As frustrated Whigs disowned their 1840 rallying cry of “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too!” (“There was rhyme but no reason in it,” concluded the acerbic diarist Philip Hone) Tyler saw himself, in August 1841, burned in effigy on the White House lawn. Former President John Quincy Adams floated the possibility of impeaching “His Accidency.” The Senate rejected four of Tyler’s Supreme Court nominees, a record that still stands. The name of one prospective secretary of the Treasury was submitted, unsuccessfully, three times in a single day.
Politically ostracized at the time, and later condemned for his twilight embrace of the Confederacy, Tyler occupies an awkward place on the presidential spectrum, somewhere between James Buchanan-bad and Chester Arthur-obscure. He is not an easy man to humanize. “A man at odds with himself” is how Tyler’s latest biographer, Christopher J. Leahy, describes him in “President Without a Party.” Mr. Leahy’s Tyler is a Shakespeare-quoting provincial, an urbane host whose stomach nevertheless rebelled at the “sauces and flum-flummeries” served up by James and Dolley Madison’s French chef. Affable and courtly when he wasn’t brittle and vindictive, Tyler was a former head of the Virginia Colonization Society who opposed the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and craved Texas for the United States, at least in part because he feared British designs to promote abolition in Sam Houston’s republic.
Mr. Leahy, who teaches history at New York’s Keuka College, is no Tyler apologist, even if at times he seems inclined to give the 10th president the benefit of the doubt (barely mentioning, for example, “fairly convincing evidence” that Tyler fathered more than one slave child, subsequently sold to help shore up his precarious finances.) In deconstructing Tyler’s complex character Mr. Leahy stresses his lifelong passion for politics, a state’s rights outlook inherited from his father, and a regional code of honor sufficiently elastic to permit dissembling over the bank issue and the raiding of secret funds to purchase support for the administration’s treaty resolving a border dispute with Canada.
Tyler’s diplomatic accomplishments were not insignificant. They included the Treaty of Wangxia, which admitted U.S. shipping to China’s ports and foreshadowed the commercial opening of Japan by Commodore Perry. His extension of the Monroe Doctrine across the Pacific would have repercussions half a century later. Unsure that he could secure a two-thirds vote of the Senate to annex Hawaii by formal treaty, President William McKinley fell back on Tyler’s precedent of incorporating Texas into the American union through a mere joint congressional resolution.