President without a Party: The Life of John Tyler

Historians have long viewed President John Tyler as one of the nation’s least effective heads of state. In President without a Party—the first full­-scale biography of Tyler in more than fifty years and the first new academic study of him in eight decades—Christopher J. Leahy explores the life of the tenth chief executive of the United States.

Born in the Virginia Tidewater into an elite family sympathetic to the ideals of the American Revolution, Tyler, like his father, worked as an attorn...