John Tyler: The Most Hated President of the 19th Century

today's video is brought to you by nordvpn a VPN service that not only allows you to browse the internet privately and securely but comes with plenty of extras and features more on them later there has been spirited debate among historians over which of the 46 presidents of the United States ranks as the best there has also been spirited though somewhat more subdued debate over which of them was the worst and boy have there been some bad ones from James Buchanan who essentially sat on his hands and watched as the nation tore itself apart and triggered the Civil War to Warren G Harding who famously presided over one of the most corrupt administrations in history but no debate about worse presidents of all time would be complete without mentioning John Tyler the 10th President Tyler was never supposed to be president he assumed the office following the sudden death of his predecessor the first time that had happened in American history it was just the first of a string of unprecedented events that would shape American politics for a generation among other things Tyler successfully derailed the legislative agenda of his own party causing them to expel him from their ranks his obstinence irritated almost everyone in Washington to the point that he had few friends and entirely too many enemies he even most important achievement during his presidency adding taxes to the union ultimately triggered a war that caused the deaths of tens of thousands and set the stage for an even more destructive War a decade later and if that weren't bad enough John Tyler managed to ruin his reputation even further at the end of his life when he advocated for succession and I was elected to the Confederate Congress causing many to view him as a traitor when he died it was accorded almost none of the honors usually given to a former president and the historical outlook on his life and career has hardly been rehabilitated by the passage of time foreign ER was born on March 29 1790 in the Tidewater region of Southeastern Virginia the tilas were one of the wealthiest families in the state tracing their Roots back to the colonial times and had a long history of Public Service Tyler's Father John Senior known as judge Tyler was no exception enjoying a distinguished political career that included a close friendship with Thomas Jefferson and election as governor of Virginia in 1808. from the start John Tyler was raised to become everything his father was a lawyer a future politician and above all a perfect Southern gentleman concerned with his standing in society and his honor at all times like many boys John loved his father and wanted to make him proud so he studied hard graduating from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg in 1807 when he was 17. he passed the bar and became a lawyer at 19 technically two years too young to sit the exam but it seems the examiner simply hadn't bothered to find out how old he was he began practicing as a lawyer in Richmond and he was good at it but his real passion was politics in fact the only reason he became a lawyer in the first place was because it was seen as a necessary prerequisite to becoming a politician politics would become the defining love of Tyler's life one that he was far more passionate about than his wife Leticia who he married in 1813. that was more about fulfilling the southern gentleman's obligation to marry well and produce children than any sense of romance and produce they did eight of them between 1815 and 1830. Tyler's first taste of politics came in 1811 when he was elected to the Virginia House of delegates serving there for five years in 1816 he seized an opportunity to get himself elected to the United States House of Representatives and would thereafter spend half the year in Washington DC tending to the people's business which caused an unfortunate drop in the revenues of his own business it was difficult to maintain a thriving legal practice at home when he spent so much time away and revenues at his Plantation suffered when he wasn't there personally supervising it Tyler would spend much of his life in debt relying on borrowing money from friends and from the bank to keep himself afloat in Congress Tyler became more well known for what he opposed than what he supported almost from the moment of its founding there had been an argument about which entity should have more power in the United States the federal government or the individual states that divided up the country Tyler came down firmly on the side of state's rights and in this like with most everything else he emulated his father judge Tyler had tried unsuccessfully to prevent Virginia from ratifying the Constitution back in 1787 and when that failed he became what was known as a constructionist constructionists believed that the federal government can't do anything that isn't explicitly permitted to them by the Constitution their opponents variously known as the consolidationists or centralists believed that the federal government can do anything that isn't specifically prohibited by the Constitution these two arguments have dominated American politics for almost 250 years and will likely keep doing so into the future [Music] foreign ER as a believer in states rights and constructionism spent most of his time in Congress opposing bills he believed were unconstitutional at the top of his list was Central Banking Alexander Hamilton's First Bank of the United States had been dissolved when its Charter expired in 1811 but President James Madison a vocal critic of the bank found himself facing an economic crisis in the aftermath of the War of 1812 and realized a second bank would have to be chartered to manage the nation's money when John Tyler and other Southern lawmakers attacked the bank as unconstitutional it's important to keep in mind that the reason they were so opposed to it was because Central Banking tended to favor the Commerce class like businesses and manufacturers most of whom were concentrated in the north it didn't benefit the planter class that dominated the Southern economy because their wealth was concentrated in assets primarily land and slaves as opposed to cash and John Tyler was absolutely one of the planter class he maintained a number of farms and plantations throughout his life all of which were operated using slave labor he saw no reason why thing change and why would he the present system already rewarded him as a result most of his constitutional stands were made just as much out of self-interest as from ideological Purity however it was four ideological Purity that he became famous as a politician not only as part of a House of Representatives but also through two more stints in the Virginia House of delegates a two-year term as Governor and as a U.S senator from 1827 to 1836. he became known as a man of principle someone who stuck to his State's rights beliefs no matter what this was epitomized in 1836 when he resigned from The Cellar following a dispute with President Andrew Jackson but while he was making a name for himself in Washington his home life suffered his frequent absences continued to play havoc on his finances and his children largely grew up without him frequently communicating with their father only through letters as for his wife her many pregnancies left her in ill health she was frequently bedridden especially after 1839 when she suffered a stroke she also suffered from what 19th century doctor is called hysteria which was frequently triggered by her husband's impending departure from home for their Capital Tyler himself was often ill plagued with stomach ailments and other diseases some medical historians have guessed that he suffered from Guillain-Barre syndrome and autoimmune disorder less is known about water Letitia since diseases of the Mind tended to be kept private back then to avoid a scandal but the most common guess is severe depression then we're going to talk about a common cyber threat that you may not be fully aware of DDOS attacks or distributed denial of service attacks occur or when a hacker floods a website or online service with traffic making it unavailable to legitimate users these types of attacks can be incredibly disruptive causing website downtime and lost revenue for businesses but did you know that you can become the victim of a DDOS attack just by clicking on a link in an email or on Twitch or in a Discord chat once the attacker has your IP address they can launch a 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by going to nordvpn.com forward slash bio protect yourself from DDOS attacks and other cyber threats today with nordvpn thanks for listening and now back to today's video [Music] in 1840 John Tyler's political career seemed to be over after his resignation in 1836 had broken with Andrew Jackson's Democratic party which had caused him to gravitate to their opponents the wings but Tyler didn't like much of the weak platform either which was dominated by Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky clay considered one of the 19th Century's most brilliant politicians was the champion of centralization having been an architect of the Second Bank of the United States and when Andrew Jackson successfully killed it in 1836 clay vowed that he would start another one 1840 was the great chance for the Whigs to seize power and make Clay's dreams a reality the country had been gripped by an economic depression since 1837 and many blamed Democratic president Martin Van Buren and his party's fiscal policy for it at the party's nomination convention in Harrisburg the Whigs eventually settled on General William Henry Harrison as their candidate for president but who would be his running mate nobody seemed to want the job of being vice president and it isn't hard to see why it was considered a political dead end in those days VPS had little to do besides preside over the Senate and they only voted in that body when there was a tie to break and it wasn't seen as a natural stepping stone for the presidency either between 1800 and 1968 only one man who had previously served as vice president had been elected president in his own right after several verbal candidates turned them down the Whigs turned to Tyler who accepted and the ticket was complete the weeks won big in the 1840 election backs of Tippy Canoe and Tyler too a popular campaign slogan that referred to General Harrison's famous victory in the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811. not only did they win the White House but they swept majorities in both houses of Congress as well Henry Clay believed he had a mandate from the American people to enact his legislative agenda and nothing appeared to stand in his way but they was about to change the course of American history on the 4th of April 1841 only a month after being sworn in his vice president John Tyler woke up to a knock on his door in the middle of the night the news he received was grave president Harrison was dead at the victim of pneumonia he was needed in Washington immediately this was the first time that the Constitutional line of succession needed to be used and it immediately provoked confusion no one was sure if John Tyler assumed the office of President upon the death of William Henry Harrison or if he remained vice president and merely assumed the duties of President until a new one could be elected constitutional confusion was averted when Tyler himself decided that he was now the president he took the oath of office the next day and for the rest of his life he would return all mail that addressed him as Vice President Tyler or acting President Tyler unopened this set a precedence in the seven subsequent cases where a president died and off as the vice president has taken over after taking the oath of office the line of succession was eventually clarified with ratification of the 25th Amendment to the Constitution in 1967. still it wasn't all smooth sailing for John Tyler for the rest of his term his opponents derided him as his accident see because of the way that it assumed the office foreign er's presidency was largely defined by what happened in those first few months after he assumed the office in September of 1841 a special session of Congress was called to address the ongoing financial crisis twice during that session Henry Clay and the Whigs passed bills to create a national bank that they believed was needed to write the economic ship and twice they were stymied when President Tyler vetoed the bill as a result nothing was done and the Whigs looked impotent this enraged clay whose electoral Landslide was now falling to pieces all around him but in hindsight it hardly seemed surprising since Tyler had always been opposed to a central bank the real question is why the wigs would have risked putting him on the ticket in the first place Harrison was 68 years old an old man by 19th century standards there was always a risk of him dying in office it seems the only answer to this is that nobody thought of it as a possibility eight presidents had come and gone before Harris and all of whom completed their terms without issue whatever the reason for putting him on the ticket the Whigs surely regretted doing so now now and they took their wrath out on John Tyler by ejecting him from the party in the fall of 1841 leaving him as a president without a party the entire cabinet Tyler had inherited from Harrison resigned except the Secretary of State Daniel Webster Tyler had few friends in Washington the Whigs now hated him and the Democrats though they were delighted to see their opponent's agenda shredded like this weren't willing to accept him into their ranks either not with Andrew Jackson still as their leader Tyler would go up against the wigs again in 1842. this time over the issue of tariffs with federal income tax still decades away import duties one of the only ways that the federal government made money once again the issue split on sectional lines northern states favored High tariffs as it Protected Their industries from European competition while Southern States hated them because it impeded their exports of cotton to attack star Mills of Great Britain Tyler as a southerner favored free trade but like many idealists that find themselves in positions of executive power he discovered that in order to actually run the country he needed to raise tariffs not lower them the federal government was running out of money in 1842 there was a real risk of the United States being unable to pay its bills still for months Tyler battled Congress over how much the tariffs should be raised whether it should be a temporary or permanent measurement over the fate of distribution an emergency program that gave the profits from federal land sales to the state so that they could pay off their own debts he vetoed two more bills that summer before an agreement that satisfied nobody was finally worked out his Bridges with the Whigs were now well and truly burned and Henry Clay resigned from the Senate everyone knew it was to prepare for his run for presidency in 1844. there was even talk of impeaching the president for the first time in history though grounds to do so were never found thank you compounding Tyler's misery during this period was the death of Leticia Tyler's wife passed away in 1842 following a second stroke one of three first ladies to die while her husband was in office for the second time in two years the White House was in mourning the Tyler administration's only major success during this period was ratification of the Webster ashburton treaty with Great Britain which settled a long-running border dispute between the state of Maine and the Canadian province of New Brunswick as oel is fixing the modern border between Minnesota and Ontario but that was basically it Tyler it seemed had no real policy platform of his own to offer up everyone knew what he was against but what was he actually for Tyler himself didn't seem to know most of the time he irritated even his closest Associates with his tendency to Waffle back and forth on various issues changing his mind multiple times and confusing everyone around him by the end of 1843 however Tyler believed he'd figured out an issue that would cement his legacy as president and might even boost his third party run for re-election the annexation of Texas since 1836 the Republic of Texas had operated as an independent country following its victory in the Texas Revolution over Mexico but all along Sam Houston the Texan leadership had been trying to convince the American government to Annex them both the Jackson and Van Buren administrations had ignored them worried that doing so would spark war with Mexico but Tyler a firm believer in Manifest Destiny saw taxes as a potentially valuable part of the union and didn't think the Mexicans oh would risk a war to stop the U.S from taking over he had taxed his fever and set as Secretary of State ayabal option to oh work on making the annexation happen he faced an upper battle in Congress though with the issue of Texas lying not only on party lines but sectional ones as well the addition of Texas as a slave state would upset the delicate balance of power kept between slave states and free States since the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and northern states weren't Keen to see the slave power again an even more dominant position in National politics than they already had still in the first two months of 1844 it seemed like the administration had enough support for annexation in the Senate and a treaty always being worked out with the Texans then disaster struck on February 28 1844 President Tyler members of his cabinet and hundreds of other guests took a ceremonial cruise down the Potomac River on board the USS Princeton a newly built U.S Navy Corvette the ship's Captain Robert F Stockton took great pleasure in test firing a 27 000 pound Naval Cannon nicknamed Peacemaker for his guests the gun was fired twice without instant but when Stockton pulled the lanyard the third time the gun barrel exploded showering the deck with deadly shrapnel six men were killed including two members of dialer's cabinet Secretary of State Upshaw and Secretary of the Navy Thomas Gilmer fortunately for Tyler he was below decks when the accident occurred had he been killed history would have looked very different as without a vice president to replace in the president pro tempore at the Senate one of Henry Clay's allies would have become president also killed in the explosion was David Gardner a prominent New York attorney and friend of president daughter Julia had been carrying on a prolonged courtship with the president for over a year despite the fact that Tyler was 30 years older than she was oddly enough the death of her father provided that push Julia Gardiner needed to finally agree to marry Tyler after rejecting him twice and they were wed four months later the first presidential wedding in American history [Music] the death of secretary Upshaw the lead negotiator on the Texas treaty complicated matters immensely his replacement John C Calhoun owas are one of the most famous pro-slavery politicians in the country and he created a scandal when he wrote in a letter to a British Minister that the reason the U.S was annexing Texas was to protect slavery from British interference as a result abolitionists Whigs and anyone who feared war with Mexico all came out against annexation the Senate rejected his treaty in April the election of 1844 turned into a referendum on annexation with no chance of being elected himself Tyler decided to play spoiler forcing other Democrats to nominate a pro-annexation candidate James K Polk in exchange for dropping out of the race himself this maneuver foiled Tyler's adversary Henry Clay one more time as he was defeated by Polk in the election instead of a treaty Tyler ensured Texas's place in the Union by a joint resolution of Congress inviting them to join which was signed by the president on his last day in office March 3rd 1845. a speared the annexation of Texas sparked conflict the Mexican-American War would last two years and claim some 40 000 lives as part of the treaty negotiations Mexico ceded to the U.S not only Texas but a huge swath of territory in the southwest which would become four new States the addition of so much new territory also inadvertently set the north and south on a collision course with each other that would end a decade later with Civil War this mostly seemed beyond the concern of John Tyler though after leaving office he retired to a new Plantation in Virginia that he named Sherwood Forest he largely withdrew from politics preferring the life of a gentleman farmer overseeing some 70 slaves as they grew wheat and corn for him his life with the second wife was certainly much happier than with his first everyone who met the tile has indicated how much John and Julia loved each other despite their dramatic age difference they also had a bunch more children seven in all for a total of 15 between two wives the most of any president the last of his children Pearl was born in 1860 when John was 70 years old this unusual circumstance combined with the similar proclivity on the part of one of his younger children Leon is the reason why John Tyler is the oldest former president to still have a living grandchild Harrison Ruffin Tyler age 94. Tyler probably should have stayed out of the secession crisis that swept through the south in the aftermath of Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860. it wasn't like he could help himself though his addiction to politics rearing its head even in old age it probably shouldn't be surprising that Tyler always the only one out of the five living former presidents that took the side of the Confederacy when civil war broke out considering that he was the only one of five that was from the south and also a slave holder but he went beyond just supporting the South he actively called for Virginia's secession and I was elected to the Confederate House of Representatives doing this and in the Wanaka traitor president in the north ruining forever what was already a bad reputation before he could take his seat in the rebel Congress however Tyler became ill his persistent ill health had finally caught up to him and he died on January 18 1862. his death was only acknowledged in the southern states Lincoln's Administration gave Tyler none of the Honors that would have been expected for a former president the northern press basically ignored his death or reported on it perfunctorally without tribute or emotion he was buried in Richmond's Hollywood Cemetery today John Tyler has been largely forgotten by the American public just another 19th century president's name to memorize an elementary school and then forget about for a man who was obsessed with his presidential Legacy who spent nearly his entire post-presidential life defending what he'd done from 1841 to 1845 to be relegated to American ignomy would probably be the ultimate insult even the south in the years after the Civil War tried to forget about Tyler since a slave holding former president undercut their adherence to the Lost Cause rhetoric that was embraced by Southern historians at the end of the 19th century some people would argue that that's just what he deserves that a man who couldn't see past his own personal principles for the good of the country and defended the South and the practice of slavery even to the point of War shouldn't be remembered fondly in life John Tyler owes a president without a party today he's arguably something worse a president without a legacy or at least not a good Legacy

Channel: Biographics

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Id: laFDV0tDuwg

Length: 22min 11sec (1331 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 30 2023