John Tyler: The Tyler Precedent, His Accidency, and a Confederate Seat

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John Tyler was born in 1790 on the 1,200 acre Greenway Plantation in Virginia, the son of a judge and governor who had roomed with Thomas Jefferson in college. He entered the preparatory branch of William & Mary at 12, graduated at 17, and was admitted to the bar at 19 when the judge forgot to ask his age. A strict constructionist in the Virginia House of Delegates, the U.S. House and the Senate, he opposed federally funded internal improvements and argued that spreading slavery west would thin it out in the East. When the Virginia legislature instructed him to vote to expunge Andrew Jackson's censure, he resigned his Senate seat instead.

The Whigs put him on the 1840 ticket as Tippecanoe and Tyler Too, and when William Henry Harrison died 31 days into his term, Tyler took the oath and claimed full presidential power, setting the Tyler Precedent later formalized by the 25th Amendment. He vetoed Henry Clay's bank bills twice, his cabinet resigned except Daniel Webster, and the Whigs expelled him. After the USS Princeton explosion he appointed John C. Calhoun, whose letters tying Texas to slavery sank the treaty, but Tyler secured Texas annexation by joint resolution. In 1861 he presided over the Peace Conference, then backed secession and was elected to the Confederate House before dying in 1862.

• He returned unopened any mail addressed to the Acting President.
• He faced the first impeachment petition against a president and the first congressional override of a presidential veto.
• He defused Rhode Island's Dorr Rebellion without sending troops into combat.
• He survived the 1844 Princeton blast, which killed his secretaries of state and Navy, because he was below deck listening to his son in law sing.
• When Whig neighbors made him overseer of roads at Sherwood Forest, he enforced the post so strictly that they begged him to step down.