A President, born while George Washington was still in office, yet has a grandson who is still alive. He was the first Vice-President to ascend to the Presidency due to the death of the President. He was a slaveholder who owned 40 slaves, yet opposed slavery. He signed a treaty that outlawed slave trading by sea.
While he was in office, he pissed off his party (Whig) by vetoing their bill to create a national bank because he was a strict constructionist who believed strongly in states rights. He had a strong dislike for the Federal Government, believing that the more populous northern states were using it as a cudgel to beat down the more agricultural southern states. The Tariff of 1828 was a great example of this- the tariff placed a 38% tax on some imported goods and a 45% tax on certain imported raw materials, especially iron products, as well as wool and cotton textiles. The target of these taxes were the southern states, and most of the southern states were demanding secession over the taxes.
The manufacturing-based economy in the Northeastern states was being undersold by manufactured items from Britain. The major goal of the tariff was to protect the factories by taxing imports from Europe, thereby forcing the agrarian southern states to buy northern goods at higher prices. This also prevented the southern states from selling their products overseas, because the loss of European nations’ ability to sell their manufactured goods to the Union meant that they no longer had the money to purchase the south’s agricultural goods. This in turn forced southern farmers to sell cotton to northern mills at lower prices. South Carolina refused to pay the tax. President Jackson was advocating for the use of military force, with Congress voting against it.
John Tyler, being one of the main opponents of Jackson’s plan, was forced out of the Democrat party and would eventually cause him to join the (northern based) Whigs, where he was elected to be the Vice President in 1840. After only 31 days, President Harrison died of pneumonia, and Tyler became President. Members of his own party attempted to use him as an empty suit to carry out the party’s wishes, and he refused, which caused the party to expel him.
When Tyler, who was from Virginia, vetoed tariffs that would further damage the south, the Whigs in the House of Representatives began the first impeachment hearings in this nation’s history. John Quincy Adams, an abolitionist who disliked slaveholders like Tyler, condemned Tyler’s use of the veto and attacked his character when pushing for impeachment. He survived, and finished out President Harrison’s term.
If you think that the Civil war was about slavery, you would be taking a shortsighted view that has been pressed by the North. The real story here is that the northern states had for years been using their numerical superiority to force the south to pay large sums of money to support northern industry.
We see the same thing playing out today, although the lines aren’t north-south. The lines are a bit more geographically muddy. Still, many of the things that happened nearly two hundred years ago have well defined parallels today.
