John Tyler
John Tyler settled by simply behaving as though it were true the question of what happens when a president dies, and was thrown out of his party for everything else he did. He was a Virginia planter of the strictest states-rights school, opposed to a national bank, to internal improvements and to any expansive reading of federal power, and he was put on the Whig ticket in 1840 purely to balance it. A month after the inauguration the president died of an illness contracted, by tradition, at his own overlong inaugural address. The constitution said that the office's powers should devolve on the vice president and did not say whether he became president or merely acted as one. Tyler took the oath, moved into the mansion, returned unopened any mail addressed to the acting president, and dared anyone to argue. Nobody successfully did, and every subsequent succession followed him; the practice was not actually written into the constitution until 1967. Having established the office he then used it against the party that had elected him. He vetoed the national bank his own side had campaigned on, vetoed the second attempt, and watched his entire cabinet resign except the secretary of state, who stayed to finish a treaty. The Whigs expelled him, and the House considered the first impeachment resolution ever aimed at a president. He governed for three years as a president with no party at all. What he achieved came from that isolation rather than despite it. The treaty his remaining minister completed fixed the disputed border with British North America and ended a genuine risk of war. Another opened the first American treaty relations with China. And in the last days of his term, having failed to get an annexation treaty through the Senate where it needed two thirds, he had Texas annexed by a joint resolution of both houses requiring only simple majorities - a manoeuvre of doubtful constitutional propriety which brought in an enormous slave state and handed his successor a war. In 1861 he chaired a conference to prevent secession, and when it failed he was elected to the Confederate Congress, the only former president to take office against the United States.
- Lived: 1790 CE – 1862 CE
- Nationality: American
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
