President William Henry Harrison died just after midnight on April 4, 1841, only 31 days after his inauguration; he was the first president to die while in office.  At daybreak on April 5 his running mate, John Tyler, who was visiting relatives in Williamsburg, Virginia, was given the news.  By the dawn of April 6, Tyler was in the Capitol asserting that he was now president, the first vice president to succeed to the presidency upon the death of an incumbent.

Harrison and Tyler came from similar backgrounds. Both were raised on plantations in the same Virginia county by prominent, slave holding families.  Tyler was a lawyer who served, at different times, in the Virginia House of Delegates, as Virginia Governor, in the U.S. House of Representatives and in the U.S. Senate.  He supported states rights, limited government and slavery, which would have made him a Jackson and Van Buren Democrat, but he disliked Jackson and instead joined the Whigs, who backed greater federal powers.

The Whigs nominated Tyler to run as Harrison’s vice president in 1840 as a tactical maneuver.  The party hoped that a dash of Southern states rights added to Harrison’s Northern nationalism would draw Southern votes to the ticket.  There was little anticipation that he would ever ascend to the top position.  Tyler invited Harrison’s Cabinet to stay, quickly took an oath of office, made an inauguration speech and moved his family into the White House within a week of Harrison’s funeral.  The crepe was still hanging in the doorways. (Tyler, by the way, had the most children of any president, totaling fifteen by two wives.  The family of his second wife, Julia Gardiner, still owns Gardiner’s Island in New York State, the largest privately owned island in the United States.  Tyler’s last surviving grandson, Harrison Ruffin Tyler, died in 2025 at the age of 96, 235 years after President John Tyler was born.)

Tyler’s actions didn’t sit well with Democrats, who viewed him as a usurper.  The Constitution was unclear about the process for succession, and some demanded a new election while others thought he could finish Harrison’s term but should retain the title vice president.  John Quincy Adams gave him the nickname His Accidency, and he was unable to appoint a new vice president;  It was not until after the Kennedy assassination in 1963 that the 25th Constitutional Amendment clarified succession and allowed the appointment of a new vice president.  Between 1789 and 1967 sixteen vice presidential vacancies occurred and were left open.  But despite concerns about his legitimacy, what became known as the Tyler Precedent held.

Once in office, Tyler determined that he was not obliged to support the Whig platform that Tippecanoe and Tyler too ran on.  He would support the Whig’s nationalistic policies only when they didn’t infringe on the powers of the states.  Tyler reestablished the Bank of the United States, which had been dissolved under Madison, enraging Democrats, and supported the annexation of Texas as a slave state, enraging Whigs. His entire cabinet resigned, he was disowned by both political parties, and a man with no party affiliation had little hope for reelection. Henry Clay commented on Tyler’s departure that “We’re well rid of that old outlaw.  He can return, like Robin Hood, to Sherwood Forest.”  Tyler promptly renamed his Virginia plantation Sherwood Forest.  (The plantation was restored by Harrison Ruffin Tyler beginning in the 1970s, and it is open for tours today.  Note its long, skinny ballroom, added by the President to accomodate what todaywould be called line dancing, but then was known as the “Virginia Reel.”) 

Back in Virginia, President Tyler worked to create a Southern Confederacy, increasing the sectional cleavage that led towards Civil War.