Tyler's doctor: I hope not, sir.
John Tyler: Perhaps it is best.
John Tyler (March 29, 1790 – January 18, 1862) was the tenth President of the United States, the second from the Whig Party, and the first Vice President to inherit the Presidency upon his predecessor’s death. He served from 1841 to 1845, preceding James K. Polk and succeeded William Henry Harrison, who died of pneumonia on April 4, 1841, just a month into his presidency. Although a graceful gentleman, Tyler was also a very stubborn man who was not very well liked and was not very easy to get along very well with at times, even his closest allies and rivals, and his argumentative and arrogant personality ruined his bid to become a Whig candidate for the 1844 election.
Tyler was a longtime Democratic-Republican who was elected to the Vice Presidency on the Whig ticket, so he was rather unpopular and had several disagreements with his former political supporters and had a tenuous relationship with his predecessor during his short Vice Presidency. After Harrison was declared dead by the pneumonia, Tyler declared that he was now the President rather than the Acting President. Upon succeeding office, he was nicknamed "His Accidency" by his detractors. Tyler was a Whig, but he didn’t really get along with the party’s most vocal leader, Henry Clay. Tyler ended up making a lot of Whigs, led by Clay, very angry by vetoing several of their bills brought to the White House, including a Third National Bank. As a consequence, most of his Cabinet resigned (not counting his State Secretary Daniel Webster) and the enraged Whigs expelled him from the party because he could not cooperate with them as he constantly impeded them and obstructed a lot of their agenda, making him the only U.S. President to be officially expelled from his own political party while still in office.
Because he vetoed the Tarriff Acts and so many bills, he is also notorious for being the first president ever to come very close to being impeached (the only other president being President Richard Nixon, who resigned in 1974 to avoid being impeached over his role in the Watergate Scandal) — on the somewhat thin reasoning that using his veto for anything other than striking down laws which were blatantly unconstitutional counted as an abuse of power, even though over half of the previous presidents had vetoed at least one billnote , Andrew Jackson had vetoed more by the same point of his presidency, and deciding on the constitutionality of laws is generally seen as the responsibility of the Supreme Court rather than the president — but the first formal vote of an impeachment resolution would prove to be unsuccessful with a total of 83-127, so Tyler remained in office. However, they would succeed at overriding one of his vetos, the first time Congress would ever override a veto, on his last day in office.note
Tyler’s most notable and controversial policy is the annexation of Texas, which declared independence in 1836. Despite the fact that he remained at odds with the Whigs and members of Congress, he also oversaw some foreign success; he signed the Webster-Ashburton Treaty with the United Kingdom (which resolved border issues between the U.S. and BritishCanada in the northeast, between Maine and New Brunswick), the Treaty of Wanghia with China (which gave America the same trade rights that the European powers were starting to get in China), and added Florida to the Union on the last full day of his presidency after ending the Second Seminole War and Dorr’s Rebellion. When the South seceded during the Civil War, Tyler was elected to the Confederate House of Representatives but died on January 18, 1862, just before taking his seat in the Confederate House of Representatives. He was the only former president to die as a traitor to the United States he once served. He was buried with his coffin draped in the Confederate flag, making him the only president buried under a different "foreign" flag,note and the only one whose death was not officially recognised in Washington.
He fathered eight children with his first wife, who died while he was in office, and remarried while he was president, making him the first President to get married during his Presidency, fathering seven more children with his second wife (whom he married after her father was killed in front of both of them by an exploding experimental cannonnote and she fainted into his arms). The second Mrs. Tyler asked to be addressed as "the Presidentress" which didn't catch on. In addition to those fifteen legitimate children, there are rumors of him having an illegitimate child. According to The Other Wiki, one of his grandsons (born in 1928) is still alive - his father, Lyon Gardiner Tyler, was born in 1853 when Tyler was 63 years old — meaning that this grandson was born when Lyon was 74 or 75 years old). Another grandson, born in 1925, died on September 26, 2020.
Rasmussen Reports, an American polling agency, polled citizens on what they thought of each President in 2007, and 76% could not give an opinion on him. If this is any evidence, he's probably one of the most forgotten and among the most controversial American Presidents. He is not helped in this sense by having a relatively bland name, unlike, for example, Millard Fillmore.
