingdom and the Treaty of Wanghia with China, which culminated in a deadlock. Tyler, a firm believer in manifest destiny, saw Texas secession as economically beneficial to the United States, signing a bill to give statehood to Texas right away before leaving office and returning to his plantation.

Tyler was one of the first to endorse the Peace Conference at the start of the American Civil War in 1861. When it didn't go well, he sided with the Confederacy. He presided over the opening of the Virginia Secession Convention and served as a member of the Confederate States' Provisional Congress. Tyler obtained an election to the Confederate House of Representatives but died before it assembled. Some scholars have lauded Tyler's political tenacity, but historians have generally given his presidency a low ranking. Under the Webster-Ashburton Treaty, Tyler made strides in uniting the American and British navies to avoid oceanic slave trafficking. Without war, the same treaty also peacefully negotiated the border between Maine and Canada. Tyler is little remembered in terms of other presidents today, and he has only a limited presence in American cultural memory. Tyler was one of the country's richest presidents, worth 51 million dollars.

Early life and education

John Tyler was born in 1790 to a slave-owning Virginia family. Tyler, like his future running mate, William Henry Harrison, hails from Charles City, Virginia, and descended from the First Families of Virginia. The Tyler family traces its lineage to English immigrants and Williamsburg, the 17th century colonial Williamsburg. John Tyler Sr., John Tyler Sr., was a Thomas Jefferson confidant and college roommate and spent in the Virginia House of Delegates with 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, as a judge on the Eastern District of Virginia in Richmond. Mary Marot (Armistead) was the granddaughter of well-known New Kent County plantation owner and one-term delegate Robert Booth Armistead. In 1797, she died of a stroke when her son John was seven years old.

Tyler was raised on Greenway Plantation, a 1,200-acre (5 km2) home with a six-room manor house that his father built on a beach. Enslaved slave labor tended to many crops, including wheat, corn, and tobacco. Judge Tyler paid tutors who challenged his children academically. Tyler was of frail health, thin, and prone to diarrhea throughout life. He continued a Tyler family line and joined the College of William and Mary's preparatory branch. Tyler graduated from the school's collegiate branch in 1807 at the age of seventeen. Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations aided in shaping his financial views, as well as his lifelong admiration of William Shakespeare. Bishop James Madison, the college's president, served as both a second father and mentor to Tyler.

Tyler read the legislation with his father, then a state judge, and later with Edmund Randolph, the former US Attorney General.

Family, personal life, slavery

More children were born in Tyler than in any other American president. Letitia Christian (November 12, 1790 – September 10, 1842), with whom he had eight children, Robert (1820–1896), Elizabeth (1827–1854) and Tazewell (1830-1844).

Letitia, Tyler's first wife, died in the White House in September 1842 after suffering a stroke. He married Julia Gardiner (1847–1927), and Stephen Lachlan (1854–1927), who had seven children: David (1846–1897), Julia Gardiner (July 23, 1848–1893), Lachlan (1851–1927), Jean Lamb (1860–1947), Richard Leopol (1846–1927), Robert Fitzwalter (1848–1927), Julia Gardiner (1851–1927), and Margaret Pearl (1851–1947),

Although Tyler's family was important to him during his political rise, he was often away from home for lengthy stretches of time. Tyler wrote that he would soon be called upon to educate his growing family if he did not apply for re-election to the House of Representatives in 1821 due to sickness. When away in Washington, D.C., it was difficult to practice law, but his plantation was more fruitful when Tyler was able to handle it himself. By the time he took the Senate in 1827, he had resigned himself to spending a year away from his family. Nevertheless, he wanted to stay close to his children by writing letters.

Tyler was a slave keeper in Greenway, who had forty slaves at one time. Although he regarded slavery as an evil and did not attempt to defend it, he never freed any of his slaves. Tyler considered slavery a part of states' rights, but the federal government lacked the authority to abolish it. The living conditions of his slaves are not well documented, but historians suspect he cared for their safety and abstained from physical violence against them. Tyler was attacked by abolitionist publisher Joshua Leavitt in December 1841, who brought an unsubstantiated assertion that Tyler fathered several sons with his slaves and later sold them. A number of black families still hold a belief in their descent from Tyler, but there are no traces of such ancestors.

Tyler has one living grandson as a result of his son Lyon Gardiner Tyler's death in December 2021, making him the first living grandchild. Harrison Ruffin Tyler was born in 1928 and remains the family home, Sherwood Forest Plantation, in Charles City, Virginia.

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