Deceased US Presidents
By Dr Khalid Siddiqui
Ohio
10. John Tyler (1841-1845): He was one of the four presidents who were never elected to the Presidency. He is the first of the eight vice presidents who became president upon their predecessor’s death in office.
President William Harrison had died only 31 days after taking office. Tyler, therefore, had the shortest tenure as a vice president. The Cabinet met within an hour of the president’s death and decided that Tyler would be "vice-president acting president". However, Tyler firmly and decisively asserted that the Constitution gave him full and unqualified powers of office, and had himself sworn in immediately as president, setting a critical precedent for an orderly transfer of power following a president's death.
The opposition felt that Tyler should be a caretaker under the title of "acting president", or remain vice president in name. It considered his presidency as a mere “regency”. He was referred to by many mocking nicknames, including "His Accidency". However, Tyler never wavered from his conviction that he was the rightful president. When his political opponents sent correspondence to the White House addressed to the "vice president" or "acting president", Tyler had it returned unopened.
Tyler was the first president to have his veto of legislation overridden by Congress. He played a major role in the annexation of Texas which entered the union in 1845 as the 28 th state. In 1842 he began a process that led to the eventual annexation of Hawaii by the United States in 1959 as the 50 th state.
He was one of the four US presidents who served the entire tenure without a vice president. His first wife, Letitia Christian Tyler, was the first of the three First Ladies who died in the White House. She was also the youngest (51) First Lady to die in White House. After her death, Tyler remarried Julia Gardiner in 1844, thus becoming one of three US presidents who got married while in the White House. In 1844 she became the first First Lady to sit for her photograph, posing at the Anthony Studios in New York.
John Tyler is the president who fathered the most children, having fifteen children over two marriages. He was a slaveholder, at one point keeping forty slaves; and he never freed any one of them. During the American Civil War (1861-1865) he sided with the Confederate States of America. In other words, he rebelled against the same country he was the president of two decades earlier. He died in 1862 and was buried in Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia next to the tomb of James Monroe.
His death was the only one in US presidential history which was not officially recognized by Washington DC due to his allegiance to the Confederate States of America. Tyler had requested arrangements for a simple burial, but Confederate President, Jefferson Davis, hosted a grand event complete with a Confederate flag draped over the coffin. He remains the only US president ever laid to rest under a flag not that of the United States.
As of September 28, 2022, one of President Tyler’s grandsons, Harrison Ruffin Tyler, 93, was alive and living in a nursing home in Virginia; the president himself was born in 1790! Thus, Tyler becomes the earliest former president of the United States with a living grandchild.
I found John Tyler the most ‘interesting’ US president.
