The American Vice Presidency

by Jules Witcover

  In 1838, when Tyler was again seeking a seat in the Virginia House of Delegates, he ran as a Whig, was elected and chosen unanimously to be its Speaker, but was stymied in a subsequent bid to return to the U.S. Senate. Tyler’s political career soon took a surprising and unexpected turn, however, at the Whig nominating convention at Harrisburg in December 1839, when Clay entered with a clear plurality of the delegates but short of the majority needed. In opposition to Clay, the party leaders Thurlow Weed of New York and Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania engineered approval of a unit rule for voting whereby each state would cast all its votes for its leading candidate. They argued that Clay could not carry their key states and others critical to winning the 1840 presidential election. At the end of the day, Clay was overtaken by William Henry Harrison and lost the nomination to him. The convention strategists believed that as a military hero with no particularly objectionable political views, Harrison could beat Van Buren this time by simply tapping into the broad anti-incumbent sentiment in a land gripped by deep economic woes.

  Turning to the matter of Harrison’s running mate, Weed and Stevens agreed the position should go to a prominent Clay supporter from the South. After three others had rejected the nomination, it was finally offered to Tyler, as a sop to Clay and as a slaveholder in a pitch to the South.14 It seemed to have been done without much thought to whether this former Jacksonian Democrat had really bought into the Whig philosophy and agenda of nationalism.

  Tyler’s nomination inevitably stirred speculation of promises made or deals struck on his part. Then and later he stoutly denied any. Daniel Webster, for one, came to his defense. “When Harrison and Tyler were nominated,” he declared later, “their opinions on public questions were generally known.” Subsequently, Tyler himself said, “I have no recollection of having opened my lips in that body on any subject whatever.”15 As for Harrison, all he offered was a flat statement that if elected he would “under no circumstances” consent to be a candidate for a second term.16 If Tyler had any thoughts of the presidency in his future, this statement was probably what gave him hope of that prospect, as it still did for Clay.

  In the 1840 campaign, Tyler was pretty much in the shadows as the now more organized Whigs, seizing on Harrison’s credentials as an old Indian fighter, greatly embellished his image as a rough-hewn man of the frontier, belying his history and actual status as a wealthy country gentleman in Ohio. In all this, Tyler was reduced to an appendage and found a place in history as part of one of the most famous and oft-repeated campaign slogans: “Tippecanoe and Tyler too.” His stature as a nonentity was also immortalized in a Whig campaign rhyme: “We will vote for Tyler therefore, without a why or wherefore,” which in turn led Philip Hone to observe, “There was rhyme but no reason in it.”17

  Pressured repeatedly to take a position on the bank question, Tyler artfully dodged, taking safe ground and giving no offense, despite his earlier open opposition to a national bank. When asked where he stood on the subject of the protective tariff, he replied, “I am in favor of what General Harrison and Mr. Clay are in favor of; I am in favor of preserving the compromise bill as it now stands; between General Harrison, Mr. Clay and myself, there is no difference of opinion on this subject.”18

  With little surprise, Harrison won overwhelmingly in the electoral college and brought Tyler in with him, although the popular vote was much closer—only six percentage points separating the old general from the former Democratic president, who struggled under the campaign taunts “Martin Van Ruin” and “Van, Van, he’s a used-up man.”

  Harrison’s death only a month into his presidency and Tyler’s sudden elevation to the office after having just recently been sworn in as vice president shocked Whig regulars. So did his swift action in taking the presidential oath and his flat declaration to his cabinet that he meant to be the nation’s chief executive in both title and reality. If Clay had expected he would have a free hand in implementing the major features of his American System—restoration of a national bank, protective tariffs, and internal transportation projects linking the states into a more homogeneous federal entity—he was soon disappointed. Tyler revealed himself as devoted as ever to the defense and protection of states’ rights and to the sovereignty he had held prior to quitting the Democratic Party of Jackson and Van Buren. Clay furthermore now saw Tyler as another barrier to his own crumbling presidential ambitions.

  When Congress met in a special session in late May 1841, Representative John McKeon of New York questioned whether Tyler was entitled to be addressed as president. A resolution of affirmation was quickly passed without a formal vote. While Tyler was now recognized as the legal president, he did not automatically become the head of the Whig Party. Henry Clay remained the recognized leader, and he had no intention of surrendering that role in advancing his view of the Whig agenda, especially to a former Jacksonian. When in the special session Clay pressed Tyler to seek another national bank, a prime Whig objective, the new president told him he would wait until the next regular session starting in December.

  Finally Clay offered a compromise on a bank bill, but Tyler vetoed it, and still another passed by Congress, on the grounds that it was an unconstitutional infringement on the rights of the individual states. As the special session was winding up, Clay, in the hope of forcing Tyler out, led a protest in which all members of the cabinet resigned, with the exception of Secretary of State Daniel Webster. Tyler responded by sending the Senate new cabinet nominations, which the senators quickly confirmed and then adjourned until the next regular session.

  Later that day, about sixty Whigs gathered on the Capitol plaza and adopted a statement dissociating themselves from Tyler, leaving him without a party. A drawn-out battle between the president and the Senate ensued, in which many of Tyler’s subsequent other appointments requiring confirmation were rejected.19

  Clay, more determined now than ever to wrest the presidency from “His Accidency,” resigned from the Senate in March 1842 to prepare for his candidacy in 1844. Meanwhile, Tyler continued to wield his veto pen against the Whig majority in Congress, using it ten times in his four years as president. As presidents often have done, Tyler looked to foreign policy to make his mark, achieving the Webster-Ashburton Treaty, which settled certain land and territorial disputes with the British, and executing the historic annexation of Texas into the Union. He justified the latter in part as a vehicle for providing more living space for slaves and thereby preserving the “peculiar institution.”

  Tyler became the first president not to seek a second term. Long widowed, he remarried in 1845, with Julia Gardiner, in the first White House wedding, and had another seven children with her. As a former president, in 1861 he was the chairman of a Washington conference that sought but failed to avert the Civil War. He subsequently served at the Virginia convention that voted to secede from the Union and was elected to the provisional Congress of the Confederacy. But he died in 1862 before he could take his seat. Nevertheless, on the basis of that election, The Smithsonian Book of Presidential Trivia mentions Tyler as “the only president to commit a public act of treason against the U.S. government,” the Confederacy at the time of his death being at war with the Union he had once led.20

  The unanticipated presidency of John Tyler was riddled from its start to its end with controversy and strife. This one-time staunch Jeffersonian Democrat sought to sustain his Virginia countryman’s “republican principles” in the Whig Party, which chose him to be its vice president and lived to regret it. In the end, nothing so became John Tyler as the manner in which he embarked on his presidency. By swiftly and resolutely declaring its legitimacy and firmly using the power bestowed by it, he cemented a peaceful, orderly, and constitutional succession that has stood the test of time.

  GEORGE M. DALLAS

  OF PENNSYLVANIA

  Unusual circumstances in the political careers of President James K. Polk and his vice president, George Mifflin Dallas, saw the one who actively sought the second
office in 1844 winding up in the first, and the man who showed little interest in the second nonetheless landing it. Polk, a former governor of Tennessee twice defeated for reelection, calculated that his chances for the presidency were over and the best he could hope to achieve was the vice presidency. Dallas, much less distinguished as a Philadelphia party leader and an appointed U.S. senator with little ambition for national office, nevertheless found himself elected as vice president.

  The man who became the eleventh vice president of the United States was born in Philadelphia on July 10, 1792. He was the second of the six children of Alexander Dallas, a local lawyer and later a secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, a recorder of U.S. Supreme Court opinions, President James Madison’s secretary of the treasury in 1814, and subsequently an acting secretary of war, before dying at the age of fifty-nine.

  The son, George, graduated with highest honors from the College of New Jersey (Princeton) in 1810 and was admitted to the Pennsylvania bar three years later at age twenty. He became the personal secretary to the former treasury secretary Albert Gallatin and traveled with him on diplomatic missions to St. Petersburg and London. In August 1814, when the British were setting fire to the U.S. Capitol and the White House, young Dallas brought a draft of British peace terms in the War of 1812 to Washington.

  In 1816 he moved back to Philadelphia, where he married the daughter of a prominent Federalist family and had eight children with her. Taking to an aristocratic lifestyle and dress, he acquired expensive tastes that kept him constantly in debt, a circumstance that obliged him to reject a number of government posts, though he did become counsel to the Second Bank of the United States. He also wrote poetry and spoke fluent French, which left a surface impression of erudition.

  In 1817 Dallas became deputy attorney general of Philadelphia, but he lacked the drive of the ambitious politician and a willingness to engage in the competitive world of elective politics. His one term in the U.S. Senate was by appointment of the state legislature, as were all his other government offices, until in 1844 he was elected as vice president.

  The developments that produced this outcome were among the more bizarre in national election annals. Polk was a disciple and favorite of Andrew Jackson, the former president and a fellow Tennessean. Dallas saw in Polk a vehicle to help restore the Jacksonian Democracy by making him the running mate of the Democratic front-runner former president Van Buren, seeking to regain the White House. The Little Magician first needed to claim the nomination in a large field in order to take on his old nemesis, Henry Clay, the Whig nominee, in the November election. But he was well ahead in delegates pledged to him. Early in April, Polk visited Jackson at his Hermitage mansion to discuss the strategy to team himself with Van Buren.

  Several days later, in separate newspapers and apparently without collusion, Van Buren and Clay each declared his strong opposition to the annexation of the recently independent Republic of Texas. Rather than thus removing the issue from the campaign, their comments proved to destroy the presidential aspirations of both men. Public opinion for bringing Texas into the Union was very strong; Van Buren’s impolitic statement would soon cost him the Democratic nomination and ignite a Jackson plan to put “Young Hickory” Polk on a path to the presidency.

  Other circumstances that would provide Polk a more direct and immediate route were at work, however. Jackson told Polk the plan had to be revised with Polk replacing Van Buren as the Jacksonian nominee. With Clay so openly and categorically opposed to the annexation, the Democrats now clearly needed and wanted a pro-annexation nominee. Jackson earlier had embraced pro-annexation, saying, “The god of the universe … intended this great valley [Texas] to belong to one nation,”1 and he immediately recognized that Van Buren had committed political suicide with his statement. He wrote Van Buren a sharply candid letter telling him that in his judgment his old political strategist had about as much chance of being elected president again as there was “to turn the current of the Mississippi.”2

  Only five days before Van Buren wrote his anti-annexation declaration, Polk had written to a Democratic club in Cincinnati saying he was “in favor of the immediate re-annexation of Texas to the territory and Government of the United States,” believing he was simply following the party line. Learning how he had put himself in disagreement with Van Buren no doubt caused him temporary concern, but in the end this arrangement would work to his advantage.3

  In an utterly self-serving report, Polk told the Tennessee congressman Cave Johnson, an ally: “Gen. J says the candidate for the first office should be an annexation man, and from the Southwest, and he and other friends here urge that my friends should insist upon that point. I tell them, and it is true, that I have never aspired so high and that in all probability the attempt to place me in the first position would be utterly abortive. In the confusion that will prevail … there is no telling what will occur.” Then he added that in any event the development would leave him in a favorable position for the vice presidential nomination, declaring, “I aspire to the 2nd office.”4

  Van Buren meanwhile counted his delegates to the approaching Democratic convention in Baltimore, hoping the nomination would still be his. When the Whigs met in the same city, Clay was unanimously nominated with little stir over his own anti-annexation statement. President Tyler, abandoned by his adopted party, meanwhile held a rump convention of his own there, vainly holding out hope of running on the slogan “Tyler and Texas.” Elsewhere in Baltimore, the Jackson Democrats prepared to decide Van Buren’s fate, with Polk and friends now implementing a revised strategy. Van Buren suffered a severe setback when the convention voted to require a two-thirds margin for nomination, which killed his chances.

  In competition with Michigan’s Lewis Cass for the presidential nomination, Van Buren led but fell thirty-one votes short of the two-thirds majority. Cass and five other candidates received votes, but none of them was for Polk. On the fourth roll call Cass moved ahead but also fell short of the needed majority, and after an overnight recess Polk for the first time got forty-four votes and the flood gates opened for him, gaining the nomination by acclamation—arguably making him the first truly dark-horse nominee.

  Then the convention turned to nominating Polk’s running mate. Nothing was heard of George Dallas of Pennsylvania. The convention, also by acclamation, nominated Senator Silas Wright of New York, leader of the Van Buren forces, in a conciliatory gesture. But Wright declined, whereupon the offer was extended to James Buchanan, Dallas’s bitter rival for leadership of the Pennsylvania Democrats, who also declined. Five more men turned it down, until the Pennsylvania delegation rallied to Dallas and gained his nomination. Dallas’s backing of Texas annexation as well as his Pennsylvania connection brought a mostly positive response at the convention and in important quarters in the South. Calhoun was reported as praising the nomination because there would be no New Yorker on the ticket.5

  The Whigs, not surprisingly, were lulled by the prospect of running against the Democratic ticket of a twice-defeated Tennessee governor and a Pennsylvania political leader of little national experience. The Philadelphia Whig leader Sidney George Fisher wrote, “Polk is a fourth rate partizan [sic] politician, of ordinary abilities, no eminence or reputation and chiefly distinguished for being a successful stump orator in Tennessee.” He called Dallas “a reckless partizan totally devoid of principle and capable of upholding or relinquishing any opinions whenever his own or his party’s interests require it.”6 A surprised Dallas made a request of Polk if at any time he was to become a burden in the campaign: “Pray cut me loose instantly and resolutely. Personally I have not the slightest wish to quit the pursuits of private life.” Aware of the functional shortcomings of the vice presidency, he described himself as “a bobtail annexed to a great kite.”7

  To make his best contribution to the Democratic ticket during in the 1844 campaign, Dallas concentrated on bringing home Pennsylvania’s electoral votes. The question of the protective tariff that
continued to divide the northern and southern states posed his diciest challenge. As a Tennessee congressman, Polk had voted against the Tariff of Abominations of 1828 and for reducing its rates in 1832, positions sharply opposed in industrial Pennsylvania and by Dallas at the time. Polk was warned that to carry Pennsylvania he would have to offer at least a nod to the needs of northern manufacture. Dallas therefore had to put party before state and region and also take a softer position on the tariff question in harmony with the presidential nominee.

  Under pressure from Dallas and other Pennsylvanians, Polk wrote a letter saying while he opposed the tariff for the purpose of industrial protection only, he supported it to raise needed revenue, at the same time offering reasonable shelter to domestic industries dependent on the making of iron and steel. A relieved Dallas replied, “I think your doctrine on the tariff will impair your strength here very little if at all, and perhaps it is the matter on which brevity would be the soul of wit.”8

  Dallas also counseled Polk to tread lightly on the discussion of immigration policies that were stirring up considerable talk in Philadelphia and elsewhere in southeastern Pennsylvania. He warned of coalitions of Whigs, abolitionists, and nativists imperiling a Democratic victory in the state and raised the specter of abolition further dividing North and South, urging Polk, “Postpone the tariff question until the country is secured against the alarming strides of abolition.”9 In the end, all such fears were swept aside as the two centerpieces of the Democratic strategy, New York and Pennsylvania, went for Polk and Dallas, beating Clay and Theodore Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, though only 1.5 percent separated the two parties in the popular vote.

  Even before Dallas’s election as vice president, he had reason to consider that the presidency itself was not out of his reach. Less than five months before the election, Polk had announced that, if elected, he would “enter upon the discharge of the high and solemn duties, with the settled purpose of not being a candidate for reelection.”10 He kept that pledge, but other subsequent circumstances made Dallas’s musings first unlikely and later impossible.