AND TYLER NO MORE

As President John Tyler prepares to expand slavery in the United States in 1844, a trio of young men plot his assassination in this novel.

After President William Henry Harrison dies barely a month into his term, Tyler takes over, an unpopular man derisively referred to as “His Accidency.” He’s an utter disaster for the Whig Party—he summarily upends its legislative agenda, including a proposal for a national bank. To make matters worse, he plans the annexation of Texas, a move that would produce a dramatic expansion of slavery and upset the delicate balance between Northern and Southern states struck by the Compromise of 1820. Monty Tolliver, a young man who got his start in Washington, D.C., working for Sen. Henry Clay, firmly opposes slavery. Monty sees Tyler’s presidency as a fiasco and its possible extension in the election of 1844 as catastrophic. Ben Geddis, one of his closest friends and a staunch abolitionist, proposes a radical solution to save the country—assassinate Tyler. Monty joins forces with Ben and Sam Shipley, another friend, to gauge the possibility. The dangerous mission causes Monty to have deep reservations, though he desperately wants to oust the “slaveholder-in-chief” from power: “Was he a bad person, he wondered, for having such thoughts?” Haynes paints a historically authentic and dramatically gripping tableau of the tumultuous politics of the time as well as the nuances surrounding the debate over slavery. In particular, he limns an intriguing portrait of Clay, a monumental figure in American history. This is a rigorously researched novel. The daunting challenge for the author was to make plausible not only the perilous plot conceived, but also the psychology of the conspirators—three otherwise sane, law-abiding citizens who plan a premeditated murder of national significance. Haynes does in fact make this believable, an impressive literary feat.

A dramatic and historically captivating political tale.