Welcome to Blogging the Presidents: A Voting While Intoxicated™ Almost Original Series. We will be taking a serious look at the 42 men who have led our country and hopefully finding a few laughable details.
PART X
As the Tyler to William Henry Harrison’s Tippecanoe, Tyler was the first President not to be elected into the position, taking over as VP. Naturally, we might expect this to hurt his legitimacy and thus effectiveness. He made it worse by abandoning his party (well, he was on the Whig ticket but had traditionally been a Democrat so perhaps it wasn’t a big shock) and vetoing most of their actions, leading to massive gridlock. This break helped create even stronger regional separation between the parties, the Whigs (eventually Republicans) in the North and the Democrats in the South, a shove towards the Civil War. He also annexed Texas, which in hindsight is probably the worst decision in the history of the country…ok, probably not, but Texas sucks. I don’t really blame Tyler too much for either because they both seemed bound to happen so he probably was truly mediocre.
He has the notoriety of being the only President not honored in Washington at the time of his death as he died during the Civil War as a supporter of the Confederacy.
