This Day in Presidential History (‘Princeton’ Explosion Brings Tragedy, Romance to Tyler)

Feb. 28, 1844—An explosion on the inaugural cruise of the USS Princeton on the Potomac River killed six people (including two Cabinet members) and injured 20; unsettled American attempts at acquiring Texas at a critical juncture; threw a monkey wrench into the use of innovative military weaponry; and landed widowed President John Tyler (pictured) a new, young wife.

The accident came at a critical juncture for the administration. Tyler, having become the first Vice-President to gain the Presidency because of the death of the incumbent (William Henry Harrison), was watching his slim hopes for winning his own term slip away. 

Like Andrew Johnson two decades later, he was a disaffected Democrat rather than a full-fledged member of the winning party (in this case, the Whigs) to which his predecessor belonged. He was, in effect, a man without a party, abandoned by all but one of the original Whig Cabinet members.

That one, Daniel Webster, was now leaving after having negotiated a treaty with Great Britain. But tensions with the British Empire remained in place because of a dispute over ownership of the Pacific Northwest, as well as lingering bad memories of the War of 1812.

The Princeton was designed to be a confidence-boosting measure aimed at the greatest navy in the world: a fast, steam-driven warship sporting the biggest gun ever mounted on a vessel to that point.

Commander Robert Field Stockton, having deafened the ears of those aboard by demonstrating the new weapon, decided to fire the ironically named "Peacemaker" gun again for a salute to George Washington as the ship passed the late President’s home, Mount Vernon. 

Nobody knows if Stockton poured a bit more into the charge or if the crew did so on its own. But as the charge ignited, flames, heat and shrapnel burst in unexpected directions.

Secretary of State Abel Parker Upshur and his just-installed successor at the Naval Department, Thomas Gilmer, died in the accident (with Gilmer gruesomely decapitated), while Tyler himself—climbing up a ladder to witness the charge—avoided following his predecessor into eternity before his full term in office was finished.

Among the other dead was former New York state Sen. David Gardiner, whose 24-year-old daughter, Julia, had previously been wooed in vain by Tyler. But Tyler’s swift action in the crisis—carrying Julia off in his arms when she fainted, away from the death and destruction—so impressed her that she finally yielded to his blandishments and agreed to marry him.

The nickname applied to George Washington—“Father of His Country”—is true only in a metaphorical sense. The nation’s first President produced no offspring. In a more literal sense, the nickname applied more directly to Tyler, who fathered 15 children, seven with Julia after the couple returned to his Virginia home once his term was over. 

Other results of the accident were not so happy. John C. Calhoun of South Carolina ended up with the State Department portfolio upon Upshur’s death. 

But, as H.W. Brands recounts in Heirs of the Founders: The Epic Rivalry of Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster, the Second Generation of American Giants, the appointment came not at the wish of Tyler but through the manipulation of the President’s friend, Sen. Henry Wise of Virginia, who misleadingly told Calhoun that if he went to the White House, Tyler would be ready to name him to the post.

The appointment vastly complicated Tyler’s attempt to annex Texas before leaving office. Once in office, Calhoun’s scolding of Great Britain for advocating abolitionism abroad enraged Thomas Hart Benton. The influential Missouri Senator, who had been carefully wooed to the cause by Upshur, now saw the land transaction as a stalking horse for introducing slavery into American territories, a movement that he (correctly) feared could splinter the Union.

The annexation treaty with Texas made it through the House but, through Benton’s fulminations, stalled in the Senate. It would take the support of incoming President James Knox Polk, and a joint resolution of Congress to bring the vast territory into the Union.

As for Stockton: Though anxious to hog credit for the Princeton when it looked like it would bring about his dream of a steam-driven navy, he couldn’t divert blame for it fast enough after the accident. John Ericsson, the inventor he had persuaded to emigrate from Sweden to work on the project, was exonerated in the post-accident inquiry, but Stockton ensured that he would not be paid by the government for his patents and his supervision of the shipbuilding. It would take his design of the Civil War ironclad Monitor before Ericsson’s genius was adequately celebrated.

 

This Day in Presidential History (Congress Overrides Veto by Despised Lame Duck Tyler)

March 3, 1845—Nearly four years of frustration over stymied legislation and dashed hopes for greater institutional and personal power were vented by Congressional Whigs in the last full day of the administration of John Tyler, as the party who put him in a position to move into the White House overcame a Presidential veto for the first time in American history.

I’ve long been intrigued by Tyler, even leaving aside the fact that, like every other person who’s ever become President, he gained his office through a unique combination of ego, talent, and force of circumstance. It’s also more than just the fact that I visited his grave in Richmond’s famous Hollywood Cemetery nearly two decades ago, or even that I met a descendant of his nearly 30 years ago.

No, this past weekend, two other people on TV reminded me afresh of the 10th President—the first one to step into the job upon the death of his predecessor and, therefore, a chief executive who left perhaps a greater constitutional mark on the office than anyone except George Washington.

The first of these two people was, believe it or not, New York’s embattled (still in office, at least while I type this) governor, David Paterson. As he tried to recover from his self-inflicted political wounds in intervening in a domestic-violence charge against an aide, commentators recalled his no-doubt entirely sincere comment about what it felt like to succeed Eliot Spitzer, forced out of office for patronizing a prostitute: “This is not what I signed up for.”

Tyler could surely relate. Right after his inauguration on March 4, 1841 as Vice-President, he left for home, convinced that no pressing business with Congress (about to end its session) or with President William Henry Harrison (who intended to defer to his Cabinet and to Senator Henry Clay on important decisions) required his presence in the capital.

For several weeks, until he received a letter from Secretary of State Daniel Webster, he was blissfully unaware that the President, having contracted a cold because of his foolhardy decision to deliver the longest inaugural address in American history without wearing a hat or coat on that raw day, had become progressively worn down since then by office-seekers.

Maybe the Virginia aristocrat felt it would appear unseemly if he rushed back to Washington. Maybe he just thought things couldn’t be that bad for Harrison. You can imagine his shock, then, when Webster’s 23-year-old son, Fletcher, a State Department aide, showed up at the Tyler estate, bearing a message that the President had died.

The second person who reminded me of the nature of the challenges faced by Tyler was his recent biographer Gary May, who, on a C-Span Book TV panel this weekend, noted that the death of Harrison was only the first of several crushing deaths that Tyler would have to cope with, including that of his wife and one of his great friends, Secretary of the Navy Thomas Gilmer, in a terrible naval accident a couple of years later.

By the end of his first year in office, Tyler was on his way to a one-term Presidency, for several reasons:

* He was not a true Whig, but rather a Southern Democrat disgruntled with Andrew Jackson. Tyler’s career and policy positions track closely with that of John C. Calhoun. Both were states’-rights advocates and narrow constructionists when it came to the Constitution; both favored relieving Andrew Jackson of command after his actions in Florida led the nation to the brink of war with Spain; both threw their support initially to John Quincy Adams, only to switch sides later to support Jackson; both turned against Old Hickory in the 1830s over the right of states to nullify federal law; and both were forced to give up their offices because of their clashes with the President.

* He stood in the way of Clay’s Presidential ambitions. Tyler supported Clay so strenuously for the Democratic nomination in 1840 that he cried when it was denied him. Nor had Tyler really harbored intense Presidential hopes of his own before he assumed the office. But the role of chief executive ended up appealing so much to him that he decided he’d keep the job. This did not sit well with Clay, who had been harboring his own ambitions for the post for the last 20 years.

* In an age of egalitarianism, he was a throwback to the Virginia Dynasty. James Monroe is customarily referred to as the “last of the cocked hats,” but the phrase only holds true if one confines it strictly to the revolutionary generation. Actually, Tyler might be considered the last of the Virginia Dynasty. He adopted virtually wholesale the opinions of his father, a close associate of Thomas Jefferson. (John Tyler Sr. also served as governor of Virginia.) Monroe’s sartorial style made him something of an anachronism even while he was in office, but Tyler’s background made him seem, if possible, even more out of place—and this at a time when political power was shifting to the Midwest and industrial North.

* He intended to use all the powers of his office. Many people assumed that Tyler was acting president, not the real thing, but he quickly took over all the rights inherent in the office. The Constitution was largely silent on any Vice-President assuming the Presidency. It was even an open question if elections needed to be called. From his first day in office, however, Tyler acted in accordance with the thought that he was President now in fact as well as in name. He even made clear to his Cabinet that he would gladly take their advice, but not abide by their majority vote, as Harrison, in his month in office, had done.

In the White House, Tyler found at last one aspect of Jacksonian decisionmaking to his liking: the aggressive use of the veto. Old Hickory employed it a dozen times over eight years; Tyler, in less than half that time, used this power 10 times. He might not have been able to move legislation, but Tyler certainly obstruct it—including the “American System” of infrastructure improvements that was at the heart of the Whig program.

By the time he cast his last veto, of a bill banning the President from authorizing the construction of revenue cutter ships without Congressional approval, Clay & Co. had had it. It was hardly a bill of great importance, but maybe the sheer pettiness of the matter made the President’s enemies more resolved to give him one last slap.

Overriding the President’s veto required a two-thirds supermajority of both houses of Congress. The Senate approved the override and sent it immediately to the House of Representatives, where, then as now, the bill was debated well into the night.

Late in the proceedings, one member noted that the clock had stood still at midnight for the last five minutes, which meant that the session was over and the bill was dead. The Speaker of the House ruled against him and the measure went to the floor, where it was passed.

The policy Tyler hoped would be his crowning achievement--the annexation of Texas--did not, in fact, turn out to be an unalloyed blessing. The resulting war with Mexico, directed by Tyler's successor, James Knox Polk, brought a host of new territories to the U.S., but also brought to the fore, as never before, the question of slavery's extension.

In addition to being the first Vice-President to take over the Presidency because of the death of his predecessor, Tyler held two other distinctions among all the men who have headed the U.S. First, he fathered, by two wives (he married the second, a woman three decades his junior, by the end of his term), 14 children who lived to adulthood. Second, by taking sides with the Confederacy in the last two years of his life, he became the only American President to betray his country.