President Tyler’s political antecedents offer some excuse for his failure to approve the national bank. He opposed Jackson, as did many other able men in the South, because Jackson had violated the strict construction policy of Southern leaders, especially in his aggressive warfare against nullification, and one trained in the school of strict construction of the supreme law could readily find excuse for withholding his approval from the United States Bank. The same principle applied to internal improvements by the Government, and could have been applied to forbid a protective tariff. The only fruit the Whigs gathered from their great triumph of 1840 was the protective tariff of 1842, that became so popular, especially in the North, that many Democrats who supported Polk in 1844 declared that they favored the tariff of 1842, and that it could not be disturbed if Polk were elected. In Pennsylvania it was common to see in Democratic processions banners bearing the inscription of “Polk-Dallas-Shunk and the Tariff of 1842,” and a letter received by Judge Kane, of Philadelphia, from Mr. Polk during the campaign was interpreted, and plausibly interpreted, as meaning an approval of the then existing tariff. The Whigs, defeated in all their other important measures, were sadly crippled in the campaign for the succession, and even the tariff of 1842 was repealed for a moderate free-trade tariff in 1846. President Tyler had provoked the earnest and generally vindictive hostility of the Whigs without having made friends with the Democrats. They loved and cheered his apostasy, but gave no love or individual support to the apostate. He confidently expected that they would make him the Democratic candidate for President in 1844, and that delusion was cherished by him until the Democratic National Convention met in Baltimore to nominate national candidates. It was attended by a very large number of office-holders and other friends of Tyler. Finding that they could not command any support for their favorite in the convention, they improvised a national convention of their own on the same day that the Democratic convention met, and unanimously nominated Tyler for President without naming any candidate for Vice-President. The movement had no vitality, as there was no response from either the press or the public, and on the 20th of August Tyler wrote an elaborate and reproachful letter, withdrawing his name from the list of Presidential candidates. When his term ended he lived in retirement on his Virginia farm, unknown and unfelt as a political factor. He was among the almost forgotten men of the past when, half a generation later, he appeared in Washington as a member of the Peace Convention that was called in 1861 to devise some measures to prevent a civil war, that he did not live to see fulfil its bloody mission.