Tippecanoe
Consider the bacterium that's going to kill William Henry Harrison just 31 days into his presidency. Streptococcus pneumoniae enters his nose, perhaps via his right hand, the one that shakes other hands at the campaign rallies, the "log cabin and hard cider" parades celebrating the "hero of Tippecanoe" and his (fictional) childhood in a humble, rough-hewn hut. The bacterium breeds, spreading through this "man of the people" born on a Virginia plantation, this daring military champion who spent most of his career angling for lucrative government posts.
Or say instead it's klebsiella pneumoniae, breathed in through his mouth, floating past the lips that had closed around so many peace pipes, when as governor of the Indiana Territory he bribed, browbeat, and bullied Native chiefs--authorized or not--to cede millions of acres of land to the United States. It settles in his lungs, weakened by all that smoke, or perhaps simply worn out by his age (68) which makes him, according to his enemies, "a superannuated and pitiable dotard."
But maybe it isn't pneumonia at all, but another bacterium, one that lurks in the sewage-steeped marsh upstream of the White House water supply. Perhaps it's salmonella typhi slipping down his throat to his stomach--the stomach that had always roiled with indigestion--and blossoming into typhoid fever. When the president is given opium, his intestine grows flaccid, and the pathogens escape to his bloodstream, make their way to his liver, his kidneys, his heart.
There, in his organs, the bacterium causes sepsis. The president's pulse grows faint. His hands and feet turn blue. He grows listless. His words are vague. But they were always vague. He was sold to the people as a frontier hero in the model of Jackson; of his policies, the less said the better. Once his celebrity carried him into office, the real Whigs--the allies of Northern businessmen and Southern planters--could run the show from Congress. "Let him say not a single word about his principles or his creed," one of his strategists insisted. "Let him say nothing, promise nothing."
Now, lingering at the border of that undiscovered country, he says nothing, promises nothing. His body rages with bacteria; his organs shut down. As his senses grow dim, he states his position--at last!--to his doctor. "Sir, I wish you to understand the principles of the Government," he says. "I wish them to be carried out. I ask nothing more."
And Tyler Too
It's unclear if John Tyler ever gets that message. A footnote in the campaign, as in its alliterative slogan, he signifies little beyond a name. "We will vote for Tyler therefore, without a why or wherefore" goes one campaign song.
Upon hearing of the president's death, Tyler races to the capitol from Williamsburg, and finds Congress debating what happens next. The Constitution is surprisingly vague about the rules of succession. Does the vice president become acting president until a new election is held? Is he acting president for the rest of the term? Or does he succeed to the presidency? Tyler Too insists on that last one. Congress, eager to resolve things, grudgingly agrees. Taking office is Tyler's most significant feat: it sets a precedent that remains the only reason vice presidents succeed dead ones until 1967, when the 25th amendment to the Constitution codifies the practice. His enemies promptly name him "His Accidency."
Right away, he falls out with his party. The Whigs wanted Harrison to be their puppet, president in name only. They stuck Tyler, a Virginian slaveowner, on the ballot to appease the plantocracy. They never expected to deal with him. When he vetoes a bill to revive the national bank, they're furious. They send it back and he vetoes it again: fisticuffs break out on the House floor. All but one member of his Cabinet resign. Drunken Whigs riot outside the White House, burning Tyler in effigy. More sober Whigs form a caucus and kick him out. A president without a party, one newspaper declares "his name is the synonym of nihil."
He preaches national destiny, but spends the rest of his presidency consolidating his own power. He uses secret funds to spread deceitful propaganda that gets the citizens of Maine to resolve longstanding border issues with Canada, selling out Americans to rack up a treaty. He enlists roughneck gang leaders to push his agenda in New York City, and surreptitiously sends a smarmy slavery apologist to England to counter abolitionist campaigns. He uses similar underhand tactics to forward a treaty annexing Texas. He's obsessed with getting Texas. It will be his signature triumph. It will win him a second term by restoring his good name.
In 1844, he hosts a gala festivity aboard the navy's impressive new ship, named the Princeton, featuring two fifteen-foot long guns capable of firing shells up to five miles. On the third round of celebratory firings, the gun Peacemaker explodes, killing the Secretary of State and the Secretary of the Navy, along with Tyler's enslaved personal attendant, Armistead, and David Gardiner, the father of a silly socialite Tyler is courting. Needing to replace two members of his Cabinet quickly, Tyler makes John Calhoun, an unhinged, pro-slavery hothead, Secretary of State. Calhoun goes around saying what everyone else prefers left unsaid: that annexing Texas will bolster both slavery and the South. This outrages Northerners, and dooms any chance the Texas treaty had of getting a two-thirds majority in the Senate.
On the up side, the death of Julia Gardiner's father causes her to accept the president's previously rejected offer of marriage. Tyler is branded an " old fool" by his enemies--Julia is 30 years his junior--but the young "Mrs. President" is a P.R. success. She promptly hires a publicist and makes sure their lavish soirees, at least, are praised in the press. Now, John jokes, no one can say he's without a party.
But even after he agrees to drop out of the 1844 race so as not to spoil the Democrats' chances, Tyler remains determined to put his name on the acquisition of Texas. He does an end run around the Senate to annex Texas by joint resolution, which requires only a simple majority. The new president-elect, James K. Polk, is already in Washington when Tyler, three days before the end of his administration, signs his name on the bill of annexation.
A partyless, one-term president, he retires to his plantation and subsides into sectionalist resentment. He produces children to carry on his name, more of them--fifteen--than any other president. Some say there are even more. Like every president before him except the Adamses, he is accused of having fathered children with enslaved women. A connection has never been scientifically proven, but Black families in Virginia's Tidewater region have oral traditions linking their names to his.
Once rejected by the nation, he seems to lose his belief in its destiny. When, in 1861, the moment of crisis comes between North and South, Tyler, by then an elder statesman, presides over the Washington Peace Conference convened to prevent civil war. But does he want peace? Or is he there in name only, killing time while the South arms up? When negotiations break down, he chooses his side unreluctantly, urging the Virginia state convention to secede even before the bombardment of Fort Sumter. He dies in 1863, on his way to take up a seat in the Congress of the Confederacy. He is, thus far, the only American ex-president put to rest in a coffin not draped in the stars and stripes. He is, thus far, the only American ex-president named a traitor, to his party and to the nation.
His name lives on in a city and county in Texas, the state he provoked a war to acquire. But not Brightpoint Community College in Chester, Virginia, Mary S. Peake Elementary School in Hampton, Virginia, Waterview Elementary School in Portsmouth, Virginia, Chancellors' Hall at the College of William and Mary, or Congress Street in Chicago. A century and a half later, they, among other places, divest themselves of his name.