Dead Presidents: Leap Day

February 29 comes along only once in four years, which might account for the fact that no Presidents or Vice Presidents of the United States were ever born or died on that day, though President John Tyler came within a few feet of death on February 28, 1844, when a 12-inch gun on the warship USS Princeton accidently exploded, killing two members of his cabinet, among others.

There have been a few bits of presidential history associated with Leap Day, however. On February 29, 1796, for example, President Washington announced that the Jay Treaty was in effect -- officially, the Treaty of Amity Commerce and Navigation, between His Britannic Majesty; and The United States of America. (John Jay was the chief negotiator on the American side.) Among other things, the treaty provided for the end of the lingering British occupation of forts in the Northwest Territory; the settlement of compensation to U.S. ship owners whose vessels by the British during the Revolution; and the establishment of a commission to delineate part of the boundary with British North American (that is, the Canadas).

On February 29, 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt formally appointed a seven-man commission -- the Isthmian Canal Commission, which reported at first to Secretary of War William Howard Taft -- to get on with the task of building the Panama Canal, one of the signal achievements of his presidency. The move came immediately after the brand-new Panamanian government, which had been helped into existence by the U.S.S. Nashville in late 1903, ceded control of the Canal Zone to the United States on February 23.

On February 29, 1936, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the second Neutrality Act, which renewed a previous act that banned trading in arms or war materials with all parties in a war, and clarified the status of Americans traveling on ships of belligerent powers -- at their own risk (everyone still recalled the Lusitania in those days). The '36 act also banned loans or credits to belligerents. Other neutrality acts were passed in the late '30s, for all the good they did in the early '40s in keeping the United States out of war.

John Tyler's (Living) Grandsons

Making the rounds of dead-president news currently is the (seemingly) startling news that John Tyler, 10th President of the United States, who was born in 1790, has two living grandsons here in the early 21st century. The story broke at the web site Mental Floss and other sites soon picked it up.

New York magazine not merely repeated the story, but bothered to interview Harrison Tyler, one of the grandsons. Not only is he still alive at 83, he lives at the Sherwood Forest Plantation in Virginia -- home of the president from 1842 to his death in 1862. The other grandson, Lyon Gardiner Tyler, lives in Tennessee.

For the record, Harrison and Lyon are the sons of Lyon Gardiner Tyler (August 24, 1853--February 12, 1935), who was the fifth child of John Tyler and his second wife, Julia Gardiner Tyler. The elder Lyon was born when his father was 63; Harrison and Lyon were born when their father was in his 70s. This full interview is here.

September 1, 1883:Alex Tyler Dies

John Tyler, 10th President of the United States (1841-45), was also the most fecund of presidents, siring a total of 15 legitimate children, and allegedly two more by slave women, though this cannot be confirmed. Tyler's possible dalliance hasn't attracted nearly as much attention as Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings (or, for that matter, the possible love child of Grover Cleveland and the confirmed illegitimate daughter of Warren Harding).

Tyler (pictured), besides producing a lot of children, also had the good fortune unusual in the 19th century of having all but one of the 15 survive to adulthood, though he did not live to see all of them grow up. His last child, Pearl, was less than 2 years old when he died, and she lived until 1947.

Today is the day that John Alexander "Alex" Tyler died in 1883. He was the second child born to John's second wife, Julia, and though he survived to manhood, did not live to see old age: he was only 35. His father left office about three years before he was born, returning to his plantation in Virginia, "Sherwood Forest."

Regarding Alex Tyler, the web site presidentschildren.com has this to say: "He was born April 7, 1848 and died at age 35 on September 1, 1883. He ran away from home at fourteen to enlist in the Confederate Army. He was rejected as too young, then later joined the Confederate Navy. Alex enlisted in the German Army at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. He worked as an engineer and a surveyor in the American West. He married a cousin but was often separated from her. His death has spawned several mysterious theories, but most historians accept an account that he died of dysentery after drinking contaminated water in New Mexico in 1883. He had one child."

March 3, 1845:First Override of a Presidential Veto

Article I, Section 7 of the US Constitution specifies that a president may veto a bill he dislikes and that a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress can override his veto (though the term "veto" isn't in the document). The first veto was under Washington, but it was to be over 50 years, and ten presidents before the first override happened. The early presidents -- except for Andrew Jackson, with five regular and seven pocket -- used the veto sparingly. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison did not use it at all.

John Tyler's veto, early in his presidency, of a bill to establish a third bank of the United States, effectively alienated him from the Whig Party (he had been elected on the Whig ticket, mostly to offer geographic balance). But Congress wasn't able to override that or four other of his vetoes. On the last day of his term, March 3, 1845, Congress finally overrode Tyler's veto of a relatively minor naval appropriations bill. To use a more modern phrasing, it was Congress' way of giving the finger to a president they disliked, a small jab at the moment when Tyler was celebrating the passage, and his signing on March 1, of the joint resolution annexing Texas.

The all-time veto champ among the presidents, not surprisingly, is Franklin Roosevelt, who in over 12 years used the veto 635 times, 372 regular and 263 pocket. Only nine were overridden. Among two-term presidents, Grover Cleveland had the highest number of vetoes, proportionally more than FDR: 584 of both kinds, with seven overridden. Andrew Johnson, whom Congress hated and who hated Congress, had the most overrides: 15 out of 29 vetoes.

February 28, 1844:President Tyler Cheats Death

Much of official Washington took a demonstration cruise on the new warship USS Princeton, pride of the US Navy, on the second to last day of February 1844, an unseasonably warm late-winter day. The guests aboard the steamer, the first in the Navy driven by a screw propeller instead of a paddlewheel, included the 10th president of the United States, John Tyler, members of his Cabinet and Congress (including Sen. Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri), military officers, journalists and even former First Lady Dolley Madison.

At two points along the Potomac, the ship fired its mighty 12-inch “Peacemaker” gun, which could hurl a cannonball five miles. After lunch, while the president was still below deck, the gun was readied for another firing. “The president started up the ladder to observe the shot but paused to listen to his son-in-law, William Waller, sing a patriotic ditty about 1776,” wrote Ann Blackman in Navy History magazine (September 2005). “Just as the young man came to the word ‘Washington’ in the lyrics, the great gun exploded, hurling fiery iron in all directions.

“The ship trembled, and a dense cloud of white smoke smothered the deck, making it almost impossible to see or breathe. According to the editor of the Boston Times, an eyewitness, when the smoke cleared, dead bodies and detached arms and legs littered the deck. The blast had killed Secretary of State Upshur; Secretary of the Navy Gilmer; Virgil Maxcy, the American chargé d'affaires to Belgium; Julia Gardiner's father [she later married President Tyler, who was a widower]; Beverly Kennon, the Navy's chief of construction; and the president's personal valet, a slave named Armistead.” The entire article is here.

The vice president of the United States was nowhere near the site of the accident, because in fact there was no vice president at the time. Tyler had succeeded to the presidency after history’s briefest tenure as vice president, upon the death of William Henry Harrison in 1841. Had Tyler died aboard the Princeton, who would have become president (or possibly acting president)?

Willie Person Mangum of North Carolina, that’s who (pictured). He was president pro tem of the US Senate at the time, and under the succession law in force, next in line since there was no vice president. He’d served in the House and the Senate, was an ally of Henry Clay, and his politics had evolved from Jacksonian Democrat to anti-Jacksonian to Whig. His political career ended at about the same time as the dissolution of the Whig Party in the early 1850s, and he died in 1861 shortly after his only son was killed at the First Battle of Manassas.

January 18, 1862:John Tyler Dies a Confederate

When the Civil War broke out, there were five former US presidents alive: Van Buren, Tyler, Fillmore, Pierce and Buchanan. Their home states, respectively, were New York, Virginia, New York, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania. Four Yankees, only one Southerner, so it’s no surprise that the only former US president to align himself with his native state and the new Confederacy was Virginian John Tyler, who hadn’t been president in over 15 years.

He was a member of the provisional Confederate Congress, which met in Montgomery and then Richmond, and was elected to the First Confederate Congress in November 1861. It was scheduled to meet in February 1862, but before that could happen, death came to President Tyler. His passing was not officially noted by the government of the United States.

The Confederate States of America, on the other hand, lauded Tyler. The Journal of the Confederate Congress for January 20, 1862, says: "He has secured, we believe, a blissful immortality. For the page of history his fame is destined to occupy, it is proper briefly to recount the many offices he has filled... as Vice-President of the United States, presiding over the deliberations of the Senate with dignity and impartiality, preserving the decorum of a body that then was a model for legislative assemblies; as President of the United States, when the national honor and reputation were acknowledged unimpeached and unimpaired in every land, and the powers of the earth looked up to the new Government as an exemplar of morals and of power worthy of respect and imitation."

Of course, eulogies of this sort do not speak ill of the dead, but all the same that's a remarkable bit of Victorian gushery for a president who completely alienated his own party and saw his entire cabinet, except one, resign at the same time.The entire entry is here.

Not until 1911, according to the Presidential Factbook (Joseph Nathan Kane, 1994), did the US Congress authorize an erection of a monument in his honor. Completed in 1915, it stands in Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond.