Restored daguerreotype of John Tyler, tenth president of the United States. Library of Congress collection. Circa 1861.
School period
College/University
Gallery of John Tyler
Sadler Center, 200 Stadium Dr, Williamsburg, VA 23185, United States
Tyler attended local schools, and at age twelve entered the preparatory branch of the nearby College of William and Mary.
Career
Gallery of John Tyler
1828
Richmond, Virginia, United States
An engraving of Tyler in his mid-thirties (c. 1826) as Governor of Virginia.
Gallery of John Tyler
1830
United States
President John Tyler, half-length portrait, facing right around 1860.
Gallery of John Tyler
1841
United States
In this oil portrait made in 1841, President John Tyler sits at a desk with a sheaf of official documents. The paper on top of the pile reads, "Bank Bill Vetoed." Tyler angered his own Whig party by opposing a national bank and vetoing several party-supported banking bills. The United States Capitol can be seen in the distance outside the window. This painting was created by William Hart and is part of the Commonwealth of Virginia's art collection.
Gallery of John Tyler
1859
United States
John Tyler, oil on canvas by George Healy, 1859; in the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.
Achievements
This obelisk marks Tyler's grave at Hollywood Cemetery.
In this oil portrait made in 1841, President John Tyler sits at a desk with a sheaf of official documents. The paper on top of the pile reads, "Bank Bill Vetoed." Tyler angered his own Whig party by opposing a national bank and vetoing several party-supported banking bills. The United States Capitol can be seen in the distance outside the window. This painting was created by William Hart and is part of the Commonwealth of Virginia's art collection.
John Tyler was the tenth president of the United States, and the first vice president to succeed to the presidency. His administration was marked by great conflict over the Texas question.
Background
John Tyler was born on March 29, 1790, in Charles City County, Virginia, United States to the family of John Tyler Sr, a member of the Virginia House of Delegates during the American Revolution and later governor of Virginia, and Mary Armistead. The senior John Tyler, a close friend of Thomas Jefferson, owned a tobacco plantation of over a thousand acres, tended by dozens of slaves. He also served as a judge in the United States Circuit Court at Richmond. A fervent advocate of states' rights, which would preserve his power, he vigorously opposed the Constitution and the rights it might give to commoners. When young John was seven, his mother died from a stroke.
Education
John and Mary Armistead Tyler raised each of their eight children to be part of the region's elite gentry, and their boys received the best education available. Tyler attended local schools, and at age twelve entered the preparatory branch of the nearby College of William and Mary. Three years later, he entered the collegiate program of the prestigious college, graduating at age seventeen in 1807. The young man began studying law under his father and an attorney cousin and gained admission to the Virginia bar in 1809.
At 21 Tyler was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates; he served from 1811 to 1815. He subsequently was elected to the Virginia Council of State, to the United States House of Representatives, to the governorship of Virginia, and to the United States Senate (1827-1834). During these years Tyler emerged as one of the chief proponents of the states'-rights doctrine. He opposed internal improvements at Federal expense, a tariff to protect native industries and a national banking system.
In 1839 the Whigs, whose presidential candidate was William Henry Harrison of Ohio, sought to balance the ticket with Tyler as their vice-presidential candidate. Because his views bore little relationship to those of the rest of his party, Tyler skillfully sidestepped the major issues during the campaign. Despite his presence on the ticket, the Whigs lost Virginia; however, they won nationally.
Harrison's death a month after his inauguration created a minor constitutional crisis and a major political one. Tyler was the first vice president to succeed to the presidency, and the question was raised as to whether he was actually president or just the vice president acting as president. Tyler established the precedent that the vice president succeeded to the powers and honors of the office as if he had been elected in his own right.
Although Tyler inherited governmental powers, he lost control of his party. As a misplaced Democrat within the Whig party, he had great difficulty with the congressional leaders of his party, especially Henry Clay. The split was most evident on three issues: the Bank of the United States, the tariff, and a proposal to distribute among the states the revenue secured from the sale of public lands. Tyler twice vetoed the charter passed by Congress for the creation of a Third Bank of the United States. He made several positive suggestions, however, for a substitute - including the creation of a Bank of the District of Columbia with less power than that of the Second Bank of the United States. Tyler also vetoed a tariff and distribution bill that he contended violated the principles of the compromise tariff of 1833 (which had ended South Carolina's nullification threat).
Tyler's increasing isolation from the Whig party was hastened by the resignation on September 11, 1841, of all the members of the Cabinet appointed by Harrison, except Secretary of State Daniel Webster. Webster remained until May 1843 in order to complete negotiations with England over a long-standing boundary dispute. Tyler's final Cabinet was composed mainly of Southerners, including John C. Calhoun as secretary of state.
The latter part of Tyler's tenure was dominated by the Texas question. After Texas won its independence from Mexico, the Jackson and Martin Van Buren administrations refrained from annexation because of the position of the North, which opposed incorporating more slave territory into the United States. Rejecting this opposition, Calhoun negotiated a treaty of annexation. This was turned down by the Senate in 1844. The question played a part in the election of 1844, after which the administration pushed a joint resolution through Congress providing for the incorporation of Texas. It was passed on the last day of Tyler's administration.
As Tyler had had little hope of renomination by the Whigs in 1844, he had sought to build a third party composed of dissident Democrats and Whigs but soon abandoned his efforts. Tyler remained active in national politics. He supported the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act. After South Carolina seceded in 1860, Tyler participated in the Washington Peace Convention that met early in 1861. When Virginia seceded, he supported his state. He was elected to the Confederate House of Representatives, but he died on January 18, 1862, a month before that body held its first session.
Tyler was a strong supporter of religious tolerance and separation of church and state.
Politics
Like most politics of his day, Tyler's political activities were molded by the confused party situation existing during the 1820s and 1830s, as the long-dominant Jeffersonian Republican party dissolved. In the election of 1828, Tyler supported Andrew Jackson but found himself in opposition to Jackson soon after the inauguration. Tyler was against the President's threat to use force against South Carolina in order to enforce the tariff nullified in 1832. Tyler also attacked Jackson for what he considered to be his high-handed way of withdrawing governmental deposits from the Bank of the United States. Oddly, by alienating himself from the administration, Tyler found himself aligned with Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and the other Northern nationalists who had created the Whig party. He was a member of the Democratic-Republican Party (1811-1828), Democratic Party (1828-1834), Whig (1834-1841), Democratic-Republican Party (1844). From 1844 to 1862 he stayed Independent.
Views
Tyler was a slaveholder, at one point keeping forty slaves at Greenway. Although he regarded slavery as evil and did not attempt to justify it, he never freed any of his slaves.
Soon after Tyler's marriage, the War of 1812 broke out with England. Tyler, who supported the conflict, headed a small militia company but saw no action. Soon after the war's end, he won election to the U.S. House of Representatives. With his elite background, Tyler quickly became a Washington insider, frequenting First Lady Dolly Madison's parties.
Madison's soirees, however, had to be held at the Octagon, a temporary residence, because the White House had been burned by British troops during the war. The War of 1812 was rife with humiliating lessons for the young nation, and it fed a great national controversy afterward. Many felt that for the young nation to expand and prosper it would have to operate as a centralized, unified entity. People who held this perspective contended that the United States needed a strong central government capable of developing infrastructure to support a growing country. They called for a national bank, cheap land for settlers, a shift from an agrarian to an industrial economic base, and the broadening of the electoral franchise to include all white males over twenty-one, even the humble settlers of the West. These "nationalists" also advocated a tariff on imports and a strong standing army to defend the nation's commercial interests.
Tyler, like most of the southern planter aristocracy, bitterly opposed this program, which he believed posed a direct threat to his economic power base and to the social structure in Virginia. He openly disliked Andrew Jackson, a raucous westerner of humble origin who gained popularity from fighting in the War of 1812. Jackson was wildly popular with the American electorate after the war. His rapid rise to power and prominence troubled Tyler.
Tyler also opposed the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which politically crystallized the issue of slavery in the young nation. At the time, the United States Congress was equally divided between members of those states allowing "the peculiar institution" and those barring it. The attempt by proslavery settlers in the Missouri territory to secure statehood threatened to upset the balance of power on the issue in the Senate. When Congress tried to grant statehood to antislavery Maine and ban slavery in new states west of Missouri, Tyler saw it as perilous meddling in the South's affairs. Slavery, he argued, should be allowed anywhere in America. The government, however, placed geographic restrictions on the practice, an expansion of federal power that appalled the Virginia aristocrat.
By 1821, a discouraged Tyler resigned from Congress. He returned to his law practice and the Virginia state legislature. In the latter, he fought efforts allowing the popular vote to choose presidential electors, preferring to keep the selection of presidential electors in the hands of the state legislature. A similar process decided the governorship of Virginia, and in 1825, its state legislature elected Tyler governor. In a state all but controlled by cotton and tobacco interests, the office had little real power, and his accomplishments were few. Tyler grew restless after a little more than a year, and he again prevailed upon Virginia's legislature to elect him to the United States Senate.
In 1824, Tyler supported John Quincy Adams's successful presidential candidacy, mainly because it served to deny Andrew Jackson the office. Adams's heavily nationalist agenda, however, quickly disillusioned the Virginia senator. When Jackson forces promoted a regionally divisive tariff bill in an attempt to cripple Adams's 1828 reelection chances, Tyler reluctantly supported Jackson as the lesser of two evils. Clinging to an unfounded hope that Jackson, a fellow Democrat, was a secret states' rights advocate - Adams's vice president, John C. Calhoun, had switched to the Jackson camp in support of such policies - Tyler gritted his teeth and supported "Old Hickory." After one of the most bitterly fought elections, Jackson won the presidency by a wide margin.
Almost immediately, Tyler realized that Andrew Jackson's beliefs had little in common with his own. Jackson's "spoils system," which rewarded campaign supporters with positions in the new administration, disturbed Tyler, who considered it corrupt. While Tyler gave lukewarm support to Jackson's 1832 reelection bid after the President's dismantling of the Bank of the United States, subsequent events brought their hostility for one another into the open.
The nullification battles waged over the "Tariff of Abominations" pitted South Carolina and states' rights advocate John C. Calhoun, Jackson's former vice president, against the President. Days after the election, South Carolina renounced federal tariffs, claiming that it had an inherent right as a state to conform or not to conform to federal policy - even if secession (leaving the Union) should ensue. Jackson considered their actions treasonous and threatened to use military force if South Carolina interfered with customs collections in Charleston. Tyler, despite his misgivings on the tariff issue, was horrified at this federal saber-rattling against a southern state. Jackson, he felt, had become a bullying dictator who acted unconstitutionally. In February of 1833, Tyler denounced Old Hickory's policy against South Carolina on the Senate floor in an inspired, fiery address. The speech drew broad support at home and propelled him to reelection by the Virginia legislature. When the time came to vote on Jackson's plan (the Force Act) to confront South Carolina, John Tyler cast the lone Senate vote against it even though it was part of a compromise package that involved lowering the tariffs that had sparked the dispute.
Quotations:
"Wealth can only be accumulated by the earnings of industry and the savings of frugality."
"I contend that the strongest of all governments is that which is most free."
"The institutions under which we live, my countrymen, secure each person in the perfect enjoyment of all his rights."
"I can never consent to being dictated to."
"So far as it depends on the course of this government, our relations of goodwill and friendship will be sedulously cultivated with all nations."
Personality
According to political scientist James David Barber, there are four primary types of character a president will exhibit: active-positive, active-negative, passive-positive, and passive-negative. Tyler fits best with the "active-positive" archetype, which is described as follows: self-confident; flexible; created opportunities for action; enjoys the exercise of power, does not take himself too seriously; optimistic; emphasizes the "rational mastery" of his environment; power used as a means to achieve beneficial results.
Physical Characteristics:
Throughout Tyler's life, he suffered from poor health. As he aged, he suffered more frequently from colds during the winter.
Quotes from others about the person
"Tyler had all the dignified charm and grace of the soft, warm manner typical of the well-bred Southerner of the early nineteenth century. He mixed readily with strangers of his class. Around working people, however, he became a different person - ill at ease, aloof, unresponsive. Some took this for vanity. But, as biographer Robert Seager pointed out, "What appeared to be vanity was an ingrained shyness and discomfort in the presence of people with dirty fingernails... He never had any experience with these people, and he was too diffident to gain any." - William A. DeGregorio, The Complete Book of U.S. Presidents
Interests
playing violin
Connections
Tyler fathered more children than any other American president. His first wife was Letitia Christian, with whom he had eight children. She died of a stroke in the White House in September 1842. His second wife was Julia Gardiner, with whom he had seven children.