PROLOGUE

Decision at Harrisburg

 

 

Nobody wanted the vice-presidential nomination. The party leaders tried to get Senator Benjamin Watkins Leigh of Virginia to take it, but he flatly refused their offer. Next, they tried former senator John M. Clayton of Delaware. He expected they might ask and prepared a written statement declining. Senator Nathaniel P. Tallmadge of New York also said no. So, too, did New Jersey senator Samuel L. Southard. At least two other men reportedly begged off. The man whom Pennsylvania Whigs wanted, Daniel Webster, was at that moment crossing the stormy Atlantic after completing a European tour and had not indicated his desire for the nomination.

The members of the General Committee of the Whig Party were understandably in a panic. They were having a difficult time completing the 1840 ticket so as to launch their campaign to unseat the incumbent president, Democrat Martin Van Buren. The Whigs had formed into a coalition opposed to Van Buren’s predecessor, Andrew Jackson, in 1834 and offered voters a set of regional candidates for president in 1836. But it was not until the first week of December 1839 that they met in a national convention, this at the newly rebuilt Zion Lutheran Church in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. There, delegates from twenty-two of the Union’s twenty-six states nominated William Henry Harrison for president. Henry Clay had at one time been the frontrunner for the nomination, but his opponents at the convention maneuvered to deny him the prize and secure the top spot for the hero of the Battle of Tippecanoe. Now several prominent Whigs rebuffed attempts to enlist them as Harrison’s running mate.1

Their refusal was understandable. John Adams, the nation’s first vice president, had deemed the office insignificant and spent his two terms in George Washington’s administration in virtual obscurity. Adams, of course, ended up winning the presidency in 1796. John C. Calhoun, on the other hand, twice accepted the vice presidency with the thought it would bolster his chances to capture the brass ring. He failed to reach the White House. The vice presidency was not usually a stepping stone to the presidency. In fact, only three of the nine men who served as vice president in the eight administrations before 1840 had been elected president. Surely, the men who refused the offer to join Harrison’s ticket recognized this historical pattern.

John Tyler, however, had no qualms about the constitutionally undistinguished position. In fact, he was relatively confident the Whigs would prevail in 1840, so he saw his nomination for the post as a way to continue his national political career, which had ended with his resignation from the US Senate in 1836. The forty-nine-year-old Whig delegate from the Williamsburg district of Virginia eagerly accepted when party leaders approached him about joining the ticket. Striking the pose of disinterestedness honed by the politicians of an earlier time, but which had largely disappeared in an era of unabashed partisanship, he claimed later that his nomination “was up to the moment of its being made, wholly unanticipated by me.” The Virginian claimed that he had “never reached forth [his] hand for any office.” This was typical Tyler posturing and was not true. He had shrewdly advertised his availability by being named a convention delegate and showing up in Harrisburg. He had all but jumped up and down and begged the convention to choose him. Easy to pick out in a crowd, Tyler was tall—roughly six feet, one inch in height—and thin, with blue-gray eyes, receding sandy-colored hair, a high forehead, and a prominent nose. He worked the spacious second-floor sanctuary of the church where the proceedings were held with the smooth assurance of a consummate politician. Catching up with men he already knew or introducing himself to men he did not, he was in his element. And in the end, of the 231 votes cast for vice president at the conclave, John Tyler received every last one of them. Whig chieftains breathed a sigh of relief.2

The difficulty the Whigs faced in coming up with a vice-presidential nominee demonstrated that their party lacked cohesiveness and coherence. They seemed to be in disarray. What prompted the General Committee to settle on Tyler was not merely desperation, though it surely seemed like that on the surface. In fact, his nomination made sense for a number of reasons. For one thing, he was a Clay delegate and had come to Harrisburg to vote for the former secretary of state and Speaker of the House—and current senator—from Kentucky. He fulfilled his duty. A story circulated at the convention that Tyler had “shed tears” when Harrison surrogates had wrested the presidential nomination from the man generally regarded as the heart and soul of the Whig Party. Tyler had not wept, but Clay had been the presumptive nominee. Now the party sought to mollify Clay—if indeed that could be done—by placing one of his avowed supporters on the ticket with Harrison. “It was an attempt of the triumphant Harrisonites to heal the wounds of Mr. Clay’s devoted friends,” wrote one observer. The irony of that effort would become apparent later.3

Tyler brought other benefits to the nomination. He boasted an impressive political resume, having served in the Virginia legislature, as the Old Dominion’s governor, and as a congressman and senator. He was a southerner who would balance Harrison—by this time a resident of Ohio—on the ticket. He had also run for vice president as a regional Whig candidate in the campaign of 1836 and had instant name recognition, especially south of the Mason-Dixon Line. The Washington Daily National Intelligencer, the Whig Party’s newspaper in the capital, confidently pointed out that “all intelligent citizens are acquainted with [Tyler’s] character and abilities, both of which qualify him to discharge with ability and honor the trust which he is invited to accept.”4

But if Tyler’s nomination had clear merit, in other respects his selection was a curious one. Along with that name recognition came clear indications of where he stood on the vital issues of the day—and throughout his long career as a champion of Old Republican, states’ rights ideology, he had demonstrated positions that were decidedly not within the mainstream of the Whig Party. For example, he had long opposed a national bank. President Jackson had killed the Second Bank of the United States in 1836. Whigs looked to create a third bank if they could win control of Congress and the White House in 1840, believing their efforts could return the county to economic prosperity after the bleak years that followed the Panic of 1837. The party also favored higher tariffs to stimulate and protect American industry. Yet as a supporter of free trade, Tyler had reflexively favored low duties and made that position clear many times. In addition, he had also once been a Jacksonian Democrat. Did any of this matter? The Whigs apparently thought not.

So out of the Harrisburg convention emerged the Harrison-Tyler ticket, and what is surely the most recognizable presidential campaign slogan of all time—“Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too.” The Whig diarist Philip Hone would later write that “there was rhyme but no reason in it,” suggesting that perhaps the Whigs should have given more thought to whether Tyler could reconcile his longstanding political views with the principles of the party.5

But nobody thought to ask.