Confronting the Presidents: No Spin Assessments from Washington to Biden

William Henry Harrison caught pneumonia and died less than a month after becoming president. Still, the authors argue that Harrison made a historical impact because he ran “the first mass public campaign for the presidency” (74). In his campaign, Harrison distributed food and alcohol to voters, held rallies with parades, and had a campaign slogan, “Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too” (74). This slogan referred to the Battle of Tippecanoe against Indigenous people in the Ohio Territory, which made Harrison a famous war hero and gave him the nickname “Old Tippecanoe.” The “Tyler” of the slogan was Harrison’s running mate, John Tyler.

Despite his populist image, Harrison came from an upper-class family, and his father had been governor of Virginia. Harrison studied history and the classics at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia and medicine at the University of Pennsylvania before having to drop out. Harrison then joined the army and married a New Yorker named Anna Tuthill Symmes.

Harrison had been in the Ohio state senate and the US Senate, and he served as an ambassador to Colombia. An enslaver himself, Harrison supported expanding slavery into all the United States’ new Western territories and opposed any federal laws against slavery. He also advocated for harsh actions against Indigenous people.

At Harrison’s inauguration, he gave a speech lasting over two hours without gloves, a hat, or a coat. He became sick from the tainted drinking water supplied to the White House from a marshy field exposed to the city’s waste. Harrison became the first president to die in office.

After Harrison’s death, his vice president, John Tyler, became president. There is controversy over Tyler assuming the presidential office instead of being designated the “acting president” (79). Henry Clay, the leader of the Whig Party, wanted Tyler replaced with “a man he kn[ew] he c[ould] control” (79), Senator Samuel Southard of New Jersey.

By April, Tyler declared that he would no longer support the platform of the Whig Party and adopted “the ideals of a Jacksonian Democrat” (80). He went against the Whig Party’s platform by shutting down the national bank and vetoing a bill written by Clay to restore it. Because of Tyler’s conflict with Clay and the Whig Party, Tyler became the first president to have impeachment proceedings begun against him, but Congress only censured him.

Tyler had been a governor of Virginia and served in the House of Representatives and the Senate. Born to a Virginia family that had become rich through enslaved labor, he supported the annexation of Texas as a pro-slavery state and planned to have “Tyler and Texas!” as the slogan for his second campaign (83). After the death of his wife Letitia, Tyler married a much younger woman named Julia Gardiner, causing a scandal and damaging his own popularity, although she became popular with the public.

Tyler’s policies favored “tariff protection for cotton and tobacco planters, states’ rights, and pro-slavery protection—ideas that w[ould] drive the impending Civil War” (84). Recognizing Tyler’s unpopularity, Andrew Jackson tried to convince him not to try to run for a second term, but he refused. Tyler’s veto of “a minor appropriations bill” was overturned by Congress, which “humiliated” Tyler (85). With no party willing to support him, Tyler retired to Virginia. When the Civil War began in 1861, Tyler joined the Confederate House of Representatives.

President James K. Polk “incited” the Mexican-American War (87). Except for the wars with Indigenous tribes, this was the first US war since the War of 1812. Polk hoped to annex the Mexican territories of New Mexico, Colorado, and Upper California, which would “double the size of the United States” (88). An enslaver himself, Polk supported allowing slavery to expand into the new Western territories.

Polk’s ambitions were shaped by the idea of Manifest Destiny, the belief that the destiny of the US was to extend from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The Mexican-American War started with the annexation of Texas, which Mexico refused to recognize, and border disputes between Texas and Mexico. Polk “intentionally” provoked the government of Mexico by sending troops to occupy the disputed territory (89). In 1846, the US blockaded the Mexican city of Matamoros, provoking Mexico into invading Texas and giving Polk a pretext for war.

As a child in North Carolina, Polk suffered from constant stomach illnesses. He studied law at the University of North Carolina, graduated with honors, and moved to Nashville, Tennessee. A friend of Andrew Jackson, Polk entered politics and was elected to Congress.

When Polk ran for president in 1844, he was an “unknown” compared to his rivals (90), Martin Van Buren and Henry Clay, who both opposed the annexation of Texas. Polk’s plans to expand westward were popular and helped him win the presidency. In his personal life, Polk entered a happy marriage with Sarah Childress, but he had “no hobbies, avocations, or interests beyond politics” (91). During Polk’s presidency, the United States took California after the Mexican-American War. Gold was soon discovered near Sacramento, causing a gold rush. Polk served only one term, which ended in 1849.

President Zachary Taylor came from a wealthy family from Louisville, Kentucky. He joined the army and married a woman from Maryland, Margaret “Peggy” Smith. Their son Richard would be a Confederate general, and their daughter Sarah married Jefferson Davis, who would become the Confederacy’s president, although she died from malaria three months after the marriage.

Taylor was a veteran of the War of 1812 and several wars with Indigenous peoples. Despite being a Southerner, Taylor opposed the growing movement for the Southern states to secede from the US. President Polk appointed him as the commander of the US Army during the Mexican-American War. He became nationally famous for refusing to surrender to Mexican forces despite being surrounded at the Battle of Buena Vista.

Taylor won the presidency with no political platform. Southern politicians turned on Taylor when he opposed Southern secession and the westward expansion of slavery. When he died, rumors spread that he was murdered because of his stance on slavery.

The authors deem Taylor “all but forgotten as a president” and claim that he “did not […] achieve anything of consequence” (100). Medical investigations after his death suggested that he may have died from arsenic poisoning, but a 1991 analysis of his remains found that he had died of cholera.

After Taylor’s death in 1850, his vice president, Millard Fillmore, became president. Fillmore was not well connected in DC politics, and the two only met after they were elected. A joke went “that Filmore’s only friend [wa]s Old Whitey—the president’s knock-kneed buggy horse” (103). Fillmore was the son of a poor New York farmer and had to work in a textile mill as a teenager. While in school, he met his future wife, Abigail Powers, but they could not marry for six years because of Fillmore’s poverty (104). After their marriage, while Fillmore worked as a lawyer, Abigail worked as a teacher, “the first president’s wife to work outside the home after getting married” (104).

Through his law practice, Fillmore became prominent enough that the Anti-Masonic Party asked him to run for the New York state legislature. Later elected to Congress, Fillmore joined the Whig Party. After becoming vice president, Fillmore backed the Compromise of 1850, which Taylor opposed. The Compromise would outlaw the sale of enslaved people in Washington, DC, while also requiring federal officials to return enslaved people who had escaped to the North “even if there [wa]s no proof of prior enslavement” (105). At the same time, the Compromise admitted California to the United States as a free state. When Fillmore vowed to enact the Compromise of 1850, Taylor’s old cabinet members resigned in protest. Fillmore replaced them with Whigs and pressured Congress to repeal the Wilmot Proviso, which barred slavery from all territories taken from Mexico. The Compromise of 1850 was a disaster. It aggravated tensions over slavery both in the South and North and caused the Whig Party to collapse by 1856.

The White House itself had not been refurbished since it was restored after the War of 1812. However, President Fillmore did have the first flush toilets installed in the White House. The authors claim that Fillmore’s “greatest legacy was sending an American fleet under Commodore Matthew Perry to Japan […] opening up the US presence in the Pacific” (106).

At Maine’s Bowdoin College, Franklin Pierce was a popular student and was friends with the author Nathaniel Hawthorne. After a term as a state representative in New Hampshire, he was elected to Congress as a member of the Democratic Party. Pierce was a friend of President Polk and a military officer in the Mexican-American War.

In his political career, Pierce developed a reputation as a “pro-slavery northerner” (111), a type of person called a “doughface” (113). Despite promising his wife, Jane, that he would leave politics, Pierce was chosen as the Democrats’ presidential candidate. He won the election in a “landslide” (112). Jane did not have guests or parties at the White House. Instead, she stayed in the upper floors of the White House, causing her to be nicknamed the “‘Shadow of the White House’” (113). In 1853, while drunk, Pierce hit a woman with his carriage and was briefly detained by the police.

Pierce signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repealed a federal regulation against introducing slavery in certain new states. It led to violence between abolitionist and pro-slavery settlers in Kansas, a conflict called Bleeding Kansas. “Ironically, given his own depression and that of his wife” (114), Pierce vetoed the Land-Grant Bill for Indigent Insane Persons, which would have provided federal funding for helping people with a mental illness. After his term ended, Pierce returned to New Hampshire, where he was unpopular for his pro-slavery views and his correspondence with Confederate President Jefferson Davis during the Civil War.

Shortly after James Buchanan’s inauguration, the Supreme Court ruled in the Dred Scott case that Black people “[we]re not American citizens and thus ha[d] no constitutional rights” (117), that the federal government could not ban slavery in new states and territories, and that enslaved people brought to new states could not be freed. It was an unpopular decision but one “cheerfully” accepted by Buchanan (117).

Buchanan was the “first bachelor president” (117). At the age of 28, he was engaged to a woman, Ann Coleman, but she broke off the engagement and suddenly died, possibly of suicide. After Coleman’s death, Buchanan was elected to Congress. During this time, he lived at a boarding house, where he shared a room with a congressman from Alabama, William Rufus King, who later became Franklin Pierce’s vice president. Rumors spread about their relationship, with them being called “Mr. Buchanan and his wife” (118).

After an unsuccessful attempt to become the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate in 1852, Buchanan was an ambassador to Britain and Russia and the secretary of state under President Polk. For his “first lady,” Buchanan brought his niece Harriet “Hal” Lane. She hosted “weekly formal dinner parties, where prominent musicians and artists [we]re invited to dine with politicians and diplomats” (119). At the same time, she advocated for better living conditions on Indigenous reservations.

Buchanan’s term as president was hit by an economic crisis, the Panic of 1857, and the conflict over slavery in Kansas. Despite Buchanan’s pro-slavery views, the new states of Kansas, Minnesota, and Oregon were admitted as free states. Southern politicians were enraged and “lobb[ied] for the reopening of the African slave trade” (121). An abolitionist, John Brown, raided a US armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Brown was captured and executed. However, he became “a hero to anti-slavery proponents” (121).

The issue of slavery and the growing tensions between Northern and Southern states divided the Democratic Party, causing the party to nominate an anti-slavery candidate, Stephen Douglas, denying Buchanan a second term.