When Fire Burns White

What is hatred? It’s blindness to the world. It is a disease with ceaseless symptoms. When eating dinner or reading the newspaper it is always there. Even when it is below the surface, random occurrences in life create unstoppable connotations flinging the hatred back in full force. Hatred is when your insides become razor wire and your skin becomes a million exposed nerves, allowing the slightest disturbance to spur excruciating agony. But even knowing this or any number of other revelations is irrelevant to a person and their hatred. No damnation or fire from Hell burns strong enough to describe pure hatred. Despite all of this, John Tyler could most assuredly admit to himself that he hated Henry Clay.

For months now, Tyler had been the tenth president of the United States. He had been the tenth vice-president but with the death of General Harrison, Tyler assumed the presidency. Tyler knew what he had done was right. He was not stealing the presidency; he was filling a void in a young nation’s power vacuum. He was granted all the powers of the president, including the title.

For a president, Tyler was a young man but he was not one to be bullied by pompous congressmen and senators. Who was Clay or even John Q. Adams to lecture John Tyler? His presidency was not just “an accident”. It was a series of events, only occasionally within Tyler control. But that doesn’t make it an accident, that makes it life.

What about the other congressional letters, sir?
The ones addressed to the “Acting President”?
Yes, sir.
Send them back unopened.

This was petty bullshit and Tyler knew it could cost him his political life. So be it. America couldn’t afford a presidential office caretaker for the next three years. And America definitely couldn’t afford the likes of power-hungry orators who practically slept on their soapboxes.

Tyler looked out the window toward the Capital Building. More than anything at that moment, Tyler prayed to whatever higher power would grant him the ability to burn down Congress with his eyes. Tyler shoved a nearby cabinet. He imagined Clay standing a mile away, looking at the president’s office with the same furious passion—further infuriating Tyler. The two men were not equals. They both were elected for jobs to do but Clay, Adams and their minions were holding the whole country back with asinine accusations, assumptions and irreverence.

But as Tyler was informed moments later, Clay was not standing on the steps on the Capital Building, but rather standing thirty feet away in the lobby outside of the president’s office. Tyler told his aid to tell another aid to tell Clay to enter immediately. And Clay did.

Tyler turned around to see Clay standing on the other side of the large oak desk. Clay wrinkled his nose just long enough for Tyler to know Clay wanted him to see. Clay didn’t smell anything; he just wanted to “say” something, or someone, stinks.

Have you been in the office of the president before, Henry?
No. And I suppose I still haven’t.

Tyler could see himself so clearly being able to lung across the desk at Clay’s sagging throat. Or walk around the desk and simply punch that Kentucky skeleton in the jaw. Either way, it would be for the good of the country.

Tyler, you’re against the tariff bill based on policy.
I’ve threatened to veto it. Yes.
That’s illegal. You can only veto a bill you feel is unconstitutional.
The bill is wrong and I can veto whatever I see unfit.
If you veto this bill, it’s a breach of the Constitution and you will be impeached.
And threatening the President, or any man, is a breach of human decency.

Clay, very consciously, loosened his own fists and struggled to keep his fingers separate. He had no new arguments to make, but that hadn’t stopped him before.

You are not the president, Mister John Tyler.
Leave now, Mister Clay, and go to your end of the avenue to perform your job in whatever way you so see fit. Because, so God help me, that is how I will perform mine!

With that, Henry Clay left the president’s office but to the misfortune of everyone, John Tyler’s hatred did not leave with him.