The president who sided with the South

The New York Times’ excellent series Disunion, on the period leading up to the War Between the States, this week profiled one of the more interesting individuals to ever sit in the Oval Office.

John Tyler was the first vice president to assume the presidency upon the death of a chief executive, when William Henry Harrison died a month into his term after contracting pneumonia during his inauguration speech.

“Many Americans in 1841 believed that the Constitution did not mandate that the vice president actually assume the highest office in the land, but merely that he execute its powers while retaining his title,” according to the Times. “So when Tyler asserted that he was actually president, he was condemned as a usurper and ridiculed as ‘His Accidency.'”

Tyler never wavered from his conviction that he was the rightful president; when his political opponents sent correspondence to the White House addressed to the “Vice President” or “Acting President,” Tyler had it returned unopened, according to Edward Crapol’s biography, John Tyler, the Accidental President.

In 1842 he became the target of the first congressional impeachment attempt in American history. Northerners believed that his actions as president – especially his appointment of an almost wholly Southern cabinet and his push to annex Texas as a slave state – had done much to deepen fissures in the Union, the paper added.

Tyler’s single term as president was anything but smooth. He stood against his party’s platform and vetoed several of their proposals. As a result, most of his cabinet resigned and the Whigs expelled him from their party.

Following the end of his term in 1845, Tyler spent the next decade and half in retirement on his plantation in Virginia.

In February 1861, Tyler, a slave owner, presided over the Peace Conference, a gathering of elder statesmen making a last-ditch attempt to rescue the Union as it pitched toward civil war.

But by the end of the month it was apparent that neither North nor South was willing to bend enough to placate the other.

Later that spring, Tyler cast a vote for Virginia’s secession and personally drafted a document placing the state’s militia force under Jefferson Davis’s direct control, according to the Times.

“In November 1861, John Tyler was elected to the Confederate Congress – becoming the only former American president ever to win office in a foreign country,” the Times reported.

He arrived in Richmond, Va., in January 1862 for the opening session but a couple of days later had a sudden attack of the chills and nausea, then collapsed unconscious. Less than a week later, he was dead, having never taken his seat in the Southern government.

Tyler’s death was the only one in presidential history not to be officially mourned in Washington, because of his allegiance to the Confederacy, and he is also considered the only president to die outside the United States because his place of death.

Interestingly, 221 years after his birth, Tyler still has two living grandsons: Lyon and Harrison Tyler.