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President without a Party - The Life of John Tyler (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R1,036
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President without a Party - The Life of John Tyler (Hardcover)
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Historians have long viewed President John Tyler as one of the
nation's least effective heads of state. In President without a
Party- the first fullA -scale biography of Tyler in more than fifty
years and the first new academic study of him in eight decades-
Christopher J. Leahy explores the life of the tenth chief executive
of the United States. Born in the Virginia Tidewater into an elite
family sympathetic to the ideals of the American Revolution, Tyler,
like his father, worked as an attorney before entering politics.
Leahy uses a wealth of primary source materials to chart Tyler's
early political path, from his election to the Virginia legislature
in 1811, through his stints as a congressman and senator, to his
viceA -presidential nomination on the Whig ticket for the campaign
of 1840. When William Henry Harrison died unexpectedly a mere month
after assuming the presidency, Tyler became the first vice
president to become president because of the death of the
incumbent. Leahy traces Tyler's ascent to the highest office in the
land and unpacks the fraught dynamics between Tyler and his fellow
Whigs, who ultimately banished the beleaguered president from their
ranks and stymied his election bid three years later. Leahy also
examines the president's personal life, especially his
relationships with his wives and children. In the end, Leahy
suggests, politics fulfilled Tyler the most, often to the detriment
of his family. Such was true even after his presidency, when
Virginians elected him to the Confederate Congress in 1861, and
northerners and Unionists branded him a ""traitor president."" The
most complete accounting of Tyler's life and career, Leahy's
biography makes an original contribution to the fields of politics,
family life, and slavery in the antebellum South. Moving beyond the
standard, often shortsighted studies that describe Tyler as simply
a defender of the Old South's dominant ideology of states' rights
and strict construction of the Constitution, Leahy offers a nuanced
portrayal of a president who favored a middle-A of-A theA -road,
bipartisan approach to the nation's problems. This strategy did not
make Tyler popular with either the Whigs or the opposition
Democrats while he was in office, or with historians and
biographers ever since. Moreover, his most significant achievement
as president- the annexation of Texas- exacerbated sectional
tensions and put the United States on the road to civil war.
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