LYCOS RETRIEVER 
John Tyler: Southern Whigs
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Like his predecessor, the short-lived William Henry Harrison, John Tyler was a Whig. What the hell is a whig anyway. During his entire presidency, Tyler sat on his laurels and accomplished absolutely nothing. The only thing he was good at was having kids he had 15 kids before he died.
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In what may be best described as an exhilarating and almost hectic pursuit of national greatness during his presidency, Tyler surrounded himself with like-minded dreamers of destiny, many of whom were ... disciples of Madison and Jefferson. His cabinet and the tiny "corporal's guard" in Congress included both northerners and southerners who had visions of national glory nearly identical to his. And it surely was not by coincidence that his administration's official newspaper and political mouthpiece was named the Madisonian. Among this regionally diverse band of commercial and territorial expansionists were, of course, the three men who served as secretary of state during Tyler's reign-Webster, Upshur, and Calhoun. Other proponents of national destiny in the cabinet were Hugh Legare, Thomas Gilmer, and William Wilkins. In Congress two of Tyler's confidants who dreamed of territorial empire and national greatness were Robert J. Walker of Mississippi and Caleb Cushing of Massachusetts.
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Tyler soon received compensation for his losses. In 1840, the Whig party, seeking a southern states' righter to balance William Henry Harrison's more nationalistic views, nominated Tyler as Harrison's running mate. Tyler, swept into subordinate office in the famous "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too" campaign, became president when Harrison died a month after the inaugural.
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Some people thought that Tyler was not the real president, because he had not been elected. But the United States Constitution says that the vice president takes over if the president dies, and Tyler said that meant he was the new president. At first, the rest of the government agreed and declared him the new president. But the Whig Party didn't want Tyler to be president, and a lot of people called him "the accidental president" or "His Accidency".
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Perhaps no other president has so often borne the epithet of "imbecile" as John Tyler, who was expelled from his own party by a rump Whig congressional caucus. The vicious political infighting that characterized his term may account for the low regard in which his presidency has been held by historians, who have generally ranked him as one of the least successful chief executives, despite achievements such as the Webster-Ashburton treaty, which heralded improved relations with Great Britain, and the annexation of Texas, which added millions of acres to the national domain.
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Tyler felt that each state should run its own affairs and that the federal government should stay within the powers assigned to it in the Constitution. Like most Southern politicians of that day, he ... believed in low tariffs, or taxes on imports.
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