by
Zeno Potas
He was one of the first
men running for the office to have a campaign slogan which was
"Tippecanoe and Tyler too." This refereed to his days as a
military officer who was the hero of the Battle of Tippecanoe in
1811, and the Battle of the Thames in 1813, recovering Detroit from
the British and their Indian allies led by Shawnee chief Tecumseh. He
gave the longest Inaugural address, 8,445 words, but served the
shortest term, only 32 days. He was the first President to die in
office. As we now know, the true nature of his death was falsified.
This has given rise to the suspicion that his demise was perhaps -
arraigned.
Elected as a Whig, he was
surrounded by Jacksonian Democrat holdovers from the previous
administration. This faction of the Democratic party, the
Jacksonians, were in disagreement with the traditionalists within
party itself. Previously Andrew Jackson's attempt to expand the power
of the presidency while diminishing the role of the elitist bankers
was stated in his veto of the bank charter renewal. In what has been
called one of the most "popular and effective documents in
American political history", Jackson outlined a major
readjustment to the relative powers of the government branches. "The
executive branch, Jackson averred, when acting in the interests of
the American people; was not bound to defer to the decisions of the
Supreme Court, nor to comply with legislation passed by Congress.
Further, executive power was no longer limited to suppressing clear
violations of the Constitution – it could be asserted on social,
political or economic grounds.
"The great danger to
our institutions does...appear to me to be...the accumulation in one
of the departments of that which was assigned to others.... Limited
as are the powers which have been granted, still enough have been
granted to constitute a despotism if concentrated in one of the
departments.... particularly...the Executive...The tendency of power
to increase itself, particularly when exercised by a single
individual...would terminate in virtual monarchy..."
Harrison continued:
"Republics can
commit no greater error than to...continue any feature in
their...government which may...increase the love of power in the
bosoms of those to whom necessity obliges them to commit the
management of their affairs...When this corrupting passion once takes
possession of the human mind, like the love of gold it becomes
insatiable."
"It is the part of
wisdom for a republic to limit the service of that officer...to whom
she has intrusted the management of her foreign relations, the
execution of her laws, and the command of her armies and navies to a
period so short as to prevent his forgetting that he is the
accountable agent, not the principle; the servant, not the master..."
"The great
dread...seems to have been that the reserved powers of the States
would be absorbed by...the Federal Government and a consolidated
power established, leaving to the States the shadow only of that
independent action for which they had so zealously contended...There
is still an undercurrent at work by which, if not seasonably checked,
the worst apprehensions of our anti-federal patriots will be
realized...Not only will the State authorities be overshadowed by the
great increase of power in the Executive department...but the
character of that Government, if not its designation, be essentially
and radically changed.....as it is...the never-failing tendency of
political power to increase itself...."
The other burning issue of the day
was the reintroduction of the National Bank Bill. His possible
assassination may have been approved by the elite of the day as the
fight for a new Bank of the United States began to warm up again with
his inauguration. His warnings on the control of the nation's
currency were made very clear that day.
"It is not by the
extent of its patronage alone that the Executive department has
become dangerous, but by the use which it appears may be made of the
appointing power to bring under its control the whole revenues of the
country...The first Roman Emperor, in his attempt to seize the sacred
treasure, silenced the opposition of the officer to whose charge it
had been committed by a significant allusion to his sword...I know
the importance...to the divorce...the Treasury from the banking
institutions...It was certainly a great error in the framers of the
Constitution not to have made...the head of the Treasury Department
entirely independent of the Executive....It is in periods like this
that it behooves the people to be most watchful of those to whom they
have intrusted power..." That wisdom still rings true today and
may have given reasonable fear to the elites who made their profits
in banking.
With his death
John Tyler, Harrison's successor and a former Democrat, abandoned the
Whig agenda, effectively cutting himself off from the party and
giving control of the government back to the Democratic party while
continuing the un-constitutional ideas of his predecessor that the
president should set policy instead of deferring to Congress. As the
clouds of Civil War began to form in the chaos that was the
pro-slavery Democratic Party he was marginalized by both parties and
became ineffective. He became the first president to have his veto's
overturned by Congress.
The query is: After his two hour
inaugural address in which he clearly laid the groundwork for a
change in the unconstitutional drift that he felt the country was in,
was he deliberately poisoned with enteric fever? Was it the bankers
for his views on a new national bank or was it the Jacksonians who
wanted more power to their president? We do know that he became ill
three weeks after his address so the story of a cold turning into
pneumonia is false. We may never know the real truth.
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