“His Accidency”

ED: If you’re just joining us, this is BackStory, and we’re talking today about fears of presidential overreach throughout American history. Now here at BackStory, we’re fully aware that your first react to the mention of the name John Tyler is not tyrant. In fact, it’s probably, who’s John Tyler?

But BackStory producer, Andrew Parsons, discovered that Tyler faced accusations of executive overreach when he was president in the 18402. Those accusations centered on Tyler’s insistence that he was the president. Here’s Andrew with the story.

ANDREW PARSONS: One night in 1841, John Tyler rose from his bed to find out the President of the United States was dead.

FRANCES PAYNE BOUKNIGHT TYLER: He was apparently awakened at around 4:00 in the morning.

BRIAN: This is Frances Tyler or–

FRANCES PAYNE BOUKNIGHT TYLER: Frances Payne Bouknight Tyler. I’m from Mulberry Hill Plantation, and I married Harrison Tyler.

ANDREW PARSONS: So you would be the granddaughter-in-law of Tyler.

FRANCES PAYNE BOUKNIGHT TYLER: Well, I’ve never thought of it that way, but I think I am.

ANDREW PARSONS: Anyway, the news was a big deal, because Tyler had been sworn in as William Henry Harrison’s Vice President just a month before. Over the course of those 30 days, Harrison had succumbed to pneumonia. Tyler hadn’t even moved to DC. He was still in his home in Williamsburg, Virginia.

FRANCES PAYNE BOUKNIGHT TYLER: Tyler took no chances. He immediately dressed and went to Washington and promptly had himself sworn in.

ANDREW PARSONS: Now anyone in this position would have been in a rush, but Tyler had even more reason to be panicked. No president had ever died in office, meaning no vice president had ever become the president before. And this is important because the language in the Constitution is vague about what to do in this situation. Basically, it says, if the president dies or resigns or is unable to quote “discharge the powers and duties of the set office, the same will devolve onto the vice president,”

Michael Gerhardt is a Constitutional Law Professor at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. He says, no one really knew exactly what that meant at the time.

MICHAEL GERHARDT: The question becomes, what is the words the same mean there? Do they mean the duties, do they mean the office, do they mean both? That language was vague, and a lot of people up until then disagreed over what that language really meant.

ANDREW PARSONS: The first thing Tyler did was meet with Harrison’s cabinet who were calling him acting president, but Tyler had a different idea. He was a lawyer and a political veteran who put forth his own interpretation of the Constitution.

MICHAEL GERHARDT: He’d said to them, I am not the acting president. I’m not the vice president acting as president. I am actually the President of the United States.

ANDREW PARSONS: Tyler took an oath of office and issued an inauguration speech, but this didn’t win him any allies in Congress. The opposition party, the Democrats, had hated him ever since he left them back in the days of Andrew Jackson. His new party, the Whigs, stood in principle against a strong executive and thought Tyler should carry out Harrison’s intentions. Tyler was suddenly in the position that nearly any action he took was interpreted as executive overreach.

MICHAEL GERHARDT: The attacks began early and they happened often throughout his four years in office. He has one of the most heated, intense four years in office of any president in history.

ANDREW PARSONS: Let’s go through the highlights. First, there was the name thing. The House and Senate immediately started pushing through legislation that would officially call Tyler Vice President. People called him acting president, vice president acting as president, and most stinging, his accidency.

MICHAEL GERHARDT: And you can find letters that were addressed to Tyler with all those different forms of addressing him, and he, basically, never responded to anything other than Mr. President or President Tyler.

ANDREW PARSONS: And then there was Henry Clay. He was the powerful Speaker of the House, was leader of the Whigs, and had run for president himself more than a few times. He quickly met with Tyler, assuming that as acting president, Tyler would be a pushover,

MICHAEL GERHARDT: It turns out Clay was dead wrong. Within a very short period of time, actually only a couple of meetings, the two men were yelling each other.

FRANCES PAYNE BOUKNIGHT TYLER: And he said, you Mr. Clay, handle your end of the Capitol Street, and I by god will handle mine.

MICHAEL GERHARDT: It became clear to Clay at that point, my gosh, Tyler’s going to become his own man. Tyler actually thinks he’s President.

ANDREW PARSONS: Which, of course, he was. Within just a few months, Clay organized the Whigs into kicking Tyler out of the party entirely. He became known as the president without a party. And then there was the rest of Capitol Hill. Congressman were enraged whenever Tyler tried to set his own agenda. Their tempers flared each time Tyler vetoed a bill or nominated his own choices for cabinet, a move that was necessary since nearly all of his cabinet resigned over the vetoes.

MICHAEL GERHARDT: What’s going to happen is he will not finish his administration without setting a record for the number of cabinet nominations rejected and the number of Supreme Court nominations rejected. So Tyler’s got battles every direction he looks to the point where there are three different impeachment attempts against him over the course of those four years.

ANDREW PARSONS: So let’s recap. Tyler gets kicked out of this party, has nearly his entire cabinet step down, has three different impeachment proceedings started against him, and can hardly get any nominations through Congress. He is called a dictator and a tyrant, all because he dared to call himself president and challenge the whims of the Whigs. But despite all this acrimony, Gerhardt says the power of the presidency was actually strengthened by the standoff across Pennsylvania Avenue. Every time Congress blew up over a veto or Tyler nominating his own men, he took pains to defend his actions.

MICHAEL GERHARDT: For each one of these exercises of power, Tyler issues what are called protests or proclamations, which are also thought to be really excellent legal documents in which he’s explaining the powers of the presidency. And he’s doing this to the party, the Whigs, who believe the president should be weak, and then each time he does it, it’s like a nail in the coffin of the Whigs because he’s saying to them, your philosophy doesn’t hold water. The president needs to be powerful, powerful enough to stand on his own two feet against the other branches.

ANDREW PARSONS: And Tyler won in the long run. First, he set the precedent of what happens after a president dies, that the vice president not only assumes the duties of the president, but becomes the president. But even more, Tyler’s vision of a president who works with Congress instead of having his strings pulled by Congress, won out.

Near the end of his presidency, John Tyler’s wife, Julia, threw a celebration at the White House. It was packed with all of his political supporters and his enemies, too. It was clear that the president who had lived in political exile by putting his head down and doing his job, at the very least, had garnered the respect of his peers. After the party, says Francis Tyler, Julia wrote a letter to her mother.

FRANCES PAYNE BOUKNIGHT TYLER: And in the letter she said, up until this point, President Tyler has been a president without a party, but last night I gave him a party for 2,000, and 3,000 came. He is now a president with a party.

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ED: Andrew Parsons is one of our Producers. We also heard from Michael Gerhardt, author of The Forgotten Presidents, Their Untold Constitutional Legacy.