President John Tyler, As Part of His Program to Place His Personal Supporters in Federal Offices, Sees the Treasury Department As a Likely Venue For Such Appointments

Tyler succeeded to the presidency upon the untimely death of William Henry Harrison, who had been in office just a month. No other vice president had become president before, and many people felt that a vice president who assumed the office of president did not assume the full powers of the presidency, and expected Tyler to act merely as a caretaker. Another complicating factor was that Tyler was a former Democrat, who although elected as a Whig vice president, was unsympathetic to Whig Party programs and goals. Tyler, an activist with plans of his own, found a cabinet and administration picked by Harrison, very much pining away for Old Tippicanoe. He was the kind of man who needed to feel personal loyalty from those he worked with. Instead he saw himself “surrounded by men who now have smiles in their eyes and honey on their tongues, the better to cajole and deceive.” With this as his attitude, it is no surprise that there were an extraordinary 22 changes in his cabinet during his four years in the White House; at one point everyone but Secretary of State Daniel Webster resigned en masse.

The biography “And Tyler Too” states that Tyler “launched a vigorous purge of federal officeholders hostile to his administration…” He also wanted to reward his supporters, and wrote his cabinet secretaries and other officials with instructions for purges and new loyal appointments. This is one of them.

Autograph letter signed, as President, Washington, January 2, 1842, to Nathaniel F. Williams, Collector of the Port of Baltimore, proposing an appointment. “I learn that in 1840 there was discontinued two inspectors of your port, and my object in writing you now is to ascertain from you the necessity either immediate or prospective of filling the vacancies of both or either, which I am very anxious to provide a situation for Mr. Carroll as to whom I wrote you sometime since and was satisfied with your answer. Yet if the additional inspectors are not wanting, I would not think of throwing the additional burden upon the Treasury. I renew assurances of my confidence and respect, J. Tyler.”

In September of that year Williams formally requested that Carroll be named inspector at his port, thus fulfilling Tyler’s request in this letter. We speculate that the appointee, Thomas Carroll, was the son of Tennessee’s two-time Democratic Governor William Carroll, who indeed had a son of this name, and to reward whom this would have been a logical move.

Interestingly, Williams was related by marriage to Napoleon, whose nephew Jerome was William’s nephew as well.