A lesson learned from JOHN TYLER: THE ACCIDENTAL PRESIDENT, by Edward Crapol

 Racism is a disease that eats away at all our best core principals. 

There are times in this blogging project when I have had the opportunity to revisit older books, courtesy of my school library asking me to review their collection, and that is where I stumbled across Edward Crapol’s 2006 study of John Tyler: The Accidental President. Tyler was in a large group of fairly anonymous post-Jackson/pre-Lincoln presidents, and I knew little about him beyond the most basic details of his life and presidency. Tyler’s entire presidency feels like a footnote almost by design, as the 1840 presidential campaign of “Tippecanoe” William Harrison invented the concept of a major presidential campaign, with “Tyler Too” being the tag-along vice presidential candidate (seriously everyone, listen to and fall in love with the They Might Be Giants rendition of that legendary campaign song). Tyler’s incredible importance to presidential history is most defined by his creating the standard that the Vice President immediately becomes President upon his death, a standard that Tyler forced into existence by sheer will (the original Constitution itself was incredibly vague on what exactly a Vice President did). Crapol argues that Tyler’s life and presidency was far more important and tragic than anyone has given it credit for. Ultimately in John Tyler, we see the story of a brilliant and promising politician who allowed his legacy to be destroyed by an allegiance to slavery and white supremacy—a path which ultimately led him to being the first president to commit an act of treason, in a most spectacular and incontrovertible fashion. 

Crapol’s book is curiously structured and focused, in a way that likely makes it fairly inaccessible to more amateur historical readers. He spends little time telling a traditional biographical story of Tyler, and even less time focusing on Tyler’s decision to torpedo the agenda of the ascending Whig Party, an act which made him an infamous pariah to many people. Instead, Crapol argues that Tyler’s defining cause that animated his life and presidency was an obsession with expanding the United States, an obsession that ultimately led him to break many of his own “limited presidential power” principles in an effort to annex Texas into the United States. Tyler likely pilfered public funds (meant for presidential security) to send agents around the world pushing the cause of American expansion, and to convince skeptical Northerners that bringing a massive new slave territory into the Union would somehow benefit everyone. He deeply believed in America’s Manifest Destiny to rule the North American continent, and he engaged in all sorts of shady political shenanigans to ensure that Texas would be annexed over massive Northern opposition. 

Crapol’s book understandably focuses on Texas, but he does not shy away from the dark core of Tyler’s philosophy that ultimately undid him—the fact that he was a massive slaveowner, and truly saw that as an acceptable model for society. Crapol even addresses accusations that the notoriously virile Tyler (he had FIFTEEN legitimate children between two wives, one of whom was decades younger than himself) fathered children with his own enslaved women, an accusation that Crapol notes can’t be definitively proven without DNA testing, but also can’t be dismissed given all historians have learned about the dark undercurrent of Southern plantation slavery. Tyler wanted to believe that the United States could permanently exist as a half-slave/half-free society, one in which pesky abolitionists were tolerated, but where slave-owners would always be the proper rulers of the country. And that brings us to Tyler’s ultimate betrayal. When the northern states united to elect Abraham Lincoln as the President in 1860 on a platform that slavery must eventually die out, Tyler refused to accept the result, and joined the secessionist movement betraying the very nation he had once sworn to protect. Tyler embraced all his darker impulses, raving about how America must always be ruled by a master race, and allowing his wife to publicly chastise abolitionists with lectures about how much black people loved slavery. Tyler did not live to see it—he died shortly after the Civil War began—but his family must have been a little stunned when his supposedly “happy” slaves gladly aided Union soldiers in ransacking his plantation later in the war. 

Tyler is the only President in American History to have not been buried under an American flag, instead having his coffin covered with a Confederate one, and his death drew nothing but silence from the millions of loyal Americans then in a death struggle with the Southern secessionists. The ultimate tragedy and lesson of John Tyler was that he was willing to throw away all of his accomplishments and legacy, simply because he could not accept a changing world where his version of proper racial hierarchies would always be properly enforced. Today, Tyler is a deserved footnote in American History, and likely always will be. The forces of change and modernization will always bury those toxically cling to the past and to their visions of proper societal structure.