This date in 1790 was the birthdate of the 10th president of the United States, John Tyler. Ten facts about him:
He was the first vice president to become president without an election, on the death of his predecessor William H Harrison in 1841. The US Constitution wasn’t clear about what should happen if a president died in office. Some, like John Quincy Adams believed the vice president should be an acting president, but Tyler declared that he was president and nobody was able to challenge it successfully. His opponents referred to him as “His accidency”.
Tyler fathered more children than any other American president. He married his first wife, Letitia Christian, on his 23rd birthday in 1813 and they had eight. Letitia died of a stroke in September 1842 and in 1844 he married Julia Gardiner and had seven more with her. Julia was 30 years his junior and five years younger than his eldest daughter, who wasn’t well pleased about the marriage. There’s speculation that he could have fathered even more with his slaves and then sold the babies. Hence there are a number of African American families today who claim to be his descendants although none of them have been able to prove it.
He claimed to be against slavery, but he’d grown up on a plantation and kept slaves himself, never freeing any of them. He believed it was up to individual states to decide whether slavery should be legal, not the federal government. We don’t know how well he treated his slaves, but historians surmise he treated them well and wasn’t violent towards them.
Tyler studied law with his father, gaining admission to the bar in 1809. He was only 19 at the time, and therefore too young to be eligible, but the admitting judge didn’t ask his age.
His presidency was somewhat turbulent. He’d defected from the Democrats to run with Harrison as a Whig, but when he became president, the Whigs decided they didn’t trust him and threw him out. For the remainder of his presidency, Tyler was, as he himself said, a man “without a party.” He was the only American president whose party expelled him while he was president.
He was also the only president to have had virtually all of his cabinet resign in protest over his veto of a tariff bill; all but his Secretary of State, Daniel Webster, resigned in protest.
He was influential in Texas’s journey to statehood. Though the Senate refused to ratify a treaty which would have made Texas statehood possible, Tyler did manage to get them to agree to an annexation bill which he signed three days before he left office.
In 1844 he entered the election, but since the Whigs had thrown him out and the Democrats didn’t support him either, he entered as a member of his own party, made up of people loyal to him. His candidacy attracted little support and in August 1844 he withdrew and the winner of that election was James K. Polk.
Tyler retired to a Virginia plantation which was called Walnut Grove, but Tyler renamed it Sherwood Forest because he saw himself as being outlawed by the Whig party and therefore identified with Robin Hood.
He died of a stroke in 1862 at the age of 71. Tyler's death was the only one in presidential history not to be officially recognised in Washington, because of his allegiance to the Confederate States. Confederate President Jefferson Davis organised a grand funeral even though Tyler had asked for a simple one. His coffin was draped with a Confederate flag, making him the only U.S. president ever buried under a flag not of the United States.
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