WHAT ADAMS DECRIED as a hurricane was in fact the new model of American politics. In the age of democracy, voters expected to be wooed and entertained, feted and fed. Candidates had to display a common touch. Americans in the republican age of George Washington were willing to defer to their leaders; in the democratic age of Andrew Jackson they expected their leaders to defer to them. Harrison was no commoner, but he let himself be portrayed as such, and his “log cabin and hard cider” campaign—so dubbed for the falsified place of his birth and the beverage he pretended to favor—established a standard that became a permanent feature of the political landscape.
The campaign left Harrison weary. Yet the four months between the election and the inauguration allowed him time to recuperate. This was no small matter, in that Harrison, at sixty-eight, was the oldest person yet to assume the presidency (a distinction he would retain until the inauguration of Ronald Reagan almost a century and a half later). Feeling hale by early March 1841, Harrison gave the longest inaugural address in American history (a record he still holds), despite lacking a hat and coat amid a nasty late-winter storm. He then proceeded to greet the guests while still wet and shivering. He shrugged off urgings to change into dry clothes, saying he had endured far worse as a frontier soldier. But he had been younger then. He fell ill and never recovered, dying of pneumonia, fever or some combination of the two a month after taking the oath.
Henry Clay and Daniel Webster had only just made their peace with yielding to Harrison as leader of the Whigs; to find themselves in the shadow of John Tyler was more than they could bear. Harrison’s was the first death of a sitting president, and the status of Tyler wasn’t immediately clear. The Constitution declared that upon the death of the president the powers and duties of the office should “devolve on” the vice president, but it didn’t say that the vice president would actually become president. None of the Whigs had intended that Tyler be president, and many were unwilling to acknowledge that he now was. They referred to him as the vice president still, or as the acting president. But Tyler immediately realized what they soon discovered: that the presidential powers, however acquired, make their wielder the president, whatever he is called. Tyler acted as president and in doing so became president.
But he also became a man without a party. Tyler had never been more than an opportunistic Whig; his pro-slavery, states’ rights views put him closer to many Southern Democrats than to most Whigs. Whig leaders like Henry Clay and Daniel Webster had accepted such latitudinarianism in a vice presidential candidate, for it broadened the Whig ticket and helped carry Harrison to victory. But they didn’t want it in a president, least of all one who bore the brand of the Whig party.
Webster tactfully let Tyler know that he was expected to conform to Whig principles. William Harrison, before his death, had tried to mend fences with Clay and Webster by offering them positions in the cabinet. Clay declined but Webster accepted the state department. As senior member of the administration, Webster became Harrison’s confidant. Harrison let Webster preview his inaugural address and offer suggestions for stylistic improvement. Webster took the draft and labored over Harrison’s lugubrious prose and frequent references to ancient history. At the end of a long day he returned to the house where he was lodging. His landlady said he looked tired and upset. “I hope nothing has gone wrong,” she said. “I really hope nothing has happened.” Webster smiled wearily. “You would think that something had happened if you knew what I have done,” he said. “I have killed seventeen Roman consuls as dead as smelts, every one of them.”
At Tyler’s first cabinet meeting as president, convened the day after Harrison died, Webster rose to address the new chief executive. “Mr. President,” he said, “I suppose you intend to carry out the ideas and customs of your predecessor, and this administration, inaugurated by President Harrison, will continue in the same line of policy under which it has begun.”
Tyler nodded vaguely, unsure where Webster was going.
Webster went on, “Mr. President, it was our custom in the cabinet meetings of the deceased president that the president should preside over them. All measures whatever relating to the administration were obliged to be brought before the cabinet, and their settlement was decided by the majority, each member of the cabinet and the president having but one vote.”
Tyler looked at Webster and around at the others. He stood up, signaling to Webster to sit. “I beg your pardon, gentlemen,” he said firmly. “I am very glad to have in my cabinet such able statesmen as you have proved yourselves to be. And 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 or shall not do. I, as president, shall be responsible for my administration. I hope to have your hearty cooperation 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.”
RELATIONS BETWEEN TYLER and the cabinet grew tenser from there. Nor did things go well between the new president and the Whig leadership in Congress. Henry Clay had expected to guide William Harrison’s administration toward a revival of the American System, including a reincarnation of the Bank of the United States. Harrison took offense at Clay’s presumption, in particular at a suggestion that Harrison summon a special session of Congress, for which Clay had drafted a proclamation. Harrison didn’t like this one bit. “You are too impetuous,” he wrote to Clay. The senator acted as though he spoke for all the Whigs, Harrison said. In fact he did not. “Much as I would rely upon your judgment, there are others whom I must consult and in many cases to determine adversely to your suggestions.”
Clay professed to be hurt. “I was mortified by the suggestion you made to me on Saturday, that I had been represented as dictating to you or to the new administration,” he responded. “Mortified, because it is unfounded in fact, and because there is danger of the fears that I intimated to you at Frankfort”—where Harrison and Clay had met en route to Washington—“of my enemies poisoning your mind towards me.” Clay reminded Harrison that he had sought no office for himself in the administration. He had asked none for any friend. His diffidence had cost him. “A thousand times have my feelings been wounded by communicating to those who have applied to me that I am obliged to abstain inflexibly from all interference in official appointments.”
Clay and Harrison reached an accommodation, and the special session was called. Then Harrison died, and Tyler began asserting his independence. He didn’t cancel the call for a special session, but he threw cold water on the purpose for which the session had been called. “As to a Bank, I design to be perfectly frank with you,” he told Clay. “I would not have it urged prematurely. The public mind is still in a state of great disquietude in regard to it.” The Democrats would raise a ruckus against a new bank. Tyler refused to commit himself one way or the other. “I have no intention to submit any thing to Congress on this subject to be acted on, but shall leave it to its own action, and in the end shall resolve my doubts by the character of the measure proposed.”
Clay could only read this message as a threat to veto a bank bill, and he wondered if Tyler hid a Jacksonian streak. Nevertheless, taking the new president at his word, Clay ushered a bank bill through Congress. He shaped the bill to Tyler’s suggestions on points of form and minor substance, and he interpreted the president’s participation in the process as support for the measure. Members of Tyler’s administration, including Daniel Webster, detected other signs of approval for the bank. And so when the bank bill passed Congress and Tyler abruptly vetoed it, the negative took the capital by surprise.
Clay resented the veto deeply. He thought it misguided as policy, in that the country needed a national bank more than ever. He judged it bad precedent, for continuing the Jacksonian practice of vetoing whatever the president didn’t like. He deemed it a usurpation by an unelected chief executive. And he took it as an insult to the Whig party and the principles for which the party stood.
Clay responded to the veto by doing something America had never seen. The Senate leader of the president’s party publicly chastised that president. Clay asserted that Tyler had not accorded the legislative branch the respect it was due. “He has not reciprocated the friendly spirit of concession and compromise which animated Congress in the provisions of this bill,” he said. A remarkable change had come over the new president in a short time. Clay recalled reading Tyler’s first message after Harrison’s death. “It was emphatically a Whig address from beginning to end. Every inch of it was Whig and was patriotic.” Clay had entertained hopes for good relations with the chief executive. “I reflected with pleasure that I should find at the head of the executive branch a personal and political friend, whom I had long and intimately known and highly esteemed.” But the veto revealed a president who wouldn’t bend his stiff neck to serve the good of the country. Clay imagined what the father of the most recent Bank of the United States, a man whom Tyler should have respected as a fellow Virginian, would have done in this situation. “If it were possible to disinter the venerated remains of James Madison, reanimate his perishing form, and place him once more in that chair of state which he so adorned, what would have been his course?” Clay asked. “He would have said that human controversy in regard to a single question”—the bank question—“should not be perpetual, and ought to have a termination.” Clay noted that the national bank had won the approval of several Congresses, the Supreme Court, and all but one president. Tyler should heed history. “Human infallibility has not been granted by God, and the chances of error are much greater on the side of one man than on that of the majority of a whole people and their successive legislatures during a long period of time.”
Clay reminded the Senate—as if it needed reminding—that Tyler lacked the authority of an elected president. “The people did not foresee the contingency which has happened. They voted for him as Vice President. They did not, therefore, scrutinize his opinions with the care which they probably ought to have done, and would have done, if they could have looked into futurity.” If the Whigs at Harrisburg, and then the people of the United States, had known what was to happen, they would not have chosen Tyler. “He would not have received a solitary vote in the nominating convention, nor one solitary electoral vote in any state of the Union.” Clay did not declare a break with Tyler, yet. But he warned that it was coming. And it would be the president’s doing. “It will not be my fault if our amicable relations should unhappily cease.”