John Tyler

By Atlas MeyersThe 10th Presidency (1841–1845)

Length57m

Summary

John Tyler was the first man to inherit the presidency, yet he spent his four years in office systematically dismantling the party that elected him. He is the "Accidental President" who established the most important unwritten rule of the American executive: that power is transferred fully, not partially. We examine the years 1841 through 1845 as a study in stubbornness. Tyler was a Virginia aristocrat with a rigid, almost theological devotion to state sovereignty, trapped in a marriage of convenience with the nationalist Whig Party. When the marriage dissolved, he did not bend; he broke the government. We trace how this isolation liberated him to pursue a controversial, aggressive foreign policy that would ultimately trigger the expansionist wars of the next decade. It is a chronicle of how a man rejected by every faction in Washington managed to reshape the map of the continent through the sheer force of refusal.