The Republican Vision of John Tyler. By Dan Monroe. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2003. x, 252 pp. $39.95, isbn 1-58544-216-X.)

Abstract

Dan Monroe seeks to answer a question that has troubled historians of antebellum politics: Why did John Tyler, a successful politician (measured by the number and importance of offices he held), twice take actions that were politically suicidal? A firm Democrat, he abandoned his party when he opposed President Andrew Jackson's actions during the nullification crisis and bank war. Later, as president, he vetoed the key legislation favored by the Whig party that had elected him to office, causing the latter's congressional delegation to read him out of their party. Regarding as necessary but insufficient explanations that emphasize Tyler's fealty to states' rights, his strict constructionist interpretation of the Constitution, and his aversion to executive power and rejecting out of hand older views that Tyler was either a political simpleton or a politically meandering Machiavellian, Monroe argues that a pervasive republican mind-set guided most of Tyler's actions from the time he was a state legislator through his presidency. A classical republican fear of unchecked power, corruption, centralization, and (with some ambivalence) commerce dominated his thinking, from which he wavered only when a particular issue revealed contradictory impulses of his philosophy.