The American Vice Presidency (18 page)

In his four years as presiding officer, Johnson was required to cast a tiebreaker fourteen times, more than any predecessor save Adams and Calhoun. Most of the time he obediently voted to sustain the administration’s policies and desires. Coming into office weighed down with considerable personal debt, Johnson, by obligation or preference, devoted a considerable amount of his time in tending to various personal enterprises, including the maintenance of a hotel and saloon back in Kentucky.

Amos Kendall, a New Hampshire transplant to Kentucky and an eventual Van Buren cabinet member, sent the president a letter from a Kentucky friend reporting his visit to “Col. Johnson’s Watering establishment,” where the sitting vice president was seen “happy in the inglorious pursuit of tavern keeping—even giving his personal superintendence to the chicken and egg purchasing and water-melon selling department.” Kendall also reported that Johnson was consorting with “a young Delilah of about the complexion of Shakespears
[sic]
swarthy Othello … said to be his third wife; his second, which he sold for her infidelity, having been the sister of the present lady.”
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As Van Buren struggled with a severe economic downturn at home and the tightening of credit under his continuation of Jackson’s hard-money policies, Johnson endured his own personal deterioration. He had never been a challenge to Van Buren’s dandified appearance and stylish dress, and his own casualness did nothing to enhance his esteem in Washington. He even began to take on a somewhat comic visage, wearing as a trademark a bright red vest that was ill-fitted to the Senate’s customary sober mien.

It was soon obvious that neither Van Buren nor the party hierarchy wanted to offer the distinctly unimpressive Johnson a second term as vice president. Former president Jackson, who had championed him as a fellow frontiersman and a War of 1812 hero, appraised Johnson now as a dead weight on the Democratic ticket. He urged the nomination of fellow Tennessean James K. Polk, who had just won the governorship impressively and was modestly seeking the vice presidency.
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Jackson wrote the Democratic
editor Francis P. Blair, “I like Col. Johnson but I like my country more,”
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and he threatened to abandon Van Buren unless Polk was nominated in place of Johnson.

At the party’s convention in Baltimore in May 1840, Van Buren’s renomination was not in question, but the opposition to Johnson was strong and vocal. Van Buren nevertheless held firm on Johnson, not wanting a convention out of control. Even so, the convention delegates could not agree on nominating Johnson and finally voted to nominate no one but to leave the vice presidential nomination to the state party organizations, which finally settled for Johnson again. While Van Buren returned to New York to shore up his somewhat neglected political base, Johnson took to the stump, in vain urging the president to do the same. He took to retelling tales of his adventures on the frontier, but he was not the charismatic Jackson.
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Harrison and his managers had learned much about politics in 1836, and they appropriated many of the successful trappings of Old Hickory to refashion the true hero of the Battles of Tippecanoe and the Thames into another Andy Jackson. When a Democratic editor in Baltimore mocked Harrison as the product of an aristocratic Virginia family who had become a country squire in Ohio, the Whigs turned the tables. They started casting Old Tippecanoe has a hard cider–drinking Indian fighter of the log-cabin wilderness, contrasting him with Van Buren as a diminutive preening and perfumed New Yorker. They even got Harrison to take a swig or two from the jug in public, joining the competition for “the common man” with a vengeance.
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As his running mate, the Whigs chose the former senator Tyler, an aristocratic Virginia Democrat and strong states-righter, as an obvious contrast to Johnson.

The 1840 presidential contest was soon being called the Log Cabin Campaign, with the polished Harrison mischaracterized as a genuine backwoodsman. Meanwhile Old Dick Johnson, in the fashion of a rough-and-tumble man of the Kentucky frontier, sought to be a sort of surrogate Jackson in behalf of the gentrified Little Magician, the son of a rural New York tavern keeper. The Harrison campaign, masterminded by cigar-puffing Thurlow Weed of New York, beat Van Buren at his own game of political organizing, with an added dose of showmanship. Soon the campaign
was flooded with signs and trinkets of the rugged West, and Johnson was reduced to an oft-ridiculed sideshow.

In the end the Jacksonian era came to a halt with the blossoming of the Whig Party, after its strong if disorganized entry into national politics only four years earlier. Although Harrison’s popular-vote victory was modest, he won in a landslide in the electoral college. As president of the Senate, Johnson had to suffer through a final task of tallying the electoral votes that made John Tyler of Virginia his successor. He went back to Kentucky and two years later sought to return to the Senate but lost. In 1844 and again in 1848 he tried for the Senate, but to no one’s surprise he was bypassed by the Kentucky legislature. Finally his old supporters in Scott County voted him a seat in the state legislature in 1850, but eleven days later he died of a stroke at age seventy.

Of the nine men who had held the vice presidency up to this time, Richard Mentor Johnson unquestionably had the most unusual, and unlikely, political résumé. But like the other vice presidents before him, except Van Buren, Johnson held the office with little political influence. That fate, however, was not to fall for very long to the man he swore in on his own last day as president of the Senate, John Tyler.

JOHN TYLER

OF VIRGINIA

T
he tenth vice president of the United States and the first Whig to hold the office was a former Democrat who served the shortest period of any occupant up to that time: only thirty-three days. Yet the decisions he made in unexpectedly leaving the vice presidency were of the highest significance, both constitutionally and politically, of any occupant up to his time.

John Tyler of Virginia, upon being sworn in with President William Henry Harrison on March 4, 1841, performed his duty as president of the Senate for less than two hours, then skipped the lavish inaugural facilities and went home to Williamsburg. Such had the minimal responsibilities of the vice president required of him. Barely a month later, however, at sunrise on April 5, Tyler was awakened by Fletcher Webster, the son of Secretary of State Daniel Webster, and Robert Beale, the assistant doorkeeper of the Senate, arriving on horseback. They delivered to him a letter from the Harrison cabinet informing him that the night before, Harrison had died, the first president to perish in office.
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The news apparently did not come as a complete surprise to Tyler, who at only fifty-one now became the youngest president to serve up to that time. He had learned earlier that the sixty-eight-year-old Harrison, speaking for ninety minutes at his inauguration on a chilly winter day in neither hat nor overcoat, had contracted pneumonia. According to the Democratic senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, Tyler had remained
in Williamsburg because he “would feel it indelicate to repair to the seat of government, of his own will, on hearing of the report of the president’s illness.”
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In any event, the vice president had had some time to consider the ramifications of such an outcome and how to deal with it.

As the first presidential standby to ascend to the highest office by constitutional mandate, Tyler had no precedents to help determine his actions. The first steps he took were to notify his family members of the news at breakfast and to consult with a Williamsburg neighbor and friend, Nathaniel Beverly Tucker, a law professor at the College of William and Mary. Tucker, remembering that Harrison in the 1840 campaign had pledged to serve only a single term, now urged Tyler to make the same declaration and not seek a term in his own right in 1844. Tyler, offering no comment, rushed off to Washington, taking a steamboat up the James River to Richmond and then catching a train to the capital, a trip of 230 miles made in twenty-one hours.
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On arrival he went to Brown’s Indian Queen Hotel, where he met with the members of the Harrison cabinet he had inherited. The senior member, Secretary of State Daniel Webster, informed Tyler that under Harrison, all administrative decisions were made “before the Cabinet, and their settlement was decided by the majority, each member of the Cabinet and the president having one vote.” Tyler was having none of it. “I am the President,” he declared, “and I shall be held responsible for my administration. I shall be pleased to avail myself of your counsel and advice. But I can never consent to being dictated to as to what I shall do or not do. When you think otherwise, your resignations will be accepted.”
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They all agreed to stay on under those conditions.

Then Tyler took preemptive action in their presence. The chief justice of the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Columbia was brought to the hotel, where he administered the oath of office of the president of the United States to Tyler. The judge signed an affidavit verifying that Tyler had asserted he was qualified to assume the presidency without taking a second oath but had asked that it be administered again, anticipating that “doubts may arise and for greater caution.”
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Tyler took the position that this second oath taking had not been imperative, inasmuch as in the vice presidential oath he had already taken he had sworn to uphold the Constitution. But he wanted to leave no question that he was assuming the presidency and not simply its powers in an acting capacity.

The language on succession was quite ambiguous. Article II, Section 1, read: “In case of the removal of the President from office, or of his death, resignation or inability to discharge the powers and duties of the said office, the same shall devolve on the Vice-President.” But did the words
the same
refer to the office itself or to the powers and duties of it? The rest of the sentence fed the uncertainty, leaving open the interpretation that the successor was merely to serve as a stand-in: “And the Congress may by law provide for the case of removal, death, resignation or inability, both of the President and Vice-President, declaring what officer shall then act as President; and such officer shall act accordingly until the disability be removed, or a President shall be elected.” By seizing the office so unambiguously and decisively, Tyler removed doubt that a successor was empowered merely to “act as president,” but was to be the actual chief executive in all the office’s manifestations.

The question was hardly academic. Former president John Quincy Adams, despairing at the ascendancy of the southern states-rights champion, argued that Tyler should be identified as “Vice-President Acting as President.”
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He wrote, “Tyler is a political sectarian, of the slave-driving, Virginian, Jeffersonian school, principled against all improvement, with all the interests and passions and vices of slavery rooted in his moral and political constitution—with talents not above mediocrity, and a spirit incapable of expansion to the dimensions of the station upon which he has been cast by the hand of Providence, unseen through the apparent agency of chance. No one ever thought of his being placed in the executive chair.”
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The question of Tyler’s legitimacy, or at least credibility, as president was reduced to the chiding identification “His Accidency.” Meanwhile, all this debate raised a hypothetical question in the Senate: if a vice president assumed the presidency, would the Senate president pro tem assume the vice presidency? No ruling was in place for this circumstance. As the country had done since its inception, the Senate president pro tem might take over an absent or deceased vice president’s Senate duties, but the office itself would remain vacant until the next election.

John Tyler had come to the vice presidency as the son of a governor of Virginia from the revolutionary generation who opposed the Constitution at the state’s ratifying convention. Born in 1790 on his father’s estate in southern Virginia, which he later inherited, Tyler graduated from William
and Mary, studied law under his father and also Edmund Randolph, the young country’s first attorney general. But he disagreed with Randolph’s advocacy of a strong central government, becoming in the Jefferson tradition a staunch defender of states’ rights and an opponent of the concept of the national bank. At twenty-one he was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates, married into more wealth and greater slave ownership than in his own family, and had seven children before his wife, Letitia, suffered a paralytic stroke and died in 1842.
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Young Tyler served five years in the state legislature and at age twenty-seven was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. There he served two terms, opposing a strong national bank, protective tariffs for northern industry, and a federal transportation network, all of which he thought detrimental to southern agrarian interests. In all this, he remained a Jeffersonian Democrat and was elected as governor in 1825 and then as a U.S. senator from Virginia. He supported Jackson for the presidency in 1828 and 1832, joining with Jackson in opposition to rechartering the national bank but breaking with him over both his removal of federal deposits and some of his cabinet appointments. In 1833 Tyler was the only Senate Democrat to vote against Jackson’s Force Bill, which overrode a South Carolina ordinance of nullification of the tariff of 1832 and authorized sending federal troops into Charleston Harbor.
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