In Romans the 13th chapter, in verse number one, let every person be subject to the governing authority, for there is no authority except from God, and those which are existing are established by God. Therefore he who resists authority has opposed the ordinance of God, and they who have opposed will receive condemnation upon themselves. For rulers are not a cause of fear for good behavior, but for evil. Do you not want to have fear of authority? Do what is good, and you will have praise from the same. For it is the minister of God to you for good, but if you do what is evil, be afraid, for it does not bear the sword for nothing. For it is the minister of God and avenger of which brings upon wrath upon the one who practices evil. Now there from our Bible, is a injunction that governments are ordained. We have to have discipline. We have to have law and order. Now, our present situation in America is not such. The whole purpose of government is to protect people, good people, from bad people. We have all different kinds of agencies in America to protect the innocent from the perpetrators, but so many times it doesn't work. People need to fear retribution for their bad actions. Insurrections are a horrible thing in countries. and we have faced one. John Tyler was a President of the United States of America. He was elected as Vice President of the United States of America and his party that he was part of originally was William Henry Harrison became President. Now the Whigs wanted nobody to know anything about what they believed at all. And the propaganda machines, the political machines were lying to the American people about William Henry Harrison and John Tyler. It was Tippecanoe and Tyler too. Now, he lived between 1790 and 1862. He had two different wives. He was a slave owner. He had 40 different slaves. Some of the slaves claim him as a descendant, but nothing has been proved about that at all. He did have more children than any president of the United States. He had 15 children. 15 children by two different wives. His first wife died of a stroke. Then he later married another woman. And he had seven children by her and eight by his first wife. That's 15 children. One of his grandchildren, today, Harrison Ruffin Tyler, is still alive. He is the only grandson living of a president from John Tyler's period of time. Now John Tyner lived between March 29, 1790 until January the 18th, 1862, which is my birthday. He was the 10th President of the United States. When William Harrison died, he was the Vice President. Now at that time, They didn't really have a clear picture of how a vice president would take over or what he would do if a president died. And this president only lived one month. He fought Congress and the Senate all that time. The Congress tried to run the White House. And he had to tell them, William Henry Harrison had to tell different people several times, he said, I am President of the United States. One time he was having a meeting and they wanted to take over and tell him what to do and he wrote down on paper, he said, I, William Henry Harrison, am President of the United States. And he wrote it down on a piece of paper and handed it to a man and said, now stand up and read that to everybody here. And he did. He tried the best he could. William Henry Harrison was the oldest president elected at that period of time besides Ronald Reagan, excepting the present one. Now, John Tyler inherited that. John Tyler brought integrity to the White House. I'm going to repeat that. John Tyler brought integrity to the White House. Not everything that he did do I agree with, but everything that he did brought advancement to the United States of America. He didn't try to tear the country down. He tried to build it up. He tried to make America great. We're going to talk about some of the things that he did. Now, when the Whig Party was propagating his election, they didn't tell anybody what they believed at all. They told them to keep your mouth shut, don't say anything, don't say anything to any reporters, don't make any speeches. Because they wanted to slip them in under the wire, the know-nothings. You didn't know anything about the man. But one thing about John Tyler is that whatever he did was of an honest conscience. He believed in states' rights. He believed that the states ought to have the right to reject any law that Congress or the Senate or the President tried to put on them. He believed that states had individual rights. He was not from a log cabin, as they said, and sitting there by a keg of cider and sitting down there and having dinner with the countrymen, the hicks of the country, so to speak, the average man. John Tyner was born of a very prominent Virginia family, and he had a good education. He was a slaveholder. He did not believe that slavery should exist in the United States. He believed that it ought to be phased out voluntarily by the states. And one of the things that he believed, that he believed that Virginia would be one of the first states in America that was a slave-owning state that would phase out slavery. He was the only president without a party. in all reality. They tried to shove things down his throat just like they did William Henry Harrison, and he backed off. First of all, he said, I'm president. A lot of people didn't want to agree with that. Now, we know that the vice president is president if the president dies while an officer becomes incapable. But back then, it was limbo. It was in the fog. The whole nation was in a time of political upheaval when he got into office. Everybody was paying off everybody else. Remember that Jackson vetoed the National Bank or the Bank of the United States because there was so much corruption in it. He didn't believe that tax dollars ought to be put in the hands of private people so they could pay off some politician or give him free loans or just give him money. And that happened. And John Totter knew about it. He rejected the Bank of the United States. And he had a lot of political enemies on both sides. The Democrats and the Whigs both began to fighting it. They tried to do away with him, like they did our last president, Donald Trump. Both parties were fighting him. But he was a national hero. He was a hero to the people of America because he spoke for them. Tyler spoke for justice and right and wrong. He wanted to set down, this is right and this is wrong. You guys, the Democrats are doing this. You're doing things that are wrong. And your Whigs are doing things that are wrong. You're paying people off. You're doing all this stuff. I won't agree with any of you. And I'm not going to play any partisan politics at all. And so he became an enemy of both sides. Andrew Jackson's actions when he was president, now this is a, he is an affiliate of Andrew Jackson and a friend of him also. But Andrew Jackson wielded vetoes and power like a dictator like we have today. All these executive orders. Dictatorship. And he squelched anybody that spoke against him. Now, John Tyler didn't take to what we might call bad-mouthing him either. The bank war. between the parties. He just simply said, I don't want to put American people's money into the hands of people. Every state ought to have a bank for itself. Now, one thing that I've always believed in, that he didn't at that time, and now we don't have any problem with this at all, but he believed that the states should not answer to the United States government for anything to improve their roads, prisons, lakes, whatever, canals, et cetera. He believed the states ought to take care of that themselves. And therefore, the people of that state ought to pay enough taxes and hold their people accountable for what's done. That, to me, it really is good. It is good. But we need an infrastructure. an infrastructure. An infrastructure is post offices, libraries, and roads. Post office, libraries, roads, and schools. He tried to promote education. He promoted William & Mary College. He was also the Chancellor of William and Mary College, just like the one before him was George Washington. He was a Virginian. Almost all the first presidents were Virginians. Virginia was an example of commerce in America and right and wrong. Tyler immediately took office when Harrison died. They would not refer to him as president. They referred to him as his accidentcy. The Whigs expelled him from his party. They tried to impeach him. But some of the things that John Tyler did, he did want every man to vote in America. Now women didn't have the right to vote period, but he wanted every man in America to vote. Basically every free man in America to vote. He had 40 slaves, but he treated them. He never beat them and he treated them. He took care of them and made sure they were taken care of in every way. They did not need or lack of anything. He believed that all slave owners ought to do that and they ought to finally wipe it off because it was evil. But it was a necessary evil because states had the right to save whether they were slave state or not. He believed in manifest destiny. He believed that America ought to expand and take up the whole continent. But remember, we have France to deal with. We have Spain to deal with. and we have Great Britain to deal with. And Great Britain was almost always ready to go to war with us. We had one war with them. One thing he did, he annexed Florida into the United States, which had been former French and also Spanish territory. He tried to annex Texas. He did draw the border between Maine and Canada. That was a war ready to start anytime. He did that. He decided that all American Indians should be sent to Indian schools. and they should be assimilated, forced assimilation into white culture. Now that wouldn't work today at all, would it? I believe that in America today, that we ought to speak one language. I believe that my Indian nations that I came from, I'm Cherokee, Chickasaw, Brule Dakota, Santee Dakota, Ojibwe, and Chickasaw. and I'm one 32nd Scots. I'm a mongrel, an Indian mongrel with a little bit of white blood in me, just barely. But I believe our people should have never been beaten and forbidden to speak our own language. But if we voted, which we didn't have the right to vote either until the 1970s, that we should have voted in the English language. taking a driver test in that language, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. My great-great-grandfather, Samuel Ackard Paul, was the first American citizen Indian of the United States and also the first Indian marshal. He tried to circumvent the Dawes Act. And all of this that was going on at this time, he wanted to make the Indian nations separate and divide their own land without American intervention. They already had colleges and schools, but then the United States government took over, and it started with John Tyler. And one of the bad things about John Tyler, that between him and Jackson, they trained bulldogs, just like William Henry Harrison did, in the Second Seminole War. They never won the war, by the way. They never did win the war. That war was never won. Now the Civil War, we're going into the good and the bad parts of John Tyler and Harrison and Jackson. They were trying to expand the United States all through the whole continent. Link one state to the other and they wanted all of it to be one nation. John Tyler, the reason why he stood for states' rights so much is that he didn't want to cram down, he figured if, he didn't want to cram down the throats of states that had slaves to tell them that they couldn't do it. He wanted them to nullify it. And he wanted his state, Virginia, to be the first to do it. But it was going to be a slow process. He trained bulldogs and bloodhounds to kill Indians and blacks that were escaping into Florida. Remember, Florida had become a state. It was going to become a state. So he wanted to have no insurrection in there at all. All the Indians want to do is go someplace and live and just leave me alone. Let us alone. Some blacks went down in there. And they intermarried with the Indians and the blacks and the Indians, well, all kinds, the Creeks, Cherokees, Osage, all of the civilized tribes went down and some of the others went down into this Seminole area and they all became known as Seminoles. That's like an Indian mongrel is what it was. They could never kill all of them. The Indians, the dogs that they sent down in there, they made friends with the dogs and stick them back on the white people. Big joke on him. But he's actually, because Florida became a state, he's the one that they said won the Seminole War. He did, he was president pro tem of the United States Senate in 1835. He was the 23rd governor of Virginia. from 1825 to 1827. He was a member of the United States House of Representatives from the Virginia 23rd District, 1816 to 1821. He was Chancellor of William & Mary College from 1859 to 1862 of his death. The cause of his death was stroke. The one grandson that is alive today, as I said, Harrison Ruffin Tyler, has had a lot of many strokes. He's in a rest home today. He's 92 years old. One of his brothers died at the age of 95. Because President Tyler had so many children, some of his grandchildren are still alive today. The one was born in 1929. His wives were Letitia Christian, from 1813 to 1842. And Julia Gardner from 1844 until his death. His parents were John Tyler Senior and Mary Armistead. Like I said, his alma mater was William and Mary College. His profession was a politician and lawyer and farmer. His military service was in the United States of Virginia. He was in the Charles City Rifle and Virginia Militia Company. His rank was captain. Like I said, he fought the National Bank during his life. He supported states' rights. He wanted the states to, he wanted, he tried to push this and talked among others that were pro-slavery. He talked to them, he said, slavery isn't evil, but each state has to nullify slavery on its own when they desire to do it. Tyler had a lifetime in public service. Even after he became president, they made him in Virginia, in his area, the superintendent of roads. And they did it to, because they were Whigs, they did it to, and Democrats. The Democrats hated him. And by the way, the Democrats back then were the conservatives. The Whigs were the liberals, if you want to say that. The Whigs literally, they wanted to make the United States government over all of the roads in America. They wanted them over all the schools in America. They wanted them to, you'd have, the states would have to pay taxes to them, and then they would relocate the taxes, reallocate the taxes to the states that were doing what they wanted them to do. Now that's a kind of a political tool, isn't it? He was against that. He believed that he wanted to bring Texas in, into the Union. And Texas was going to come in the Union and Missouri would come in the Union as slave states. But what he wanted to do was just diffuse slavery all over. Diffuse it to where there were less slaves. He was a lawyer and a great political leader in his time. He spoke at Thomas Jefferson's funeral. He gave the eulogy at Thomas Jefferson's funeral. He thought Thomas Jefferson, and he believed Jeffersonian politics. He believed that each state had the right to accept or reject the laws that were put in place in the Senate and in the House of Representatives. He said states had autonomy. And he did not want to break up the union. He did not want to break up the union. He was a, what you might call a democratic maverick. A conservative maverick. Now the Southern Democrats were the most conservative people party in America until Lyndon Baines Johnson got in there. And Lyndon Baines Johnson basically destroyed the Southern Democrat Party and ran them off to the Republicans. And your most conservative Republicans were the former Southern Democrats. There was a a problem going on in Rhode Island. Now, Rhode Island is a very special state in America, isn't it? Rhode Island was the first state, or the first colony in America that had freedom of religion. Every other colony, you had to be a member of the state church. You had to pay tithes and taxes to the state church. Whether you believe it or not, you had to do it. In Rhode Island, John, Dr. John Clark, petitioned the King of England for like 11 or 12, 13 years to try to allow Rhode Island to be a free enterprise. And he was a Baptist minister. The first freedom of religion in America was brought to America by Baptist ministers. John Tyler said, honor is more important than anything. Honor. Being honest and honor. He said, I shall carry with me into retirement the principles which I brought into public life. I shall carry with me in retirement the principles which I brought into public life. And by the surrender of the highest station to which I was called by the voice of the people of Virginia, I shall set an example to my children which I'll teach them to regard as nothing a place in office when either it is to be attained or held in the sacrifice of honor." And that's what really shined in his life was his honor. The Whig Party propagated him as a country bumpkin living in a log cabin and yet he had a, basically, he lived in a palace. They told him not to talk. We had an election like that just recently. We had a president, a running for president that didn't talk, that didn't do any press conferences or hardly anything at all. Propaganda. Propaganda machines. They told Toddler to stay at home before he became president. His economic policy, he believed that the settlers going into the different colonies in America ought to go in there and settle, and as soon as possible, they ought to become states. He, there was a tariff in America, and the Northern states wanted a tariff. They wanted a high tariff. And the Southern states wanted little or no tariff, because they wanted to trade with their cotton and products and everything else, and there wasn't any gigantic industry in the South. And the Northern states wanted a tariff. So, John Tyler compromised, he believed in compromising. not principled, but to compromise to get along. And he wanted to put a ceiling on tariffs at 20 percent. And so we have the nation letting the North have a tariff and the South a tariff so light that it could not hurt their infrastructure. And if they wanted to, they didn't have to have the tariff at all because they didn't have to go along to the rules of the Senate and the House of Representatives or the President because they were an autonomous state. They started trying to impeach him over the tariff. Now, when John Tyler became President of the United States, Henry Harrison's cabinet, they tried to cram down his throat and he wouldn't do it. But John Tyler, in honor of Henry Harrison, did not. He kept all the same cabinets that Henry Harrison had. And he told them that, now, if you don't agree with me, that's too bad. I'm president. But if you want to work with me, I'll work with you. But if you don't agree with me and you don't think you can work with me, just resign. But he said, I will not call for your resignation. You do that. I'm going to give you that honor. Henry Clay was always problematic with any president. Henry Clay tried to run Harrison's presidency, and Harrison told him, don't ever talk to me in person again. Send me a letter. I don't want to deal with you. He said, you're trying to be president. I'm president. And the same thing with John Tyler, with Henry Clay. He had problems with it. Now remember that Tyler didn't have support of the Whigs and he didn't have support of the Democrats. Whatever he tried to do, he fought both sides. In foreign and military and domestic policy, he contrasted with many of their ideas that they wanted to go to war all the time. John Tyler made a treaty with Great Britain over the eastern border of Canada and Maine in the United States without war. He brought Florida into the United States without war. And he wanted to bring Texas into war, into the United States. He did not want to fight with Mexico, but he believed that Texas had declared itself an independent state, the great state of Texas. And he wanted the Texans to come into the state. They wanted to come in as a slave state, and he said, okay, we believe in states' rights, come on in with your slaves. But I want you to honor the rest of the states, and he wrote down a long list of what Texas had to concede to. Now, Both parties were fighting him all the time. There was a Doar Rebellion in Rhode Island that we talked about a while ago. Rhode Island was the first state, the first colony in America that had freedom of religion. Rhode Island has always stood out for what's right. In the Doar Rebellion, Thomas Doar They armed themselves and proposed to install a new state constitution. They had been under the constitution that was established in 1663. Now remember, in 1639 and 40, Roger Williams and John Clark established two Baptist churches, one in Providence and one in Newport, Rhode Island. And nobody had to pay taxes to them, just the members of those churches. But now, what this Doar Rebellion wants is they want every white man, male, in Rhode Island to be able to vote. They want it to be franchised. And some of the people in the Rhode Island did not want that. That you had to own property, you had to be landed before you could vote. And Tyler brought that nearly bloody war When he told America, the United States of America, and he told Rhode Island, he said, I think that you ought to institute in Rhode Island the following infrastructure to enlarge and franchise and let most men in your state vote. Unless they were a criminal or something. But they tried to go in there and stop this insurrection. They called it an insurrection. All they wanted was every man the right to vote. He said, I will not intervene in that state at all with military unless there is an actual insurrection. But I tell you, let these men have the right to vote. That's what they want. That's all they want. He said, if there's an insurrection, if there's shots fired, if people are killed, I will come in with a militia. So the Doar Rebellion was basically squelched and put down. But they got the right to vote. That's what they wanted. Now, in the Supreme Court, they were, and during Tyler's presidency, Henry Baldwin died in 1843, and Smith Thompson died also. And he tried to put his men in the seats there, but they kept on rejecting it because neither party wanted him. There was a great political upheaval in this land still. Patting each other on the back, they were all, and like before Trump came into America, We had the Democrats that were corrupt and we had the Republicans that were corrupt. He tried to bring some honesty to both sides. And he tried to show them that they were wrong. Both sides were wrong. But he wanted to protect America from communism and socialism. I don't have as much trouble with socialism at all as I do communism. Communism takes your arms away from you, your right to bear arms, and it takes your freedom of speech away from you. And that's what's going on right now. We've got a problem with this. The annexation of Texas was very, very dear to Tyler's heart and what he wished. He felt it was time for Texas to be annexed. Now, in Texas, there's a place called Totter, Texas, and Totter, Texas is named after John Totter. He had set up everything that he could do to set forth Texas in the Union. He'd drawn up all the rules and everything that he wanted them to agree with, all the grievances and everything else. And then he said, emancipation will begin in Virginia. What's the emancipation? That means the voluntary freeing of slaves. George Washington freed his slaves at his death. Thomas Jefferson freed his slaves at his death. And all the time, especially Washington, took care of his slaves. And when he died, he made sure that all of them were freed, but all of them were provided for to help them into the next stage of their life. Thomas Jefferson was basically married to Sally Hemings, which was his wife's half-sister, and she was three-quarters white. She did not look black as the movies and stuff show her. His children that he had by her, were all looked white. They were seven-eighths white. Seven-eighths white. John Tyler wanted Texas into the Union most. There were so many anti-Tyler people in America in the political scene. He finally got a real good cabinet together. And he was just about assured to run for President again. And one of the things he wanted to do was annex Texas also. Over and over again he tried to pursue annexing Texas because it would give so much more land and so much more power to the United States as an entity. He, on February the 28th, 1844, The day after the annexation treaty, there were 400 guests, including Tyler and his whole cabinet, on a ship. And this ship was called the USS Princeton. And there was a brand new gun on that ship, and it was going to go down the Potomac River. And he was going to fire this big gun and show them off what great cannons they had to protect the United States of America in case of war with Mexico or Great Britain or whatever because he was trying to get Oregon and Washington territory again also. And he knew that they might have some trouble. But he believed in building up the Navy and being able to carry, what is it, speak softly and carry a big stick, like Teddy Roosevelt said. That's what he wanted to do. He was going to build up the Navy and he was going to do this. And he took this ship, the USS Princeton, down the Potomac River. And they fired this big gun. And on board was his whole cabinet and his daughter and many other guests, 400 people all together. And he had his son-in-law, William Waller, sing a song And then they were going to go down on deck and they were going to fire this big gun off again. People wanted to hear it shoot again. And the gun exploded. And killed almost every member of his cabinet. With that terrible, terrible, terrible catastrophe, he lost the presidency. And they started fighting him because his cabinet members were assuring this. These people that supported him were all dead. Tyler was unhurt, having remained safely below deck, but a number of others were killed, including his crucial cabinet members, Gilmore and Upshur. Also killed or mortally wounded were Virgil Maxey of Maryland, Representative David Gardner of New York, Commodore Beverly Keenan, Chief of Construction of the United States Navy, Armistead Tyler's black slave, and his body servant. And the death of David Gardner had a devastating effect on his daughter, Julia, who fainted and had to be carried away. Tyler lost any hope of completing the Texas Anastasian plan before November or any hope of re-election. And then the Whigs and then the Democrats began to just tear his character down. And here's an honest man. This happened in our lifetime now. The press and the political parties began to tear the man apart like dogs at his heels. And finally, A few of them began to realize that this was a wise man. They said that we'll call off all these hounds if you'll just not run for president again. And they brought this man that was unknown, completely unknown, to run for them. And they said, who is James K. Polk? Who is James Knox Polk? Who is this guy? Well, he was going to set him up there as a puppet. And that didn't work either. He was going to be a puppet to them. Again, the political, the Congress and the Senate wanted to run America rather than the President. Well, he said, you know something? If he's going to annex, and they said that he was going to annex Texas, if he's going to annex Texas, annexation is better than re-election. I concede. I want to do what's best for America. And he went home, and he became a farmer, and he lived his life out there. And those people there, the Southern Democrats, and the Whigs that were there, made fun of him and said, we're going to make you Commissioner of Roads. And to their dismay, he did it. Not only did he take care of the roads in this part of Virginia, he went to each slave owner on every plantation and he said, I want some of your slaves or your free men, and I want them, they're going to work on the roads this week. And they squalled and bawled and everything. He said, you elected me. I'm going to do my job. He said, when I was president, I did my job. And when I'm a road man, I want to do my job. Like I said, he had 15 children. One of the children is still alive today. There are paintings and photographs of his wives and his children and him. He actually has a real photograph of him. Now, the bad thing about all this, Taylor was a slave owner, but he treated his slaves right. He treated them like free workers. He took care of them and provided for them. He did not beat them or anything like that at all. He believed that one day there would not be any slaves in America. He said each state ought to make that decision for themselves. But when the Civil War began or started to begin, he was against it. He did not want to divide the Union. He thought it could be compromised. The Civil War did not begin over slavery. I want you to understand that. I'm going to say it ten times if I have to. The Civil War did not start over slavery. The Civil War started over states' rights. And since John Tyler believed in states' rights, guess which side he went with? He went with his conscience. And he went with the Confederacy. He was elected. Jefferson Davis honored the man great. He said he was one of the greatest heroes of American states' rights. He died in 18, January the 18th, 1862. And President Jefferson Davis presided over his funeral, calling him a hero. He was the only American president that is not honored and buried in the Capitol. He's buried in Virginia, which isn't very far from there. But he was also buried under a Confederate flag, not an American flag. The only American president buried under a flag not under the country that he was president of. Because he believed in states' rights until the day he died. He went back and became a farmer and then when the states, the Confederacy succeeded from states he voted for, he tried to make peace to begin with. He did everything he could do to make peace. But when the North tried to force the South to do what they wanted to do, he said, you can only go so far. If you go over these bounds, then we will not stay in the Union. And then he voted to secede from the Union. John Tyler is still an American hero. He brought integrity to the White House. He made treaties instead of wars. He saved a lot of American lives in doing that. And peace with Great Britain. Always, there was a dispute over where Canada and Maine ended and Canada began, and he settled that one. An American hero with flaws. All of them have flaws. Every one of them have flaws. Some of them are criminals. We've had some of them, too. Some of them are lifetime criminals. I don't know whether I'll live long enough to get to all of them or not, get down to them or not, but because we just finished the 10th President of the United States, all I can say is this man was an American hero. He believed and lived what he believed. He stood for the presidency of the United States, and he stood for states' rights, and he believed in making America great enough where America could stand against any foreign power. He built up our military forces, and by a sheer freak accident, He lost his bid for the presidency and he did it and relinquished it willingly for the good of the nation. How many would do that? How many men would do that? He said, it's more important for the advancement of this nation than it is for me to be president. May we also have that type of honesty and integrity that John Tyler had. John Tyler is rated at one of the greatest Presidents of the United States and one of the worst Presidents of the United States according to whose opinion. I rate him up there with the top three quarter Presidents of the United States because he tried to stand for what's right. He tried to build America up strong enough to withstand all enemies. and to give America honor. Yes, he did the American Indians wrong, and I'm one of them. But I'll tell you, the man did what was right for America. We were looked down upon as almost not even humans. You know that in California, in the state of California, when California became a state, a black man could be a citizen and vote in California. They were selling Indians as slaves in Los Angeles as late as 1869, just in case you don't know it, the Civil War was over in 1865. They were hunting American Indians as big game all the way up until the early 1900s. That's bad all over, from one end of the United States to the other. What America did with American Indians, they do have a dark history. But this is a great man that stood for America, even though he had flaws like you and me. Our Father, we send this message out to encourage people and let them know actually what America has stood for and what it hasn't stood for in history. Father, I pray if one out there that doesn't know you, that they'll hear enough of your gospel to come to you and say, Father, forgive me of my sins because of what Jesus did for me. And we can do that in Jesus' name.