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Chapter VII - Three Presidents, Growing Tensions
Three Presidents, Growing Tensions 1836 - 1844
While Texans campaigned for recognition, farsighted Northerners looked to the Pacific Northwest for fertile land to settle during the relatively brief terms of three presidents. Martin Van Buren succeeded Andrew Jackson in 1836, and William Henry Harrison followed him in 1840. Tragically, Harrison succumbed to pneumonia on April 4, just thirty-one days after taking office. The hatless and coatless Harrison had delivered a two-hour inaugural address in chilly March weather, and many attributed his subsequent death to this overexposure. Vice-President John Tyler stepped into the vacated presidency five days after Harrison's death when Congress passed resolutions making him the chief executive of the nation. In the first year of Tyler's term, "Oregon fever" lured thousands of hardy settlers to travel by covered wagon through hostile Indian territories in search of new homes.
By the election year of 1844, unresolved problems of expansion and sectionalism which had been kept at bay by the Missouri Compromise broke loose in response to demand for lands west of the Mississippi. Expansion into Oregon and the rejection of Texas annexation, both strongly favored by antislavery groups, had heightened existing tensions. Southern leaders became increasingly anxious as their ability to control debates over new states and slavery diminished. Bitterly split over the issue of annexation, Americans needed a wise and bold president who could handle such potentially explosive issues.
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