JOHN TYLER: OUR GREATEST PRESIDENT?

As Presidents Day approaches, we often ask, who was our greatest President? Perhaps we should ask a deeper question: by what criteria should our presidents be rated?

Historians often rank the presidents, but being mostly left of center, they usually rate the based upon how much they expanded the scope of government, how many new government programs they ushered in, what social changes they forced upon the nation, and how many wars they brought us through.

But are these the criteria that make a great president? I don’t think so. The greatest presidents, in my opinion, are those who respected the limits the Constitution places upon government and especially upon the executive branch, those who refrained from social engineering, and those who, insofar as possible, kept the nation out of wars.

My nomination for Great President? John Tyler.

John who?

That’s right, John Tyler (1790-1862), our 10th president.

A rising star in the Virginia Democratic Party, Tyler served as a state legislator, governor, congressman, and U.S. Senator. He began his career as a Jacksonian Democrat, but he soon broke from Andrew Jackson because he believed Jackson’s policies infringed upon states’ rights. So when General William Henry Harrison ran for president in 1840 as a Whig, Tyler became his running mate, and they ran together as “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.” Harrison died after serving only one month in office, and a constitutional crisis emerged. Some believed the vice-president did not actually become president when the president died but merely assumed the president’s duties. But Tyler immediately took the oath of office and was proclaimed as president, establishing what was called the Tyler Precedent.

President Tyler strongly believed the Constitution should be interpreted strictly according to the intent of its Framers. His states’ rights policies soon put him at odds with the Whig establishment. He vetoed the Whigs’ bills to create a national bank and to raise tariff rates, and he was the first president to see a veto overridden by Congress. He vetoed domestic improvements bills because he believed them to be unconstitutional, and he so angered the Whig establishment that the Whigs expelled him from their party. In 1840 he at first ran for reelection on the John Tyler Party but withdrew from the race, supporting Democrat James Knox Polk.

Tyler retired to his plantation, which he named Sherwood Forest because he, like Robin Hood, had been declared an outlaw. But he remained active in Virginia political affairs, and after the election of President Lincoln n 1861, he chaired the Washington Peace Conference to avert the War Between the States. When that failed, Tyler remained loyal to his home state of Virginia. Virginians elected him to the Confederate Congress in 1862, but he died before taking his seat. Jefferson Davis organized and attended his funeral, and a Confederate flag draped his coffin.

I feel a personal tie with John Tyler, because I knew his grandson.

How could I have known the grandson of a president who served 1841-45? That’s quite a story.

Tyler was married in the White House, and when he was 63; he and his wife had a son named Lyon Gardiner Tyler. Lyon’s first wife died in 1921. He then married Susan Harison Ruffin in 1923; their son Harrison Ruffin Tyler (John Tyler’s grandson, named after William Henry Harrison) was born in 1928 and died only last year at age 96. After a successful career as a chemical engineer, he retired to his ancestral Sherwood Forest and devoted himself to preserving historic sites.

I met Harrison Tyler at a conference in Jamestown, VA, in 2007 and had an engaging conversation with him about American history and politics. He was a fine Virginian and a fine American, and the grandson of a great President who followed the Constitution.

Colonel Eidsmoe serves as Professor of Constitutional Law for the Oak Brook College of Law & Government Policy (obcl.edu), as Senior Counsel for the Foundation for Moral Law (morallaw.org), and as Chairman of the Board of the Plymouth Rock Foundation (plymrock.org). He and his wife Marleen reside in rural Pike Road, Alabama. He may be contacted for speaking engagements at eidsmoeja@juno.com.

THE VIEWS OF SUBMITTED EDITORIALS MAY NOT BE THE EXPRESS VIEWS OF THE ALABAMA GAZETTE.