?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,500 - $ 2,500
"NO OTHER MOTIVE HAS GOVERNED ME BUT A DESIRE . . . TO RESTRAIN EXECUTIVE POWER" TYLER, JOHN. Autograph Letter Signed, as Senator, to a committee including former VA Supreme Court justice John Coalter ("Gentlemen"), expressing pride in representing fellow Virginians, pledging to uphold the Constitution and to restrain the power of the presidency, expecting that the minority who oppose him will diminish, declining to visit the committee, and, in a postscript, adding a sentiment to be communicated to the committee: "Virginia--Her banner waves in the breeze with the Constitution and laws inscribed upon it. Will not her sons gather to it as one man and swear to uphold it or perish?" 1 1/2 pages, 4to, with integral address leaf; conjugate leaves joined with glue, faint scattered soiling, folds. "Senate Chamber" [Washington], 29 May 1834
"I have been sensibly impressed with the honor conferred upon me by the citizens of Fredericksburg through the resolution adopted at their late meeting . . . . In my recent public course no other motive has governed me but a desire to uphold the Constitution and the laws, and to restrain Executive power already grown too great, within the courts which they prescribe. I did not doubt for a moment but that a majority of the people of Virginia would in this concur with me; and the result has shewn that I was not mistaken. That a respectable minority would be found maintaining opposite opinions was reasonably to have been expected, and that men of high intellectual power and unquestioned patriotism are to be found in that minority cannot be doubted; but I do believe that events which have transpired since many of the elections took place, have been well calculated to produce a diminution of the numbers composing that minority and greater unanimity in sentiment amongst our fellow citizens. I am proud so to think: for being Virginian in the largest signification of that term, I would rejoice to see our whole family united in sentiment, in feeling and in action. . . ." On March 25, 1834, the U.S. Senate adopted a resolution of censure against President Andrew Jackson, who, in 1833, ordered all federal deposits in the Bank of the United States transferred to private banks using, in the words of the resolution, "authority and power not conferred by the Constitution and laws, but in derogation of both." Although Tyler opposed the rechartering of the Bank of the United States, he found more opprobrious what he believed was the unconstitutionality of Jackson's efforts to subvert the Bank.
