John Tyler: One of the Good Guys

    John Tyler became the 10th president acting from 1841-45. The ninth, William Henry Harrison passed not long after taking office, Tyler became acting president until the public accepted him and he took his presidential oath. There are many ways to judge a president, but the least biased goes back to the Constitution and the oath each president takes. Tyler played the game, aiding in the slow decline of presidents upholding their oaths.

     Many presidents before John Tyler had decided a National Bank would be unconstitutional, by this time the Whig party was advocating to enstate the 2nd bank. John Tyler’s most constitutional decision as president was to continue to veto the bank in favor of the prosperose system Martin Van Buren had instated years prior.

     This decision was the main reason Tyler was kicked out of the Whig party. The president felt he had to appeal to the public after this since he lacked a party. Between that issue and his views on slavery, he had a few missteps.

     John Tyler was pro-slavery and aided in the Texas annexation which reframed the annexation debate around protecting slavery and raised fears in the South that Britain might abolish slavery in Texas. 

     Abolishing slavery completely was also unconstitutional, the founders believed that slavery was against the liberty land they were trying to create, but that forcing people to lose their slaves all at once would be taking the majority’s freedom away and it would happen on it’s own. John Tyler wasn’t necessarily in the wrong for being pro-slavery at the time, but it was certainly unconstitutional to enforce it and interfere with what Martin Van Buren specifically stayed out of not long before. Tyler was a good guy for America, but he wasn’t one of America’s heroes.