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John Tyler: Presidents
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Refusing to be intimidated, Tyler responded the following Monday by sending the Senate a new slate of cabinet officers. Despite the president's break with the Senate's leaders, the body on September 13 quickly confirmed each of the nominees and then adjourned until December. Later that day, in a starkly dramatic move, sixty prominent Whigs assembled in the plaza adjacent to the Capitol. In a festive mood, they adopted a manifesto that asserted the supremacy of Congress in policy-making, condemned the president's conduct, and proclaimed that the Whig party could no longer be held responsible for the chief executive's actions. Tyler had become a president without a party.
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Mr. Tyler had really won a victory of the first magnitude, as was conclusively shown in 1844, when the presidential platform of the Whigs was careful to make no allusion whatever to the bank. On this crucial question the doctrines of paternal government had received a crushing and permanent defeat. In the next session of congress the strife with the president was renewed : but it was now tariff, not bank, that furnished the subject of discussion. Diminished importations, due to the general prostration of business, had now diminished the revenue until it was insufficient to meet the expenses of government. The Whigs accordingly carried through congress a bill continuing the protective duties of 1833, and pro riding that the surplus revenue, which was ... sure soon to accumulate, should be distributed among the states. But the compromise act of 1833, in which Mr. Tyler had played an important part, had provided that the protective policy should come to an end in 1842.
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Perhaps the individual who more than any other was responsible for creating this perception of Tyler was his son Lyon G. Tyler. In his three volume work, The Letters and Times of the Tylers, published in the 1880s, he interpreted his father's career through the lens of the Civil War, consciously cultivating an image of John Tyler as a gracious, noble, and honorable southern patriot. Years later, in a pamphlet published in 1929 that gained some notoriety, he compared his father to Abraham Lincoln and not surprisingly concluded that Tyler was the superior man both as leader and moral example. In his admirable, if misguided, profession of filial piety, the son not only distorted history but ... did a disservice to the father. If John Tyler was not Lincoln's equal much less his better, it is also the case that as president he pursued a broad national agenda and was not simply an unyielding, doctrinaire sectionalist and states' rights advocate. Tyler was a key participant in the leadership of an antebellum generation that grappled for at least four decades with the issues of sectionalism and the preservation of the Union.
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Tyler argued that his vice-presidential oath covered the possibility of having to take over as chief executive and consequently there was no need for him to take the separate presidential oath. The cabinet, major newspapers, and some Tyler advisers disagreed. To remove any doubt, despite his own strong reservations, Tyler agreed to the oath, which was administered on April 6 at Brown's Indian Queen Hotel by Chief Judge William Cranch of the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Columbia. Taking this step produced a significant reward, for it boosted Tyler's annual salary five-fold from $5,000 to $25,000.
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In an apparent attempt to force Tyler out of office, all the members of the cabinet except Webster resigned in allegiance to Clay. Acting with a speed that suggested he had anticipated this turn of events, Tyler named the new secretaries in two days. On Sept. 13, 1841, the day the Senate confirmed the cabinet appointments, the Whig caucus declared all party ties with Tyler dissolved on the ground that he was seeking to build a new political party. The congressional Whigs then used every difference with the president as an occasion to charge him with "executive usurpation"—the same charge the party had made against Jackson.
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Tyler's Presidency was rarely taken seriously in his time. He was usually referred to as the "Acting President" or "His Accidency" by opponents. Further, Tyler quickly found himself at odds with his former political supporters. Harrison had been expected to adhere closely to Whig Party policies and work closely with Whig leaders, particularly Henry Clay. Tyler shocked Congressional Whigs by vetoing virtually their entire agenda, twice vetoing Clay's legislation for a national banking act following the Panic of 1837 and leaving the government deadlocked. Tyler was officially expelled from the Whig Party in 1841, a few months after taking office, and became known as "the man without a party."
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