John Tyler, who by actively supported the Confederacy became the first—and perhaps the only—president to commit a public act of treason against the U.S. government, emerges from his well-deserved obscurity as the subject of today’s #stampoftheday. A 10-cent stamp issued on September 2, 1938, the stamp was a part of the “Prexies,” – a series of stamps depicting every previous president except Herbert Hoover (plus Ben Franklin and Martha Washington).
If you know Tyler’s name at all, it probably comes from the phrase “Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too,” the campaign slogan (and title of one of the first songs linked to a presidential campaign) for the Whig ticket in the election of 1840. A strong advocate of state’s rights who had served in in both the US Senate and House, Tyler was the vice-presidential nominee, put on the ticket to attract the votes of Southerners. The presidential nominee was William Henry Harrison, a former general and long-time politician and public official who in 1811, led US forces in a successful effort to destroy homes of Native Americans opposed to white settlement at the that were located at the confluence of the Tippecanoe and Wabash Rivers in what is now Indiana.
There was no Whig platform-the party leaders decided that trying to put one together would tear the party apart. Instead, the Whigs ran a negative campaign blaming the country’s recession on President Martin Van Buren, who was running for reelection. Harrison (and Tyler) won and in April 1841, one month after taking office, Harrison died, which made Tyler the first vice-president to succeed a deceased president.
Harrison’s Cabinet, which met within an hour of Harrison’s death contended that Tyler would be vice-president acting as president. Tyler, however, asserted that the Constitution gave him full and unqualified powers of office, which set a critical precedent. Despite their differences, Tyler decided to keep Harrison’s Cabinet. When they met with him for the first time Secretary of State Daniel Webster told Tyler they expected him to continue Harrison’s making policy by a majority vote. Tyler refused, telling them: “I, as president, shall be responsible for my administration. I hope to have your hearty co-operation in carrying out its measures. So long as you see fit to do this, I shall be glad to have you with me. When you think otherwise, your resignations will be accepted.” Several months later, after Tyler vetoed a national banking bill supported by many Whigs, everyone in his Cabinet (except Webster) resigned.
As president, Tyler had many other notable firsts. He had 15 children, more than any other President. He was the first president to have a veto overridden by Congress. He had more Supreme Court nominees (four) rejected than any president before or since. He was the first president to be subject to impeachment hearings. And he probably set some sort of record when, on a ceremonial cruise down the Potomac on the newly commissioned USS Princeton, a gun misfired killing several people, including two members of his Cabinet. To be fair, Tyler did have a few successes. He signed a treaty with Great Britain establishing the boundaries between Maine and Canada, and a trade treaty with China. He also set in motion the actions that ultimately resulted in Texas becoming part of the US. But he couldn’t get the Whigs or the Democrats to nominate him for president in 1844. So he didn’t run for reelection and retired to his plantation in Virginia.
While some historians credit Tyler for setting the important precedent on presidential succession and others praise his foreign policy accomplishments, for the most part they hold him in low esteem. His biographer, Robert Seager II, for example, wrote: Tyler “was neither a great president nor a great intellectual,” adding “his administration has been and must be counted an unsuccessful one by any modern measure of accomplishment.” In fact, a survey of historians conducted by C-SPAN in 2017 ranked Tyler as 39th of 43 men to hold the office.
As if that’s not enough, 16 years after leaving office Tyler, returned to public life as an an active supporter of secession. He headed a committee that negotiated the terms for Virginia’s entry into the newly formed Confederate States of America; he helped negotiate the transfer of the Confederacy’s capital from Montgomery to Richmond; and he helped procure supplies that it needed to wage war. He also was elected to the Confederate House of Representatives but died before its first session. This, according to “The Smithsonian Book of Presidential Trivia” (published in 2013) means Tyler was “the only president to commit a public act of treason against the U.S. government.”
Oddly, not everyone agrees with that assessment as Washington Post columnist John Kelly found out when he cited this fact in a light-hearted column about the book that appeared on President’s Day in 2013. As Kelly noted in a second column “Who knew that John Tyler had so many fans?”…I heard from several of them…[and] these Tyleristas did not take kindly to my assertion that Tyler was a traitor.” One reader, for example, wrote that by Kelly’s standards, George Washington was traitor and added: “I realize that Washington [DC], and your newspaper, consider anything Confederate to be evil but most southerners believed that their principle allegiance was to their state, and as such, southerners who fought for the Union were traitors. The fact that they lost the war does not refute that argument.”
In that second column, Kelly responded: “To which I say: Yes it does! The South lost! They lost the war! The winners get to decide! If the British had defeated George Washington you can bet they’d be calling him a traitor today. And besides, the South was in favor of slavery! Some may call it ‘political correctness’ to harp on that point, but given what a monstrosity slavery was, it seems a point worth harping on.” Kelly went on to quote Edward P. Crapol, another Tyler biographer, who said when Tyler actively supported the Confederacy, “he knows he’s a rebel. He knows what he’s done. They’re not playing bean bag…This is very serious stuff.”
So there you have it. Among the many stamps in my late father’s collection is this one, which (like a few others in the collection), honors someone who actively supported an armed insurrection against the US government in support of a system that enslaved and brutalized other human beings. It’s really quite amazing when you stop to think about it.
Be well, stay safe, fight for justice and work for peace.