Tazewell in 1824 to the United States Senate to fill the vacancy caused by the death of John Taylor. Re-elected in 1829, he served from December 7, 1824, to July 16, 1832, when he resigned to become Virginia's governor, as discussed below. While in the Senate, Tazewell was President pro tempore of the Senate during the Twenty-second United States Congress and chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. His principal published work is Review of the Negotiations between the United States and Great Britain Respecting the Commerce of the Two Countries (1829). Tazewell served as Norfolk's delegate to the Virginia Constitutional Convention in 1829–1830. When the Whigs secured majorities in the Virginia Assembly for six years, they first elected the Old Republican as a Whig governor 1834–36. However, he resigned a year before his term ended. During his two years as governor, Tazewell had to address abolitionism. However, Nat Turner's revolt had occurred in 1831 while Tazewell was home from Washington (and caused him to neglect his plantations). He became an advocate of wholesale colonization and, as Governor, asked Virginia's legislature to formally request that Northern states suppress abolitionist groups and also asked Congress to suppress delivery of such literature through the U.S. Post Office. Tazewell's governorship was also marked by an expansion of the James River Canal, which was to connect to the Kanawha Canal and thus the Ohio River. Under his leadership, the Assembly instructed Virginia's U.S. Senators to support internal improvements, protective tariffs, and a national bank supporting Henry Clay's American System. Following his term as governor, Tazewell retired from public life but received 11 electoral votes for vice-president in the election of 1840. Tazewell owned plantations and enslaved persons in the Hampton Roads area. In the 1830 U.S. Federal Census, his Norfolk household included nine free white people (5 his children) and a dozen enslaved people. Although Virginia state slave censuses are not available online, and several federal census returns appear either missing or digitally misindexed, by 1860, his household included nine enslaved people (3 men, 5 women, and one 2-year-old boy) in Norfolk, and over 100 enslaved people across the Chesapeake Bay in Northampton County, Virginia (inherited through his wife). Death and legacy Governor Tazewell died a widower in Norfolk, Virginia, on May 6, 1860. Initially interred with his wife on his estate on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, he was re-interred in 1866