President Atchison?(Flashback: to know nothing of what happened before you were born is to remain ever a child--Cicero)

The names of antebellum Presidents float dreamily across the mind: Van Buren, Harrison, Tyler, Polk, Atchison, Taylor, Fillmore, Pierce.... Wait a minute. Atchison?

Well, that all depends on whether or not epitaphs lie. For in the Greenlawn Cemetery in Plattsburg, Missouri, David Rice Atchison, who served two terms in the U.S. Senate, is interred under a gravestone bearing the inscription:

President of the United States For One Day Sunday, Mar. 4, 1849

Blame it on the Sabbath. Zachary Taylor refused to be inaugurated at noon on Sunday, March 4, delaying his oathtaking till Monday. Since the terms of outgoing President Polk and Vice President Dallas expired on March 4 and since Taylor did not take his oath till March 5, punctilious imps asked the question: Who was President in the evening of March 4 and morning of March 5, 1849?

Signally, no one really bothered to answer that question until well after the fact. In 1849, the office of the President had yet to achieve its modern immensity. Indeed, the casual reader of nineteenth-century newspapers is struck by how few times the President is mentioned. Whole weeks go by without the cognomens of Fillmore or Buchanan taking up newspaper space. America was easily able to survive a single day--even a clutch of days--without a President.

For his part, David Atchison believed (most of the time) that the U.S. had been utterly President-less for those 24 hours in March. After all, Atchison's term as President pro tempore of the Senate (the person next in line for the Presidency after the Vice President) had expired with the Thirtieth Congress on March 3, and he was not reappointed until the Senate met on Monday, March 5. lust as Taylor hadn't taken the oath on March 4, neither had Atchison.

Ruth Silva writes in her standard reference Presidential Succession (1951), that "taking the oath does not make anyone President and adds nothing to his powers." Zachary Taylor became President on March 4, oath or not. Thus "there is no basis for David Atchison's claim that he, as President pro tempore of the Senate, was the ...