2

The Sentinel

Tyler’s retirement from politics was brief. He enjoyed his reunion with his wife and children, but to his surprise he quickly discovered that he no longer liked practicing law. Once he had enjoyed the drama of defending desperate criminals at trial, but now most of his clients were members of his extended family—which brought him no money—or the local government, which gave him little satisfaction.¹

His frustrations exploded one day when a man named Thomas Macon, whom he had roughly cross-examined in court, came to complain about his treatment. “Mr. Tyler,” Macon said, “you have taken with me a very unjustifiable liberty.” Tyler denied doing so but commented on Macon’s poor courtroom demeanor. Incensed, Macon replied: “You have not acted the part of a gentleman, sir.” For a man of Tyler’s class and status, there were few greater insults, and Tyler suddenly hit Macon. A fistfight ensued; Macon struck Tyler with his riding crop, but Tyler managed to seize it, returning the blows. The two were eventually separated by spectators, but Tyler thought he was the victor. He happily told friends that Macon’s face was so badly bruised in the fight that despite the passage of time, “his appearance even now gives evidence of it.”²

The life of a gentleman farmer also disappointed him. In the best of times, Virginians, as Susan Dunn noted, were more skilled at statecraft than farming. An overreliance on slave labor and “single crop farming,” an exhausted soil, and poor management made a farmer’s existence far from idyllic. Tyler’s return to the land in 1821 coincided with an especially bad period for wheat, his main crop. “The wheat never perhaps promised less to the husbandman than now,” noted the Richmond Enquirer.³

Politics provided an escape from this domestic boredom. In April 1823, Tyler decided to seek election to one of two vacancies in the Virginia legislature. He won. Over his following two years in the state capital, he resisted change. When a more open, democratic system of choosing presidential electors was introduced, he dissented vocally—but lost. Reformers at the College of William and Mary, which had fallen on hard times, recommended a move from Williamsburg to Richmond; Tyler opposed it. Education, he believed, flourished “in the shade and delighted in the stillness of solitude,” rather than in the jangling disharmony of the city. He mounted a campaign to defeat relocation and succeeded. It was clear to his colleagues that his years in Washington had not changed him—he remained “an undeviating Republican.” Then in 1825, Tyler was elected governor, the office once held by Thomas Jefferson and his own beloved father. But it was an insignificant post, designed by the men of 1776 who opposed executive power. Tyler accomplished little; he recommended a public school system for all Virginia children, but left it to the legislature, where the real power resided, to act. Invariably, it did not, and Tyler appeared most content with the status quo.⁴

Yet he was not without ambition, as well as a bit of luck. By 1827, Senator John Randolph had become an embarrassment to the citizens of the Old Dominion. Particularly troubling were Randolph’s bizarre personal habits. One critic charged that “he dressed and undressed himself in the Senate Chamber,” unacceptable behavior by a gentleman anywhere, let alone one representing Virginia. Randolph was “a royal nuisance,” who “had to be handled with infinite care, for he was a wicked debater with a sharp and nasty tongue.”⁵ His current targets were President John Quincy Adams and Secretary of State Henry Clay. On March 30, 1826, in “perhaps the most offensive speech ever heard in that body,” Randolph called Adams and Clay a “combination of the Puritan and the blackleg.” Clay, who for years had been an object of Randolph’s barbs, had enough and the following day challenged him to a duel. Randolph accepted. On the morning of April 8, they exchanged shots on the Virginia side of the Potomac, because Randolph insisted on shedding his blood only on home soil. Neither was injured, but Randolph’s reputation was finally shattered. His enemies at home looked for a more genteel politician to oppose him in the next election and their choice was Governor John Tyler.

Tyler publicly expressed his continuing admiration for Senator Randolph while privately allowing the anti-Randolph forces to place his name in nomination. On January 13, 1827, Tyler defeated Randolph by five votes. Randolph took the whole thing in stride; when the two later ran into each other at Richmond’s racetrack, Randolph extended his hand, saying: “How is your Excellency? And when I say your Excellency, I mean your Excellency.” At thirty-six, Tyler was the U.S. senator from Virginia.⁶

Tyler had the position but not the funds to support himself in the Capitol. “My monied affairs are all out of sorts,” he wrote Henry Curtis, “so much so that I scarcely know how I shall reach Washington.” Financially strapped, he decided to sell his most disposable property: Ann Eliza, a favored house slave among the Tyler family. At first, Tyler tried to place her with a good family who would not harm her. He offered her to his brother-in-law, but Curtis was not interested. He asked Curtis to solicit his neighbors, but none wanted her. A few weeks before he was to be sworn in, Tyler decided that if a sale between friends or acquaintances was not possible, “then the better way would be to put her in the wagon and send her directly to the Hubbard’s … for public auction. Her sale has become indispensably necessary to meet the demands of my trip.” Eliza never returned to Greenway, so she was likely sold, probably at auction, which would mean that Tyler began his Senate career with monies generated by the sale of a human being.⁷

 

 

Tyler’s return to Washington in December 1827 coincided with a democratic political revolution led by Andrew Jackson. In background and temperament, Tyler and Jackson were completely different, reflecting the changing nature of American leadership. Tyler had been born and bred in comfort; Jackson’s parents were poor Irish immigrants who had settled in the Carolina backcountry to become subsistence farmers. Tyler’s father was warm and supportive; Jackson’s father was killed in an accident shortly before Jackson’s birth, in 1767. The Revolutionary War launched Judge Tyler’s career. Jackson was not so fortunate: the war destroyed his family and it almost cost him his life too, when a British officer’s sword cut into his head, leaving him scarred for life. His eldest brother, Hugh, died following the Battle of Stono Ferry in 1779; his brother Robert fell to scarlet fever; and his mother died of cholera while nursing American prisoners of war.⁸

While Tyler’s rise to prominence was steady, assisted by his affluent connections, Jackson’s was solitary, swift, and often violent. Although poorly educated, Jackson read law and became a successful lawyer and businessman in Tennessee. Whereas Tyler engaged in his single fistfight with Macon, Jackson, quick-tempered and chronically angry, “brawled and quarreled incessantly, coolly and deliberately killed a man in a duel, fought others with cane, fists, and gun.” Jackson catapulted to the Senate at age thirty, but left a year later to become a justice on Tennessee’s Supreme Court. His victory at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815 made “Old Hickory” a national hero. Three years later President Monroe authorized him to pursue marauding Seminoles into Spanish Florida. Seizing the area, he found two British “spies,” who were charged with inciting the Indians. After a hurried military trial, they were executed, though Jackson had not asked for the government’s permission. His behavior was criticized in Congress by Tyler, among others. “I demand to know who was authorized, under the Constitution to have declared [this] war—Congress or the General?” Tyler cried. “We live in a land where the only rule of our conduct is the law.”⁹

Tyler’s warnings were ignored, and Jackson’s popularity skyrocketed. Jackson’s methods may have been harsh, his supporters admitted, but he had paved the way for American control of Florida. “Old and young speak of him with rapture,” a pro-Jackson newspaper claimed. But when friends urged Jackson to seek the presidency, he demurred, remarking: “I know what I am fit for. I can command a body of men in a rough way; but I’m not fit to be President.”¹⁰

Then the financial Panic of 1819 and the sectional strife created by the Missouri Compromise, among other events, nurtured the popular animosity against Washington insiders. This benefited the war hero, who by 1824 concluded that he was ready to be president. It was a crowded field: his chief opponents were Secretary of State John Quincy Adams; Speaker of the House Henry Clay; and Secretary of War William Crawford (who was in the race despite poor health). Jackson won 41.3 percent of the popular vote. But without a majority in the electoral college, the election was thrown into the House of Representatives, where the three candidates with the most electoral votes—Jackson, Adams, and Crawford—scrambled for votes.¹¹

Speaker Clay was heartsick over his defeat. If only the paralyzed Crawford had dropped out, Clay—the master of the House—might have been able to shift things his way. Now he was forced to choose between the lesser of the two great evils: Jackson or Adams. Clay detested Adams but believed a Jackson presidency would be “the greatest misfortune that could befall the country.” And since Adams shared with him similar views on economic issues, Clay backed Adams, who, in the so-called corrupt bargain, won the electoral majority and the presidency. President-elect Adams appointed Clay to be his secretary of state—the post from which the previous three presidents had ascended.¹²

For John Tyler, the election was a victory without joy. He originally supported Secretary Crawford—the states’ rights candidate—but his illness led Tyler to look elsewhere. Both Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun advocated the hated American System, so they were unacceptable. Andrew Jackson, whom Tyler feared since the Florida adventurism, personified almost everything Tyler hated about the new frontier politics. “[N]o government can last for any length of time, in consonance with public liberty, without checks and balances,” he later said. “Without them we rush into anarchy, or seek repose in the arms of monarchy. We can neither trust King Numbers or King One with unlimited power. Both play the despot.” Jackson conjured the threat of despotic rule supported by the illiterate masses. For Tyler nothing was worse, so he supported the nationalist Adams. Tyler believed that the fact that Adams won the presidency with only 30 percent of the popular vote would limit the president’s worst ideological predilections.¹³

Tyler was proved wrong. The president, in his first Annual Message to Congress, in 1825, asked for the enactment of new nationalist economic and educational programs, including vast internal improvements and the creation of a national university and astronomical observatory. None were to Tyler’s liking. “From the moment of seeing that message,” Tyler explained, “I stood distinctly opposed to this administration.” He stood ready to defend his sacred principles, becoming “a zealot” on behalf of “liberty and the Constitution.” He was not alone. Jacksonians swept the off-year election of 1826, winning control of Congress, and they set out to destroy the president and prepare for Old Hickory’s election in 1828. Their plan, conceived chiefly by New York senator Martin Van Buren, the master political strategist of his day, was to recreate the old Jeffersonian alliance of Southern planters and Northern Republicans to do battle against Federalism, reincarnated in the person of John Quincy Adams.¹⁴

Their chief tool was a new tariff bill designed to build support for Jackson in the mid-Atlantic, South, and West while hurting Adams in New England, where he was strong. The Jackson men thought they could not lose: if the tariff became law, their candidate’s chances of victory would be increased; if Adams vetoed the bill, it would be used as a potent issue against him with New England manufacturers. Tyler understood the political machinations behind the bill but in the end voted against “that curse to the whole South.” When the tariff passed both houses and Adams signed the “Tariff of Abominations” into law, it planted the seeds for one of the great crises in American history.¹⁵

 

 

The presidential contest of 1828 must have reminded Tyler of 1824. Tyler’s top choice, New York governor DeWitt Clinton, had constructed the extraordinary Erie Canal with state rather than federal resources, proving that the country could develop internal improvements without ceding state autonomy. But Clinton did not wish to run and supported Jackson. Once again, Tyler was left without a candidate, confronted with choosing between the hated Adams and the frightening Jackson. Swallowing his fears, he picked Jackson. To his brother-in-law Henry Curtis, Tyler admitted that he was “most earnestly solicitous for Jackson’s success … . Every day that passes inspires me with the strong hope that his administration will be characterized by … Republican simplicity.”¹⁶

Despite his private optimism, Tyler was publicly silent during the campaign. But he must not have liked the contenders’ ungentlemanly tactics in a campaign that “began in the gutter and remained there.” Jackson’s wife, Rachel, received special vilification. The truth itself was politically embarrassing: she had left her abusive husband Lewis Robards for Jackson before marrying him, both believing, incorrectly as it turned out, that Robards had divorced her. Now Clay’s scandalmongers asked, “Ought a convicted adulteress and her paramour husband to be placed in the highest offices of this free and Christian land?”¹⁷ Jackson’s propagandists responded by attacking Secretary Clay and President Adams with equal venom. Besides advertising rumors about the “corrupt bargain,” Clay was called a “traitor” for having consorted with Aaron Burr, while Adams was considered a monarchist with “royal extravagances.” Yet nothing could stop the Jackson bandwagon, and he won the presidency easily with 56 percent of the popular vote.¹⁸

Tyler further warmed to Jackson after he entered the White House. He observed that Jackson “seemed to me to lay aside the royal diadem … . All satisfied me that I stood in the presence of an old-fashioned republican.” Tyler was especially pleased when, in May 1830, the president vetoed the Maysville Road bill, preventing the use of federal funds to construct a Kentucky highway, a program of internal improvements. Jackson’s veto “is hailed with unbounded delight by the strict constructionists,” Tyler rejoiced, “and the two houses of Congress resound with his praise.” To his friend Littleton Tazewell, Tyler wrote that the veto “is good as a first step, and greatly raises my hopes and confidence.”

Actually, Jackson was not, as Tyler believed, “a strict constructionist.” By various means, the president was seeking “a middle path” between the Adams-Clay nationalists and radical Southerners like his vice president, John C. Calhoun, who coveted the presidency. For example, in July 1832, Jackson signed into law a new tariff, an effort to amend the 1828 Tariff of Abominations by lowering its rates. Northerners, whose manufacturers needed such protection, favored it, but it did not satisfy the Southerners. Tyler called it “an unmixed pill of bitterness,” a sign that materialism was taking over the nation. “Man cannot worship God and Mammon,” Tyler told the Senate during an exhausting three-hour speech. “If you would preserve the political temple pure and undefiled it can only be done by expelling the moneychangers and getting back to the worship of our fathers.” Finding middle ground was proving difficult.¹⁹

Still, Tyler’s admiration for Jackson intensified that year when the Second Bank of the United States again became the center of controversy. Given Jackson’s animus toward monopolistic, antidemocratic institutions, it is likely that he would have eventually gone after the bank, but the involvement of its current director, Nicholas Biddle, in anti-Jackson politics made a showdown inevitable. Jackson had learned that bank branches in Kentucky and Louisiana contributed to Adams’s coffers during the 1828 campaign, and the bank’s headquarters in Philadelphia bursted with anti-Jackson feeling. Biddle was known to buy support from congressmen, including the eminent Daniel Webster, making the bank “an enormous financial and political power.” The new president had wanted to take on the bank early in his first term, but his closest political advisors urged him to wait.²⁰

In December 1831, hoping to head off the simmering conflict, Treasury Secretary Louis McLane, a friend of both Biddle and the bank, forged a compromise in which the bank would reform certain of its practices in order to secure the president’s approval of another charter. Jackson was amenable to the deal. It would reform America’s economic system and eliminate the national debt, which was of crucial importance to him. But Jackson wanted one important assurance—that the rechartering not occur prior to the 1832 election.

When McLane issued a report urging that the bank be rechartered, antibank journalists, including editor Francis Blair, one of Jackson’s closest advisors, learned of it and howled. Later that month, the National Republican Party nominated Henry Clay for president and quickly expressed its support for Biddle and the bank. The party issued a statement predicting that a reelected Jackson would abolish the bank, and Clay, now Kentucky’s U.S. senator, hoped to use the bank issue to win the presidency. Clay convinced Biddle to immediately seek a renewed charter. After Biddle remarked that Jackson would almost surely veto the bill, the arrogant Clay replied, “Should Jackson veto it, I will veto him!”²¹

Early in 1832, a rechartering bill that left the bank’s powers generally unchanged made its way through Congress. The House Ways and Means Committee supported the bill, spurring Jackson to write that the bank had become “a hydra of corruption, so dangerous to our liberties by its corrupting influences everywhere, and not the least in the Congress.” For his part, Tyler continued in his hatred of the bank. He became Jackson’s ally in the Senate, opposing the bill and supporting every amendment designed to defeat it. The bank’s policies, Tyler proclaimed, turned America into “a nation of usurers.” The Senate passed the measure, by only eight votes, as did the House, by a significantly wider margin. Biddle, adding insult to injury, invited his supporters to join him in a celebration so noisy that “it would reach the ears of the President.”²²

Biddle’s defiance enraged Jackson. He vetoed the bill and issued an explosive explanation of his decision. Previously, presidential vetoes were rare and occurred because the president deemed a law unconstitutional. Jackson pushed far beyond this to a president’s prerogative on economic, political, and social factors and framed the issue to put the office of the presidency clearly on the side of the people. “It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes,” Jackson said. “[Therefore], the humble members of society—the farmers, mechanics, and laborers—who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustices of their Government.”²³

Tyler supported Jackson’s veto, but while he believed that “money is the great corrupter,” he had little confidence in “the humble members of society.” He disliked class warfare, and Jackson’s expansive view of presidential power worried him. Yet he could never vote for Clay. “Clay stands no chance,” he wrote. “Jackson is invincible.” To Tyler’s delight, Jackson won the veto fight and, with it, reelection.²⁴

 

 

As the Jacksonians celebrated their victory, a political storm was forming in South Carolina. It had started in 1828, when Vice President John C. Calhoun, angry and depressed over the passage of the Tariff of Abominations, returned home to brood about the future of his country. And he was good at brooding. An English visitor to the Senate called him “the cast-iron man, who looks as if he had never been born and never could be extinguished.” “I hold the duties of life to be greater than life itself,” Calhoun noted. His most sacred obligation was to the Palmetto State, which he believed suffered under all tariffs, new and old.²⁵

Calhoun’s solution to the tariff threat was nullification, a right that he believed belonged to every state. The Union was essentially a compact of states that had agreed to form a government to which it delegated certain powers. If a state considered a federal law unconstitutional, it could declare it null and void, and fight its enforcement. At the request of the South Carolina legislature, Calhoun codified his thinking in an unsigned document, called the “Exposition and Protest,” which was widely distributed throughout the state. Four years later, it became a guide to action. In the presidential election, the state’s electors had rejected both Jackson and Clay in favor of Virginia governor John Floyd. On November 19, 1832, a special state convention issued an Ordinance of Nullification, proclaiming the Tariff of Abominations and its more recent progeny “null, void and no law”; the ordinance would go into effect on February 1, 1833.²⁶

When news of South Carolina’s challenge reached Jackson, he lashed out. While Congress had been granted the right by the Constitution to enact tariffs, nullification was quite another matter. Calhoun was demented, he told a friend; the rebellion’s leaders would be arrested, their “wickedness, madness and folly … and the delusion of their followers in the attempt to destroy themselves and our union has not its parallel in the history of the world.” In a dramatic proclamation on December 10, he rejected the state’s philosophical case: nullification was “incompatible with the existence of the Union, contradicted expressly by the letter of the Constitution, unauthorized by its spirit, inconsistent with every principle on which it was founded, and destructive of the great object for which it was formed.” Furthermore, it was the president, not Congress, who represented the people. He bluntly informed South Carolina that “disunion by armed force is treason,” and its people would pay “dreadful consequences.”²⁷

Tyler stepped in to resolve the crisis. He did so by turning to the one man he felt might devise a way out of this nightmare—Henry Clay. Clay “received [him] cordially … . He saw the danger.” Flattering the recently defeated presidential contender, Tyler persuaded Clay of “the true glory which he had it in his power now to acquire” by finding a solution that both North and South could support. Tyler claimed that Clay hesitated, asserting that others should assume the leadership, but then agreed. Since Clay was already privately discussing a possible compromise prior to seeing Tyler, it is likely that the roguish Clay was having a bit of fun at Tyler’s expense.²⁸

Regardless, Clay needed little convincing. His entire political career had built to this moment, and a success might wipe away the stain of his recent debacle, increase his popularity in the South, and win him the presidency in 1836. Clay told Tyler about his plan to continue the present tariff system until 1840, when it would be altered significantly so that all tariff duties would be equal and collected only to provide the revenue necessary for the government to function. If the South could give him “time,” Clay said, the “principle” of protecting one special region would die. “Time is of little importance to us,” Tyler replied. The South had long suffered under the tariff system. But he agreed to discuss Clay’s plan with other Southerners who wished to avoid war.²⁹

Tyler next met with Governor John Floyd. “Consult in the strictest confidence with those around you and let me have your views,” he told Floyd. “Bear in mind that the principle of protection is to be utterly abandoned and the wound inflicted on the Constitution thereby to be healed.” Tyler argued that Clay’s plan had something for everyone—the North would enjoy the fruits of protection for a few more years, then it would be gone and the South freed of its scourge. “When we talk of reconcilement and a restoration of peace,” he concluded, “would it not be better to have peace de facto and embrace in true brotherly affection?” Clay’s genius had nearly convinced Tyler “that the battle is fought and won. My fears for the union are rapidly dissipating.”

Tyler’s hopes for a settlement were premature. Although the administration did support a bill designed to reduce the tariff, each side seemed bent on a military confrontation. Some nullifiers, calling themselves the Whigs and their enemies the Tories, believed that they were battling King Andrew I, as their patriotic ancestors had fought King George III. When a South Carolina congressman met with the president and asked him if there was anything he could tell his constituents, Jackson replied: “Please give my compliments to my friends in your state and say to them, that if a single drop of blood shall be shed there in opposition to the laws of the United States, I will hang the first man I can lay my hand on engaged in such treasonable conduct, upon the first tree I can reach.” South Carolina’s governor called for military volunteers, while Jackson continued to build up his forces. He wrote, “The Union must be preserved … . I will die with the Union.”³⁰

Tyler found himself in an especially difficult position. He would soon face reelection. The standoff had shocked his beloved Virginia, arousing unionists in the West and nullifiers in the East. An opponent who espoused nullification might well defeat him. Like many politicians who want to retain their jobs, he struggled to find a middle ground that would appeal to both sides. The result was a sword’s-blade stance that distinguished him from both Jackson and Calhoun. As a strict constructionist, Tyler rejected nullification because the Constitution nowhere gave that power to the people. But as a states’ rights man, he believed that the states were sovereign and therefore had the right to secede from the Union if that was their choice.

He became increasingly troubled by Jackson’s expansion of presidential power and began to call the White House “the Palace.” During Jackson’s first term, Tyler had twice criticized the president for abuses of office. “There is already the spice of monarchy in the presidential office,” he had told the Senate. When Tyler learned that Jackson planned to ask for congressional authorization to use force against South Carolina’s “rebellion,” he turned decisively against the president. Jackson had “deceived” him, Tyler told a friend. “His Proclamation has swept away all the barriers of the Constitution, and given us, in place of the Federal government … a consolidated military despotism … . I tremble for South Carolina.”³¹

On January 16, 1833, Jackson formally submitted his “Force Bill” to the Senate. Ten days later, the Virginia legislature proclaimed its support of state sovereignty and called the president’s action unconstitutional. This spurred Tyler to take a public stand. On February 6, he spoke out against the “Bloody Bill.” Tyler was an extremely able speaker; Jefferson Davis, for one, thought him “the most felicitous among the orators I have known.” The visitors’ gallery was more crowded than usual, perhaps because Tyler’s political future was uncertain—in just nine days, Virginia’s General Assembly would either reelect Tyler or choose another. He did not disappoint his audience. It was perhaps the most emotional speech he had ever delivered. The issues at stake, his son later wrote, “aroused all the energies of his soul.”

Tyler began by expressing his hope that a peaceful settlement could be achieved by means of the compromise he had discussed with Clay. “The manufacturers desire time,” he said. “Give them time, ample time. If they will come down to the revenue standard and abandon the protective policy, I would allow them full time.” Certainly this approach was preferable to a war against South Carolina. “You level her town and cities in the dust; you clothe her daughters in mourning, and make helpless orphans of her rising sons;—where then is your glory?” he implored. “Glory comes not from the blood of slaughtered brethren. Gracious God!” his voice choked … . “Whither has the genius of America fled? We have had darker days than the present, and that genius has saved us.”

The Union should not buckle under the “pernicious doctrine” of nationalism, Tyler asserted. “Everything, Mr. President, is running into nationality. You cannot walk along the streets without seeing the word on every sign—National Hotel, National boot-black, National black-smith, National Oyster-house.” Some in the gallery must have laughed, but Tyler was deadly serious. The states had been reduced to “mere petty corporations, provinces of one consolidated government. These principles gave to this government authority to veto all state laws, not merely by Act of Congress, but by the sword and the bayonet.” Not only was nationalism “untrue and illogical,” it was “anti-American.” America was a compact of states and the federal government was their creature, not their sovereign. Nothing could have been farther from Jackson’s conception of the Union.

He paused to look around at his colleagues, who sat in stony silence. Jackson’s proclamation and the Force Bill, he continued, would “place the President at the head of the regular army in array against the States, and the sword and the cannon would come to be the common arbiter … . I would peril all, everything that I hold most dear, if I could be the means of stilling the agitated bellows.” The Jacksonians, though, were the clear majority, and he appealed to their consciences. “If war should grow out of this measure, you are alone responsible.” He refused to believe that there was not one man among them who would “step forward to rescue his country in this her moment of peril.”³²

While Tyler would act “as a sentinel upon the watch-tower to give the alarm on the approach of tyranny,” he was also willing to compromise for peace. Following his speech, Senator William Cabell Rives, Tyler’s fellow Virginian but a loyal Jacksonian, argued vigorously in favor of the bill and declared resistance to it “unconstitutional,” a sign that Tyler’s position might cost him reelection.³³ Indeed, Jacksonians in western Virginia now urged James McDowell, a popular member of the House of Delegates, to run against Tyler, and after his Senate speech some of his supporters deserted him. On February 15, McDowell was nominated along with Tyler and four other men. After the votes were counted, Tyler emerged victorious with a majority of one.³⁴

Meanwhile, the nullification crisis seemed to be easing. A bill designed to reduce the tariff, supported by the administration, was under debate in Congress, so the South Carolina legislature postponed dire action. Then, on February 12, Henry Clay introduced a compromise tariff bill, which quickly won the support of John C. Calhoun.³⁵

But the president was taking no chances. Hearing rumors that the Force Bill might be tabled in the Senate, he ordered his surrogates to “rush that bill thro [sic] … . This is due to the country, it is due to me & to the safety of this union.” He asked that every senator’s vote be formally recorded so that “the nullifiers may all be distinguished from those who are in support of the laws, & and the union.” But when the Force Bill finally came to a vote on February 20, the nullifiers as well as their opponents left the chamber without voting yeah or nay. Among them were John C. Calhoun, who was violently opposed to the measure; Henry Clay, who was strongly in favor; and Thomas Hart Benton, a Jackson man, who was skeptical. Virginia’s other senator and Tyler’s critic, William Rives, abstained. The final tally was thirty-two in favor, one opposed. Only Tyler, who was himself not a nullifier, had the courage to vote against. No other vote cast in his long career gave him more pleasure: “Against that odious measure my name stands conspicuously,” he said later, “since it is the only vote recorded in the negative on … that bloody bill.”³⁶

Six days later, the House easily passed the Compromise Tariff Bill of 1833, and on March 1 the Senate, with John Tyler voting yes, approved the measure with votes to spare. The nullification crisis was over. Perhaps more than any other Southerner, Tyler had helped to bring about that outcome. He had encouraged Clay to lead the effort and brought him together with Calhoun to work out an acceptable settlement. That effort also gave him great pride. At a banquet at the Gloucester County Courthouse, organized by his supporters, Tyler raised his glass: “[To] Virginia, the blessed mother of us all; he who denies her his allegiance and shall refuse to come to her rescue in her hour of peril and her danger, is unworthy to be called her son.”³⁷

 

 

The happy interlude did not last. President Jackson, emboldened by his victories over Clay and the nullifiers, moved to complete his destruction of the Second Bank of the United States. In September 1833, Jackson ordered the removal of federal funds from the bank, placing them in twenty-three state depositories, called “pet banks.” Nicholas Biddle, Jackson’s old foe, leaped to the battle. “This worthy President thinks that because he has scalped Indians and imprisoned Judges he is to have his way with the Bank,” he mocked. “He is mistaken.” Biddle ordered the bank to call in debts, refuse to extend loans, and tighten credit, all of which damaged the economy.³⁸

No man despised the bank more than Tyler, but he resisted Jackson’s dictatorial tendencies. “Concede to the President the power to dispose of the public money as he pleases,” he wrote Henry Curtis, “and it is vain to talk of check[s] and balances. The presidential office swallows up all power, and the president becomes every inch a king.” Clay, whose political stock had risen when he held back the cries for civil war, took the opportunity to build a coalition of disaffected Jacksonians. “We are in the midst of a revolution,” he told the Senate, “rapidly tending towards a total change of the pure republican character of the Government, and to the concentration of all power in the hands of one man … . If the Congress does not apply an instantaneous remedy, the fatal collapse will soon come.” He introduced resolutions to censure Jackson, who, he charged, “has assumed upon himself authority and power not conferred by the Constitution and laws, but in derogation of both.” Clay hoped his new coalition would finally win him the presidency in 1836.³⁹

Virginia’s citizens were suffering from the bank’s new policies, so Tyler supported Clay’s resolutions and urged that the federal funds be restored. “The administration is evidently sinking,” he wrote Letitia on February 17, 1834, “and I do not doubt that in six months it will be almost flat … . I have not yet spoken, but everybody seems anxious to hear me.” A week later, he told a crowded Senate chamber that he still believed the bank was unconstitutional and hoped to see it die, but Jackson’s act was illegal. The president had seized powers, creating his own rich and powerful state banks. “Give the President control over the purse,” he warned, “and I care not what you call him, he is ‘every inch a king.’” Jackson’s veto of the rechartering of the bank prevented it from dying slowly without disrupting the economy. Now his attack on the dying institution had thrown it “into convulsions.” The funds must be returned. Tyler even proposed that Congress should submit the question of the bank’s future to the people in the form of a constitutional amendment. Above all, “if the Bank must die, let it die by law … . By that I will stand.”

For the first time, Tyler publicly revealed his disenchantment with Jackson’s leadership of Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party. He called Jackson’s Democrats “a party which changes its principles, as the chameleon its color, with every cloud or ray which proceeds from the presidential orb.” He could not belong to a party “which denounces the tariff, and yet votes for and sustains the tariff of 1828—that Bill of Abominations … a party which denounces the Bank and sustains the Force Bill; which denounces the Bank and even now sustains the President in his assumption of power conferred neither by the laws nor the Constitution. No, sir, I belong not to that … party.” The country’s only hope, Tyler suggested, was the new Whig Party that was forming under Henry Clay’s leadership. He was not yet ready to formally join it, but he had clearly become an ally.⁴⁰

Other Virginians were leaving the Jackson fold. Tyler’s friend Littleton W. Tazewell was elected governor of the commonwealth in March 1834, and anti-Jacksonians took control of the new General Assembly. That body instructed Tyler and his Senate colleague William Rives to vote for Clay’s censure resolutions. Rives would not and resigned his seat. The assembly appointed Benjamin W. Leigh, a “Tidewater grandee” of the Whig persuasion, to replace him. On March 28, Leigh, Tyler, and twenty-four other senators voted to censure Jackson. Twenty senators stood with the president, including Thomas Hart Benton, who pledged to fight forever until the censure was formally expunged from the Senate’s records. ⁴¹

Censuring the president was “an unprecedented action” that brought a strong protest from Jackson, who claimed his actions were entirely legal and constitutional and reflected the wishes expressed by the American people in his landslide victory of 1832. “The President is the direct representative of the American people,” Jackson proclaimed. For those now calling themselves Whigs, this was political and philosophical heresy. Republican government, they passionately believed, rested on the idea that Congress—not the president—represented the people’s will. Although the Senate rejected Jackson’s protest and endorsed the censure, Tyler’s worst nightmare had come true: “King Numbers” led by “King One” controlled the government.⁴²

Tyler’s prediction in February 1834 that Jackson’s movement would soon be “flat” proved incorrect, especially in Virginia. In spring 1835, Tazewell and his supporters were routed by the Jacksonians, who again proved to be superb organizers and practitioners of a new politics of rallies, parades, and popular appeals. With control of both houses of the Virginia assembly, the Jacksonians targeted for elimination Senators John Tyler and Benjamin Leigh, two of their beloved president’s staunchest critics. The instrument of their destruction would be the venerated “doctrine of instructions.” In the next session of Congress, Senator Thomas Hart Benton’s motion to expunge Jackson’s censure, defeated on two earlier occasions, would come up and the House of Delegates would instruct Tyler and Leigh to vote for it. When the two men refused, they would be forced to resign their seats.⁴³

Yet Leigh and Tyler had another option. While both men supported instruction, they had made it clear that they would not vote for measures they deemed unconstitutional. The Constitution required Congress to record proceedings in a journal; it did not provide for the actual destruction of those pages, as specified in Benton’s resolution. If the measure passed, an important event in the Senate’s history would be obliterated, as if it never happened. “I will not obey instructions which shall require me to vote for a gross violation of the Constitution,” Leigh wrote Tyler in July 1835.⁴⁴

Tyler was not as certain. Friends recommended that he follow Leigh’s example and unite against the Jacksonians, but one Whig ally suggested that both Tyler and Leigh resign, lest they be accused of wanting to cling to power for personal gain. An anti-Jackson campaign might also destroy the Whigs’ chances of defeating Vice President Martin Van Buren in the next presidential contest. There was talk about a Vice President Tyler, and Virginia’s Whigs actually nominated him. But in early February 1836, Virginia’s assembly approved what Tyler called “the villainous instructions”; he could no longer delay a decision.

“My resolution is fixed, and I shall resign,” he wrote his son Robert. Retirement, he had told him, held “no horror for me; for, come when it may, I have the satisfaction to know that I have been honest in the worst of times.” When Clay and Calhoun learned of Tyler’s decision, they tried to persuade him to stay. “Gentlemen, the first act of my political life was a censure of Messrs. Giles and Brent for opposition to instructions,” Tyler explained. “The chalice presented to their lips is now presented to mine, and I will drain it even to the dregs.” Calhoun seemed incredulous, then replied: “If you make it a point of personal honor, we have nothing more to say.”⁴⁵

In his formal letter of resignation, Tyler explained that he could not subscribe to such an unconstitutional resolution. If it were passed, the Senate would become “a secret conclave, where deeds the most revolting might be performed in secrecy and darkness.” Honor and principles remained his only guideposts. “Parties are continually changing,” he concluded. “The man of to-day gives place to the man of to-morrow, and the idols which one set worships, the next destroy. The only object of my political worship shall be the Constitution … . I shall carry with me into retirement the principles which I brought with me into public life, and by the surrender of the high state to which I was called by … the people of Virginia, I shall set an example to my children which shall teach them to regard as nothing place and office, when either is to be attained or held at the sacrifice of honor.” His fellow senators must have appreciated Tyler’s moral stand because, not long before Tyler retired, they elected him president pro tempore, a post then held by only the most highly regarded. His enemies in the Virginia assembly had the final word, however. To replace Tyler, they elected William C. Rives.⁴⁶

Tyler returned to Virginia in early March 1836, a few weeks before his forty-sixth birthday. Half his life had been spent in politics, but now he looked forward to a private life. “Perhaps I am doomed to perpetual exile from the public councils,” he wrote. “If so, I am content.”