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He returned to New York, practiced law successfully for 24 more years, married an aging prostitute who in a year accused him of infidelity. At 80, Burr, full of years and dishonor, died after making a will in favor of two illegitimate daughters, aged 6 and 2. CJ John Tyler was nominated for Vice President (1840) by the Whigs because, as a Jeffersonian, he was a nuisance to them in the Senate. A month after he was inaugurated, Tyler was playing marbles in a Williamsburg street when Daniel Webster's son brought him the news that President William Henry Harrison was dead of pneumonia. Tyler picked up his marbles, went to Washington, became a better
President than anybody expected, died in 1862, just after being elected to the Confederate Congress.
¶ John Cabell Breckinridge (1857-61) complained that President James Buchanan consulted him only once—and that was on the wording of a Thanksgiving proclamation. But if he found the vice presidency dull, the rest of his life was not. He ran for President against Lincoln, splitting the Democratic vote and assuring the defeat of Stephen Douglas, later became a combat major general in the Confederacy, and then its Secretary of War. He refused to surrender, fled to Cuba, stole a ship, became a pirate, moved to London, then to Toronto, and died, with his citizenship rights unrestored, in his old Kentucky home. CJ Levi P. Morton (1889-93), a Vermont-born New York banker who was one of the richest men of his day, picked the wrong term to be Vice President (with Benjamin Harrison). He turned down a chance at the Republican nomination in 1880 (he might have succeeded Garfield), and another chance in 1896 (he might have succeeded McKinley). Morton was an efficient fund-raiser for his party, entertained lavishly at his town and country houses, kept a herd of purebred cattle, tried to popularize milk by saying: "I serve milk alternately with champagne—one costs the same as the other." Alternating milk with champagne, he lived to be 96—the record for Vice Presidents. ¶Thomas R. Marshall (1913-21) had the humility the vice presidency requires. He was not too dignified to pose on the Capitol steps wearing a World War I German helmet. After Woodrow Wilson had a stroke with 17 months of his term left, Marshall refused to consider taking over the presidency. Bored by a pompous Senate speech about what the nation needed, Marshall turned to a clerk, muttered: "What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar." Marshall is remembered with affection largely for this remark and for saying that the condition of a Vice President is like that of a man in "a cataleptic fit. He is conscious of all that goes on, but has no part in it."
On the Ball. So firmly was the vice presidency fixed in the American mind as the symbol of uselessness that it was easy for the musical satire, Of Thee I Sing, to establish Alexander Throttlebottom as the quintessence of vice presidentiality.