These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

George Washington as the great ship steamed past Mount Vernon.1 Tyler, a gaunt and ungainly man, had staked his presidency on annexation. But his presidency had been weak from the start, and by the time the treaty was drafted, he was a president without a party. A southern aristocrat who despised populism, Tyler had been nominated as Harrison’s running mate because he’d been a vocal critic of both Jackson and Van Buren, and because Whigs hoped he would carry his crucial home state, Virginia. He’d hardly been queried on his politics, nor had voters been informed of them. As one campaign song had it, “We will vote for Tyler therefore / without a why or wherefore.” But Tyler did have political positions, strenuously held: he had long advocated states’ rights. An opponent of the national bank, Tyler didn’t like anything national; he once complained about the signs he saw all over Washington, DC: “National Hotel, National boot-black, National black-smith, National Oyster-house.”