Page:Life of Henry Clay (Schurz; v. 2).djvu/209

Rh his seat in the Senate. Thus he became a martyr to his convictions. Then he was sacrificed by the Whigs to a competitor for a seat in the Senate, Rives, to attract the “Conservatives,” and he acquiesced. This gave him a “claim” upon the consideration of the Whig party. He also tried to promote Clay's interest in the Harrisburg Convention, and was grieved at his defeat.

This was his “record” when the Harrisburg Convention nominated him as the Whig candidate for the vice-presidency, and there is no ground for believing that this record was not known. Clay himself had reason to remember that Tyler was his friend with a mental reservation; for, in a letter written before the Harrisburg Convention, Tyler had said to him that he regarded him as “a Republican of the old school, who had indulged, when the public good seemed to require it, somewhat too much in a broad interpretation to suit our Southern notions.” Henry A. Wise says that Tyler “was put into the vice-presidency by the friends of state-rights and strict construction avowedly for the purpose of casting any tie vote in the Senate in their favor.” This may have been in the minds of some of the delegates, while the majority, no doubt, voted for him without considering the future beyond the election. He was a Whig only inasmuch as he belonged to one of those heterogeneous elements combined in opposition to the Jackson-Van-Buren party.

Now the unexpected, the unthought-of, hap-