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and Tyler too
A Biography of
John and Julia Gardiner Tyler
BY ROBERT SEAGER II
This beautifully written and engrossing
biography of John Tyler, the tenth Presi-
dent of the United States, and his fasci-
nating wife, Julia, brings a neglected period
of American history vividly and exuber-
antly to life.
Few people know anything about Tyler,
except for the fact that he was the Tyler
of "Tippecanoe and Tykr too." No Presi-
dent ever longed so much to be remem-
bered for his deeds, but to posterity he has
become the last half of a slogan.
In this scholarly book, written with the
wit and imagination that readers wrould
more readily expect in a novel, Robert Sea-
ger tells the story of John Tyler and Julia
Gardiner. Since both were from old, aris-
tocratic families, the book is as much about
the New York Gardiners as it is the Vir-
ginia Tylers. Professor Seager has been
given access to thousands of family letters
never before made available to an historian,
and the result is not only a superb biogra-
phy, but an exciting adventure in the social
and political history of an almost forgotten
era. (continued on back flap)
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AND TYLER TOO
and Tyler too
A BIOGRAPHY OF JOHN &
JULIA GARDINER
TYLER
BY ROBERT SEAGER II
McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc.
New York Toronto London
AND TYLER TOO
Copyriglit (c) 1963 by Robert Seager II. All Rights Reserved.
Printed in the United States of America. This book, or parts
thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permis-
sion of the publishers.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 63-14259
First Edition
55890
To the memory of my father
Warren Armstrong S eager
1898-1952
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Mr. Howard Gotlieb, Curator of Historical Manuscripts in the Sterling
Memorial Library and Archivist of Yale University, is chiefly responsi-
ble for this volume. He first brought to my attention the extensive
Gardiner Family Papers in the Yale Library on which the book is
largely based and suggested a joint biography of John and Julia Gardiner
Tyler. Throughout the entire period of research and writing he has been
a constant source of information, encouragement and assistance. With-
out his kind help and continuing interest there would have been no
book.
Mrs. Gail Grimes Mirabile, formerly of Yale University Library,
taught me to read Gardiner handwriting and introduced me to the
peculiarities of Julia Gardiner's punctuation system. Mrs. Carolyn
Strauss of New Haven, Connecticut, discovered valuable Tyler materials
reposing in the Pequot Collection in the Yale Library. Mrs.. Amy Osborn
Bassford, Curator of the Long Island Collection in the East Hampton
Free Library, brought important Gardiner data to my attention and
assisted me in other ways. To no less degree am I grateful to the follow-
ing librarians and curators of manuscripts for putting Gardiner and
Tyler and related manuscript materials in their charge at my disposal:
Mr. Peter Draz of the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress;
Miss Mattie Russell, Curator of Manuscripts, Duke University Library;
Mr. Robert E. Stocking of the Manuscripts Division, Alderman Li-
brary, University of Virginia; Mr. James A. Servies, Librarian of
William and Mary College, Williamsburg, Virginia; and Mr. Randolph
W. Church, Librarian of the Virginia State Library, Richmond.
I am indebted in other important ways to Miss Lois Engleman,
Librarian of Denison University, Granville, Ohio; Mrs. Jane Secor,
Reference Librarian, Denison University Library; Mr. Vernon Tate,
Librarian of the United States Naval Academy; Mr. Francis Allen,
vii
Librarian of the University of Rhode Island; the Reference Staff of the
New York City Public Library; Mr. Marcus C. Elcan, editor of The
Iron Worker, Lynchburg Foundry Company, Lynchburg, Virginia; and
to my brother-in-law, Mr. Deane M. Parrish, Jr., formerly of the Rich-
mond, Virginia, Times-Dispatch.
The book would have been far less accurate and factually complete
had it not been for the Tyler and Gardiner descendants who gave me
their time and patiently answered my many questions. They were:
Mrs. Alexandra Gardiner Creel of Oyster Bay, New York, grandniece
of David Lyon Gardiner and donor of the Gardiner Papers to Yale
Library; Judge J. Randall Creel; Mrs. Julia Tyler Wilson and Mrs.
Elizabeth Tyler Miles of Charlottesville, Virginia, granddaughters of
John Tyler; Miss Pearl Tyler Ellis of Salem, Virginia, and Mrs. Cornelia
Ellis Booker of Washington, B.C., also granddaughters of John Tyler;
Mr. J. Alfred Tyler of Sherwood Forest, Charles City, Virginia, grand-
son of John Tyler, and Katherine Thomason Tyler, his gracious wife;
Mrs. Arthur Costello of Sahuarita, Arizona, granddaughter of J. Alex-
ander Tyler; and Mrs. Priscilla G. Griffin of Wawa, Pennsylvania,
granddaughter of Robert and Priscilla Cooper Tyler. Elizabeth Tyler
Coleman and her publishers, the University of Alabama Press, have per-
mitted me to quote extensively from Miss Coleman's excellent Priscilla
Cooper Tyler and the American Scene, 1816-1889, published in 1955.
Miss Coleman is the great-granddaughter of Priscilla Cooper Tyler.
These people were all unfailingly kind and helpful, providing me with
recollections, anecdotes, letters and pictures of the various Tylers and
Gardiners who figure in these pages. This is not, however, an "official"
family biography in any sense.
Professor Henry H. Simms of the Ohio State University and Pro-
fessors Lionel U. Ridout and James C. Hinkle of San Diego State Col-
lege provided me with information and insights that enabled me to
avoid many factual and interpretive pitfalls. So too did Professors
Frederick W. Turner III of Haver ford College; Tristram P. Coffin of
the University of Pennsylvania; Robert Sorlein of the University of
Rhode Island; and my former colleagues at Denison University, G.
Wallace Chessman, William P. T. Preston, Jr., and John K. Huckaby.
Needless to say, the author is alone responsible for all errors in fact and
interpretation that may remain in the work.
I am indebted to Denison University, particularly to Dean Parker
E. Lichtenstein, for the leave of absence from my teaching duties there
that allowed me to commence research on the book. And I am grateful
to my colleagues in the Department of History of the United States
Naval Academy, mainly Professors William W. Jeffries, E. B. Potter
and Neville T. Kirk, for creating the scholarly atmosphere in the De-
partment that enabled me to complete the manuscript and see it through
press.
viii
I am especially in the debt of Mrs. Ruth-Ellen K. Darnell of Balti-
more, Maryland, formerly of Yale University Library, who read the
manuscript in its various stages and suggested numerous stylistic and
organizational improvements. Her assistance throughout has been in-
valuable.
I am also grateful to my sister-in-law, Mrs. Ann Brock Parrish of
Richmond, Virginia, for her many benevolences to me during my several
extended visits to the Richmond- Williamsburg area for research. Her
culinary kindnesses enabled me to subsist for long periods of time on an
academic leave of absence without salary. My aunt, Mrs. Lillian Hales
Didenhover of Raleigh, North Carolina, similarly rescued me from mal-
nutrition when research carried me to Durham.
But most of all I am indebted to my wife, Caroline Parrish Seager.
It was she who did all the backbreaking clerical work on this book over
a period of three years. She transcribed fifteen hundred single-spaced
typed pages of recorded notes; typed the entire manuscript four times;
labored over my grammar, style and punctuation; checked all the foot-
notes; and read and corrected the galley and page proofs. How she
managed to do all this and maintain an efficient household, I will never
know.
Robert Seager II
Annapolis, Maryland
IX
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
Foreword xiii
1 True Love in a Cottage i
2 The Gardiners of East Hampton 17
3 John Tyler: His Father's Son, 1790-1820 48
4 The Dilemmas of a States' Rights Politician, 1822-1834 73
5 John Tyler: The Middle Years 102
6 And Tyler Too 127
7 His Accidency: The Disadvantages of Conscience 147
8 Courtship and Catastrophe i72
9 Tyler and Texas — And Tammany 209
10 Julia Regina: Court Life in Washington 243
11 Alexander Gardiner: Sag Harbor to the Rio Grande 266
12 Retirement to Sherwood Forest 289
13 Tyler and Polk: A Question of Reputation 312
14 Sherwood Forest: The Good Years 334
15 And the Pursuit of Property 361
xi
1 6 Black Men and Black Republicans 387
17 Rumors of War: An End to Normalcy, 1855-1860 417
18 From Peace to Paradise, 1861-1862 447
19 Mrs. Ex-President Tyler and the War, 1862-1865 473
20 Reconstruction and Epilogue, 1865-1890 511
Notes 557
Bibliography 647
Index 655
Xll
FOREWORD
This book does not pretend to be a definitive study of President John
Tyler and Ms times (1790-1862). Nor, obviously, is it the last word
on his wife, the vivacious Julia Gardiner Tyler (1820-1889). It is,
instead, an attempt to humanize John Tyler and bring him out of the
shadow into which history has cast him; to see him as his wife, his
family and his intimate friends saw him, and as he saw himself. The
book is therefore an informal social history of the Tylers and the
Gardiners, two proud families who numbered in their midst many able
and ambitious people. Not the least of these were the tenth President
of the United States and his second wife. The backdrop against which
the Tyler- Gar diner family alliance is viewed is the political and sectional
history of the United States from 1810 to 1890.
Few Americans today know much about Tyler save that he was
the "Tyler too" who ran for the Vice-Presidency on the ticket that
elevated someone nicknamed "Tippecanoe" to the White House back
in the distant reaches of the iSoos. That Tyler became the first Vice-
President to succeed to power when an elected President died in office
is also not as well known as it might be among contemporary Americans.
Ironically, few American Presidents have so wanted to be remembered
to posterity for their deeds. Yet John Tyler has become one of America's
most obscure Chief Executives. His countrymen generally remember
him, if they have heard of him at all, as the rhyming end of a catchy
campaign slogan. Only one solid biography of him has appeared in the
century since his death — Professor Oliver P. Chitwood's fine study
which was published twenty-five years ago. Unfortunately, it has long
been out of print and is virtually unobtainable today.
When I began the research for this volume there seemed to be a
place for a new evaluation of Tyler that, insofar as possible and prac-
ticable, would emphasize the human side of the man — his fears, frus-
xiii
trations, ambitions, joys, sorrows and loves. The recent appearance of
some ten thousand new Gardiner and Tyler family letters, many of
which include revealing insights into the private lives of Tyler and his
intimates, fixed my decision in the matter of emphasis. These valuable
letters have never before been employed by an historian. They are the
foundation upon which this book has been based. They help fill the
vacuum of primary source material created when the bulk of Tyler's
private papers were burned in the fires set by the retreating Confederate
Army during Lee's evacuation of Richmond in April 1865. In addition
I have employed several thousand Tyler and Gardiner letters reposing
in known manuscript collections and in the three volumes of Tyler
papers and letters published by the late Dr. Lyon Gardiner Tyler in
the mid-i88os. The intense personal quality of much of the available
material has encouraged an effort to convert the bronze statue of the
forgotten President into a flesh and blood creature. The reader will dis-
cover that I am as interested in Tyler the husband, the father and the
planter as I am in Tyler the President, the states' righter and the
secessionist.
This is as much the story of the New York Gardiners as it is of
the Virginia Tylers. It details the love of a widowed President for a
woman thirty years his junior, their courtship, their marriage, and their
life together in the White House and afterwards at Sherwood Forest
plantation. It is largely through Gardiner eyes, especially those of the
incomparable Julia and her delightful sister Margaret, that we see John
Tyler the family man and the statesman. Surely the nineteenth century
produced few American women as fascinating, attractive and forceful as
Julia Gardiner Tyler. Whether she was flirting with politicians, "reign-
ing" as First Lady over her White House "Court," lobbying for Texas
annexation, advising the President on patronage, raising her seven
children, presiding over a James River plantation house, demanding
secession, or running the Union blockade, her every action and activity
revealed her boundless energy. Like her domineering mother Juliana
and her ambitious brother Alexander Gardiner, Julia Tyler was a posi-
tive and dynamic personality who usually got what she wanted. For-
tunately for the historian, the members of the loquacious Gardiner
clan liked nothing better than to write each other long, candid, and
gossipy letters. Because of this, nearly half of the book turns on the
intimate history of the Gardiner family before, during and after its
connection with the ill-starred tenth President.
As for Tyler the politician, it seemed presumptuous for me to
attempt to rewrite Professor Chitwood's excellent John Tyler: Cham-
pion of the Old South (1939), which deals primarily with Tyler's
public life until 1845, or to rework the materials in two first-rate
scholarly monographs on the subject — Robert J. Morgan's A Whig
Embattled: The Presidency under John Tyler (1954), and Oscar D.
xiv
Lambert's Presidential Politics in the United States, 1841-1844 (1936).
For this reason, I have treated cursorily those sectors of Tyler's political
career^ about which Chitwood, Morgan and Lambert have already
written in great detail. Only when the new documentary evidence has
warranted a closer look at Tyler's motives and attitudes on crucial pub-
lic issues have I discussed that side of his life with any completeness at
all. For example, I have gone rather extensively into his third party
movement in 1843-1844 and the patronage questions involved, and
into his motives in Texas annexation. The Gardiners were quite close
to these developments and their private correspondence throws much
new light on the problems encountered. Otherwise, many of the ac-
tivities of Tyler's long and controversial public career have been
drastically compressed, mentioned only in passing, or slighted alto-
gether.
Similarly, it proved impossible to provide as historical background
more than a cursory account of the many issues and personalities in
American history from Tyler's birth in 1790 to Julia's death in 1889.
Consequently, I have sketched in only enough of this material to make
Tyler's actions and reactions, and those of the members of his family,
intelligible to the reader whose college course in American history may
have become hazy over the years. In doing so, I have made no par-
ticular effort to resolve the great national controversies with which
Tyler -concerned himself — the Bank of the United States, the tariff,
internal improvements, slavery, secession and the Civil War. I un-
limber little of the available scholarly artillery — the hundreds of
biographies, monographs, Ph.D. theses, memoirs, and articles — that
might be brought to bear on every nuance of each of these complex and
controversial issues. It was clear to me at the outset that I would have
the space in a single volume to do little more than state the basic
nature of these problems, provide a few passing references to each
in the backnotes and bibliography, and move on to emphasize the
Tyler-Gardiner view of the matter as it personally affected them and
as it was revealed in their private correspondence. This decision may
have made for some imbalance in my interpretation.
Nor have my personal biases always been well camouflaged in
these pages. Tyler owned Negroes and he accepted the institution of
human slavery. He believed in rigid states7 rights, strict construction of
the Constitution, the territorial dismemberment of the Mexican Empire,
and secession. I have little confidence that any of these ideas and poli-
cies were in the best interests of the United States at the time, although
I try to treat Tyler's view of them in a manner which is neither hostile
nor patronizing. He opposed the Bank of the United States, the pro-
tective tariff and popular democracy. My twenty-twenty hindsight tells
me that the nation needed a national bank, a moderate tariff, and an
expansion of the democratic process in the ante-bellum period. I can
xv
not accept human slavery in any form although I think I can appreciate
and sympathize with Tyler's moral dilemma on the agonizing questions
of abolition and secession. To the Gardiners money and social position
were the root of all good and the measure of all worth; I think not.
Both families were Anglophobes; I am not. While I have tried to
suspend my biases the better to appreciate and understand theirs, I
am certain that mine remain and push through to the surface. The
reader should therefore be aware of these fundamental conflicts be-
tween the biographer and his subjects and make allowances accord-
ingly.
Nevertheless, the reader will learn very quickly that I like John
and Julia Tyler and most of the members of their immediate families.
By and large they were engaging people. Tyler made many mistakes,
and his intellectual window on the world of his day appears a clouded
one to me a hundred years removed from the period in which he lived
and worked. He was somewhat too thin-skinned about personal criti-
cism; he could be maddeningly self-righteous; he managed money
casually. Yet I find him to be a courageous, principled man, a fair and
honest fighter for his beliefs. He was a President without a party. Con-
sidering this overriding political fact, his achievement of Texas annexa-
tion by manipulating Polk and the Democracy was the intrepid and
successful playing of a weak hand. He was a skillful politician in the
best sense of that often misused word. The inherent rebel in Tyler's
stubborn nature also impresses me as a laudable characteristic. It seems
a refreshing quality in this era of social and political togetherness. When
the majority said, "Yes . . . how true . . . you're so right," John Tyler
could generally be counted upon to say, "No, gentlemen, it won't do."
He seldom compromised his principles. If anything, he was too rigid
in them. He lived in great psychological fear of historical obscurity and
economic insolvency. Yet on more than one occasion he accepted eco-
nomic hardship and the prospect of certain obscurity rather than take
what he considered the hypocritical road to political popularity. He
died insolvent and unsung.
*""* True, he was neither a great President nor a great intellectual.
He lived in a time in which many brilliant and forceful men strode
the American stage — Clay, Calhoun, Benton, Webster, Jackson, Douglas
and Lincoln — and he was overshadowed by all of them, as was the
office of the Presidency itself. The leading issues with which he grappled,
relatively few in number by today's standards, ultimately required a
bloody civil war to resolve. Save for the success of his Texas policy
and his Maine Boundary treaty with Great Britain, his administration
has been and must be counted an unsuccessful one by any modern
measure of accomplishment. Had he surrendered his states' rights and
anti-Bank principles he might have salvaged it. He chose not to sur-
render and the powerful Henry Clay crushed him. From then on he
xvi
administered a caretaker government amid mounting threats of im-
peachment and assassination.
He was, however, a good lawyer, a fine farmer, an excellent husband
to two wives, and an understanding father to fourteen children. In Julia
Gardiner he had one of the great belles of the nineteenth century for a
•wife. She cured him of an inherent prudery and brought his best personal
qualities to the fore. In a word, she made him happy. She was an able,
bright, determined, and socially ambitious woman, and the reader will
soon discover that I am both impressed and amused by her sheer drive
and her immense extrovertism. Her will power was exceeded only by her
personal charm and her often cynical sense of humor. As a hostess she
was without peer. She remains, with few real challengers, one of the
most interesting First Ladies in White House history. I like her and
her numerous children and the essentially tragic figure who was her
husband. I hope the reader does too. It is a bias for which I make no
apology.
xvn
TRUE LOVE IN A COTTAGE
You must not believe all the President says about
the honeymoon lasting always — he has found out
that you in common with the rest of Eve's daughters
are fond of flattery.
— JULIANA MCLACHLAN GARDINER, 1844
The Right Reverend Benjamin Treadwell Onderdonk, fourth Bishop
of the Episcopal Diocese of New York, was a busy man. But not too
busy to see Alexander Gardiner, the twenty-six-year-old lawyer and
Tammany politician who had requested an appointment at noon on that
hot Saturday of June 22, 1844. No time was wasted after young
Gardiner strode into the Bishop's chambers. Characteristically, he came
right to the point. His mission, he explained, was as simple as it was
confidential. Would the Bishop officiate at the marriage of his younger
sister, Miss Julia Gardiner, to John Tyler, President of the United
States? Taken aback, Onderdonk pressed Gardiner for the details, and
Alexander briefly explained that the proposed ceremony was being
planned for the Church of the Ascension on Fifth Avenue at Tenth
Street at 2 P.M. on Wednesday, June 26. The Reverend Dr. Gregory
Thurston Bedell, rector of the church and clergyman to the family when
the Gardiners were resident at their Lafayette Place town house, would
assist the Bishop at the ceremony. Gardiner impressed on Onderdonk
the importance of absolute secrecy in the matter, pointing out that the
wedding date had been hastily arranged and that President Tyler would
arrive incognito in the city late on Tuesday evening, June 2$. Only four
months had elapsed since the tragic death of David Gardiner, the bride's
lather. He had been among those struck down when the great experi-
mental gun aboard the steam frigate Princeton exploded the preceding
February. The family was still in deep mourning. For this reason, ex-
plained Alexander, the Gardiners were planning a very small ceremony.
There was to be no publicity of any kind. With that admonition,
Alexander Gardiner departed.1
Aside from the Bishop's ready assent to perform the nuptials, no
record of his reaction to this brief interview has survived. But Benjamin
Onderdonk was a worldly man. He lived in no stained-glass tower and
several practical thoughts undoubtedly crossed his mind after Alexander
had left. He knew that the Gardiners were a long-established, wealthy,
and prominent family, residents at various times of Gardiners Island,
East Hampton, and New York City. They were the direct descendants
of Lion Gardiner, the professional soldier who had first come to America
in 1635 under contract to the Connecticut Company as a fortifications
engineer. He was aware that Julia Gardiner was an attractive and ac-
complished woman, for several seasons one of the reigning belles at
Washington and Saratoga Springs. Surely he wondered at the propriety
of so conspicuous a wedding following hard on the heels of so pub-
licized a family funeral. He could imagine what the gossips would do
with that (as they did). And he may have ruminated on the plain fact
that John Tyler was fifty-four and his bride-to-be fully thirty years his
junior. If such were his thoughts, however, he kept them to himself.
The courtship of John Tyler and Julia Gardiner had begun in
Washington in January 1843, f°ur months after the, death of the tenth
President's first wife, the beautiful Letitia Christian Tyler of Virginia.
It matured quickly during the early spring of 1843 amid a storm of
rumor, speculation, and gossip, much of the latter salacious and vicious.
In March 1843 a "definite understanding" had been reached, although
no formal engagement was then announced, Julia's mother had blocked
that. The sudden death of David Gardiner on the Princeton necessitated
a further delay in plans. Thus it was not until April 20, 1844, seven
weeks after the tragedy aboard the Princeton, that the President of the
United States, using a second-hand envelope (John Tyler was a frugal
man), wrote to Juliana McLachlan Gardiner, mother of the intended
bride, asking formally for Julia's hand in marriage:
I have the permission of your dear daughter, Miss Julia Gardiner, to ask your
approbation of my address to her, dear Madam, and to obtain your consent
to our marriage, which in all dutiful obedience she refers to your decision.
May I indulge the hope that you will see in this nothing to object, and that
you will confer upon me the high privilege of substituting yourself in all that
care and attention which you have so affectionately bestowed upon her. My
position in Society will I trust serve as a guarantee for the appearance which
I give, that it will be the study of my life to advance her happiness by all
and every means in my power.2
Juliana Gardiner knew perfectly well what Tyler's "position in
Society" was. In answering the President's letter on April 22 she implied
that this fact was not sufficient to dull her sense of judgment on so
important a matter. She must insist that her daughter receive from
Tyler's hands "all the necessary comforts and elegancies of life" to
which the Gardiners had been long accustomed. It would have been im-
polite to look the Presidential gift horse straight in the mouth, but
Juliana did want to make certain that the Tylers had a horse of some
value:
In reply to your letter received day before yesterday I confess I am at a loss
what answer to return. The subject is to my mind so momentous and serious,
rendered doubly so by my own recent terrible bereavement, that I know of no
considerations which this world could offer that would make me consent with-
out hesitation and anxiety, to a union so sacred but which death can dissolve.
The deep and solemn emotions of rny mind are not to be regarded as a cri-
terion of the mind of others neither do I desire by any reference to my own
feelings to cast a shade over the future hopes of those whose anticipations of
life are comparatively unclouded. Your high political position, eminent public
service, and above all unsullied private character command the highest respect
of myself and family and lead me to acquiesce in what appear to be the
impulse of my daughter's heart and the dictates of her judgment. In cases of
this kind I think the utmost candor should prevail and I hope you will not
deem the suggestions I consider my duty as a mother to urge otherwise than
proper. Her comfortable settlement in life, a subject often disregarded in
youth but thought of and felt in maturity, claims our mutual consideration.
Julia in her tastes and inclination is neither extravagant nor unreasonable tho'
she has been accustomed to all the necessary comforts and elegancies of life.
While she remains in the bosom of my family they can be continued to her. I
have no reason to suppose but you will have it in your power to extend to
her the enjoyments by which she has been surrounded and my reference to
the subject arises from a desire to obviate all misunderstanding and future
trial,3
For a woman torn emotionally by the sorrows and psychological
readjustments of early widowhood, Juliana Gardiner had a canny ability
to penetrate to the core of the practical economic realities of life, par-
ticularly those relating to its "enjoyments" and "elegancies." Her con-
cern was a natural one, conditioned by the fact that for two centuries
the Gardiners had held high status in fashionable New York society.
Thus when Juliana Gardiner questioned the President of the United
States on his ability to provide adequately for young Julia it was an in-
grained family reflex action. Unfortunately, Tyler's reply to her in-
terrogatory (if indeed he did reply) is not extant. The important point
was that his future mother-in-law — nine years younger than himself —
had consented to the union.
Tyler's party arrived in New York by rail from the capital at
10:30 PrM. on Tuesday, June 25, and slipped unobserved into Howard's
Hotel. /His traveling companions from Washington included John
Lorimer Graham, Postmaster of the City of New York and patronage
dispenser for the Tylerite political forces in the area; John Tyler, Jr.,
his second son and private secretary; and Robert Rantoul, prominent
Boston politician, sometime Collector of Customs there, twice unsuc-
cessfully nominated to high public office by the President. [So insistent
was Tyler on secrecy that he persuaded D. D. Howard, the proprietor
of the establishment, to lock up his servants for the night lest they
leak the news of his arrival in the city. In the best tradition of a
Renaissance poisoning, the secret was kept.
At two o'clock on the sultry Wednesday afternoon of June 26 the
ceremony was held, Bishop Onderdonk and Dr. Bedell presiding. Present
in the small wedding party at the Church of the Ascension were the im-
mediate family: Juliana, the bride's mother; Margaret Gardiner, Julia's
twenty-two-year-old sister; Alexander and David Lyon Gardiner, her
older brothers. Of the numerous Tyl&s, only John, Jr., accompanied
his distinguished father. Nonfamily guests included United States Post-
master General and Mrs. Charles A. Wickliffe, their daughters Mary
and Nannie, Miss Caroline Legare, daughter of Hugh S. Legare of South
Carolina, the late Attorney General and Secretary of State in the Tyler
administration, and Colonel and Mrs. John Lorimer Graham. Margaret
served her sister as bridesmaid and Alexander was her groomsman. The
bride wore a simple white dress of lisse "with a gauze veil descending
from a circlet of white flowers, wreathed in her hair." Since she was in
mourning for her father she wore no jewelry. As the New York Herald
remarked, "In her form and personal appearance, she is beautiful; and
we should be proud to have her appear at the Court of Queen Victoria."
This gratuitous remark was an oblique reference to the groundless
rumor that Tyler was about to withdraw from the 1844 Presidential
canvass, throw his strength to Democrat James K. Polk, and receive
in. return the ambassadorship to the Court of St. James's.4
Julia was pretty. By the standards of her day she was considered
beautiful. Her raven-black hair was parted in the middle and pulled
back into neat, tight buns covering her ears. Her dark oval eyes were
large and expressive, the flashing beacons of an animated and ex-
troverted personality. Firm chin, full lips, and a straight nose perhaps a
trifle too large for her small round face completed a picture of charm
and attractiveness. She was five feet three inches in height with a tiny
hourglass waist and a full bust. Tending to plumpness, Julia (like all
women) would always complain of her tendency to gain weight. But
on her wedding day in June 1 844 her light complexion, white dress, and
gauze veil contrasted effectively and strikingly with her dark hair and
eyes to produce a trim appearance of radiance and loveliness. Indeed,
her bright face, shapely figure, and pleasing manner were enough to
excite the envy of any man for John Tyler's good fortune. In the homage
of one newspaperman the President was "Lucky honest John." 5
Following the brief Episcopal ceremony five carriages transported
the wedding party from the church to the Gardiner residence on La-
fayette Place. After a light wedding breakfast the guests repaired to
the foot of Courtland Street, where they boarded the ferryboat Essex
for a cooling turn around the harbor. Julia meanwhile had changed into
a plain black baize traveling gown. Waiting aboard the ferryboat to
greet and congratulate the radiant couple was a noisy group of local
politicians and Tyler supporters. Chief among them were William
Paxton Hallett, Silas M. Stilwell, George D. Strong, and Louis F.
Tasistro. A band entertained the happy cargo as the Essex moved among
the ships anchored in the harbor. Thundering salutes were received
from the warships North Carolina and — ironically — Princeton, and
from the guns of the fort on Governors Island. Within an hour the
President and Julia were debarked at Jersey City. There they entrained
for Philadelphia and a honeymoon trip that would lead them to Wash-
ington, Old Point Comfort, and to the President's recently acquired
estate, Sherwood Forest, in Charles City County, Virginia. Margaret
accompanied the newlyweds as far as the capital, an arrangement not
considered unusual in Victorian days. A maidservant completed the
wedding party. The plan was to stop a few days at the White House
to permit Tyler to attend to official business that had piled up during
his absence, and then to proceed to Old Point Comfort and Sherwood
Forest for the remainder of the honeymoon.
When news of the wedding was published the next day in the New
York papers, the effect was electric. Alexander, who thoroughly enjoyed
intrigue, was particularly pleased with the coup he had so skillfully
arranged:
The city continues full of the surprise [he wrote Julia] , and the ladies will not
recover in some weeks. At the corners of the streets, in the public places and
in every drawing room it is the engrossing theme. The whole affair is con-
sidered one of the most brilliant coup de main ever acted; and I can not but
wonder myself, that we succeeded so well, in preserving at once the President's
dignity, and our own feelings, from all avoidable sacrifice.6
For a day or two even the sensational murder trial of the notorious
Polly Bodine was pushed to the inside pages of the papers. The Herald,
among other newspapers, enjoyed the heaven-sent opportunity to juxta-
pose the wedding story with Tyler's vigorous fight for the annexation
of Texas and his campaign for re-election on that issue. The puns were
bad but the spirit was good:
Miss Julia Gardiner [wrote a Herald reporter] is known as one of the most
accomplished daughters of the State of New York. It is said that the ladies
of this Country are all in favor of annexation, to a man. Miss Gardiner is an
honor to her sex, and goes decidedly for Tyler and annexation ... the
President has concluded a treaty of immediate annexation, which will be rati-
fied without the aid of the Senate of the United States ... if we have lost
Texas by the recent vote of the Senate, the gallantry of the President has
annexed Gardiners Island to the "Old Dominion." . . . Now, then, is the
time to make a grand movement for Tyler's re-election. Neither Polk nor
Clay can bring to the White House such beauty, elegance, grace, and high
accomplishments as does John Tyler, and meetings should be at once con-
vened— committees appointed — and all proper measures taken to ensure the
reign of so much loveliness for four years longer in the White House.7
The secrecy with which the Chief Executive's wedding had been
arranged and executed produced some understandable embarrassment.
John Jones, editor of The Madisonian, the Tyler newspaper in Wash-
ington, was only one of many administration insiders caught by surprise.
On the day before the ceremony Jones had run a routine announce-
ment of the President's temporary departure from the capital to rest
from his "arduous duties" and seek a few days' "repose." At this un-
intended faux pas the Herald chortled with good-natured glee: "John
don't know what's going on. We rather think that the President's
'arduous duties' are only beginning. c Repose/ indeed!" 8
Most distressed by the suddenness of the wedding were the numer-
ous intimate friends and relatives of the Gardiners in New York City
who had received neither intimations of nor invitations to the important
social event. They were particularly critical of the fact that the Presi-
dent had seen fit to surround the wedding party with such socially un-
acceptable political hacks as John Lorimer Graham, William Paxton
Hallett, and Louis Tasistro and that the Gardiners had acquiesced in
this disgraceful arrangement. Following the departure of the President
and Julia for the South it fell to Alexander Gardiner to pacify the
injured sensibilities of this group. In this delicate task he claimed com-
plete success. He reported to Julia on June 28 that the "presence of
so many persons at the solemnization, and the announcement that they
constituted the bridal party, and were our guests after the ceremony,
awakened some unpleasant feelings among our relations and friends, but
these have been entirely quieted . . . there were some names introduced
to the public as part of your party, in which you would have taken no
great pride in such a connection." Nevertheless, as late as mid- July
family friends in the city were still bitterly complaining about the way
the whole thing had been handled.9
At East Hampton, Long Island, the news was received with sur-
prise and delight but with little of the causticity displayed by the bride's
friends in the city. Julia had grown up in the hamlet and her friends,
neighbors, and kinsmen there absorbed the fact of her marriage in the
unsophisticated manner of all villagers. They were too proud of East
Hampton's sudden prominence in the world to worry about the social
structure of the wedding party.10
Relatives on the Tyler side were also stunned by the suddenness
of the event, particularly the President's four daughters by his first wife.
These ladies were well aware of their father's desire to marry Julia
Gardiner. While they felt some concern about the sharp age difference
involved in the match, they all had accepted the inevitability of the
union. Throughout the difficult readjustment period that followed the
ceremony, their attitude toward their new young stepmother was in-
fluenced by the fact that they had all been extremely close to Letitia
Tyler, their own mother. Her death in September 1842 was still very
much on their minds and in their hearts. Hence it was the timing of the
wedding and its near-elopement character that produced their initial
pique. They were certainly not made privy to their father's specific
plans. Three weeks before the wedding the President had told his eldest
daughter, Mary Tyler Jones, who was five years Julia's senior, that he
had "nothing to write about which would be of any interest to you."
He merely mentioned in passing that " whatever I may do on any sub-
ject be assured my dear daughter that your happiness will ever be near
to the heart of your Father." This was the only hint of the approaching
nuptials any of his daughters received. Thus when the President an-
nounced the actual occurrence of the event to Mary on June 28 it was
really a plea for her approbation:
Well, what has been talked of for so long a time is consummated and Julia
Gardiner, the most lovely of her race, is my own wedded wife. If I can lay
my hand on a paper containing a proper account of the ceremonial I will send
it. Will not my dear child rejoice in my happiness! She is all that I could
wish her to be, the most beautiful woman of the age and at the same time the
most accomplished. This occurrence will make no change in aught that relates
to you. Nor will new associations produce the slightest abatement from my
affection for you Will you not also write a suitable letter to Julia . . .
expressive of your pleasure to see her? X1
Mary was a mature and sensible woman and she soon adjusted to
the idea of a young stepmother. Her sister, twenty-one-year-old Eliza-
beth Tyler Waller, required more time. So hurt and upset was she by
the news that it was nearly three months before she could bring herself
to write Julia and acknowledge the event. Addressing her letter to "My
dear Mrs. Tyler," Elizabeth begged for time to absorb the implications
of the new situation:
My reasons for not having written you before will I hope be appreciated, and
I shall endeavor in giving them to you to be as candid as I would wish you
to be to me. For weeks after your marriage I could not realize the fact, and
even now it is with difficulty that I can convince myself that another fills the
place which was once occupied by my beloved Mother. I had ever been taught
to love that Mother above all else on Earth and surely you must feel that the
short space of two years could not have obliterated her memory sufficiently
for me to have been enabled to greet any one whom my father might have
married with a great deal of affection. We are strangers to each other now
which renders it impossible for either of us to entertain that affection which
I hope in after years we may feel. It would be impossible for me to regard any
one in this world in the lights of a Mother were they many years your senior
— but I shall endeavor to love you with the affection of a sister and trust it
may be reciprocated on your part.12
Mary and Elizabeth did finally come to love and admire Julia. Tyler's
second daughter, Letitia Tyler Semple, did not. Hers was a quiet ven-
detta with Julia that lasted through the years. She disliked her new
stepmother instantly. After a while her unreasonable hostility was
reciprocated by Julia — whose several attempts at peacemaking were all
rudely rebuffed. Alice Tyler, the youngest of the President's daughters,
seventeen at the time of the wedding, also proved difficult about the new
order of things. Although she thawed considerably while serving as a
member of the First Lady's "Court" during the brilliant 1844-1845
social season in Washington, she and Julia would have some tense
moments in the years ahead. But by the time of her own marriage in
1850 she had come to respect, if not love, her beautiful stepmother.
With Tyler's three sons there was never a problem. Fourteen-year-
old Tazewell was too young to grasp fully the implications of what had
happened. His memory of Letitia was fairly dim and he was pleased to
have a new mother. Both of Tyler's grown sons, Robert and John, Jr.,
were extremely fond of Julia. And while she in turn was often privately
critical of their political behavior and personal habits (particularly
those of the erratic John, Jr.), their relations over the years were gen-
erally warm and cordial. Save for the continuing hostility of Letitia
Semple} Julia fitted easily and quickly into the Tyler family complex.
Julia's honeymoon trip to the South was a bit like Caesar's trium-
phal return from Gaul. The wedding night was spent in Philadelphia.
Following a brief stopover in Baltimore, the honeymoon party reached
Washington on the evening of June 27. "Wherever we stopped, wher-
ever we went, crowds of people outstripping one another, came to gaze
at the President's bride," Julia exclaimed ecstatically; "the secrecy
of the a fair is on the tongue and admiration of everyone. Everyone
says it was the best managed thing they ever heard of. The President
says I am the best of diplomatists."13
On Friday afternoon, June 28, there was a wedding reception in
the flower-laden Blue Room of the White House attended by "a throng
of distinguished people." Julia, Margaret, and the President received the
guests. In the center of the oval room stood a tastefully decorated table
on which was placed the wedding cake "surrounded by wine and
bouquets." John C. Calhoun, Tyler's energetic and controversial Sec-
retary of State, escorted Julia to the bride's table and, in the approved
South Carolina feudal manner, gallantly helped her cut the great cake.
The reception lasted two hours. To the young bride it was all "very
brilliant — brilliant to my heart's content." Julia was truly in her ele-
ment. "I have commenced my auspicious reign," she confided to her
8
mother, "and am in quiet possession of the Presidential Mansion." 14
In spite of this triumphant declaration it took the pragmatic
Juliana another week to comprehend fully the fact that her new son-in-
law was in truth the President of the United States, and that Julia
had begun her "reign" at Ms side:
My mind has been so absorbed with you [she wrote to Julia on July 4] that
the idea never occurred to me until this morning at the breakfast table it
seemed suddenly to break upon me that I had a son President of the United
States — as I was alone and no person to communicate this sudden conviction
to I enjoyed it by myself. To my mind however it is more like poetry than
reality. I used to indulge a fancy when David and Alex, were little children
perhaps one of these may be President — yet the idea in truth appeared so
improbable to my mind as to render it absurd.15
One disquieting bit of news about Julia's married life soon drifted
north to Juliana Gardiner. Within a few days of their arrival at the
White House, Margaret reported Tyler's good-natured complaint that
Julia's demand for his constant attention prevented him from working.
He had great difficulty getting his sleepy wife out of bed in the morn-
ing, and he observed that in other ways she was "a spoilt child."
Margaret agreed with the President, conveying to Lafayette Place her
own opinion that if the honeymoon lasted much longer Julia would be
spoiled beyond redemption. After all, she confided to her mother, the
President's job required a great deal of difficult and complex work, a
burden made no lighter for him by his strong political "hope of return-
ing to the White House in '48." l6
Juliana reacted quickly and positively to this adverse report from
the capital. She told Julia bluntly that her reign in Washington would
likely be short enough, and that she had better not "interrupt the Presi-
dent in his business." Instead, she should "urge him on" in order to help
effect his re-election in November. Her advice on the more personal
question involved was equally straightforward: "Let your husband work
during all business hours," she ordered. "Business should take the
precedence of caressing — reserve your caressing for private leisure and
be sure you let no one see it unless you wish to be laughed at." Spe-
cifically, she suggested that Julia busy herself with putting the White
House in order. She had heard from Julia's maidservant Elizabeth, and
she knew from personal observation, that it was a dirty and run-down
establishment. She pointed out that "the President should make the
government clean it forthwith. . . . You know how I detest a dirty house.
Commence at once to look around and see that all things are orderly
and tidy. This will amuse and occupy you. . . ." 17
To this recommendation of occupational therapy Margaret, after
she had returned to New York, added the practical suggestion that
Julia might well start doing something constructive and useful for the
Gardiner family in her new position as First Lady. "You spend so much
time in kissing, things of more importance are left undone," she com-
plained. There was, for example, their brother Alexander, whose re-
cently launched political career in New York City needed a sharp
Presidential nudge. "Recollect that A — too would like to have you make
hay for him while the Sun shines/' she reminded her sister. "In truth
you must be a politician." Julia's reaction to the family advice which
descended from New York was one of contrition. "I very well know
every eye is upon me, my dear mother, and / will behave accordingly." 18
As it turned out, Julia would have more effect on her brother's
political fortunes than on the White House dirt. The Presidents House
was in appalling condition in 1844, a slumlike casualty of the running
three-year battle between Tyler and the Congress. The hostile House
of Representatives had stubbornly refused to appropriate the funds
necessary to keep the mansion in even a minimum state of cleanliness.
Its white pillars were stained with tobacco juice, its draperies and rugs
were threadbare and worn, its walls and ceilings cried for paint, and in
its windows and remote corners one might observe "spiders amusingly
playing at beau-peek for a naughty fly." Juliana McLachlan Gardiner
was a forceful and persuasive woman, as was her young daughter, the
new First Lady; but the two of them together, supported by all the
power and prestige of the Executive branch, were unable to move
the Congress of the United States to redecorate the White House dur-
ing the remaining seven months of the Tyler administration. Nothing
was done by Congress toward basic redecoration until the Polks took
possession in March 1845. Before she left Washington for Old Point
Comfort, however, Julia satisfied herself that the President at least
appreciated the sad condition of the domicile, and she exacted from
him a promise that when they returned in August she would find the
premises "in prime order." 19
Margaret returned to New York on July i, although Tyler strongly
urged her to accompany them on to Old Point Comfort. He feared his
bride would "grow gloomy through the separation" from her beloved
sister, as for a brief time she did. But Margaret demurred, and the
honeymooners left Washington alone by boat on July 3, arriving at Old
Point at one o'clock the next morning. They were met at the landing
by Colonel Gustavus A. De Russy of New York, commanding officer
of Fortress Monroe, who conducted them to their cottage. Julia was
delighted with the comfort and beauty of the honeymoon retreat, and
the separation from Margaret was soon forgotten. As Tyler's confidential
agent in the matter, De Russy had done well in tastefully selecting and
purchasing the furniture in Norfolk, and Julia described the arrange-
ments he had made with genuine enthusiasm:
Col. De Russy is one of the first officers of the country and a perfect gentle-
man. His taste, and I believe, his own hand, arranged our sleeping apartment.
... A richly covered high post bedstead hung with white lace curtains looped
1C
up with blue ribbon, and the cover at the top of the bedstead lined also with
blue — new matting which emitted its sweet fragrance, two handsome mahogany
dressing tables, writing table, and sofa, the room was papered to match, and
the whole establishment brand new — True love in a cottage — and quite a
contrast to my dirty establishment in Washington. It seemed quite as if I had
stepped into paradise.20
The next two days were filled with a ceaseless round of social
activities. All the officers of the garrison were marched in a body to the
honeymoon cottage to pay their respects to the Commander-in-Chief
and his bride, "a really imposing scene/7 wrote Julia. The troops were
solemnly reviewed, a duty which Julia thought "all very fine and im-
posing but I was so annoyed by the mosquitos [sic] which positively
devoured me." In addition, there was a dinner aboard a Revenue cutter,
endless toasts to the happiness of the President and his lady, and a
flying visit from the swashbuckling John Tyler, Jr. An inspection tour
of the USS Pennsylvania (the largest sailing warship ever built in
America), lying in Hampton Roads, was marred somewhat when the
flustered and confused Commodore William C. Bolton lost count of the
formal salute and fired only nineteen guns instead of the customary
twenty-one for a President of the United States. Flowers and wine,
marching men and gallant officers, booming salutes, compliments and
flattery made these days memorable for the young lady of East
Hampton, thrust suddenly into the national spotlight.21
Never had Julia been so completely happy. "The P. bids me tell
you the honeymoon is likely to last forever/' she breathlessly told her
mother, "for he finds himself falling in love with me every day." This
was a bit too lyrical for the practical Juliana. "You must not believe
all the President says about the honeymoon lasting always/3 she wrote
her starry-eyed daughter, "for he has found out that you in common
with the rest of Eve's daughters are fond of flattery." It was a charge
Julia could not easily deny. She was a woman, and she was a Gardiner.
Flattery, when it flowed freely and abundantly, was the very fountain
of her emotional strength and happiness. At Old Point Comfort in July
1844 it flowed in torrents.22
While Julia thoroughly enjoyed the deference and attention that
came with being the First Lady of the land, she was not insensitive
to the fact that her husband was under great political strain during
the entire honeymoon. For him it was a time of decision. As Julia
explained it from Sherwood Forest in early July, "In this region of the
country the President's friends are strong and true, but whether he
shall continue as a candidate is a question upon which he is now
deliberating. As to his views the President will soon write to Alexander."
This was the first indication anyone in the Gardiner family had that
the President was contemplating withdrawing himself and his Demo-
cratic-Republican third party from the 1844 campaign. The Gardiners
ii
had simply assumed, as had most of the President's close friends, that
Tyler would continue in the race, win or lose. There is considerable
evidence that they were confident of his success in the tricornered con-
test with Polk and Henry Clay. Nonetheless, it was reassuring to know
that the Gardiners would instantly be privy to the President's innermost
political thoughts, whatever his decision in this instance would be. The
Tyler-Gardiner marriage alliance was destined to be one that was
political as well as social and economic. Because of this, the redoubtable
Juliana could insist with good reason that her daughter learn to "be
a politician and look deep into the affairs of State." Julia learned to be
a politician — rapidly — and her later contribution to the social and po-
litical success of the Tyler administration was no small thing.23
On the sixth of July the President and his bride went up the James
River for a five-day inspection visit to Sherwood Forest, located on the
north bank twenty-seven miles southeast of Richmond. It was a mag-
nificent sixteen-hundred-acre plantation which Tyler had purchased in
1842 as his place of retirement. When Julia first saw it, the ninety-by-
forty-two-foot house, located in a large grove of oaks, was undergoing
the extensive remodeling and enlargement that would bring it to its
present length of three hundred feet. The President's son-in-law, Henry
Lightfoot Jones, and his daughter, Mary Tyler Jones, were temporarily
managing the estate and supervising the construction work of the slave
gangs. The basic work was not scheduled for completion until Decem-
ber 1844 and It would be a full year after that before all the detail
work was finished. When at last it was finished in 1845 it was one of the
most beautiful and impressive homes in Tidewater Virginia.
The morning after their arrival at the plantation, Tyler called
the sixty-odd slaves to the house to greet their new "missus." It was a
solemn moment. The Negroes shuffled their feet and tugged self-con-
sciously at their caps. For a few embarrassed minutes no one spoke.
"Well, how do you like her looks?" the President finally called
to one of his oldest Negroes.
"Oh, she is mighty handsome — just like one doll-baby, by Gov>,"
said the old-timer. The slaves laughed uproariously, the remark being
what Julia correctly recognized as "the quintessence of a negro com-
pliment." 2*
While Tyler talked politics with his friends and constituents in
the area, still contemplating his course of action in the Presidential
canvass, Julia wandered over the house and grounds, trying to decide
what furniture and shrubs would be needed,
. . . directing the Carpenters and mechanics where to make this change and
where this addition. The head carpenter was amazed at my science and the
President acknowledged I understood more about carpentry and architecture
than he did, and he would leave all the arrangements that were to be made
12
entirely to my taste. I intend to make it as pleasant as I can under the cir-
cumstances. A new house I would have arranged and built differently of course.
It will be the handsomest place in the County and I assure you there are
some very fine ones in it. The grove will be made into a park (twenty-five
acres) and stocked with deer. . . . The President says when we walk about
the house "This is for your mother to occupy, this for Margaret, and that for
David and Alexander." . . . How I wish I had you here to talk over my
arrangements for I am sure I don't know what to propose, and in everything
the President appeals to me. In the world, as here, wherever he goes and
whatever is done it is we in all situations he seems only to consider.25
That Tyler was supremely happy with his new bride there is no
doubt. Her beauty, vivacity, good humor, and poise delighted him;
her stamina amazed him. Julia correctly represented his feelings when
she said that "Nothing appears to delight the President more than to
notice the admiration, and to hear people sing my praises." He was
completely captivated by Julia. When John Tyler was happy poetry
invariably flowed from his lips and from his pen. Thus from his honey-
moon with Julia came a final version of the verse ''Sweet Lady,
Awake! )J which he had originally written during their courtship. Sub-
titled "A Serenade Dedicated to Miss Julia Gardiner," the President
revised, polished, and reworked it at the honeymoon cottage at Old
Point Comfort. Julia, her considerable musical talents unimpaired by
her new title and responsibilities, set it to music:
Sweet lady awake, from your slumbers awake,
Weird beings we come o'er hill and through brake
To sing you a song in the stillness of night,
Oh, read you our riddle fair lady aright?
We are sent by the one whose fond heart is your own,
Who mourns in thy absence and sighs all alone.
Alas, he is distant — but tho' far, far away,
He thinks of you, lady, by night and by day.
Sweet lady awake, sweet lady awake!
His hearth, altho' lonely, is bright with your fame,
And therefore we breathe not the breath of his name.
For oh ! if your dreams have response in your tone,
Long since have you known it as well as your own.
We are things of the sea, of the earth, and the air,
But ere you again to your pillow repair,
Entrust us to say you gave ear to our strain,
And were he the minstrel you would listen again.
Sweet lady awake, sweet lady awake!
While it is hardly Gilbert and Sullivan in quality, the ballad remains
the only known musical collaboration of a President and his First
Lady. Although the team of Tyler and Tyler was destined to pose
13
no serious threat to that of Rodgers and Hart, the sentiment of the
President's love for his young wife was sincere,26
Before the return of the honey mooners to Old Point Comfort
from Sherwood Forest on July 10, and well before the honeymoon
trip finally ended at Washington in early August, the gossips were hard
at work discussing the suitability of a marriage between a fifty-four-
year-old man and a twenty-four-year-old woman. Julia's mother re-
ported a typical exchange among several ladies at a resort hotel in
Rockaway, Long Island, which seemed to sum up all the vicious pos-
sibilities. As one of the gossips put it, "Well I never would like to inter-
fere much with inclinations of my daughter in such cases, but I can't
help thinking it was a great sacrifice for such a young and beautiful
belle to make in marrying a man so much older than herself." Others
chimed in with the observations that the President was "not rich either"
and that he had "a large family besides.77
It was not enough to label this, as Juliana promptly did, the
"ignorant gossip ... of our enlightened fashionable society such as con-
gregate at the watering places in this region." Privately and subcon-
sciously the age question also disturbed the Gardiners, the Tylers, and
many of their intimate friends. Elizabeth Tyler Waller had this in her
mind when she wrote to Julia in September of her difficulty adjusting
to any stepmother, even one "many years your senior." J. J. Bailey, a
Gardiner family friend, had teased Julia in 1843 about her developing
romance with the President, repeating a widely held conviction in
Washington society that such a match "would appear like green tendrils
round a gnarled oak or like a wreath of roses on the brow of Saturn —
Julia Gardiner and John Tyler indeed 1" — a remark the socially sen-
sitive Juliana had relayed to her son Alexander in New York with great
concern. Indeed, when Margaret Gardiner first met the President at
a Washington reception in December 1842, she described him to her
brother David as a "most agreeable old gentleman." Subconsciously,
Margaret never overcame this initial impression of Tyler. In a "funny
dream" she reported to Julia in November 1845, she
. . . thought we were all at Newport together with you — awaiting his arrival.
In the midst of the crowd he presented himself just emerged from a regular
spree, so bloated as to be quite unrecognizable. You were so ashamed and
provoked as to take no notice of him. But David went to shake hands and
told him tie always thought he was a young looking man but he was anything
but that now. "Yes," replied the P — in melancholy tones, "I have grown old
in a few days " Was there ever anything so ridiculous? 27
At one point Tyler himself wondered whether the age gap might
not be too broad. Riding in his carriage one day in March 1844 with
his good friend Henry A. Wise, he decided to confide to the Virginia
14
politician his intention to marry a much younger woman. He named
Julia Gardiner and watched closely for Wise's reaction.
"Have you really won her?'7 asked his friend in amazement.
"Yes/' replied the President; "and why should I not?"
"You are too far advanced in life to be imprudent in a love-
scrape/' countered the cautious Wise.
"How imprudent?" Tyler pressed him.
"Easily," said Wise. "You are not only past middle age, but yon
are President of the United States, and that is a dazzling dignity which
may charm a damsel more than the man she marries."
"Pooh I" laughed the President. "Why, my dear sir, I am just full
in my prime!"
Wise was not convinced. To make his point stronger, he told Tyler
the story of a James River planter who had also decided to marry a
much younger woman. The planter finally asked his house slave, Toney,
what he thought of the match.
"Massa, you think you can stand dat?" asked the servant in awe.
"Yes, Toney, why not? I am yet strong, and I can now, as well as
ever I could, make her happy."
"Yes; but Massa," replied Toney, "you is now in your prime,
dat's true; but when she is in her prime, where den, Massa, will your
prime be?" Tyler burst into laughter.28
If Julia or the President ever worried about the thirty-year differ-
ence in their ages, none of their surviving personal letters give any in-
dication of it. Nor is there any evidence to suggest that Julia tortured
herself psychologically with fears of a lengthy widowhood. On the
contrary, she passed off the age question with good humor. There is
no better illustration of this than the lines of a poem she wrote for her
husband in March 1852, on the occasion of his sixty-second birthday:
There may be those with courtier tongue
Who homage pay to me —
But deep the tribute love compels,
With which I bend to thee!
Let ruthless age then, mark thy brow —
It need not touch thy heart —
And what e'er changes time may bring,
I'll love thee as thou art ! ...
Then listen, dearest, to my strain —
And never doubt its truth —
Thy ripen 'd charms are all to me,
Wit I prefer to youth! 2Q
The fears of Henry A. Wise were never realized. Returning from
his ambassadorship to Brazil in the fall of 1847, ne saw Tyler again
for the first time since their carnage ride and conversation in Washing-
ton in March 1844. Wise immediately noticed that included in the
former President's baggage on the river boat that day was a double-
seated wicker baby carriage.
"Aha! it has come to that, has it?" laughed Wise, lifting his eye-
brows.
"Yes," said Tyler; "you see now how right I was; it was no vain
boast when I told you I was in my prime. I have a houseful of goodly
babies budding around me " At the time he had but two, but more
would come along — five more, to be exact.30
In early August the all-too-brief honeymoon ended, and Julia and
the President returned reluctantly to Washington. Tyler had important
political business to attend to, the day-to-day work of the Presidential
office having accumulated during his trip. There was the November
election to think about, an Annual Message to Congress to write, and
the Texas annexation question to reconsider. He had finally decided
to withdraw from the campaign in favor of Young Hickory, and con-
fidential negotiations with the Polk forces to effect this with maximum
advantage to the Tylerites were already under way and would re-
quire his personal attention.
More and more of his time was taken up with his official duties,
and Julia saw little of him for the next few weeks. Since her own social
duties as First Lady would not commence until the Congress recon-
vened in early December, the President suggested she visit New York
in September for a short rest. The coming social season would de-
mand all her energies. Julia agreed and alerted her mother to her pro-
jected homecoming with the plea, "Can't it get into the New York
papers that Mrs. President Tyler is coming to town accompanied by
Mrs. Ex-President Madison, the Secretary of War and lady?" 31
Julia, it was clear, was beginning to live her exciting new role.
The honeymoon with John Tyler was over. The honeymoon with the
idea of being "Mrs. President Tyler" was just beginning. It would last
for forty-five years.
16
THE GARDINERS OF EAST HAMPTON
You must be more cautious in expressing your opin-
ions so freely as it will certainly give you trouble.
— JULIANA MCLACHLAN GARDINER, 1835
The marriage of the aristocratic John Tyler of Virginia to the vivacious
Julia Gardiner of New York brought together two proud and promi-
nent families, each with roots deep in the history and tradition of
America. Whether a Gardiner had married into the Tyler family or a
Tyler into the Gardiner family was a status question each gossiper de-
cided for himself. To George Temple ton Strong, prince of New York
snobs, the point was irrelevant. "I've just heard a rumor," he confided
to his diary, "that infatuated old John Tyler was married today to
one of these large, fleshy Miss Gardiners of Gardiners Island. Poor
unfortunate, deluded old jackass." To others in New York, especially
to those family-conscious souls at or near the Gardiners' social level,
the social and financial "suitability" of the alliance remained a sub-
ject of parlor conversation for months.1
Certainly Julia had no cause to feel social or economic inferiority
in the presence of the Tylers. Nor did she. The Gardiners had far
more material wealth than the Tylers. And while they had produced no
Presidents or even governors, they were secure in the knowledge of
having arrived in America in 1635, a good fifteen years before the first
Tyler reached Virginia. As early as May 3, 1639, they had acquired
Manchonake Island (later called Gardiners Island), the thirty- three-
hundred-acre property in Block Island Sound lying off the eastern tip of
Long Island. Not until January 7, 1653, fourteen years later, had Henry
Tyler, the first of his clan in the New World, received his relatively
modest two-hundred-fifty-four-acre grant at Middle Plantation, Vir-
ginia. From the Gardiner standpoint the Tylers were recently arrived
immigrants — and poor ones at that. As a close student of genealogy,
Julia was confident that none of the Tylers, save Governor John Tyler
of Virginia and his son, the President, had matched the timely and im-
pressive contributions to the nation's history of Lion Gardiner (1599-
1663), founder of the Gardiner line in America.
The European background of Lion Gardiner is blurred. Aside from
his birth in 1599 no detail of his childhood has survived. The names of
his parents are unknown. His social status can only be guessed at. One
English genealogist, Sir Thomas Banks, linked the Gardiners with a
descendant of Robert Fitzwalter, baronial leader in the great struggle
against King John. This generous act had the advantage of identifying
the otherwise obscure Gardiners with the English nobility, the Battle
of Runnymede, and the Magna Charta. Julia naturally favored this
version of her ancestry, and she sought to perpetuate it by naming her
sixth child Robert Fitzwalter. Nonetheless the Banks theory remains a
doubtful hypothesis, no better or worse than the less-impressive tradi-
tion that Lion was descended from a family of bellmakers named
Gardiner who lived near Heddingham Castle in Kent in the early six-
teenth century. It was from Kent that many of the English soldiers
who fought in the Netherlands during the Thirty Years5 War were re-
cruited. In 1635 one of these soldiers was certainly Sergeant Lion
Gardiner, who, in his own words, was "an engineer and master of works
of fortification in the legers of the Prince of Orange in the Low Coun-
tries." Still, the evidence of his humble Kentish origin is scarcely more
than suggestive. Not until 1635, when Lion Gardiner was thirty-six and
on military duty in Holland, does his career take on the solidity of
historical fact.2
In that year he was employed by the Connecticut Company on a
four-year contract at £100 per annum to migrate to Connecticut, there
to build forts and fortifications to protect the threatened colonists from
the Pequot Indians and stem the expansion of the Dutch eastward from
New Amsterdam. Before departing for the distant wilderness he took as
his wife Mary Wilemson of Woerdon, Holland. So impressed was he
with her solid bourgeois background (she was, he later boasted to
posterity, a kinsman of prominent Dutch "burger meesters"), one might
hazard the guess that the general social direction of the adventuresome
sergeant's marriage was rather more up than down.
In any event, Lion Gardiner arrived in Boston from Rotterdam
aboard the 25-ton bark Batcheler on November 28, 1635, having passed
through "many great tempests." He was at once assigned to building a
fort at what is now Saybrook, Connecticut. For the next few years,
principally during the great Pequot War of 1636-1637, he slaughtered
the Indians scientifically. In these engagements he sustained painful
arrow wounds and experienced many other hardships. He was also
18
forced to endure the multiple stupidities of Ms God-fearing Massa-
chusetts superiors who fell on their knees and on the aborigines with
equal frequency and elan. Always an outspoken individualist (a trait
Julia would inherit from him honestly), he came to reject the official
Boston line that the only good Indian was a dead Indian. Instead, he
made a genuine and successful effort to learn the Indian tongue and
understand their culture and their point of view. It was during this
somewhat subversive program of self-education that Lion established
a close personal friendship with Waiandance, a Montauk chief from
eastern Long Island. Indeed, when Gardiner published his critical
Relation of the Pequot War in East Hampton in 1660, he reserved the
main bolt of his wrath not for the ignorant, diseased, half-starving
Indians but for the arrogance of the Massachusetts Bay officials who
provoked the confused savages to war and then made no military
preparations to protect the white settlers. "The Lord be merciful to us
for our extreme pride and base security, which cannot but stink before
the Lord," said Lion in disgust.3
When his contract with the Connecticut Company expired in July
1639, Lion settled down on Manchonake Island. He had purchased the
island from the Montauks through the good offices of his friend
Waiandance in May of that year "ffor ten coates of trading cloth." The
beautiful property contained large fertile fields, a pond, harbor, inlets,
beaches, woods, and breathtaking scenery. It was alive with ducks and
deer. For ten pieces of cloth it was one of the great real estate bargains
of colonial times. In March 1640 the Montauk contract was supple-
mented by a deed from the Earl of Stirling, grantee of Charles I,
transferring the island to Lion Gardiner for an annual consideration
of £5. This action marked the formal planting of the Gardiner tree in
America. For more than three hundred twenty years, thirteen genera-
tions of Lion's descendants have, with uncommon tenacity — through
wars, depressions, and taxations — preserved and maintained Gardiners
Island. It remains today the only seventeenth-century royal land grant
in America to come down intact in the hands of the same family.
When Lion moved Mary and his two children from Saybrook to the
island in 1639 it marked the first English settlement in what is now
New York state. There in 1641 was born the first English baby in New
York, his third child and second daughter, Elizabeth. She was a strange
girl who died in childbirth in 1658 muttering semicoherent witchcraft
charges against one Goodie Garlick of East Hampton, Long Island.4
By 1663, the year he died, Lion Gardiner was full of honor, dignity,
and real estate. Throughout the 16505 he had acquir-ed by gift and
purchase from the friendly Montauks extensive lands around East
Hampton and in eastern Long Island. In 1653 he moved his family to
East Hampton to escape the isolation of the offshore island, leaving his
farm there to be run by tenants. On the day of his death he was a
19
man of substance. Builder of forts, conqueror of Indians, historian of
the Pequot War, soldier, engineer, linguist, individualist, Lion Gardiner
was no ancestor to scorn.
Julia Gardiner Tyler had no need to apologize for her family
origins. Although a full century and a half separated his death and her
birth, she was a worthy child of old Lion. The Gardiner individuality,
outspokenness, and love of life and adventure ran strong in her. So too
did the material acquisitiveness of the Gardiners and the inordinate
concern of all the family for proper marriage alliances. Her physical
stamina and will to prevail over all adversity had a firm genealogical
basis. Indeed, when Lion was disinterred for reburial in 1886, two and
a quarter centuries after his death, his massive six-foot skeleton was
still intact, bones white and hard, teeth still firmly set in powerful jaws.
Like the great family he had launched, he too had prevailed.5
Gardiners Island remained the emotional home of all the Gardiners
in America as they married, multiplied, and moved away from the
island and from East Hampton to various parts of Connecticut, Massa-
chusetts, and New York. Most of the island's numerous proprietors
tended its rich fields and large flocks with care and concern. Some of
the descendants of Lion were wastrels and spendthrifts who exploited,
scarred, or neglected the property. Some were psychological incompe-
tents and alcoholics. But the majority were respected farmers, business-
men, and lawyers. And all regarded the island as the symbol which
gave the family its unity and identity.
With careful planning and genealogical exactitude the island was
passed from eldest son to eldest son down through the centuries. When
a transfer could not be accomplished legally, or if the logical recipient
of the proprietorship refused the bequest or was too young to exercise
it responsibly, family conferences determined in what manner the next
eligible son should become proprietor, or "Lord of the Isle" as the
owners began styling themselves grandly in the mid-eighteenth century.
There were, to be sure, some frictions in this, but the complex process
of title transference was accomplished over the years with an amazing
smoothness and lack of rancor. Happily, each generation produced
sons.6
Other problems arose. Not the least of these was the supply of
labor to work the island. Lion had tended his fields with white farm
hands hired in Saybrook. When the Indians were expelled from Long
Island, New England, and eastern New York state and the march of
the frontier westward opened up cheap and ample lands to white farm
laborers, a grave shortage of help developed on Gardiners Island. Some
time during the seventeenth century (no firm date is possible) Negro
and Indian slaves were imported to work the land and tend the large
herds of sheep and cattle. Thus David Gardiner (1691-1751), the
fourth proprietor, could and did stipulate in his will that his wife,
20
Mehetable, receive from Ms estate "one negro wench as she shall make
choice out of all my negro slaves." At least sixteen Negro and Indian
slaves were on the island at the time of the American Revolution, and
as late as 1816 the will of John Lyon Gardiner (1770-1816), seventh
proprietor, showed fourteen slaves on the property. All evidence points
to the Gardiners as conscientious and paternalistic slavemasters ; but
they were slavemasters nevertheless. Only when slavery was outlawed
in New York state in 1817 were the slaves on the island gradually
manumitted. Exactly when the last slave there received his freedom is
not known, certainly by 1827, at the end of the grace period allowed for
emancipation. During the 18205, therefore, the work of the estate came
to be performed by resident white tenants and by farm hands hired
seasonally from the Long Island mainland. This arrangement survived
well into the twentieth century.7
Given this background, there was understandably little hostility
toward slavery in the Gardiner family at the time of Julia's birth in
1820. The New York Herald correspondent who described the Presi-
dent's new wife in 1844 as a "Northern bride with Southern principles/7
called attention not to a conversion in Julia's thinking occasioned by
her marriage to John Tyler but to a fixed attitude toward slavery that
was part of her family heritage. On the great slavery question that
tore the nation asunder in 1861 the Rebel Julia was never a " traitor "
to her background or upbringing. Ten years before her birth on Gardi-
ners Island the property was operated in much the same manner as
any large and prosperous Virginia plantation. A thirty-three-hundred-
acre farm that boasted thirty-five hundred sheep and a hundred head of
cattle, stabled sixty horses, produced annually one hundred hogs, two
thousand loads of hay, and thousands of pounds of wool and required a
labor force of eighty to a hundred men during the harvest and shearing
season was, indeed, a plantation comparable to the great establishments
in the South.8
By 1820 the island had developed a history and a folklore peopled
with pirates and naval captains. In 1699, during the proprietorship of
the jovial and much-married third "Lord of the Isle," John Gardiner
(1661-1738), the famous Captain William Kidd dropped anchor in
Gardiners Bay, and was entertained by the proprietor while his men
were secreting a treasure valued at £4500. Although the booty was re-
covered after Kidd's arrest, the island long remained a mecca for
gullible treasure-seekers who regularly hacked away at the earth in
pursuit of Kidd's gold. In 1728 the celebrated Block Island pirate,
Captain Paul Williams, visited the island, sacked the main house,
wounded the proprietor, and made off with the family silver. No less
costly was the visit in 1774 of Captain Abijah Willard's squadron en
route to Boston to supply General Thomas Gage. The British com-
mander sent ashore a provisioning party which seized $4000 worth of
21
livestock and food. Similarly, British Admiral Harriot Arbuthnot
requisitioned provisions on the island with such vigor in 1780 that by
war's end the seventh proprietor, John Lyon Gardiner, reported that
there was "scarcely personal property left sufficient to pay back taxes."
Nor did the island fare much better during the War of 1812. At the
outset of that contest Lord Nelson's great Captain, Sir Thomas Hardy,
hove to in Gardiners Bay and again plundered the island's livestock.
<clt is not my wish," he politely wrote John Lyon Gardiner in July 1813,
"to distress the Individuals on the Coasts of the United States who
may be in the power of the British Squadron." But the sheep and cattle
were seized nonetheless. Stories of pirates, treasure, and British depreda-
tions fascinated Julia Gardiner as she grew to young womanhood in
East Hampton.9
Julia's father, David Gardiner, was the great-grandson of David
Gardiner (1691-1751), fourth proprietor of the island. Little is known
of his early life save that he was born in East Hampton in 1784. He
was the second of the five children of Captain Abraham Gardiner and
his wife, Phoebe Dayton, both of East Hampton. Throughout his
childhood the reigning "Lord of the Isle" was his cousin, John Lyon
Gardiner, the seventh proprietor. As a young boy and student at the
local Clinton Academy David often sailed out to the island to hunt
ducks and search for Captain Kidd's nonexistent treasure. In 1800 he
went to Yale and was graduated in the famous class of 1804 which
numbered among its members the brilliant young John C. Calhoun of
South Carolina. Later that year he was in New York City reading law
in the office of Sylvanus Miller. From 1807 until his marriage in 1815
David Gardiner practiced law in New York.10
Practically nothing is known of these early New York years in
the life of Julia's father except that he maintained a profound inter-
est in Gardiners Island, escaped the yellow fever epidemic which struck
the city in 1809, and opposed the embargo and non-importation eco-
nomic foreign policies of Presidents Jefferson and Madison as disastrous
to business. In 1814 he marched out with the local lawyers when they
contributed, as a professional group, two days' voluntary labor on
the Brooklyn Heights fortifications. This duty was demanded when it
appeared that a British fleet might descend on the city. David thor-
oughly enjoyed the excitement and the patriotic fervor the enemy threat
stimulated. But he was not skilled with spade, shovel, and pickaxe, and
his two twelve-hour manual-labor stints on Harlem Heights and Brook-
lyn Heights left him blistered and exhausted.11
It is known that David Gardiner worried a great deal about his
financial future during his days as a young lawyer. In 1809 he wrote
that his
22
prospects are more promising than they have appeared at any other time —
and should they be realized I hope to escape the trammels of dependence —
for I believe that as long as a person is in such a situation it is impossible to
be happy, and for the last two years my feelings have been more tortured with
the idea of dependence than all the pain I have ever before experienced
My thoughts have been so continually and imperceptibly drawn to the sub-
ject that it has fixed a gloom upon my mind which every exertion has been
frequently unable to move I have never possessed that nerve or that
indifference to look with contempt upon the superciliousness of a creditor
wrhom the emptiness of my pocket placed above me. . . . Indeed the day
which finds me able to satisfy my pecuniary demands, or as the phrase is,
places me above the world, shall be kept by me as a day of Jubilee.12
This deep-rooted fear of economic insolvency was one David Gardi-
ner passed, only slightly diluted, to his four children. They too were
often inclined to regard human worth and social acceptability in terms
of money. And like their father, their own fear of material insecurity
was a strong, constant, and dominant force in their lives — so strong that
David Lyon and Julia were willing in 1865-1868 to tear the Gardiner-
Tyler family alliance apart in a jackal-like struggle over their mother's
will.
David Gardiner's patiently awaited "day of Jubilee" finally arrived
in 1815 when he married the wealthy young Juliana McLachlan, the
sixteen-year-old daughter of Michael McLachlan, a Scots emigre to
Jamaica in the West Indies following the Battle of Culloden in 1746.
The clan McLachlan had chosen the wrong side in that civil struggle, and
young Michael's change of hemisphere was not entirely voluntary. How
long he remained in Jamaica, what business he undertook there, and
what year he arrived in New York City is not known. It is established
only that his wife gave birth to two children, Alexander, birthdate
unknown, and Juliana. Juliana was born in New York on February 8,
1799.
It is also recorded that Michael McLachlan prospered as the owner
of a brewery in Chatham Street and that he wisely invested his profits
in real estate in lower Manhattan. Thus, when Alexander McLachlan
died in 1819, Juliana came into possession of thirteen valuable pieces
of commercial and residential property located on Chatham, Oliver,
Greenwich, and Harrison streets. These produced at the time an annual
rental income of $6000 to $7000, and during Juliana's long tenure of
ownership they steadily increased in market value from $130,000 to
$182,000. Used to material comfort as she was, Juliana would spend
her lifetime advising young ladies of her acquaintance, especially her
own daughters, not "to marry any man without means. It would answer
very well for a young lady who had a fortune in her own right but not
otherwise." 13
23
Juliana McLacHan Gardiner was a forceful, opinionated young
lady who completely dominated her husband. An excellent mother to
the four children who made their appearances, and much loved by them,
she nevertheless ran her home and her offspring with an iron hand.
Possessed of a sharp sense of social propriety and an ear keenly tuned
to imagined snubs, she regarded as perpetual occupations the main-
tenance of social exclusiveness and the consolidation of social gains. Her
interest in cleanliness, precision, and order amounted to a passion.
Spring cleaning in her home was a ritual conducted with religious over-
tones. She hired and fired her terrified Irish servants with monotonous
regularity. She was sharp and short-tempered with those she considered
inferior, firm and fair with those she regarded her equals. She con-
sidered no one her superior. Her morality was of the strict Calvinist
variety, intolerant and absolute. She had a quick temper and a testiness
that stemmed from a lifelong struggle with migraine headaches which
could prostrate her for days at a time. Still, she was something of a
hypochondriac. She constantly experimented with unnecessary medica-
tions, often with painful results. She was also the family's amateur phy-
sician, consulted on every illness. Difficult and cantankerous as could
be, she would do anything to advance the interests and comforts of her
children. She loved them, worried about them, and toward them she
was utterly selfless. They were permitted, however, to make no decision,
however minor, without her advice and counsel. A peculiar mixture of
tyrant and chaperone, autocrat and nursemaid, Juliana McLachlan
Gardiner was the dominant force in the lives of her children and in the
life of her placid husband.
Following her marriage to David Gardiner, Juliana turned over to
him the management of her Manhattan properties. He in turn em-
ployed various agents, notably Jacob G. Dychman, to collect the rents
and look after the necessary maintenance. Within a few months after
his wedding he abandoned the practice of law and moved his bride to
East Hampton, preparatory to taking up residence on Gardiners Island.
Except for managing his wife's business affairs in the city and oc-
casionally providing legal advice for other members of the Gardiner
family , David Gardiner retired at the age of thirty- two. Julia accurately
described him after 1822 as a man "possessing means and leisure." The
only known gainful activity he subsequently undertook was the man-
agement of Gardiners Island. This was a temporary occupation which
began in 1816. It terminated in 1822 when he purchased a house in
East Hampton and settled his family there.14
The Gardiners Island opportunity was presented when the seventh
proprietor, John Lyon Gardiner, died in 1816. His widow, Sarah Gris-
wold Gardiner, offered to lease the island to her cousin David. The
heir apparent, David Johnson Gardiner, was a boy of twelve at the
time, still a student at Clinton Academy in East Hampton. The lease
24
price ranged from $2500 to $2900 per annum, a nominal figure con-
sidering the agricultural potential of the island. David Gardiner thus
became the regent of the island until the eighth proprietor reached
maturity. As his farm manager and overseer he hired Burnet Mulford
of East Hampton. Mulford did the work.
Just how David fared financially in Ms agrarian undertaking can-
not accurately be determined, although it is doubtful that he profited
from his stewardship. These were difficult years for the island. Live-
stock appropriated by British naval commanders during the War of
1812 had not been fully replaced, and after 1817 the island labor-supply
system experienced the shock of manumission. That Gardiner poured
more capital into the project than he took out is suggested by his
mortgage and account records. As late as 1828 he was still involved
in a nagging correspondence over the unpaid debts and confused in-
ventory balances of his period of tenure. It seems probable, then, that
David Gardiner's brief career as a gentleman farmer cost him more
than he earned. Certainly he was not a very efficient agriculturist.
His most significant crop during his six years' residence on the island
was three of his four children; David Lyon was born there on May 23,
1816; Alexander on November 3, 1818; and Julia on either May 4
or July 23, 1820. Margaret, the youngest, was born in East Hampton
on May 21, i822.15
Turning from gentleman farming to gentleman politics after his
removal from Gardmers Island to East Hampton in 1822, David was
elected to the New York state senate in 1824 to represent the First
District of New York (Suffolk County). At Albany he identified him-
self with the John Quincy Adams political faction, and he was re-
elected to the senate in 1825, 1826, and 1827 on his record of conserva-
tive opposition to the emerging Martin Van Buren brand of popular
democracy based on machine politics, patronage manipulation, social re-
form, and state-financed public works. His four- term career as a state
senator was, on balance, undistinguished. In general, he upheld the
rights of the individual and his property against all encroachments, real
or imagined, by the state. Thus he supported the exemption of con-
scientious objectors from militia duty, and he opposed legislation re-
ducing the legal interest rate in New York state from 7 to 6 per cent.
As a junior member of the state senate his committee assignments were
not important, nor did they afford him an opportunity to influence
legislation at the committee level. On one occasion, however, he was
instrumental in killing in committee a bill that sought to control wolves
and panthers through a bounty incentive system. He voted for the
panthers, presumably on the ground that bounty payments were crude
subsidies which interfered with the inalienable rights of citizens to be
eaten by wild animals. Not surprisingly, the popular Jacksonian up-
heaval of 1828 swept him from office. Nevertheless, for the rest of Ms
25
life he called himself Senator Gardiner and he always listed his occupa-
tion as " Senator." 16
Following his involuntary retirement from the New York senate
in 1828, little is known of David Gardiner until his re-emergence in
Washington in 1842 as the father of the celebrated Julia. Occasional
glimpses during these fourteen years reveal a country squire ex-
pensively dressed in moleskin shooting coat and black velvet vest, an
anti-Jacksonian complaining to Washington officials of poor postal serv-
ice in East Hampton, and a devoted trustee of Clinton Academy, the
school at which his sons David Lyon and Alexander received their
preparation for Princeton. During this period he also began his research
into Gardiner family genealogy and into the history of East Hampton.
From this contemplation of the family navel he derived great satisfac-
tion, Margaret once reporting him in his study on a rainy Monday
afternoon happily "buried in old writings, records, deeds, wills, etc." 17
David Gardiner's active interest in politics never waned. In 1832 he
ran again for the state senate, entering vigorously into the Whig cam-
paign against Jacksonianism on Long Island. During the canvass he
was called upon to distribute $200 in party slush funds among the
Whig faithful in Suffolk County in an attempt to get the entire anti-
Jackson vote to the polls. He was therefore dismayed to learn in
November that in spite of his handouts the Whigs had "lost the
county stock and fluke," the popularity of Jackson having "carried
all before it." His own candidacy for the senate was unsuccessful by
some two hundred votes. "I extremely regret," said his cousin Sarah
Dering, whose father was Jackson's Collector of Customs in Sag Har-
bor, "that some of my best young friends here and elsewhere, such as
the Gardiners . . . are so far led astray by their aristocratic newspa-
pers." 18
Gardiner's distrust of Andrew Jackson and the new popular de-
mocracy of the 18303 deepened with the President's removal of the
federal Treasury deposits from the Bank of the United States in
October 1833. The act severely shook the credit structure of the Man-
hattan Bank in New York where David Gardiner normally borrowed
money which was secured on expected rents from Juliana's properties.
Jackson's move inconvenienced and angered him. In the off-year elec-
tions of 1834 he again worked vigorously for the Whigs on Long Island.
In 1838, however, he turned down a projected Whig nomination for a
Suffolk County judgeship with the plea "It is now nearly or quite
twenty years since I left the bar and I have grown rusty in all its pro-
ceedings . . . new principles of law have been adopted and old principles
set afloat." His rejection of office in no way compromised the continuing
political education of his sons. By 1840 he had succeeded in conveying
intact his conservative political principles to both David Lyon and
Alexander.19
Two years apart in age, the sons of David Gardiner were quite
different in temperament and character. Alexander was quick, bright,
extroverted, and outspoken. Attractive to women, he thoroughly en-
joyed mingling in the social world. He had a sharp sense of humor and
a first-rate mind, and he became an excellent lawyer. In addition, he
had a natural talent for business and for financial speculation. He en-
joyed the excitement and the pressures of politics, and when given the
opportunity by John Tyler in 1844 he entered into the New York
political arena with skill and enthusiasm. He was an energetic, am-
bitious, effervescent, dynamic, and sometimes impetuous human being.
Intellectually he was the most capable member of the family. He and
his sister Julia had much in common. They had the same interests,
laughed at the same things, shared the same sense of the ridiculous, and
reacted in much the same manner to the foibles and pretensions of
people around them.
David Lyon was quite the opposite. He was quiet and introverted.
In the presence of women he was shy and backward. He preferred
shooting ducks on Montauk Point to practicing law in New York or to
flirting with the Gotham ladies. He had little skill and no interest in
the law. And while he did have some feeling for business, he thoroughly
disliked managing the family real estate in New York. As a part-time
gentleman farmer he was unsuccessful. Stolid and stable, sometimes
pompous and stuffy, he lacked imagination and incisiveness of mind,
He also permitted his strong-willed mother to dominate his private life
rather than create family tensions by opposing her desires. Like all
the members of the Gardiner family, economic security was vitally
important to him. But he insisted on life's material comforts without
displaying any militant acquisitiveness. On only one occasion in his
life did he truly bestir himself, traveling to California in 1849 to mine
gold, and that failing (as it did), to mine the miners. As a shopkeeper
and real estate speculator in San Francisco and San Diego he had
modest success. This was the only real work he ever tried. Most of his
seventy-six years on earth were years of semi-retirement. When he fi-
nally married in 1860, at forty- three, it was to a lady of great wealth and
property. At that point he ceased doing anything at all. With all his
impassiveness, however, David Lyon Gardiner was no dolt. Julia discov-
ered this to her sorrow in 1865 when, much to her surprise, he ener-
getically contested his mother's deathbed will which, under suspicious
circumstances, had named Julia the principal beneficiary.
David Lyon was more like his sister Margaret than his brother
Alexander. While he had none of Margaret's sense of humor or devilish-
ness and little of her independence and charm, he was closer to her in
temperament than either of them was to the personality whirlwind that
was Julia or the Roman candle that was Alexander. David followed in
his father's footsteps in his lack of any urgency or sense of direction,
27
his uncritical acceptance of the alleged privileges of wealth and family
background, and in his willingness to play the role of the English coun-
try squire. Within the immediate family circle, then, Alexander was the
brilliant and extroverted, Julia the unpredictable stormy petrel, Mar-
garet the quiet freethinker, gracious and dependable, and David Lyon
the phlegmatic and retiring.
David Lyon and Alexander both attended Princeton. David entered
the college in 1833; Alexander followed him to Nassau Hall a year later.
David Lyon's career at the school was neither eventful nor memorable.
He liked the place well enough, but he missed his duck hunting, stood
apart from his classmates, and — like all college students in all eras of
history — he constantly pleaded for and spent more money than his
father thought necessary. When the more imaginative Alexander reached
Princeton in 1834 the two collegians planned and executed joint raids
on the parental money bag with the precision of general staff officers.
Scarcely a letter moved from East Hampton to New Jersey without
containing extra spending money for some allegedly vital project
dreamed up by the brothers. Naturally, each ten-dollar check from
home was accompanied by the fatherly lecture, likewise as old as formal
education itself, on the values of thrift and frugality and the need for
greater academic effort. "Bend down to your studies with a resolution
to accomplish whatever industry well directed can effect in scholarship,"
their father demanded. "Do not be content with a medium standing —
if you cannot reach the top at least strive to approach it." 20
The Princeton of the mid- 18303 offered no academic frills and few
material comforts. The physical task of reaching the college from New
York was itself difficult and harrowing. Juliana angrily reported herself
"be-splattered with mud by the time we reached here" on one of her
infrequent visits to Princeton while her sons were in residence. The
rooms in the dormitory and in boardinghouses in town were scarcely
luxurious and the Gardiner boys complained continually of cold quar-
ters, plugged fireplaces, and Spartan surroundings. The academic regi-
men was as rigorous as the weather, the curriculum as bare and classical
as the room furnishings. Alexander found his studies "difficult and
tedious" and wished that instead of theoretical mathematics, which
"agrees badly with me," he could study navigation and surveying,
"something that would be far more useful to us hereafter." Happily, the
social life of Princeton agreed with him better. He took part in various
student pranks and capers, and he flirted outrageously with the young
ladies imported to the campus for the dances. From these undergradu-
ate releases the dour David Lyon remained aloof.21
Politically, the college community, town and gown, was conserva-
tive, Whig, and anti- Jackson. In March 1834, for example, students
joined townspeople to protest Old Hickory's removal of the Treasury
deposits and to urge their immediate restoration. This political-economic
28
orientation was quite in keeping with what the young Gardiners had
learned in their own parlor at home, and they were exposed to nothing
in the Princeton curriculum that caused them to doubt the tenets of
their Whig catechism. "Old Jackson is playing the mischief with the
banks in this State," complained an exercised David Lyon to his equally
exercised father.22
The intellectual safety of the curriculum was guaranteed the pa-
trons of the college. Save for Alexander's quaintly dissonant opinion
that modern American women could "learn many useful, becoming and
profitable lessons from the females of the barbarian nations" (a view
he derived from a reading of Tacitus and Caesar), there is little evi-
dence that either of the undergraduate Gardiners experienced any
significant challenge to the ideas and attitudes they brought to Prince-
ton with them. Thus Alexander in his Fourth of July oration at the
college in 1838 could point boastfully to the decisive impact of the
American Revolution on struggles for human freedom in Ireland, Po-
land, France, Greece, Canada, Texas, and Belgium and predict that in
the future these same principles "must, and will extend over the whole
surface of the globe." In the same breath, however, he chastised Ameri-
cans who demanded the abolition of Negro slavery as dupes of "cunning
and disorganizing demagogues from other lands," and charged that
their agitations "violated the rights of property and person, and
trampled upon the laws of this country." To Alexander Gardiner, at
the age of twenty, the educational process had no relevance or applica-
tion to such highly controversial subjects as the slavery question.
Formal education was the key that unlocked the golden door to status,
power, and wealth — no more. "Be not deceived as to the importance of
knowledge," he stoutly maintained. "Who are they that govern the
land? Who are they that direct enterprise? Who are they that accumu-
late wealth? Behold the triumphs of the educated!" Nothing at Prince-
ton in 1834-1838 disabused him of this notion, and the viewpoint is
not unknown among Nassau undergraduates even today.23
While her brothers endured the rigors of Princeton, Julia made her
own way in the educational and social world at Madame N. D. Cha-
garay's Institute for young ladies on Houston Street in New York City.
It was a fashionable finishing school for the daughters of wealthy and
socially prominent New York families. If Princeton shielded the young
men of these proud clans from the raw realities of contemporary Ameri-
can social, political, and economic life, Madame Chagaray shielded
their sisters from life itself. At 412 Houston Street the world of sex,
poverty, sin, and exploitation was officially nonexistent. Instead, the
curriculum turned delicately on music, French, literature, ancient his-
tory, arithmetic, and composition — nothing controversial, nothing tran-
scending the superficially literate polish the young ladies were specifi-
cally sent there to acquire.
29
Julia was entered at Madame Chagaray's in April 1835. There she
remained as one of the forty boarding students through the 1836-1837
school year. She very likely attended the 1837-1838 session as well,
although there is no certain evidence that she did. Throughout this
period, Eliza Gardiner Brumley, a "naturally refined" family cousin,
formerly of East Hampton, looked after young Julia's progress and
helped her with her problems. When the rules permitted absence from
the school premises, Julia regularly visited the Reuben Brumley home
on Bleecker Street. And when her brothers came through town from
Princeton en route home for visits or vacations they would stop to see
their sister and take her on shopping expeditions. In spite of these
family contacts Julia was desperately homesick at first, and she
pleaded to be allowed to return to East Hampton. This feeling soon
passed, and within a few months she found herself more bored and
lonesome at home than in the bustle and activity of the school.24
From East Hampton to the Chagaray Institute came a steady
stream of detailed maternal advice. Juliana was not one to leave much
to young Julia's imagination. A fifteen-year-old girl needed constant
counsel from home, even down to advice on ten-cent purchases:
You must be more cautious in expressing your opinions so freely as it will
certainly give you trouble. Do not say anyone is not good looking. Nothing is
more offensive or unlady-like You must engage yourself about your
studies and make all the progress you possibly can. You must also aim at
being correct and take an independent stand as it will never answer for you
to lean too much upon your companions — be polite and pleasant to them all.
. . . When you walk out take no money except what you will want to use as
you may lose it I place great confidence in your propriety but you can-
not be too cautious. If you accept the invitations of your friends and they
inquire with interest how you like your school if you cannot approve of
everything do not condemn anything. Open your heart to your parents
only. . . . The account you gave of your expenses I must say was not
altogether satisfactory I think [the hair net] was a foolish purchase
although I excuse it as everybody has something to learn by experience.25
With all her nagging, Juliana was as excited as her daughter by the
approach of young Julia's first formal dance. She entered into the
preparation of the necessary clothing with zest. Since she and Julia were
about the same size she decided to contribute one of her best white
formal dresses to the cause. And after the obliging Eliza Brumley had
taken it in a bit at the waist, Julia was ready for her social debut. Her
breathless description of the event of Friday evening, May 21, 1835,
revealed it as the high point of her teens. At the age of fifteen Julia was
already beginning to evidence something of the poise and sophistication
John Tyler later found so attractive:
The 2ist was a memorable evening. Our Soiree has taken place and is finished
to my great comfort for I was tired of thinking about it. You would have
30
foeen surprised to have seen how very much the young ladies [day scholars]
-were dressed. The boarders were not decked off in quite such style but
sufficiently so I assure you. I presume you would like to know how / was
dressed. I will begin. Pearl earrings, your buckle, and a beautiful bouquet of
flowers in my bosom. It was composed of minunet [sic], lily of the valley,
lover's wreath, a geranium flower and leaf. Mrs. Cowdrey (Mrs. B[rumley]'s
next door neighbor) and herself made it. There was also a rosebud — it was
"beautiful! None in the room could compare with mine. I was the only one
in the room that had the lily of the valley and minunet [sic]. My dress
looked very well indeed among white satins, silks and lace dresses. Five hun-
dred were invited but between three and four hundred only made their appear-
ance as the night was stormy. The company did not break up til half past
three at night and we were none of us in bed before five. There was an entire
band of music consisting of Harp, piano, viola, cello, etc., etc., etc. I was
perfectly delighted, dancing every cotillion but one. It is a long time since I
have enjoyed myself so much. . . .26
It was during these years at Madame Chagaray's that Julia came
gradually to understand the complicated mores of intricate maneuver,
ambiguous pursuit, and feigned artlessness that comprised the flirtation-
courtship-marriage strategy of mid-nineteenth-century American women.
There was nothing in the Chagaray curriculum that dealt with this. It
just came naturally to Julia, who discovered at the age of fifteen that
it was important to a woman of her social class that her prospective
"husband be "a very fine young man and have considerable property' ';
but she also insisted that he be "good looking" and possess great "con-
versational powers." She was still very young. By the time she was
seventeen she had become far more sophisticated about the economic
realities of the tribal mating dance. When she was twenty she was so
adept at attracting hot-blooded suitors that her family whisked her
•off to Europe for a cooling-off period. Nothing like a damp cathedral
to cool reciprocated ardor.
Margaret did not experience the social advantages of Madame
Chagaray's Institute. She was, as a result, less cynical about men and
marriage, and she naively insisted that love should play a major role in
the process. She would always feel this way. At her own boarding
school she made few friends and she attracted no beaux of suitable de-
meanor. Juliana was wholly dissatisfied with the institution. "I believe
the company [there] is only a middling one," she told Julia in 1837.
'"I shall not desire her return after this term." 27
By 1839 Julia and Margaret had completed what formal education
they were to receive and were at home again in East Hampton. Alex-
ander and David Lyon were in New York City reading law. David Lyon
had drifted into law rather casually after leaving Princeton in 1837. As
an undergraduate he had shown no interest in the subject and his
decision to pursue it professionally was an arbitrary one. Alexander,
on the other hand, took it seriously, worked hard at his books, and
31
prepared with diligence for the difficult bar examinations. When he
passed these with distinction in May 1842 and modestly conveyed the
news of his success to East Hampton, Julia reported the entire family
"very agreeably relieved." She could not, however, resist the tempta-
tion to chide her brother: "How over-modest were you in your account
of the examination. ... I think when one produces a sensation there is
no harm in blowing the trumpet to one's family . . . this is the principle
upon which I always act." 2S
The financial burden of his sons' legal educations was undertaken
by David Gardiner. He sent them money for their room, board, and
clothing; and when their perpetual pleas of dire poverty became too
heartrending, he provided spending money as well. When the two
brothers finally opened their own law office in Wall Street in June 1842
they attracted so little business they were forced to rely further on their
father's bounty. Not until May 1843 did the young lawyers begin to
command even a minimum living wage, and this modest success so
impressed Alexander that Margaret warned him he "must not get too
much excited but be as composed as possible." 29
During these three years of legal study and enforced financial
prudence, David Lyon and Alexander moved from boardinghouse to
boardinghouse searching for inexpensive accommodations consistent
with their mother's insistence on the cultural advantages of a socially
agreeable company. Variously they lived on Dye, Houston, and Cham-
bers streets, and at one point in 1842 they contemplated a move to
Madame Garcia's boarding establishment on Leonard Street because
French was spoken at table. Juliana had very positive opinions about
New York City boardinghouses. She urged the proposed move to
Leonard Street because she had heard that Commodore Charles Stew-
art's son and other acceptable people boarded there and that skill in
conversational French could be rapidly acquired. "Don't be too sharp
about your bargaining" with Madame Garcia, she warned, "as it may
give an unfavorable impression and nothing is gained by it." She felt
that her young sons, now in their early and middle twenties, required
her constant advice on the wicked ways of the world, and nowhere more
needfully than in the area of boardinghouse morality. "Those houses
are not always entirely select," she cautioned Alexander. "There is a
great mixture and a great many husbands seeking young ladies A
very general and rather distant politeness is all that is necessary until
you find them out and then very likely you will wish to be still more
distant." 30
Alexander was not interested in ladies of the sort pursued and
caught by boardinghouse Lotharios — or if he was he wisely kept the
information from his hidebound mother. But he was interested in girls
and he pursued them relentlessly. One of these was Mary Livingston.
32
Encouraged in his efforts by Juliana, he called at the Livingston house
time after time only to be told that Mary was busy or "out." When
he did manage to see her she would tell him she had "been out of town
engaged in a little business/' an explanation Alexander rightly regarded
as "very mysterious." So persistent was the young swain and so atten-
tive and polite was he to her mother (always sound strategy) that Mrs.
Livingston finally told him confidentially, "Yes, Mary is out sometimes,
Mr. Gardiner, but then you know the ladies often say they are out when
they are not — you've lived in the City long enough to find this out.'3
She conveyed this hint to Alexander "as full as ever of smiles, winks,
nods, craft and mystery." A passing interest in Miss Ann Ware was
quickly dashed when Julia observed that she had "a fine head of hair
and a quite symmetrical petite figure," but "as for her wealth Pa does
not believe a word of it." Next in an unending line came Miss Julia
Lane, who elicited from Alexander love letters strewn with such death-
less phrases as "To share with thee prosperity and adversity ... to have
thee to cheer, to inspire ... oh! priceless treasure!"31
Alexander's social life in the city was a strenuous round of formal
calls, cotillions, and suppers, most of which the bashful David Lyon
avoided. "I have not yet joined the dance," David Lyon confessed, "my
time having generally been otherwise occupied." To Julia and Margaret,
marooned in distant East Hampton, Alexander boastingly recounted
his social and romantic conquests and sent to his sisters a steady stream
of local gossip — what beaux were pursuing what belles; who was en-
gaged, married, or divorced; friends seen and greeted in lower Broad-
way; and the financial status of various eligible maidens and bachelors.
Most of this was trivia. Some of it was caustic and snobbish. But all
of it was extremely important to the isolated sisters.32
To be sure, some of the gossip Alexander overheard in the city was
extremely vicious. As he came to learn "the social secrets of the fash-
ionable cliques," he was distressed at how malevolent the in-fighting
could be, how like a barracuda tank was the social maneuvering of the
New York elite. Gradually he came to hate the "ill-feeling in which they
habitually indulge," and the "under-hand whispering by which they
endeavor to put down those whom envy and fear prompt them to hate."
His mother's opinion on the ceaseless backbiting was less troubled and
more philosophical. It was, she told him, "exactly in character with that
set of New Yorkers and always has been." Alexander must learn to
live with it.33
The detailed reports of the goings and comings of the fashionable
set in town caused Julia and Margaret to feel even more removed from
the mainstream of passing events. They begged their brothers to send
them the New York newspapers and magazines and every fragment of
gossip they could collect. Every social scandal and every character
33
assassination they instantly devoured and commented upon by return
mail, demanding more. "Tell us all the news," Julia implored, "even the
tidbits." In 1839-1840 theirs was a vicarious social life.34
In return for the edifying services of their brothers the girls could
offer little. There was simply no news available of comparable titillation
in East Hampton. Margaret lamented on one occasion that she could
not fill a single page since absolutely nothing had happened in the
sleepy village. Julia, on another occasion, confessed that she had
"drained the weekly stock of news most completely. It is indeed flat
and stale and unprofitable. You must read it with good grace and upon
the principle of 'take what you can get/ for I certainly get what I can."
The Sunday sermons at the local Presbyterian church provided the girls
no conversational ammunition beyond the laconic report that the Rev-
erend Mr. Samuel R. Ely's homiletics ranged from "so-so" to "perfectly
intolerable." Thus when a group of white toughs beat an East Hampton
Negro half to death in the street in front of the Gardiner home for an
alleged impertinence, Julia was grateful for the opportunity to write a
detailed account of the rare excitement, concluding with the observation
that the Negro had received a good thrashing "for his impudence which
taught him to his sorrow that he must mind his Ps and Qs here." 35
Time dragged slowly for Julia and Margaret. A semiannual trip to
the city for necessary shopping, an occasional visit to the Samuel
Gardiner home on Shelter Island, Julia's August 1839 invitation to a
ball at West Point as the guest of Cadet Daniel G. Roberts, and a few
poetic letters from casual beaux in New York scarcely sufficed to break
the monotony.36
Keeping abreast of clothing styles in the city was a difficult enough
task, and few letters reached David Lyon or Alexander that did not
contain urgent "emergency77 pleas for thread, lace, ribbon, hats, gloves,
silks, and fashion magazines. Swatches were sent to be matched, de-
tailed and technical tailoring instructions were given. When the hard-
pressed brothers botched one of their numerous purchasing commissions
(which was not infrequently) a sharp reprimand would arrive from
Julia in East Hampton: "I intend returning you those exquisite pink
gloves for you to change. ... I think Taste hid herself in your pocket
when they were selected." Speed was always essential in these matters.
"My dear child," she scolded Alexander on another occasion, "you must
learn to execute commissions in the twinkling of an eye." Nor was any
detail left to the imagination. "If you find you can not get silk in any
store then please go back and purchase the Tarlatan muslin — Have I
made you understand?" 3T
To while away the tedious hours and to give vent to a naturally
romantic nature, Julia learned to play the guitar. On warm moonlit
evenings in East Hampton "as the dew falls with perfume from the
honeysuckles," she would sit for hours on the piazza and strum her
34
guitar, singing of home and heaven, love and chivalry, and romantic
lands far away. She had a sweet, clear voice and her impromptu con-
certs were much admired by her family and friends. For her brothers it
simply meant more tiresome shopping commissions. Julia sent them
scurrying around to the music stores of the city to fill her needs for
sheet music. Her repertoire grew rapidly and she soon mastered such
ballads as aOh, Why Hast Thou Brought Me No Love," ''There's
Nothing Nice But Heaven/' "Moonlight! Moonlight! or, What An
Hour Is This!," "The Home of My Childhood,'7 "Chi Bene Ama Non
Obblia" ("It is an Italian song," said Julia helpfully), and "Thou Art
Gone." This was all very sweet, but the twenty-year-old Julia wanted
more from life. As she explained her plight to Alexander, "I generally
hail the approach of [night], as in the Land of Dreams I can at least
experience variety." There was very little variety in East Hampton,
Long Island.38
It was Julia's boredom, her restlessness, her strong desire to escape
East Hampton, and her hunger for excitement that explains her involve-
ment in the embarrassing "Rose of Long Island" incident of 1839-1840.
It would almost seem she provoked it. If indeed she did, her strategy
was successful. At least it got her out of East Hampton. And had she
not been taken first to Europe and then to Washington she would
never have met John Tyler.
Late in 1839 a cheap throwaway advertising lithograph was dis-
tributed throughout New York City by Bogert and Mecamly, a semi-
fashionable dry goods and clothing establishment on lower Ninth
Avenue. The advertisement pictured Julia Gardiner strolling in front
of the store carrying on her arm a small sign, shaped like a lady's hand-
bag, which boldly proclaimed: "I'll purchase at Bogert and Mecamly's,
No. 86 Ninth Avenue. Their Goods are Beautiful and Astonishingly
Cheap." In the manner of a professional model Julia was magnificently
overdressed in a sunbonnet which trailed large ostrich feathers. She
wore a heavy fur-hemmed winter coat. Depicted at her side was an
unidentified older man, clad like a dandy in top hat and light topcoat
and carrying an expensively wrought cane. The advertisement was
captioned with the abstruse identification, "Rose of Long Island." It
was one of the first, if not the first, endorsed advertisements to appear
in New York City. Certainly it was the first personal endorsement of a
mercantile house by a New York lady of quality. That Julia posed for
the lithograph, or approved the use of her likeness in connection with it,
cannot be doubted.39
The Gardiners were embarrassed and humiliated that a proper
daughter of theirs could have become involved in such a crass, com-
merical display. Not only did the family shop at the more fashionable
Stewart's, but their own daughter had now been pictured to the general
public in the company of an older man who was dressed like a swell.
35
Something had to be done. Convinced that idleness was Satan's ally,
David Gardiner began thinking of a European tour for his restless
daughters. No surviving family letter ever mentioned the mortifying
incident. The memory of it and all reference to it were buried with the
speed of an unembalmed corpse.
Were this not awkward enough, the Gardiners were further em-
barrassed a few months later with the publication of "Julia — The Rose
of Long Island/' an eight-verse, sixty-eight line effort by one "Romeo
Ringdove,3' which appeared on the front page of the Brooklyn Daily
News for May n, 1840. A copy of the paper was sent anonymously to
Julia. It was definitely not great poetic literature, as an excerpt will
indicate. It was, however, in the nature of distinctly unwanted pub-
licity. As "Romeo Ringdove" phrased his love for "The Rose of Long
Island":
In short, I was bedeviled quite,
Bewitched's a prettier word!
She stole my heart that luckless night,
This gentle singing bird.
She sang about "The Rustling Trees,"
"The Rush of Mountain Streams,"
About "The Balmy Southern Breeze,"
The "Sunlight's Radiant Beams." . . .
I grieve my love a belle should be,
The idol of each beau;
It makes it idle quite, for me
To idolize her so.
When gallants buzz like bees around
Who sweets from flowers suck,
Where shall the man so vain be found
As hopes this rose to pluck?
And since, to end my cruel woes
No other mode I see;
I'll be a hornet to her beaux,
To her a bumble-bee.
To a less Victorian generation all this would seem quite innocent. But
1840 was not a good year for buzzing around on the front page of a
metropolitan newspaper. Julia's renewed notoriety as the "Rose of Long
Island" was more than her parents could tolerate. "Pa still talks of
taking me to Europe in October — I think seriously," wrote Julia. Some
basic decisions were indeed being made in the Gardiner home.40
David Gardiner had discussed the European trip before the poetic
phase of the double-barreled "Rose of Long Island" incident. He now
began planning it as an imminent event. His brother; Nathaniel Gardi-
36
ner, was engaged to manage Juliana's properties during the absence of
the family. David Lyon and Alexander, it was decided, would remain
at their law studies in New York. Letters of introduction were secured.
Benjmin F. Butler, Attorney General of the United States, supplied one
to Lewis Cass, American ambassador to the Court of Louis Philippe;
and Charles King of New York wrote to Georges W. Lafayette intro-
ducing David Gardiner as a former member of the New York senate
and "a man of education and fortune." The departure date was set for
September i84O.41
In the meantime the girls were taken on a short trip to Washington
and to White Sulphur Springs in Virginia — a practice run of sorts for
the social trials of the coming jaunt to Europe. On August 3, 1840, the
family left East Hampton for the capital. It was a rigorous trip by
steamboat from Sag Harbor to New Haven (Juliana feared the noisy
boilers would explode at any minute), and thence by rail to New York
and Washington. By the time they reached Washington on August 9
Juliana was exhausted and quite ready to return to East Hampton. "I
think I shall keep on as it is for Julia's advantage, but for myself it is
a great effort even to think of it," she complained. As usual, Juliana
found the strength to go on. She always did. The single day in Wash-
ington was profitably spent. The senator had an interview with Presi-
dent Martin Van Buren and Juliana took her daughters to view the
White House. She found the furniture in the East Room "rich and
elegant." The family left the capital on August 10 for a short stay at
White Sulphur. Just what "advantage," social or physical, Julia derived
there is not known, although the Gar diners were "very much pleased"
by the trip to the spa. As Juliana summed it up, "We have traveled a
long distance and seen a great variety of people. All seem to think we
have a feast before us in going to Europe." 42
David Gardiner, his wife and daughters sailed from New York
aboard the packet ship Sheridan, Captain de Peyster, on September 27,
1840. Margaret's diary entry for the day of departure conveyed the
intense excitement the sisters felt. "A new world is opening before us!"
she wrote. "Bright are our anticipations I I was awakened by the songs
of the sailors whilst hoisting sails and preparing for sea." The voyage
across was an interesting one for the girls, particularly for Margaret,
who flirted rather openly with Captain de Peyster.43
Arriving in London on October 29, the Gardiners found that they
could "perceive no difference in the appearance of the people from those
of New York." They toured the churches, found the country "cold and
dreary," ogled the public buildings, and predicted that New York
would soon outstrip London. It was par for the course.44
The Channel crossing to France on the steamer Waterwitch was
"exceedingly turbulent." Nonetheless, Julia was in fine form and she
soon managed to beguile and captivate one of the passengers, Sir John
37
Buchan, who was "extremely gallant, and quite enveloped J. in his
macintosh to keep off the spray." This little fling under the macintosh
was quickly terminated by violent seasickness which sent Julia scurry-
ing to her cabin, a clear victory for Poseidon over Aphrodite. Un-
fortunately, Sir John's attempts to see Julia again were smashed on
the rocks of divergent itineraries.45
In Paris it was a strenuous round of cathedrals, galleries, museums,
and receptions, French lessons for Margaret, a new guitar for Julia, a
visit to the Chamber of Deputies for Senator David, and a sick head-
ache for Juliana. The pace was killing. The Parisian high point, and
for the Gardiner sisters the outstanding event of the entire grand tour,
was their presentation at the French court of Louis Philippe on January
7, 1841. This treat was arranged by Ambassador Lewis Cass. As
Margaret described it:
Twenty-eight American ladies were presented, besides a large number of
English and French. . . . The dresses of the ladies were rich and splendid,
while many of the English were emblazoned with diamonds, and with the gay
and elegant uniforms of the gentlemen presented a tout ensemble which far
surpassed my most brilliant imaginings The King looks old, is very
affable in manners, and resembles his paintings, except in stature. In this he is
given too much height. He was dressed in the uniform of an officer of the
army, and wore an auburn wig, which but half concealed his snow-white hair.
He principally addressed the married ladies — asked J. and myself if we were
sisters, and passed on In a short time followed the Queen, attired in
scarlet velvet robe and cloak, confined at the waist with a band, and diamond
clasp. Her head-dress was fancifully arranged with diamonds of great bril-
liancy, and a bird of paradise. She is tall and thin. In short, a perfect
anatomy, and there's a striking contrast, in this respect, to the King. Her
conversation was a mixture of French and English, which I could not com-
prehend, and only bowed in reply The salons were insufferably warm,
and I was obliged to retire twice, in consequence of faintness. I was attended
by the King's physician and two or three maids in waiting, and furnished
with cologne, salts, orange flower water, etc.46
When Julia later spoke of her "reign" as First Lady she had this
recollection of royal splendor as a guide and a goal. Having observed
the etiquette, posturing, and regal brilliance of the Tuileries, Julia
undertook to transplant to the White House something of its opulence
and its studied deference to reigning monarchy. She would even sur-
round herself with "ladies in waiting" and insist on many court pro-
cedures. David Gardiner was equally impressed with the magnificence
of the French court. His detailed analysis of its brilliance and the
social advantages of Americans' being presented there was dispatched
to the editor of the New York American and printed in the edition of
May 25, i84i.47
In Rome the family was disappointed to find "very few Ameri-
38
cans," but there was some compensation in obtaining rooms in the Hotel
de Londres just below those of Christina, the former Queen of Spain.
And an audience with Pope Gregory XVI impressed them. They found
the reactionary old Pontiff's "affability of manner and pleasant con-
versation very gratifying." Margaret was thoroughly repelled, however,
by some Roman Catholic practices:
We all witnessed the washing of feet, and serving at table, of thirteen poor
priests, of different nations, by the Pope in imitation of the washing of the
apostles' feet by our Saviour ... we went to the Hospital Pellegrini, and
saw the washing, and serving at table, of a host of poor pilgrims, by the noble
ladies of Rome. It is a disgusting act of humility! These ladies actually
washed and kissed the feet of the filthy miserable people.
She was relieved, on her arrival back in England three months later, to
find herself "in a Christian land once more." Julia was less concerned
with the ecclesiastical side of Rome. Instead, she engaged in a fleeting
romance with Baron von Krudener, a young German nobleman then
visiting in the city. How involved each became with the other can only
be surmised by Julia's recollection that he had worshiped her "in
secret, in silence, in tears." Twenty-five years later she still remembered
him fondly, and when her sons went to Germany to college after the
Civil War she urged them to discover what had become of him.48
The Roman holiday was followed by an exploration into the smok-
ing crater of Vesuvius. During her descent into the volcano Julia be-
came extremely frightened and nearly fainted. It was one of the very
few times in her life her poise and self-assurance deserted her. It took a
volcano to do it. She rallied quickly, however, and enjoyed the next
stages of the trip as the family moved leisurely northward from Pom-
peii to Florence, Venice, Leghorn, and Genoa. Then traveling through
Switzerland, into Germany, down the Rhine, and on to The Hague,
Amsterdam, and Brussels (where Julia treated herself to a brief ro-
mantic fling with a Belgian count ), they finally reached London again
on July 3, i84i.49
Sightseeing trips to Scotland and Ireland occupied the family in
July and August. Julia was occupied too. This time it was with a Mr.
Delebarger of London, an employee of the War Ministry who, accord-
ing to Juliana, "foolishly became very much taken with Miss Julia
without any encouragement from any quarter." Julia did not have to
provide much overt encouragement. A glance over her fan generally
served to start the chemical reaction. The Delebarger involvement was
quickly terminated by Juliana. The Gardiners left England in early
September in the Acadia, and after an extremely rough crossing they
reached Boston at the end of the month. They had been gone a full
year.50
It had been an exciting and educational experience for Julia and
39
Margaret. If Julia had attracted ardent young men to her side in
London, Rome, and Brussels, the incidents were less disastrous from
the Gardiner standpoint than having her paraded in lithograph and
verse through the public prints of New York. At the same time, how-
ever, it was certain that after having seen the wonders of the Tuileries,
the Vatican, and Westminster Abbey, East Hampton would seem tame
indeed to the Gardiner girls.
Throughout the European tour the letters of David Lyon and
Alexander to the family had described in detail the swiftly changing
political scene at home. Their sympathies, of course, were Whig. In
November 1840 both of them voted for "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too" in
preference to President Martin Van Bur en and the egalitarian policies
he favored and the Gar diners so detested. When news of the sudden
death of President William Henry Harrison on April 4, 1841, reached
the Continent, the Gardiner girls, in common with other American
ladies then touring in Europe, carefully wrapped their left wrists in
black crepe as a testament uto the sense of grief universally felt by
Americans ... for the death of the good man and soldier, the Hero of
Tippecanoe." 51
Alexander's April 9, 1841, letter to his father provided the absent
family a full account of the shocking news of General Harrison's death
after one month in the White House:
This melancholy event, which has really cast a gloom over the country, was
the result of an illness of only a week. His disease was the bilious pleurisy.
. . . His enemies have asserted that he was infirm from age, and this doubt-
less led Mm to exert himself more than he would otherwise have done. He was
accustomed to walk before breakfast in the morning, and it was on one of these
occasions that he caught his death. The labours he was obliged to undergo
about the time of bis inauguration were prodigious; and since, his house has
been beset from morning til night by office beggars and others. . . .
Alexander described the suddenness with which Vice-President Tyler
had been "drawn from the bosom of his family" in Williamsburg "to
assume the direction of affairs" in Washington, the funeral arrange-
ments for the dead President, and the deep mourning into which the
nation was plunged. Like thousands of other Americans, Alexander
Gardiner also posed the crucial question of the hour. Who was the
enigmatic John Tyler, and for what did he stand?
In the midst of these scenes Mr. Tyler has assumed the government, and
retained the Cabinet selected by Gen. Harrison. Yet some doubts are enter-
tained whether he may not strike out a new course of political policy. He is
of the Virginia school, and has been very decidedly anti-bank, anti-tariff, and
anti-distribution of the public lands. The party insists that his opinions are
now altogether Whig, and that he will carry out the measures proposed by the
Harrison administration. Time will decide, but it would be stranger indeed if
he were not orthodox.52
40
As the nation and the Gardiners soon discovered, John Tyler was
very definitely of the "Virginia school" and, from the Whig standpoint,
he was certainly not "orthodox." Indeed, by the time the Gardiners
had landed safely again in Boston in September 1841 these facts had
become clear. John Tyler's voyage through the turbulent seas of the
bank crisis had just ended in disaster, and waves of Whig criticism
crashed heavily onto the decks of his sinking Ship of State. In this
assault few critics pounded the renegade Tyler administration with less
mercy than the brash young Alexander Gardiner.33
The political explosion in Washington in 1841 was a dramatic
spectacle, educational enough to warrant closer study. Julia and
Margaret had already seen the capitals of Europe, visited the public
buildings of London, Paris, Rome, and Brussels, consorted and flirted
with the statesmen and nobility of half a dozen nations. It was past
time, David Gardiner reasoned, for his sprightly daughters to glimpse
the wonders of American democracy in action, however chaotic that
action might be. It was decided, therefore, that the family should pro-
ceed to Washington for a short visit. In this way the sadly neglected
political education of Julia and Margaret could be advanced. The
European trip had polished and readied them for an introduction to
Washington society. Now they needed an introduction to politics. So it
was that the young ladies and their parents departed by train from
New York in mid- January 1842 bound for the sprawling, mud-caked
capital on the Potomac.
The girls began to attract admiring male glances immediately. As
the train rolled south toward Washington, a "handsome, portly gentle-
man" came several times into the car where Julia and Margaret were
seated and self-consciously adjusted his cravat at the ornate mirror, cast-
ing, as he did so, "several furtive glances" at the attractive Gardiner
sisters. Only after she reached Washington did Julia discover that the
handsome, forty-two-year-old stranger with the large cravat and the
roving eyes was Congressman Millard Fillmore of Buffalo, New York,
political protege of Thurlow Weed and later President of the United
States. He was, Julia learned to her dismay, quite married.54
The family took up residence at Mrs. Peyton's well-known board-
inghouse on the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Four-and-a-Half
Street. It was as comfortable and fashionable a place of its sort as the
backward capital afforded, and it served as a residence and eating club
for a bevy of congressmen and government officials. Among those pres-
ent at Mrs. Peyton's place in January 1842 were Congressmen Edmund
Hubard and Francis Mallory of Virginia, John McKeon and Richard
Davis of New York, Caleb Gushing of Massachusetts, Thomas D.
Sumter of South Carolina, and Thomas Butler King of Georgia.
Within a few days of their arrival the Gardiners were caught up in
the social swirl of the town. Congressman Sumter7 who was a retired
United States Army colonel, was particularly attentive to Julia and
Margaret. He squired the young East Hampton ladies from reception
to reception with a gracious chivalry that matched anything the girls
had experienced in Europe. Millard Fillmore and Senator Silas Wright
of New York soon called on the Gardiners, as did Congressman
Fernando Wood, later mayor of New York City. Senator David Gardi-
ner was no ordinary tourist. Formerly a leading Whig politician in
Suffolk County, he was worth cultivating politically and socially. Luck-
ily for his daughters, his position and wealth assured the family im-
mediate absorption into the top circles of Washington society.55
Julia and Margaret reveled in the excitement of the Washington
social scene and in the opportunity to meet the great and the near-great
of the American Republic. Julia was quickly singled out by young
Richard R. Waldron of New Hampshire, a purser in the United States
Navy. He became her constant escort and guide. Through Waldron and
Colonel Sumter the girls met Postmaster General Charles A. Wickliffe
and his attractive daughters. The Wickliffes, reported Margaret, were a
lovely family who had "remained long enough at their home in Ken-
tucky not to be easily contaminated by mingling with the worldly.7' It
was the beginning of a friendship that would last for many years.
Waldron obligingly escorted the Gardiners to the House and Senate
to hear the debates, and to the weekly Assemblies or balls patronized
by the rich, the well-born, and the politically important people of the
capital. At a reception on January 18, 1842, Julia first met Robert
Tyler and enjoyed "quite a critical discussion ... of the poets" with
him. The thrill of meeting the President's eldest son was almost over-
whelming, and when the girls reached Peyton's later that evening they
eagerly "talked over the proceedings until after one."
At a private dance in the home of General John P. Van Ness a few
nights later, where "the wine flowed like water," they saw a less attrac-
tive side of Washington society. They were shocked at the behavior of
General Aaron Ward, a New York congressman. Ward got quite drunk
and insulted Madame Bodisco, the beautiful and shapely wife of the
Russian ambassador. According to Margaret's pristine description of
the incident, the tipsy congressman introduced Madame Bodisco to
David Gardiner and then "told her to show the gentleman her eyes.
Asked Pa if he did not think she had a nice figure, etc." That the
popular Madame Bodisco had clearly visible charms could not be
denied. The low-cut bodice of her dress left little to the imagination.
But the ground rules of polite society in 1842 did not include drunken
references to a lady's endowment. This was the stuff of duels.56
~~ These social activities were of little importance when compared
with the much anticipated moment on the evening of January 20, 1842,
when Julia and her parents were first invited to the White House to
42
meet President John Tyler. Margaret, unhappily, had a severe cold
that night and was forced to remain in her chambers. "The Presi-
dent's break with the Whigs/' Julia recalled, "had been the occasion
of unprecedented political excitement, and his name was on all lips."
She was curious to meet the controversial Chief Executive. Young
Waldron obligingly escorted the family to the President's reception.
As usual, the First Lady, Letitia Christian Tyler, made no ap-
pearance downstairs that Thursday evening. Half-paralyzed by a
stroke three years earlier, she took no part in the social life of her
husband's administration. Instead, the guests crowding into the White
House were greeted by the President and his daughter-in-law, Priscilla
Cooper Tyler, who acted as the Chief Executive's official hostess. Julia's
formal introduction to the politically harassed tenth President of the
United States was performed by Congressman Fernando Wood. For
the young lady of East Hampton it was a personal triumph. So cor-
dially was she greeted by John Tyler, so gracious and effusive were
his "thousand compliments," that those standing nearby "looked and
listened in perfect amazement." Years later when she recalled that most
important moment in her life Julia still remembered in Tyler's deport-
ment an "urbanity" so pronounced "we could not help commenting,
after we left the room, upon the silvery sweetness of his voice . . .
the incomparable grace of his bearing, and the elegant ease of his
conversation." 57
John Tyler may not have been America's most successful Presi-
dent, but the courtly Virginian was certainly one of America's most
gracious and socially engaging Chief Executives. So polite and courteous
was he with strangers, so warm and genuine was he in his greeting and
in his concern for the comfort and well-being of his guests, that few
who met him escaped his personal magnetism. No suggestion of his
many personal trials, political disappointments, and private worries,
family or financial, ever publicly escaped his lips. Surrounded by the
inadequate lights, shabby furniture, unpainted walls, and grimy ap-
pointments of the President's Mansion, Tyler gave off a personal charm,
dignity and regality that transformed his surroundings.
Julia's brief visit to Washington in January-February 1842 ended
much too quickly to suit her. When, in early March, the Gardiners
were again at their East Hampton home the boredom of that pleasant
hamlet seemed all the more oppressive after the wonders of Europe
and the delights of the capital. Julia was soon plunged once more into
the depression of isolation. Gathering the local gossip for David Lyon
and Alexander scarcely compared with the excitement of the previous
eighteen months — even when the gossip concerned the erratic behavior
of her colorful cousin, John Griswold Gardiner, ninth proprietor of
Gardiners Island.
John was the black sheep of the family. In March 1842 he went
43
berserk while engaged in what Julia termed a "regular frolic77 and
before he was finally locked up in the East Hampton jail he had
wrecked a farmer's kitchen in Sag Harbor, disturbed the peace in
Montauk, created a drunken scene in Acabonack, and fired his shotgun
at a cornhusker named Bennet in the grain barn on Gardiners Island.
Bennet escaped death only by lunging at the proprietor and spoiling
his aim. Whereupon crazy John calmly reloaded and was again taking
aim at his antagonist when Henry Davis, a Negro agricultural laborer
on the Island, seized the gun. "Amid such a number of white com-
panions," remarked Julia, "the intended victim owed his life at last
to a negro — I think abolition a good cause.73 Whether the "Lord of
the Isle" was under the influence of whiskey or opium or both during
his two-day spree, the sisters could not ascertain. They were fairly
certain he was under the influence of something. The subsequent trial
of John for assault with intent to kill occupied the summer months and
stimulated conversation for a time in the otherwise torpid town.
Gardiner was eventually fined $33 for disturbing the peace, a judg-
ment the proprietor himself considered pretty lenient for "a man who
has been a drunkard all his life." 58
Even with John Griswold Gardiner to liven things up occasionally,
life in East Hampton was incredibly dull. The usual Fourth of July
celebration was called off in 1842 when the eligible toastmasters
quarreled over whether wine should be used to drink the toasts at the
dinner. The drys won the argument and local patriotism received a
body blow. When a gang of boys broke into the general store, smashed
the windows, and hurled rotten eggs at the merchandise, the incident,
big news in East Hampton, interested the twenty- two-year-old Julia
not at all. It was a far cut below her presentation at the court of
Louis Philippe and her discussion of the poets with Robert Tyler in
Washington. "We have been stationary nearly five months,'7 she com-
plained to Alexander in July. "Dear me! Sometimes I feel dolefully
ennuyee." Few days passed that the sisters did not frantically write
their brothers in New York to send them the news of the fashionable
set in the city or demand of them that they execute some trifling
purchasing commission. While Julia was certain that the "innocent
pleasures of a country life'7 were adequate for "the evening of life,77 the
point was that she was still young. "We can make our lives sublime/7
she insisted to Alexander, with more hope than conviction. There was
not much sublimity in East Hampton.59
During the early summer months of 1842 Julia began agitating
for a trip to Saratoga Springs or Newport. She had heard there was a
"considerable company'7 at both spas. When this effort to escape East
Ha-mpton failed, she then urged her father to lease or purchase a town
house in New York City. The sharp sag in the real estate market in
New York not only made this suggestion an economical one, but it had
44
the further advantage of putting David Gardiner's Increasingly eligible
daughters where the boys were. For these reasons he began to con-
sider the idea seriously. Meanwhile Julia pleaded for a return to
Washington when Congress convened again in December 1842. So
piteous were her entreaties with her father that he could scarcely
resist them. By November the parental promise of another trip to the
capital had been reluctantly given, although the harassed senator
confessed to Alexander that "were it not to gratify your sisters I must
confess I should prefer a more quiet winter." Alexander sided with Julia
In the matter, assuring his father that he would "derive more pleasure
from a winter In Washington than you seem to anticipate." 60
Her spirits raised considerably by the combined prospects of
moving Into town and returning to Washington in the winter, Julia's
cup of joy very nearly overflowed when she learned that the Gardiners
had been conspicuously included in Moses Y. Beach's little volume,
Wealth and Pedigree of the Wealthy Citizens of New York City. First
published in the summer of 1842, the book set out "to define the true
position of sundry Individuals who are flourishing under false colors. . . .
In a country where money, and not title, is the standard by which
merit is appreciated, it is desirable to adjust the standard with as much
exactitude as possible. . . ." Beach Included only the names of families
with resources in excess of $100,000. The accuracy of some of his
figures was questionable, but at least he provided a rough guide to the
tricky New York marriage market. For this invaluable service the
Gardiners were grateful.61
The entry under the name of David Gardiner was brief and to the
point: "$150,000. To the ancestors of this distinguished family be-
longed Gardiners Island, Suffolk Co., L.I. One was called 'Lord
Gardiner,7 by some of his poor tenantry." Julia's erratic cousin, John
Griswold Gardiner, the ninth proprietor of Gardiners Island, was rated
at $100,000, although at the very moment of his triumph, if triumph
it was, he was drunkenly celebrating the birthday of his horse by riding
the animal into his mother's parlor where the astonished lady sat
sewing. It was just another "high frolic," said Julia, similar to the
spree that had put the latter-day Caligula in the East Hampton jail
two months earlier.62
Julia could hardly wait to get her hands on Beach's volume.
She learned of its existence from her Uncle Samuel while attending
the funeral of her Uncle Nathaniel's wife, Elizabeth, at East Hampton
in June 1842. The news livened up an otherwise dreary afternoon. She
was elated to hear that editor Beach considered the Gardiners to be
"a very respectable family who used to be styled Lords by their poor
tenants." Her father, no less eager to see the book, ordered son David
Lyon in New York to procure and send a copy "by the first opportunity
by water." The little volume was a gold mine of information and Julia
45
spent many pleasant hours researching the financial situations of her
New York friends and acquaintances. She learned, for example, that the
families of her friends Mary Conger and Mary Corse weighed in at
$200,000 and $250,000, respectively; and that the family of Catherine
Hedges was rated at $200,000. Even the unattractive and obnoxious
young Jacob LeRoy who would chase after Margaret in Washington in
1843 could look forward to a $300,000 inheritance. None of this in-
formation proved very valuable to the Gardiner sisters in the long run.
Julia married a man who could never have aspired to the Beach register,
and Margaret married one who had not two dimes to rub together.63
The only damper on Julia's spirits as she anticipated a brighter
social future came in the knowledge that her brother Alexander had
renounced the Whig Party and voted for the Democrats in the Novem-
ber 1842 elections in New York City. A trip to depression-ridden
Norwich, Connecticut, in June 1842 had shown him that a stone's throw
from closed mills and breadlines were all the evidences of the con-
spicuous consumption in which the wealthy indulged. Perhaps this
sight influenced his sudden conversion. It would be encouraging to think
so. More likely, Alexander Gardiner became a Democrat in 1842 for
pragmatic reasons. As a struggling young lawyer in New York City he
sorely needed clients and contacts. To further his career in the law he had
decided to dabble in local politics at the ward level and the best way to do
this was through Tammany Hall. Tammany was basically anti-Van
Buren in 1842, locked as it was in bitter patronage struggles with
the Little Magician's Albany Regency. Within its tattered folds were
also members of the old Workingmen's Party of the middle 18303.
These white proletarians, native-born and immigrant, feared the aboli-
tion of slavery. They viewed the economic implications of abolition
on the white labor market of New York City with undisguised horror.
Alexander had no difficulty adjusting to the ideological orientation of
Tammany Hall on the Negro question. The Hall was also controlled by
pragmatists who had small respect for either Martin Van Buren or
liberal Jacksonian democracy. These men were Conservative Demo-
crats. They were corrupt, but they could deliver the street vote and
win local elections. The town's self-satisfied Whigs generally could not.
From Alexander's standpoint it was as simple as that.
Still, Margaret voiced the collective Gardiner opinion of Alex-
ander's heresy when she told her brother that she "could scarce reconcile
myself to the idea of your voting the Democratic ticket. At any earlier
period it would certainly have overthrown any resolutions I might
have formed of conferring a Dukedom upon you. You might better
not have voted at all, I think; and so does Pa, but for another reason —
you would then escape your indefatigable military friend, Mr. Jack-
son." Margaret had missed the point. Her brother had not become a
Jackson Democrat. And to her irrelevant criticism Alexander replied
46
wearily that Tammany's "triumphant success" in the election had re-
inforced him in the Tightness of his decision. There was no point in
going into it further.64
In choosing the Democratic Party in 1842 Alexander Gardiner
gained one distinction to which no one else in the immediate family
could aspire. He was a Democrat before his sister's courtship by
John Tyler began. He was in Tyler's party before Julia was in Tyler's
family. And John Tyler in 1842 needed all the help he could command.
4?
JOHN TYLER:
HIS FATHER'S SON, 1790-1820
For myself, I cannot and will not yield one inch of
the ground.
JOHN TYLER, 1 820
Few American Presidents have left a record of their childhood so scanty
as that of John Tyler. Much of what has survived — the anecdotes
and the distant recollections — is tinged with myth and fantasy. It is
known that the tenth President was born the second of three sons
(there were five daughters) to John and Mary Armistead Tyler on
March 29, 1790, at Greenway, a twelve-hundred-acre family estate on
the James River in Charles City County, Virginia. Beyond that, little
can be said about John Tyler until he entered the preparatory division
of William and Mary College in 1802. As a youth he was very slight
in build; his long, thin patrician face was dominated by the high
cheekbones and the prominent Roman nose he would later joke about
— the "Tyler nose/' Julia called it. His lips were thin and tight, his
dark brown hair was silken. Physically, he was never robust. He was
always much too thin and throughout his life he was highly susceptible to
colds, to severe gastric upsets, and to frequent attacks of diarrhea. As
a child and young man he was serious-looking, inclined to moodiness.
When he was seven, in April 1797, his mother died of a paralytic
stroke. He thus grew to adulthood without the comforting guidance
of a woman.
Judge John Tyler raised young John to manhood and by all sur-
viving accounts he did an excellent job of it. The future President
would always recall with tenderness a picture of the old Judge as he
sat on the front lawn of Greenway playing his violin for the plantation
youngsters or telling them tall stories of the great revolution against
Britain. He was a great favorite of the local small fry, white and
Negro. Young John Inherited his father's love of music and he learned
to "fiddle," as he called it, at an early age. It was a relaxing hobby
to which he returned after the frustrating White House years. It is
doubtful, however, as one story has it, that he played the instrument so
movingly at the age of ten that mice emerged from the baseboard to
dance to his tunes.
Given the paucity of details of Tyler's childhood It is not sur-
prising that the biographical gap has been filled with the standard
motifs of a precocious and foreordained youth which Americans de-
mand of their Presidents — myths assiduously propagated by eager
campaign biographers at election time. Hence if John Tyler cannot in all
honesty be placed In a log cabin at birth (there were rude log cabins at
Green way plantation but they were inhabited by Judge Tyler's forty
slaves), his biographers have linked him with the Child-of -Destiny
motif and with the David-and-Goliath theme.
The first of these harmless little stories has his mother holding
him In her arms on a bright moonlit night at Greenway In 1791. The
baby caught sight of the shining orb through the branches of an old
willow tree, eagerly stretched his chubby arms heavenward, and cried
bitterly for the moon. At this point, according to the legend, the
mother quietly whispered, "This child is destined to be a President of
the United States., his wishes fly so high."
The second tale pits young John Tyler against the local Goliath
symbol, Mr. McMurdo, a cruel Scottish schoolmaster who held forth,
birch In hand, at the little school on the River Road near Greenway.
According to this legend, the tyranny of the rod finally became so
oppressive and unjust that John led a schoolboy revolt which resulted
in the physical overpowering and manacling of the giant, much to the
satisfaction of his father, who shouted "Sic semper tyrannis!" on learn-
ing of the classroom revolution. Tyler did later recall that it was a
wonder McMurdo "did not whip all the sense out of his scholars," but
he never verified the specific fact of the revolt or mentioned his alleged
role in it.
Nevertheless, the McMurdo yarn probably has a larger grain of
truth in it than one which pictures Vice-President Tyler down on his
hands and knees at sunrise one morning in April 1841 playing marbles
with his sons when sweaty couriers from Washington ride up to inform
him that General Harrison has died and that he has become the
President of the United States. This, of course, is the homey-touch
theme which is also required of American Presidents by their constit-
uents, and it would be somewhat more believable in this instance were
it not known that in 1841 two of Tyler's sons were married men in
their twenties and only the third, Tazewell, was at the marble-playing
age.1
49
Only in 1802 does John Tyler emerge from the shadows of my-
thology. In that year he traveled from Greenway to Williamsburg to
enter the secondary division of the College of William and Mary. The
twelve-year-old boy boarded in town with his brother-in-law, Judge
James Semple. In 1806 his name first appeared on the roll of the col-
legiate students, although it is probable he began college-level studies
a year earlier. The college curriculum at the time was a narrow one —
classical languages and English literature predominating — but in his
undergraduate years Tyler was also introduced to history and political
economy. The text used in the economics course was Adam Smith's re-
cently published Wealth of Nations, and Tyler seems to have com-
mitted its concepts and leading arguments to memory. His subsequent
speeches on the tariff and free trade were drawn almost verbatim from
this influential work. Indeed, Smith's persuasive arguments for govern-
ment noninterference in the sphere of individual enterprise neatly com-
plemented emerging states' rights arguments in the field of economic
policy, and Tyler was quick to enlist them in the South's struggle against
any and all latitudinal constructions of the Constitution on tariff and
trade questions.2
By all reports Tyler's academic career at William and Mary was
a brilliant one, and his subsequent devotion to his alma mater would
gladden the heart of any present-day alumni secretary. In 1807, at the
age of seventeen, he was graduated from the little college he loved so
much. He returned to Charles City and began the study of law, first
under his father's direction, then under that of his cousin, Chancellor
Samuel Tyler. Finally, when his father became governor in 1809, he
studied in the Richmond office of the brilliant Edmund Randolph,
former United States Attorney General in the Washington administra-
tion. His work with Randolph he remembered as the least satisfactory.
He recoiled with distaste from the Federalist principles to which
Randolph exposed him, principles which undercut the states' rights
teachings of his father and his William and Mary professors. Randolph's
loose construction of the Constitution and his advocacy of a strong
central government pained Tyler greatly. "He proposed a supreme
national government," Tyler recalled in horror, "with a supreme ex-
ecutive, a supreme legislature, and a supreme judiciary, and a power in
Congress to veto state laws." It was shocking.3
-*^
The most important single fact that can be derived from John
Tyler's formative years is that he absorbed in toto the political, social,
and economic views of his distinguished father, John Tyler, Sr., Revo-
lutionary War patriot, governor of Virginia (1809-1811), and judge of
the United States Circuit Court. Judge Tyler was a congenital rebel
and individualist, an intellectual child of the French Enlightenment,
devoted in person, idea, and political loyalty to his friend and con-
50
temporary, Thomas Jefferson. These qualities and attitudes he passed
undiluted to his son, and the William and Mary faculty saw that they
stuck.
Born in 1746, Judge Tyler was a direct descendant of Henry
Tyler, first of the family in America, who had arrived in Williamsburg
from England in 1653. l^16 English background of Henry Tyler is
as obscure as the origin of Lion Gardiner. Lyon G. Tyler, the family
biographer, once argued that Henry Tyler was an aristocratic Cava-
lier in flight from Puritan despotism, and that the whole Tyler
clan was directly descended from the famous Wat Tyler, the fourteenth-
century revolutionist against the tyranny of Richard II. To further
this dubious connection Judge Tyler named one of his sons Wat. But
Hke the wished-for Gardiner alliance with Robert Fitzwalter and the
Barons of Runnymede, the claim can be established neither histori-
cally nor genealogically. It is probably just as well. Wat Tyler had
a conception of private property and social equality scarcely acceptable
to Ms slaveowning descendants on the Tidewater Virginia plantations.
He was, in truth, an egalitarian socialist. Nevertheless, John Tyler
himself accepted the alleged family connection with Wat the Red and
gloried In it, defending its legitimacy against all doubters. "I am proud
of Wat Tyler and cannot let him go/' he once confessed. So it passed
into the family tradition.4
More solidly based in historical certainty than the Wat Tyler con-
nection is the Revolutionary career of Judge John Tyler. Not only did
he serve with distinction in the Virginia legislature during the un-
pleasantness with the Redcoats, risking his life and his property in the
great cause throughout its darkest and most discouraging days, he
also emerged from the contest as one of the Old Dominion's leading
voices for a strengthening of the wartime Articles of Confederation.
As a member of the Virginia House of Delegates in 1785-1786, the
Judge helped draft the resolutions appointing Virginia's delegates to
the famous Annapolis Convention. This meeting, a preliminary to the
Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, was called to con-
sider the propriety of investing the Confederation Congress with enough
additional power to regulate and promote interstate commerce. This
limited function by a weak central authority Judge Tyler favored. He
did not support the corollary idea that commerce regulation should
expand into or take on the form of a whole new constitutional and
federative political system. "I wished Congress to have the regulation
of trade/5 he recalled in stunned disbelief at what eventually happened
in Philadelphia in 1787-1788, "but it never entered my head that we
should quit liberty and throw ourselves into the hands of an energetic
government. When I consider the Constitution in all its parts, I cannot
but dread its operation. It contains a variety of powers too dangerous
to be vested in any set of men whatsoever." 5
51
To Judge Tyler, the Constitution of the United States was little
less than the beginning of tyranny in America; and as a member of
Virginia's 1788 convention to consider the new document he worked
vigorously , albeit unsuccessfully , to block its ratification. "Little did
I think that matters would come to this when we separated from the
mother country," he told the convention sadly. Clearly, he missed the
point that the Constitution was actually a very conservative docu-
ment. While under its subsequently adopted Bill of Rights (which
Judge Tyler strongly favored) it guaranteed certain individual liber-
ties to all white male adults, it then effectively removed real power
from the hands of these same people with a system of political filters
and a provision permitting the states themselves to determine the con-
ditions of suffrage. A complicated arrangement of checks and balances
within the federal authority was skillfully designed to render the gov-
ernment virtually impervious to pressures and manipulations by any
man, special-interest group, state, or section. Its theory of residual state
power and its complex amending clause also contributed to its conserva-
tive stability. In its final form it was a brilliantly contrived monument
to the status quo that over the years would demand the most elastic
judicial interpretation to make it function at all. Indeed, it would
ultimately require the bold decisions of Chief Justice John Marshall
and the near-revolutionary agitations of Andrew Jackson's unwashed
multitudes to blast it into the evolution that gave it life and preserved
it. At the moment of its birth, however, the Constitution of the United
States was hardly a radical, a dangerous, or even a democratic docu-
ment.
The Tylers, father and son, were determined to keep it that way.
Initially they were not fearful of the rise of the masses; they feared
the use of the federal machinery by one sector of the propertied class
to exercise a tyranny over the other — the Northern merchants over
the Southern planters. Only by maintaining the power of the individual
states over their own internal affairs could the nationalistic implica-
tions of the document, weak as these were, be cribbed and the pre-
rogatives of the Virginia planter and his feudal way of life be preserved.
This in essence was what Judge Tyler and John Tyler meant when
they invoked "states' rights" as the key to "individual liberty." It was
not a theoretical abstraction. Instead, the states3 rights idea in the
South was the main foundation of a society dominated by slaveowning
white men of property. The alternative was a powerful central gov-
ernment run by and for the merchant classes — or those with no
property at all. To prevent the capture, consolidation, and manipulation
of the machinery of the federal government by such untrustworthy
people, the Constitution had to remain the static document it was. Any
interpretation that rendered it more democratic, more responsive to the
popular will, more relevant to the revolutionary theory of the equality
52
of men, or more powerful and efficient in Its practical operation In rela-
tion to the states had to be opposed with all the vigor of Horatio at
the bridge. For this reason John Tyler, like his father before him, would
spend the greater part of a political lifetime demanding a starkly
literal Interpretation of the written words of the conservative docu-
ment, voicing these demands with all the fervor of a Bible Belt Funda-
mentalist elucidating the Book of Exodus to a backwoods congregation.
In sum, he insisted that the rules of the game not be changed while
the game was in progress. The original rules would do nicely.
Given the gradual broadening of white male suffrage in the 18203-
18303 under the Impact of Jacksonian democracy, strict construction
also seemed the only alternative to the potential political tyranny of a
Northern and Western majority over the "peculiar institution" of hu-
man slavery. Thus John Tyler, tutored at his father's knee, would
view nationalistic phrases in the Constitution like "We the people of
the United States5' and "the general welfare" as semantic booby traps
requiring constant defusing and disarming in the interest of states'
rights and the maintenance of slavery as a legal form of private prop-
erty. He consistently eulogized the "primitive simplicity" of the docu-
ment, noting frequently that he was "a republican after the strictest
sect," a true keeper of the original flame.6
As a young man John Tyler was less certain of his relationship
to the slave institution. In general, he followed his father in accept-
ing the fact of slavery. And, like his father, he was a slaveowner all his
life. Nevertheless, he opposed a continuation of the African slave trade.
As a United States senator in 1832 he fought for legislation to end
the actual buying and selling of human beings within the shadow of the
Capitol. The sight of this made him physically ill. He never attended
a slave auction. As President he signed in 1842 the treaty with Britain
which obligated the United States to maintain naval units on the
African coast to enforce the nation's anti-slave-trade laws.
At the same time he never advocated or supported an effective
program of slavery abolition; nor would he ever acknowledge the right
or duty of the federal government to interfere in the brutalizing in-
stitution at the state, local, or personal level. He never manumitted
any of his own slaves. Instead, he found comfort of sorts supporting
the notion of "gradual abolition" in Virginia though the impractical
African Colonization scheme. He also advocated a diffusion or "bleed-
ing" of the Old Dominion slave population into and throughout the
territories — a form of abolition by anemia. In moments of candor he ad-
mitted that the removal of Negroes to Liberia was little more than a
Utopian solution to slavery, "a dream of philanthropy, visiting men's
pillows in their sleep, to cheat them on their waking." Since both
"solutions" to the problem were impractical, and gradual to the point
of being glacial, Tyler in effect upheld the slavery institution through-
53
out his life. Still, he wished sincerely that slavery would just go away
somehow, quietly and without fuss. He hoped for this in spite of the
fact that his own economic welfare and that of his large family became
inexorably linked with the slave-labor system after his retirement from
the White House to Sherwood Forest in 1845.
At Sherwood Forest he conducted a slavery operation that was
humanitarian, gentle, and paternalistic. There were no whips, lashes,
split families, or runaways. On Sherwood Forest plantation the Ne-
groes did sing and dance and play their banjos and clack their bones.
But the realization that he was a kind master brought John Tyler no
closer to a moral evaluation of the system. He simply borrowed Judge
Tyler's view that slavery had been fastened on the United States by the
colonial policy of Great Britain. This conveniently identified the em-
barrassing institution with a hated foreign symbol and glossed over
his moral confusion on the issue. It was a weak rationalization, but it
was an important contributing factor to the intense Anglophobia he
carried with him through life. As late as 1851, on a visit to Niagara
Falls, John Tyler would refuse so much as to set foot on British soil.7
The slavery problem was still a small black cloud on a distant
horizon in 1811 when Tyler attained his majority and began the prac-
tice of law in Charles City County. That year he was also elected to
the Charles City seat in the Virginia House of Delegates. As a lawyer
and a state legislator he exhibited all the characteristics of a young
man in a hurry. He loved the law, which he regarded as the "high
road to fame/' and he quickly became a brilliant courtroom performer.
At the outset of his legal career he took many near-hopeless criminal
cases because they gave him an opportunity to develop and polish that
feeling for the grandiloquent which ultimately placed him in the very
first rank of American orators. At his best, Tyler was the rhetorical
equal of Webster, Clay, Benton, and Calhoun in his ability to move
and manipulate an audience. This mastery of the spoken word he first
learned in the Charles City courthouse. As a young lawyer he dis-
covered that the way to a juror's heart was often not through the law
but through the emotions. Like the clergyman who pounds the pulpit
harder as his theology becomes weaker, Tyler developed a forensic style
that permitted him to play on the emotions of jurors as though they
were strings of his violin. Jefferson Davis once said that "as an extem-
poraneous speaker, I regard [Tyler] as the most felicitous among the
orators I have known." 8
As a tyro legislator young Tyler made an instant impact in the
House of Delegates in 1811. The point at stake was the national-bank
question, the issue on which John Tyler rode into national prominence
in the 18303 and the one that would ultimately break the back of his
Presidency in 1841. In 1791 the first Bank of the United States had
54
been chartered by Congress for a twenty-year period. The Bank was
a privately owned and operated institution (in which the federal govern-
ment held only 20 per cent of the stock) designed to act as a fiscal agent
for the government. It was also a depository for government funds,
and it was further empowered to issue currency secured by govern-
ment deposits and by its own capita! resources. Alexander Hamilton
and other Federalist economists of the period hoped that this currency
would provide the new nation a much-needed, stable, and standardized
medium of exchange. The charter also permitted the establishment of
branch banks in the principal commercial cities of the several states.
It was. then7 essentially a private corporation with monopolistic power
to do the banking business of the federal government throughout the
states. As such it had no specific constitutionality, and the incorpora-
tion bill passed the Congress in a welter of sectional controversy, the
South vigorously in opposition. For this reason President Washington
hesitated signing the measure.
Soliciting the written opinions of his Cabinet members on the con-
stitutionality of the Bank, the President received from Jefferson the
positive view that the Constitution nowhere empowered the Con-
gress to incorporate a bank. Alexander Hamilton, on the other hand,
in a brilliant and seminal state paper, set forth the doctrine of "im-
plied powrers," arguing that the constitutional power of Congress to col-
lect taxes and regulate trade also implied the constitutionality of a
bank in which to deposit the tax and tariff receipts. As he put it
(firing the shot which thenceforth in American history separated the
Hamiltonian "loose constructionists" from the Jeffersonian "strict con-
structionists"), "If the end be clearly comprehended within any of
the specified powers, and if the measure have an obvious relation to that
end, and is not forbidden by any particular provision of the Con-
stitution, it may safely be deemed to come within the compass of the
national authority." Washington accepted this interpretation, rejected
Jefferson's protests, and signed the controversial bill into law.9
It was the possibility of just such semantic taffy-pulling within
the framework of the Constitution that Judge Tyler had protested in
1788. When the Bank charter came up in Congress for renewal in
1811, both the Judge and his son carefully watched Virginia's reaction
to the menace from Washington. The issue was thoroughly debated
in the Virginia legislature during the 1810-1811 session, the year before
young Tyler arrived on the scene. At that time the legislature had over-
whelmingly voted to "instruct" Virginia's United States senators, Wil-
liam B. Giles and Richard Brent, to work against and vote against
the renewal of the Bank charter when it came before the Senate. Both
senators had, however, disobeyed these instructions from Richmond,,
Brent outright and Giles partially.
Although the Bank renewal bill was killed in the Senate in Febru-
55
ary 1811, forcing the institution temporarily out of existence, young
Tyler decided that Virginia's erring senators should be signally pun-
ished. Not only was he convinced of the absolute unconstitutionality of
a national bank, but he was also angry that the senators the legislature
had elected and sent to Washington had defied the authority of that
legislature and hence the authority of the "sovereign" state of Virginia.
Thus when he reached the House of Delegates late in 1811 Tyler in-
troduced three spot resolutions, "without conference or consultation
with any human being/7 censuring Giles and Brent for their failure to
obey the specific instructions of the legislature on the Bank question.
This action, as precocious as it was brash, drew immediate attention
to the ambitious young man from Charles City. The Tyler motions
were referred to a select committee. From this ordeal they emerged
in watered-down form, but the basic idea asserting the right of the
legislature to instruct its United States senators survived intact, and the
Tyler resolutions were passed by the House of Delegates 97 to 20.
For the new member from Charles City it was a heady victory.10
His legal and political careers signally commenced, John Tyler
felt prepared to take a wife. He had thought the matter through
carefully. "The very moment a man can say to himself, 'if I die to-
morrow, my wife will be independent/ he is fully authorized to obey
the impulse of affection," he maintained. Convinced that he was ready
for the step, he obeyed his own impulse, and on March 29, 1813, his
twenty-third birthday, he married Letitia Christian of Cedar Grove
plantation in New Kent County. She was the daughter of Robert Chris-
tian, and from a material standpoint the match was an advantageous
one for the groom, even though he had inherited part of the Greenway
estate from his recently deceased father and now had property and
slaves of his own. The Christians were a numerous, politically promi-
nent, and wealthy tribe, and when the bride's parents died soon after
the wedding, Letitia came into a sizable competence. In the single
surviving love letter Tyler wrote her before their marriage, dated
December 1812, he made the point that while his own financial situa-
tion was clearly not equal to hers, that fact alone made him realize
that she truly loved him:
You express some degree of astonishment, my L., at an observation I once
made to you, "that I would not have been willingly wealthy at the time I
addressed you," Suffer me to repeat it. If I had been wealthy, the idea of
your being actuated by prudential considerations in accepting my suit, would
have eternally tortured me. But I exposed to you frankly and unblushingly
my situation in life — my hopes and my fears, my prospects and my de-
pendencies— and you nobly responded. To ensure to you happiness is now
my only object, and whether I float or sink in the stream of fortune, you
may be assured of this, that I shall never cease to love you.11
.«H8^— +~<B»»»
56
There is no evidence that the gentle Letltia thought Tyler himself
might have been "actuated by prudential considerations." She was a
quiet and introverted girl, more beautiful in facial features than Julia
Gardiner. Socially reserved in manner, domestic in her interests, she
was unconcerned with the subtle economics of marriage alliances within
the planter aristocracy. She was in love with the young lawyer and
legislator from Greenway, and she wanted him as he was. Their court-
ship was a calm, undemonstrative affair. Tyler confessed that until
three weeks before the wedding he had not even dared kiss Letitia's
hand, "so perfectly reserved and modest" was she. A few sonnets ad-
dressed to her, a few books lent and discussed, and they were married.
Not surprisingly, Tyler regarded the approaching ceremony with a
certain impassivity. Six days before the wedding he wrote his friend
Henry Curtis, "I had really calculated on experiencing a tremor on the
near approach of the day; but I believe that I am so much of the
old man already as to feel less dismay at a change of situation than
the greater part of those of my age." 12
The Tyler- Christian marriage was a tranquil relationship through-
out. It gave off none of the sparks of Tyler's later marriage to
Julia Gardiner. It was, however, a happy marriage, and it remained
so for twenty-nine years. Letitia Christian Tyler was a lovely woman.
Every surviving account of her, every recollection, emphasizes her
domestic virtues, her sweetness of manner, her devout religious life, and
her selflessness. Her seven children were devoted to her. Still, Letitia
Tyler never really emerges from the mists of history, perhaps because
none of her own letters survived. She preferred to remain wholly in the
background of Tyler's public career as he moved steadily from the
House of Delegates upward through the House of Representatives, the
governorship of Virginia, the United States Senate, and into the White
House. She had no known political interests and no desire to live in
Washington. So wretched were living accommodations in the mudhole
that was the capital, and so comfortable did she make her successive
homes at Woodburn, Greenway, Gloucester, and Williamsburg that
she accompanied her husband to Washington only once before his
elevation to the Presidency. This was in the winter of 1828-1829.
During this brief exposure in the capital she wa^ remarked upon for
her "beauty of person and eloquence of manner." J3n only one occasion
did she visit the fashionable watering places of the North, preferring
instead, when she left home at all, the various Virginia springs, j She
knitted and stitched and gardened (she loved flowers), supervised her
household slaves with humanity and kindness, raised her seven chil-
dren, and minded her own business. Hers was a quiet and useful life,
filled with domestic interests. She remained, by choice, well removed
from the limelight of her husband's political career.13
57
After Letitia was semi-invalided by a paralytic stroke in 1839 s^e
lived out her few remaining years in the seclusion of her bedchamber,
demanding no special attention, creating no special problem. When
Priscilla Cooper Tyler, wife of Letitia Js oldest son Robert, first met
her new mother-in-law in 1839 she noted that Letitia, then forty-seven,
. . . must have been very beautiful in her youth, for she is still beautiful now
in her declining years and wretched health. Her skin is as smooth and soft as
a baby's; she has sweet, loving black eyes, and her features are delicately
moulded; besides this, her feet and hands are perfect; and she is gentle and
graceful in her movements, with a most peculiar air of native refinement
about everything she says and does. She is the most entirely unselfish person
you can imagine. I do not believe she ever thinks of herself. Her whole
thought and affections are wrapped up in her husband and children. . . . The
room in the main dwelling furtherest removed and most retired is "the cham-
ber/' as the bedroom of the mistress of the house is always called in Virginia
. . . here Mother with a smile of welcome on her sweet, calm face, is always
found seated on her large arm-chair with a small stand by her side, which
holds her Bible and her prayer-book — the only books she ever reads now —
with her knitting usually in her hands, always ready to sympathize with me
in any little homesickness which may disturb me. . . . Notwithstanding her
very delicate health, Mother attends to and regulates all the household affairs,
and all so quietly that you can't tell when she does it. All the clothes for the
children, and for the servants, are cut out under her immediate eye, and all
the sewing is personally superintended by her. All the cake, jellies, custards,
and we indulge largely in them, emanate from her, yet you see no confusion,
hear no bustle, but only meet the agreeable result.
When she was dying in the White House in September 1842, her last
act was to take from a -bedside vase a damask rose. She was still holding
it in her hand when she was found dead. She died as she had lived,
without fuss or ostentation, always in the shadow of John Tyler's
ambition.14
No sooner had Tyler settled with his bride at Mons-Sacer, a
beautiful five-hundred-acre section of the Greenway estate he had
inherited from his father, than he was called to arms against the
British. Once again the Redcoats were marching, and during the 1812
session of the House of Delegates the young legislator vigorously upheld
the war measures of the federal and state governments against the
English. Every resolution designed to throw Virginia's military and
economic weight effectively onto the balance received Tyler's enthu-
siastic support. He was convinced that Britain's policy of impressment
and search on the high seas, and her interference with American
shipping, were the real causes of the War of 1812. That the United
States had intervened in the larger European war on the side of the
Napoleonic military dictatorship; that the desire of the "War Hawks"
for territorial expansion at the expense of British Canada and Spanish
58
Florida might have been a fundamental reason for the conflict; or
that British Impressment of American seamen had been surrendered in
practice if not In principle well before 1812 were thoughts that con-
cerned Tyler not at all. He wanted war. Judge Tyler wanted war. In-
deed, the Infirm Judge, lying on his deathbed at Greenway In January
1813, cursed the fates that would not permit him to "live long enough
to see that proud English nation once more humbled by American arms.'7
The fathers hatred of the ubiquitous Redcoats was the son's hatred,
and young Tyler undertook to discomfit the traditional enemy In every
conceivable manner, legislatively and militarily.15
The War of 1812 was not a glorious passage in American arms.
Tyler's own military experience was rather typical of the amateurish
performance of American militia which led directly to the greatest
military disaster ever sustained by the United States. In the summer of
1813, a British raiding party landed at Hampton, plundered the town,
and for a time appeared poised and ready to march up the James River
to Richmond. The Virginia legislature had adjourned for the summer
and Tyler was home in Charles City with his bride of four months.
The British threat at Hampton fired his patriotism. He immediately
joined a local militia company, the Charles City Rifles, raised for the
defense of the state capital and its river approaches. In this raw and
disorganized little unit Tyler was commissioned Captain, and he set to
work to produce something in the ranks resembling military discipline.
Although -wholly ignorant of the military arts, he improvised a simple
system of drill which the unskilled farmers were able to master. Thus
when the Charles City Rifles were attached to the Fifty-Second Regi-
ment of the Virginia Militia and ordered to Williamsburg they managed,
thanks to Captain Tyler, to get there in some sort of order. They were
quartered upstairs in the William and Mary College building, there to
await the approach of the enemy. One night when all were asleep a
rumor was broadcast that British forces had suddenly entered the
town. Panic struck Captain Tyler's men. In their eagerness to quit
the dark building the entire group, officers and men, tumbled head over
heels down a long flight of stairs and landed in a struggling heap
at the bottom. Following this self-inflicted rout, Tyler's intrepid band
was attached to a new unit, hopefully titled the Second Elite Corps
of Virginia, General Moses Greene commanding. This assignment lasted
one month and was fortunately uneventful. The British raiding force
soon withdrew from the Hampton area, and the Charles City patriots
returned triumphantly to their farms. Their little war was over.16
Tyler had a good sense of humor and he often laughed over the
ludicrousness of his brief military career. When his political enemies
later referred to him derisively as "Captain Tyler" or "The Captain/'
he took no offense. He frequently joked about his "distinguished mili-
tary services during the War of 1812," and he thought the whole ex-
59
perience made a delightful parlor story. Nevertheless, for his heroic
contribution to the defense of Williamsburg he later qualified for a
war bonus of one-hundred-sixty acres of land. He first considered a plot
in St. John's County, Florida, but finally elected to take a quarter-sec-
tion in what is now Sioux City, Iowa. In the difficult days of Recon-
struction Julia was happy to have the monthly bonus of eight dollars
later allotted by Congress to the widows of War of 1812 veterans. So Ty-
ler's military service was not a waste of time and effort after all.17
The fact remained, however, that John Tyler had little feeling for
the martial life. He distrusted the military mentality and he feared the
appearance in American politics of an American Napoleon, a Man on
Horseback. Men of destiny like General Andrew Jackson frightened
him. He consistently opposed the creation of a standing army. Instead,
he became a partisan of the infant United States Navy. This toothless
force, mainly stationed abroad, was unlikely to overthrow the govern-
ment and Constitution by force and violence. When it appeared in 1832
that two erstwhile military heroes, Andrew Jackson and Richard M.
Johnson (the alleged slayer of Tecumseh), might run together on the
Democratic ticket, Tyler remarked with discouragement that "the day
is rapidly approaching when an ounce of lead will, in truth, be worth
more than a pound of sense." 18
In 1816, following the close of the unfortunate War of 1812, John
Tyler was elected to the United States House of Representatives from
the Richmond district, defeating his good friend Andrew Stevenson in
a special election for the vacant seat. Since he and his opponent both
ran on states' rights platforms, the campaign was little more than a
popularity contest. Tyler's arrival in Washington in 1817 was not, of
course, that of a raw freshman congressman from a frontier district.
Member of a prominent Virginia family, son of a former governor,
master of Woodburn, and husband to a daughter of the powerful Chris-
tian clan, Tyler moved swiftly and surely into the most exclusive social
life of the capital. Within a few weeks he was dining at the "Seven
Buildings/' the makeshift home of James and Dolley Madison during
the period of the rebuilding of the White House. Dinner at the
Madisons' was a gastronornical experience that produced a grave shock
to his system. The gracious Dolley took great pride in the table she
set. Foods were sharply spiced in the French manner and the champagne
always flowed. "They have good drink,'7 he wrote Letitia, "champagne,
etc., of which you know I am very fond, but I had much rather dine at
home in our plain way . . . what with their sauces and flum-fiummeries,
the victuals are intolerable." 19
Equally intolerable were living conditions in the capital in those
years. Cows and hogs wandered about the muddy lanes that passed for
streets. Malaria-infested swamps were cheek by jowl with the few
60
scattered private residences. Sidewalks were virtually nonexistent. The
town was dirty, sprawling, and fever-ridden. In the summer it was a
stinking oven. Even on the main thoroughfare, Pennsylvania Avenue,
the street lamps were extinguished in iSiS because the District treasury
had no funds for fuel. It was a city of mediocre boardinghouses and
crowded hotels. Like most of the members of Congress, Tyler lived in a
boardinghouse. At these places the food was dreadful. On one occasion
he was served bad fish and was seriously ill for several days. Dolley
Madison's fare may have been too "Sum-flummery" for Tyler's taste
but he did not get ptomaine poisoning at her table. At the local board-
inghouses any meal could be a wild gamble with destiny. Washington
was obviously no place for Letitia.20
Tyler's career in the House of Representatives during the years
1817 to 1820 was not distinguished. It remains of interest only be-
cause the freshman congressman from Charles City made clear the ideas
he would support for most of the remainder of his life. In his maiden
speech in the House he laid down the political principle which would
govern his voting on important issues. He would never, he said, at-
tempt to court popular favor. "Popularity, I have always thought, may
aptly be compared to a coquette — the more you woo her, the more
apt is she to elude your embrace.'7 On the contrary, he would listen to
no "mere buzz or popular clamour" from the voters of his district, only
the "voice of a majority of the people, distinctly ascertained and plainly
expressed." And he would close his ears to the majority voice if his con-
stituents ever demanded that he violate the Constitution. "If instruc-
tions go to violate the Constitution, — they are not binding — and why?
My constituents have no right to violate the Constitution themselves,"
he said, "and they have, consequently, no right to require me to do
that which they themselves of right cannot." 21
Like many of his planter-politician contemporaries in the South,
especially those from "safe" districts like Charles City, Tyler developed
no rapport with the masses of people. Nor did he attempt to develop a
common touch. He shunned the people, avoided their importunities, and
defied their proclaimed champions. "The barking of newspapers and the
brawling of demagogues," he once said, "can never drive me from my
course. If I am to go into [political] retirement, I will at least take care
to do so with a pure and unsullied conscience." The warmest of men in
his private life, he was incapable of projecting his warmth, good humor,
and camaraderie to people of humble station; in this regard he was a
great deal like Woodrow Wilson. A brilliant speaker in the presence of
other statesmen or to groups of his social and intellectual peers, he
quailed before the indiscriminate mass of men. He invariably preferred
to address them in pamphlets or through the columns of newspapers
rather than from the stump. During the campaign of 1840, forced to
tour the West to carry the Whig message to the decisive coonskin-cap
61
element, his speeches took on a nervous, unconvincing ring as though he
were half-afraid some rough and hearty citizen would interrupt him,
hand him a cup of hard cider, slap him on the back, and call him "good
old Jack Tyler." -
After the emergence of Andrew Jackson onto the American political
stage, Tyler came to fear the potential power of the people. Throughout
the remainder of his long political life he worried lest the establishment
of a £'mere majority principle" in government wreck the country, subvert
the Constitution, and reduce the social order to mobocracy. As he
summed it up in 1851, in opposing a further broadening of the suffrage
in the Old Dominion:
One word more. The opinion is deeply seated with me that no government
can last for any length of time, in consonance with public liberty, without
checks and balances. Without them we rush into anarchy, or seek repose in
the arms of monarchy. We can neither trust King Numbers or King One with
unlimited power. Both play the despot. By the first, the minority is made the
victim; by the last, the whole people. . . . The majority principle may lead
to the establishment of a branch of the Legislature in which the full voice of
the "political people" may be heard, while at the same time those having
the deepest stake in the community [the property holders] . . . may very well
insist upon being protected by some wholesome check over the action of the
mere numerical majority.
Resisting "King Numbers" and "King One," Tyler advocated instead
the reign of King Few, a paternalistic oligarchy of influential property-
owners. In his view, this was the only answer to the dictatorship of the
One or the tyranny of the Many. Understanding the aspirations of the
people was not John Tyler's strong suit. And his inability to do this
caused contemporaries like Edmund Rumn to conclude that "Mr. Tyler
has always been a vain man.35 This charge misses the point. Vanity was
not Tyler's problem. He was no more or less vain than any other of the
ambitious men of his time. What appeared to be vanity was an ingrained
shyness and discomfort in the presence of people with dirty fingernails.
He had difficulty communicating with citizens who moved their lips when
they read, if indeed they could read at all. He had never had any ex-
perience with these people, and he was too diffident to gain any. It is
extremely doubtful that John Tyler could ever have won the White
House in his own right after Andrew Jackson revolutionized and democ-
ratized the American image of the Chief Executive in 1828-1836. Tyler
simply did not have the common touch, and no campaign biographer
could create what was not there.23
What Tyler could do best, and what he did do with great energy
during his first years in Washington, was to protect his stark version of
the Constitution from the onslaught of the proponents of the so-called
American System. This program, most prominently and consistently
sponsored by Henry Clay during the decades after the War of 1812,
62
linked a protective tariff with a national system of government-financed
internal improvements and a national bank. Designed to bind the sprawl-
ing and expanding country together, to increase the domestic consumer
market, subsidize infant home industries, stabilize the currency, and
render the United States less dependent commercially and economically
on a war-prone Europe, the American System sought to bring the North-
ern manufacturing interests into a political and economic alliance with
the turnpike- and canal-conscious frontier West. From this arrangement
the interests of the Tidewater and coastal South seemed virtually ex-
cluded.
It was a program which stemmed naturally and reactively from the
humiliation of the War of 1812. Its proponents hoped that by bringing
together the political and economic interests of two of the three great
sections, the North and the West, something resembling a nation might
be created out of a loose confederation of individual states. The lesson
of American involvement in the Napoleonic Wars was plain enough. The
United States could not exist in a world of competitive nation-states as
a vague and contentious confederacy. Nothing discredited the original
constitutional conception of a United States more swiftly and positively
than the state jealousies, sectional squabbling, and lack of central eco-
nomic and military direction that had characterized the prosecution of
the war. A seagoing and agrarian people whose economic health turned
on foreign trade either had to make themselves self-sufficient economi-
cally, and less dependent on foreign manufactures, or maintain larger
standing armed forces and accept the necessity and inevitability of
fighting for their trade on the high seas in each future European war. In
this sense, the American System was a decision for and a step toward
a national economic self-sufficiency bordering on economic and com-
mercial isolation from Europe. It was a sensible concept at the time.
In 1816-1836 the country needed a national bank, a moderate protec-
tive tariff, and a system of government-sponsored internal improvements.
John Tyler and most Southern states7 righters strenuously disagreed. To
them, the constitutional price was too high to pay. The United States
was a confederacy of states, not a nation, and it should stay that way.
The alternative was tyranny.
At no project did young Congressman Tyler work harder than in his
effort to bring the second Bank of the United States to defeat and ruin.
Chartered by Congress in 1816 for a twenty-year period, the new na-
tional bank, like the old, was essentially a private corporation monopo-
listically empowered to do the government's banking business and pro-
vide a depository for its revenues. The need for it, or something like it,
seemed obvious in 1816 when postwar inflation, currency dislocations,
and the proliferation of unsound private banks (many of them little
more than wildcat operations) threatened to bring the fiscal integrity of
the nation to grief. By 1819, however, the new Bank was in deep trouble.
63
Mismanagement, corruption, and favoritism had stained its three years
of operation and the resulting congressional Investigation was perhaps
inevitable. Demands in the South to repeal the Bank's charter altogether
were voiced more loudly as a sharp break in grain prices in the European
market in 1819 produced widespread depression and economic discontent
in the United States. The search for a scapegoat began almost at once.
The Bank was it.
Against the background of the depression an investigation of the
Bank was ordered and launched, and John Tyler was appointed to the
five-man congressional committee to carry it out. His specific task was
to evaluate the operations of the Bank's branches in Washington and
Richmond, This he did over the Christmas recess of 1818. The job was
difficult and highly technical. "To have to wade through innumerable
and huge folios in order to attain the objects of our enquiry; to have
money calculations to make; and perplex one's self with all the seeming
mysteries of bank terms, operations and exchanges/' was a task so com-
plex, he confessed, that "the strongest mind becomes relaxed and the
imagination sickens and almost expires." Yet he stuck doggedly at it, and
the experience made him an expert on banking matters in short order.
He did not commence his investigatory labors entirely free of bias. To
Ms brother-in-law Henry Curtis, who had married Tyler's sister Chris-
tiana in 1813, he wrote:
Our "wise men flattered us into the adoption of the banking system under the
idea that boundless wealth would result from the adoption. . . . Mountains were
to sink beneath the charm, and distant climates, by means of canals, were to
be locked in sweet embraces. Industry and enterprise were to be afforded
new theaters of action, and the banks, like Midas, were to turn everything
into gold. The dream, however, is over — instead of riches, penury walks the
streets of our towns, and bankruptcy knocks at every man's door. They
promised us blessings and have given us sorrows; for the substance they have
given the shadow; for gold and silver, rags and paper. The delusion is
over. . . ,24
The report the committee submitted to Congress in January 1819
was a model one. Well researched, well organized, and fair, it made sev-
eral specific criticisms of the loose management of the Bank and pointed
out several violations of the institution's charter. The most damaging of
these was the accurate charge that the directors of the Bank had en-
couraged outright stock-jobbery.
In the subsequent debate on the floor of the House Tyler pressed
home a slashing, wide-ranging attack on the institution. He argued that
the chartering of a national bank was unconstitutional to begin with,
that the institution was shot through with corruption and speculation
(which was true), and that the violation of a single article of its charter
should invalidate the whole charter. "If any one member of the human
body offends/' he said, "the whole body bears the punishment. If my
64
finger violates the law, my body pays the penalty. If my hand commits
murder, the hand is not lopped off, but the ligaments and arteries of the
whole system are cut asunder." He blamed the deepening national de-
pression on speculative stock- jobbing (this was an oversimplification of
an extremely complex set of economic factors), and he called attention
to the fact that "Gloom and despondence are in our cities. Usury stalks
abroad and boasts of its illicit gains, while honesty and industry are
covered with rags." All this he blamed on the second Bank of the United
States. Specifically, he recommended abandoning the national-bank con-
cept entirely. He suggested that government revenues be deposited in-
stead in several "notoriously solvent" state banks. As to the possible
political repercussions of his vigorous opposition to the Bank, his atti-
tude was characteristic: "Whether I sink or swim on the tide of popular
favor, is a matter to me of inferior consideration." 25
It was an able speech which summed up states' rights objections to
the national bank and offered a solution which was worth a try. Its
weakness lay in its naive analysis of the causes of the existing national
depression and in Tyler's willingness, given proven violations of the
Bank charter, to throw the baby out with the bath water. His was a
narrow view, one rejected by the majority of the Congress.
The states' rights position on the Bank was legally undercut two
months later when Chief Justice John Marshall, speaking for an unani-
mous Supreme Court, announced his opinion in M'Culloch v. Maryland.
In this famous decision Marshall denied the right of Maryland to tax a
branch of the second Bank of the United States — "the power to tax
involves the power to destroy," he argued in one of the best-remembered
sentences in American history. Specifically, he upheld the constitutional-
ity of the Bank's 1816 charter. Drawing heavily on Hamilton's 1791
doctrine of implied powers, Marshall further stated: "Let the end be
legitimate, let it be within the scope of the constitution, and all means
which are appropriate, which are plainly adapted to that end, which are
not prohibited, but consistent with the letter and spirit of the constitu-
tion, are constitutional." This view was supplemented by Marshall's
broader contention that the powers of the government stemmed from
the people themselves, not from the voluntary act of confederation of
the several states. "The government of the Union," he maintained, "is
emphatically, and truly, a government of the people. In form and in
substance it emanates from them. Its powers are granted by them, and
are to be exercised directly on them, and for their benefit." Needless to
say, this was not what many of the Founding Fathers had had in mind
three decades earlier.26
Re-elected to the House in 1819, Tyler returned to Washington to
enlist for the duration in the South's cold war against the American
System nationalists. First he lashed out at the tariff of 1820, which
sought to raise existing import duties on textiles and metals by some
65
4o per cent, ostensibly to protect domestic manufacturers from ever-
increasing European competition. This protection, argued Clay and
others, would help struggling American manufacturers through the
period of national depression. Tyler did not challenge the constitutional-
ity of the tariff; that was beyond question. He did, however, challenge
its wisdom, pointing out that the deepening depression was related to
the outbreak of peace in Europe which had temporarily dried up markets
supplied by the neutral Americans during the Napoleonic Wars. Tyler
was sure that the European powers would soon be at each others' throats
again and that to continue a policy of tariff protection would only result
in sealing America off from what would soon be a thriving market once
more:
Who can tell how long the causes which now operate to our injury may con-
tinue to exist? All human affairs are constantly undergoing a change; and
even while I am addressing you, new causes of dispute among the powers of
Europe may be unfolding themselves. The speck which is now scarcely dis-
cernable on the horizon, the next moment may swell into a cloud, dark and
portentous. Will you not, by this system, deny to us all benefits from any
change which may occur? Yes, sir, you will have done so. Society lives on
exchanges; exchange constitutes the very soul of commerce. . . . Can you
expect that foreign nations will buy of you for any length of time, unless you
buy of them? 2T
If this idea had a certain ghoulish quality, if frequent European
war was indeed the key to the economic health of the American state,
the morality of the notion did not disturb Tyler. In common with the
free-trade viewpoint of most Southern agriculturalists, he argued that
cotton and tobacco needed no tariff subsidy, that these commodities
could find their way easily and profitably into the markets of the world
without government protection or stimulation of any sort. Projected
tariffs on sugar, coffee, molasses, and salt, on the other hand, represented
a direct tax on those who must use these staples. "Who will have to pay
it?" Tyler asked. "Inasmuch as the agricultural class is the most
numerous, they will have to pay the greater portion of it. It operates as
a direct tax on them." Southerners asked no tariff protection for their
own commodities. Yet they were expected to shoulder the higher prices
tariffs caused in order to stimulate the growth of Northern manufactures.
The protective tariff in this sense was little more than a form of sectional
economic exploitation.
Congressman Tyler felt that the whole American System concept
of making the agrarian United States over into an image of indus-
trial Britain was dangerous and wrongheaded. He preferred to see
his country remain agricultural, the supplier of the warring world's
foodstuffs. A profitable neutrality in European power politics could
best be preserved in the future, he was convinced, through a condition
of agrarianism:
66
A manufacturing nation Is, in every sense of the word, dependent on others.
Look to England! Cut off from the markets of the world, misery and ruin
await her. Threaten to close your ports against her, and she becomes forthwith
alarmed. Close them and a great portion of her population are thrown out of
employment, and reduced to beggary. How is it with an agricultural nation?
Other nations are, in great measure, dependent on it for food. They may
dispense with your silks and gee-gaws. but bread they must have. And when
its foreign trade is destroyed, that very circumstance operates beneficially to
the poorer classes, for they are then enabled to obtain the necessaries of life
in greater abundance, and on much cheaper and much better terms. . . . Let
other nations press on, if they please, to that point where they will lose their
agricultural, and assume a manufacturing character; so much the better for
us ; our markets will thus be increased for the products of our soil, and wealth
and happiness will await us. . . .2S
In proposing a free-trade alternative to protectionism, Tyler ac-
cepted Adam Smith's idealistic notion of a great world market controlled
and ordered by a mystical law of supply and demand. He followed
Smith's suggestion that each nation should sell in that market those
commodities it was most cheaply and efficiently capable of producing
while buying from that market those commodities most cheaply and
efficiently produced elsewhere. American commodities in this first cate-
gory were obviously cotton, tobacco, and grains. To attempt to produce
in America those goods more cheaply manufactured abroad was sheer
madness. And to stimulate such production at home artificially through
tariff protection was at best a form of robbery practiced by Northern
manufacturing interests on the vast mass of American consumers. He
was jubilant, therefore, when the 1820 tariff bill was defeated by a
narrow margin, although he could see that the sectional conflict on the
tariff issue, like the Andrew Jackson problem, was just beginning.
John Tyler's fear of the colorful Jackson began in 1818 in profound
shock over the General's military irresponsibility in a command situa-
tion. It lasted until a few months before Old Hickory's death in June
1845. Throughout this period the two strong-willed men disliked each
other with a passion bordering on the unreasonable. In fairness to Tyler,
however, it must be pointed out that Jackson gave some cause for
alarm in 1817 when he undertook his celebrated invasion of Spanish
Florida to chastise the Seminoles. In this self-generated punitive expedi-
tion he assumed for himself a power to make and levy war clearly dele-
gated to Congress by the Constitution. When he captured, court-
martialed, and executed two pro-Seminole British citizens, Alexander
Arbuthnot and Robert C. Ambrister, during the course of his foray, he
arrogated a judicial power without precedent or antecedent in American
history. From a purely legal standpoint, his was the unique case of an
American military commander on an unauthorized foreign invasion,
arresting two British subjects on Spanish soil and bringing them to trial
there under American military law. He then executed both of them, even
though the officers of his own hand-picked military court had only
sentenced Ambrister to six months at hard labor. Finally, when the
rampaging General seized and deported Spanish colonial officials in
Florida and proclaimed in force there the revenue laws of the United
States, he usurped a quasi-diplomatic function clearly not his under the
Constitution. It was an amazing performance. That both Britain and
Spain were nations with which the United States was at peace in 1817
created severe embarrassment and a threat of war.
It was too much for Congressman Tyler. When a motion to censure
Jackson was brought to the floor of the House of Representatives in
January 1819, Tyler was angrily on his feet. He reviewed the facts in
the case, observing pointedly that
. . . however great may have been the services of General Jackson [in the
past] , I cannot consent to weigh those services against the Constitution of the
land. . . . Your liberties cannot be preserved by the fame of any man. The
triumph of the hero may swell the pride of your country — elevate you in the
estimation of foreign nations — give you a character for chivalry and valour;
but . . . the sheet anchor of our safety is to be found in the Constitution of
our country. ... It is the precedent growing out of the proceedings in this case
that I wish to guard against I demand to know who was authorized, under
the Constitution, to have declared the war — Congress or the general? ... I
cannot imagine a more formidable inroad on the powers of this House
Under what laws have these [British] prisoners been deprived of their exist-
ence? We live in a land where the only rule of our conduct is the law. The
power of promulgating those laws is vested in Congress. They are not the
arbitrary edicts of any one man, nor is any so high as to be above their
influence.29
Tyler's was a vigorous and, in the circumstances, legitimate indict-
ment of the rampaging general, but it was to no avaiL The dashing
Jackson, hero of New Orleans, was too popular on the Western frontier.
The fact that he had killed a few hundred Indians, executed two subjects
of insane old George III, and inconvenienced the colonial administration
of the hated Spanish Don merely increased Ms stature in the boondocks
as American Hero, First Class. "Among the people of the West/' one
journal observed, "his popularity is unbounded — old and young speak
of him with rapture, and at his call, 50,000 of the most efficient war-
riors of this continent would rise, armed, and ready for any enemy."
Given these circumstances, no resolution of censure could be passed
through Congress, and Tyler was left to worry over the prospect of a
Man on Horseback riding roughshod over the Constitution while the
ignorant frontier element went wild with joy. He never trusted Jackson
thereafter.30
An even greater threat to domestic tranquility in America soon
pushed Jackson's dangerous heroics into the back of Tyler's mind. This
68
was the 1819-1820 Missouri Compromise debate, a political watershed
in American history and In the personal life of John Tyler. In Its larger
meaning it marked the first concerted attack from the North on the
South's "peculiar institution." It produced in the South a comprehensive
defense of human slavery as a positive moral good. In the life of Tyler
it added to a growing feeling of frustration and inadequacy that led
him to resign his congressional seat and retire to private life. His was
a leading voice In opposition to the Compromise on the floor of the
House. In great alarm he pointed out the long-range danger to the
South of granting to Congress the power to prohibit or regulate slavery
in the territories. The Missouri Compromise was the camel's nose under
the tent flap so far as the ultimate end of slavery was concerned. Or
so Tyler argued.31
The question at issue was whether Congress under the Constitution
had the right to determine where and whether slavery should be legal in
territories not yet ready for statehood. The debate took an ugly turn in
1819 when the Congress attempted to admit Maine and Missouri into the
Union simultaneously with a view toward maintaining the exact balance
existing in the Union between free states and slave states. The intent,
laudable in itself, demanded nevertheless an acceptance of the idea that
Congress had the right to set territorial limits on the location and ex-
pansion of slavery, a right nowhere made specific in the Constitution.
To be sure, a precedent for this right did exist. In 1787 the Confedera-
tion Congress had passed the Northwest Ordinance, setting forth the
conditions for territorial organization in the lands north of the Ohio
River. The first Congress under the Constitution had re-enacted this
legislation. Under its provisions slavery was specifically prohibited in
these territories. But whether this had any applicability to the Maine-
Missouri problem was another question. As the debate progressed,
tempers flared, insults were flung, and pistols were packed on the
floor. "Missouri is the only word ever repeated here by the politicians,"
Tyler wrote Henry Curtis in alarm. "You have no possible idea of the
excitement that prevails here. Men talk of a dissolution of the Union
with perfect nonchalance and indifference." He was not much less
agitated himself, however. "For myself," he said, "I cannot and will
not yield one inch of the ground." 32
The main Southern argument that Missouri should be admitted
slave and Maine free to preserve the political balance of power in the
Union struck Tyler as an extremely dangerous one in that it threatened
eventual sectional strife and definitely beclouded the essential point
that Congress had no specific power to prohibit slavery in the territories,
either under the Constitution or under the 1803 Louisiana Purchase
treaty. The treaty by which the vast Louisiana Territory had been
acquired from France had specifically upheld slavery in the area, and,
presumably, in any state or territory subsequently carved from the ex-
tensive domain. But it was the sectional- balance-of -power concept that
most distressed Tyler:
Look at the page of history and tell me what has been the most fruitful cause
of war, of rapine, and of death? Has it been any other than this struggle for
the balance of power? . . . Sir, it is the monster that feeds on the bodies of
mangled carcasses, and swills on human blood. And has it come to this, that
we are now to enter into this struggle for power? . . . Equality is all that
could be asked for, and that equality is secured to each state of this Union
by the Constitution of the land.33
Tyler's counterargument was that slavery should be permitted to
spread into any territory where it could competitively maintain itself as
an economically viable institution. It would therefore limit its own ex-
pansion if Congress would obey the Constitution and maintain a hands-
off policy toward it. This occurring, he felt that the problem of the
South's political power within the Union would solve itself. In his speech
attacking New York Representative James Tallmadge's amendment pro-
hibiting the further introduction of slavery into the Missouri Territory,
Tyler maintained that a diffusion of the slave population into frontier
territories would be beneficial to master and slave alike and would mark
a step toward gradual abolition.
Admittedly, his reasoning on this point had a certain unreal qual-
ity about it. He held that the opening of Missouri and other terri-
tories to slavery would benefit slaves in the slave states by reducing
Negro overcrowding there and by expanding the market for slaves west
of the Mississippi. This would drive the price of slaves upward (bene-
fiting the slaveowners and dealers) and cause masters to treat their now
more valuable slaves with greater kindness and humanity (benefiting
the slaves). As the number of slaves in the slave states was thus pro-
portionately reduced, opposition in the South to the idea of compensated
emancipation would wither, the ultimate financial cost of such emancipa-
tion to the federal or state government would be lessened, and the
importance of slavery in the total economy would decline. Thus a grad-
ual and orderly abolition would be brought within the range of possibil-
ity. "You subserve, then, the purposes of humanity by voting down this
amendment/' Tyler informed his colleagues. "You advance the interest
and secure the safety of one half of this extended Republic: you amelio-
rate the condition of the slave, and you add much to the prospects of
emancipation and the total extinction of slavery.7' 34
The final compromise on the heated Missouri question was really
no compromise at all, from Tyler's standpoint. The so-called Thomas
Amendment, sponsored by Illinois Representative Jesse B. Thomas in
February 1820, admitted Missouri as a slave state. This satisfied the
South that the Tallmadge Amendment had been defeated and that
slavery had at least hurdled the Mississippi. But this gain came at the
70
expense of prohibiting slavery forever in the Louisiana Territory north
of 36°3o/. In accepting this less-than-half-a-loaf the South won a battle
and lost a war. The precedent for congressional regulation of slavery in
the territories was established, the geographic extent of slave territory
was limited to a much smaller area than that which lay north of 36°3o',
and the political balance of power between slave and free states in
Congress was potentially, if not actually and immediately, upset. The
Compromise had, however, prevented possible dissolution of the Union.
Tyler was heartsick at the outcome. He wanted neither the breakup
of the Union nor the Compromise. Just what he did want is not entirely
clear. In the final vote in the House, the Missouri Compromise was
adopted 134 to 42. Of the 42 nays, 37 were from the South and 17 of
these were from Virginia. Tyler, of course, was one of the 17. On the eve
of the Civil War, forty-one years later, Tyler could still say of the
Missouri Compromise:
I believed it to be unconstitutional. I believed it to be ... the opening of the
Pandora's box, which would let out upon us all the present evils which have
gathered over the land. ... I want, above all things, to preserve the little
space I may occupy upon the page of history legibly and correctly written. I
never would have yielded to that Missouri Compromise. I would have died in
my shoes, suffered any sort of punishment you could have inflicted upon me,
before I would have done it.35
Everything seemed to be going badly for John Tyler in 1820. Four
years of hard labor in Congress had taken its toll, emotionally, physi-
cally, and economically. He was sick, tired, overworked, and discouraged.
The income from his neglected law practice had dropped to half what it
had been in 1816. Children were coming along now with distressing
regularity (Mary in 1815; Robert in 1816; John, Jr., in 1819; and
Letitia in 182 1) and Tyler was worried about his ability to provide them
with proper educations and the material comforts of life. Most im-
portantly, his vigorous efforts to preserve the Constitution had appar-
ently failed. The corrupt and hated Bank had not lost its charter, the
Man on Horseback had not been censured, the disastrous Missouri
Compromise had been adopted. The victory on the tariff proposal of
1820 was at best a temporary one. The great test on that issue was still
to come.
In December 1820 Tyler decided to resign from Congress. He saw
no reason to continue the unequal struggle against the American System
nationalists, Federalists, and loose constructionists. A letter to Dr. Henry
Curtis indicates that 1820 was one of the psychological low points of his
life:
I have become in a great measure tired of my present station, and have
brought my mind nearly to the conclusion of retiring to private life, and
seeking those enjoyments in the bosom of my family and in the circle of my
71
friends, which cannot be found In any other condition of existence ... the
truth is, that I can no longer do good here. I stand in a decided minority, and
to waste words on an obstinate majority is utterly useless and vain. ... To
my last breath I will, whether I am in public or private life, oppose the
daring usurpations of this government — usurpations of a more alarming
character than have ever before taken place. . . . How few are there who ever
pass beyond my present condition? Not more than one in a thousand. By
remaining here, then, I obtain for myself no other promotion; for were I to
remain all my life, I should still die only a member of Congress ... the honor
of the station is already possessed [By resigning] I should promote my
peace of mind, and with it my health . . . which is now very precarious.
On January 15, 1821, Tyler drafted an open letter to his constituents
resigning his seat for reasons of health. In February of the previous
year he had experienced a serious gastric upset — probably food poison-
ing— which, he informed Curtis, "was so severe as to render my limbs,
tongue, etc. almost useless to me. I was bled and took purgative medi-
cine The doctor here ascribed it to a diseased stomach.77 He was still
feeling the after-effects of this upheaval a year later. Indeed, one med-
ical historian has suggested that Tyler may have had a cerebral vascular
accident from a thrombosis, so slow was he in recuperating from this
illness. Whatever his malady, his plea of poor health was sincere. He
was a sick man. Returning to Charles City, he again took up the prac-
tice of law. His old friend Andrew Stevenson was nominated for and
elected to Congress in his place with Tyler's support and endorsement.36
Tyler's health slowly improved, although in mid-iSai he could
still complain of a severe "dyspepsia77 which "not only affects my body,
but often my mind. My ideas become confused, and my memory bad
while jaboring under it.77 What the despondent thirty-one-year-old
Virginian could not know was that his life was about to enter a new
and useful cycle; nor, of course, could he know that the year 1820
had provided him a future wife. In that year Julia Gardiner was born
on Gardiners Island.37
72
THE DILEMMAS OF A
STATES' RIGHTS POLITICIAN, 1822-1834
Speak of me always as a Jackson man whenever you
are questioned. . . . In this way those who make en-
quiries will be readily satisfied and be no wiser than
they were.
JOHN TYLER, 1832
John Tyler at last recovered his health and self-assurance, a fact
Colonel John Macon ruefully discovered for himself one afternoon in
June 1822 outside the New Kent County courthouse. Macon was a hot-
headed Tidewater cavalier quick to take affront when any insult, real or
imagined, came his way. In this instance it was imagined. Tyler had
given him no cause to be offended. But Macon, a witness in a suit Tyler
was contesting, considered his delicate sense of honor somehow injured
by the lawyer in the course of a routine cross-examination. When Tyler
emerged from the building at sunset Macon strode rapidly up to him.
"Mr. Tyler," he said belligerently, "you have taken with me a very
unjustifiable liberty."
Tyler eyed his antagonist narrowly, replying only that he was not
aware he had offended the Colonel.
"You have not acted the part of a gentleman, Sir/' Macon con-
tinued.
Tyler's own boiling point was not high when it came to personal
imputation and he promptly struck Macon in the face with his fist. A
wild brawl ensued, the Colonel laying on hard with a riding whip. Tyler
finally wrested the whip away and slashed Macon several times. That
ended the fight. Tyler happily reported that he had received no injury
and that he had marked the Colonel's face severely.1
73
If Tyler's fighting spirit had revived by 1822, so too had the com-
pelling lure of public life. In 1823 he was elected again to the Charles
City seat in the Virginia House of Delegates. Immediately he threw
himself into the fight to block Old Dominion endorsement of the so-
called Tennessee Resolution which was designed to democratize the
party caucus system of nominating Presidential candidates. The Ten-
nessee Resolution asked that the people be given a voice in the nominat-
ing process, a reform Tyler considered dangerous since the candidate for
the White House it would benefit most in 1824 was the popular hero,
Andrew Jackson. Tyler favored the candidacy of the Virginia-born
Georgian, William H. Crawford. For this reason he unwisely linked his
support of Crawford with his opposition to the Tennessee Resolution.
So diligently and openly did he labor for Crawford that the legislature
reluctantly abandoned its support of the caucus system rather than see
Virginia's congressional delegation instructed to support any one of the
five contenders for the prize. Crawford, Clay, Jackson, Calhoun, and
John Quincy Adams all had vigorous partisans in the House of Dele-
gates. Tyler thus sustained a stinging defeat on the Tennessee Resolu-
tion; he emerged from the fight "covered in sackcloth and ashes." With
the undemocratic caucus system in its death throes, Presidential nomina-
tions for a time were made by various state legislatures.2
As the 1824 Presidential campaign unfolded, Tyler found himself
supporting the candidacy of John Quincy Adams after a paralytic stroke
virtually removed states' rights hopeful William Crawford from the
canvass. Clay and Calhoun were too closely identified with the Ameri-
can System heresy to suit Tyler, and Calhoun had made the additional
mistake of supporting the Missouri Compromise. Senator Jackson, on
the other hand, was erratic and unpredictable, the mystery candidate
of the 18203. Just what he stood for in 1824 was difficult to ascertain.
About the most that could be said for him was that he wanted very
much to be President. To achieve this laudable ambition he charged
boldly down from the hills of Tennessee damning "King Caucus" and
extolling the democratic virtues. His appeal, much to Tyler's disgust,
was to the illiterate frontier element, to the newly enfranchised, and to
those patriots dazzled by his military reputation as scourge of Redcoat
and Redskin. To sharpen this vote-catching image his managers shrewdly
converted the Andrew Jackson who was planter, land speculator, and
aristocrat by taste into "Old Hickory," backwoods democrat and
champion of the Common Man. Since at various times in his career
Jackson had both supported and opposed national banks, protective
tariffs, and internal improvements, he could be — and was — all things to
many men. Tyler considered him an unstable opportunist, a greater
danger by far to American institutions than Adams. True, Adams was
noted as a loose constructionist, a friend of the American System, and
no lover of human slavery. But Tyler rationalized his vote for the
74
former Federalist on the grounds that Adams actually In office would
be more moderate, responsible, malleable, and predictable than any of
the other heretical candidates. It was Tyler's first major exercise in
political clairvoyance and the result was a disaster. He should have
supported the infirm Crawford, paralysis or no paralysis.3
The result of the election of 1824 pointed up the poverty of a
political system based on warring factions led by strong men nominated
by various state legislatures. Of the four major candidates Jackson re-
ceived a plurality of the popular and electoral votes, running well ahead
of Adams, Crawford, and Clay. He did not, however, command a ma-
jority in the Electoral College and the decision was thrown into the
House of Representatives, where each of the twenty-four states had one
vote. Under the constitutional provision relevant to this confused situa-
tion only the three leaders in the electoral vote could be considered
further. Clay's name was thus dropped from consideration at the outset
even though he had outpolled Crawford in the popular vote. Eliminated
from contention as he was, Clay nevertheless held the balance of power
in Ms hands and with it the real key to the White House door. Following
a confidential talk with Adams, the details of which have never come
to light, the ambitious Kentucklan advised his supporters in the House
to vote for Adams. That endorsement did it. The final outcome was
thirteen votes for Adams, seven for Jackson, and four for Crawford. By
polling 30 per cent of the electoral and popular vote John Quincy Adams
of Massachusetts had become the sixth President of the United States.
John C, Calhoun of South Carolina, Vice-Presidential candidate on both
the Adams and Jackson tickets, became Vice-President. The whole
thing was a mockery of the American electoral process and a fraud
against democracy. This aspect of it did not disturb Tyler. On the con-
trary, throughout the remainder of his political life he never lost sight
of the fact that one way to deal with the menace of King Numbers in a
Presidential canvass was to force the decision into the House of Repre-
sentatives.
The pyrotechnics of the 1824 election came a few days later, when
Adams suddenly announced Clay's appointment as Secretary of State —
traditionally the post of succession to the Presidency itself. With the
release of this stunning news, a plump little Pennsylvania congressman
named George Kremer waddled briefly into the pages of history. In an
anonymous letter to a Philadelphia newspaper Kremer charged that
Clay's support of Adams in the House election and his subsequent ap-
pointment to the Adams Cabinet were part of a "corrupt bargain.77 Clay
was furious at the imputation. Oiling his dueling pistols, he demanded
satisfaction for the "base and infamous calumniator, a dastard and a
liar" who had sullied his honor. When the guileless Kremer identified
himself as the author of the "corrupt bargain'7 charge, the idea of a duel
became ridiculous. Kremer was not worth shooting, and Clay put away
75
Jiis weapons, convinced that powerlul jackson forces naa secretly em-
ployed Kremer as their mouthpiece. If Kremer was not worth the lead
it would take to kill Mm, the erratic and imperious Senator John
Randolph of Virginia was. When the lanky Virginian repeated the "cor-
rupt bargain" indictment on the floor of the Senate in 1826 in a wild
tirade against the President, suggesting that the Adams-Clay administra-
tion was at best a "coalition of Blifil and Black George,'7 a cynical al-
liance of "the Puritan with the blackleg/' Clay promptly challenged
him. Fortunately, both men were mediocre marksmen and honor was
satisfied bloodlessly after each had fired a shot.4
Tyler never believed that the Adams-Clay relationship involved a
"bargain" of any kind. Although Clay carried the charge with him to his
grave, no historical evidence has ever been adduced to support the
accusation. Tyler had quietly supported Adams in the campaign and he
realistically accepted Adams' appointment of Clay to the Cabinet as
part of the normal political process. The thought of General Jackson
still hovering in the political wings frightened him. He also entertained
the hope, one soon to be blasted, that the Adams administration would
prove less nationalistic in its policies than some states' righters feared.
It was in this spirit of wishful thinking that he wrote the Virginia-born
Clay in March 1825 saying that he personally considered the bargain
and corruption charges groundless. Only Clay's ready and patriotic sup-
port of Adams' candidacy in the House had brought about the "speedy
settlement" of the "distracting subject":
Believing Mr. Crawford's chance of success to have been utterly desperate,
you have not only met my wishes . . . but I do believe the wishes and feelings
of a large majority of the people of this your native State, I do not believe
that the sober and reflecting people of Virginia would have been so far
dazzled by military renown as to have conferred their suffrages upon a mere
soldier — one acknowledged on all hands to be of little value as a civilian. I
will not withhold from you also the expression of my approval of your
acceptance of your present honorable and exalted station.
This friendly, unsolicited letter arrived in Washington in the midst of
one of the great crises of Clay's political life. He was grateful for Tyler's
moral support, and his subsequent friendly relations with the Virginian,
until their dramatic break in 1841, reflected something of his continuing
gratitude. If they had little else in common, both men feared and hated
Andrew Jackson.5
In 1825 John Tyler was elected governor of Virginia by the state
legislature. The office was ceremonial in character and little political
significance attaches to Tyler's elevation to it. Virginia in 1825 was still
operating under a 1776 state constitution which reflected the bias of
the state's Revolutionary leaders against any centralization of adminis-
trative authority. In addition3 the party situation within the Virginia
legislature in 1825 was in flux, just as it was at the national level. Each
of the great sectional leaders — Clay, Adams, Jackson, and Caihoun —
commanded strong personal support in Richmond. At no time, there-
fore, did Tyler have a disciplined political organization with which to
work. Nor during Ms thirteen-month tenure of office did he work to build
one. He sought no changes in the constitutional structure that reduced
the governorship to little more than the exercise of verbal masonry at
cornerstone dedications. Governor Tyler proposed legislation and the
legislature disposed of it. As a training ground for executive leadership
the governorship of Virginia was deficient in every respect.
Tyler urged, for example, that the legislature create a system of
public schools for all classes of people. But he submitted no plan for
financing the scheme and left the question of implementation to the
General Assembly. While the idea was sound and farsighted, there was
no executive follow-through and no willingness to ask for or fight for
the higher taxes the school plan would require. Similarly, Tyler was
convinced that something should be done to bring the transmontane
counties into a closer political and commercial relationship with the
Piedmont and Tidewater. A canal- and road-building program to bind
the state together was recommended. But he preferred to leave the de-
tails of this to "the wisdom of the General Assembly/5 noting only that
unless Virginia got into the internal-improvements business soon, pres-
sure in the western counties to invite the federal government to do the
job would become irresistible.6
Also less than energetic was Tyler's circuitous effort to convince the
General Assembly that the governor's salary was inadequate to sustain
the social demands of the office. During his term as governor the ex-
penses incurred in entertaining the exclusive society of Richmond and
the state legislators and their ladies mounted steadily. In spite of Letitia's
heroic efforts to maintain simplicity at official social functions the costs
invariably exceeded the cash income of the governor. To suggest this
point as delicately as possible to the members of the legislature, Tyler
wryly invited them all to a banquet at the Mansion at which he served
only Virginia ham and huge quantities of cooked corn bread; cheap
Monongahela whiskey was ladled out in copious amounts to wash down
the glutinous fare. Whether the lawmakers became sick or drunk or both
is not recorded. Nonetheless, the tactic failed. Tyler's salary was not
raised, and by the time he resigned the office in January 1827 to accept
election to the United States Senate he was in serious financial difficulty.7
Still, Tyler enjoyed his gubernatorial career — at least he said he
did. Sterile as it was from the standpoint of his political education or
the possibility of truly constructive accomplishment, it did give him the
psychological satisfaction of following in the footsteps of his revered
father. He once remarked that the honor of being a member of the
United States Senate could scarcely compare to that afforded by the
77
governorship of Virginia. Never theless, when an opportunity to leave the
Governor's Mansion in Richmond was presented to him early in 1827,
Tyler jumped at the opportunity to return to Washington.8
Tyler's promotion to the Senate in 1827 was accomplished only
after a bitter and controversial fight with incumbent Senator John Ran-
dolph in the General Assembly. The issue between them was not politi-
cal; it was entirely personal. Randolph was a brilliant and caustic
advocate of states' rights. He had loyally supported William H. Craw-
ford in 1824 — long after John Tyler had abandoned the stricken
Georgian for John Quincy Adams. So orthodox was he on states' rights
that Governor Tyler himself publicly urged his speedy re-election to
the Senate and stated his hope that there would be no opposition to
the Randolph candidacy in the General Assembly. Privately, however,
Tyler had serious objections to Randolph's erratic personal behavior
and to the Senator's tendency to indulge in public proclamations un-
becoming a Virginia gentleman. Many Virginians shared the governor's
concern. It was true that Randolph had an unhappy facility for verbal
provocation. Henry Clay once reminded him of a rotten mackerel lying
in the sun shining and stinking and the charge of Clay's "corrupt bar-
gain" with Adams had produced the celebrated duel with Harry of the
West. On another occasion the colorful senator was reported to have
undressed and dressed in the Senate chamber. When angry he indulged
in character assassination; when depressed he sought solace in liquor.
His hatred of the Adams-Clay administration was so passionate that he
was willing to make common legislative cause with the Jacksonians
against it. This alliance proved quite disturbing to conservative states'
lighters in Richmond, Tyler among them.
On January 12, 1827, the day before the balloting was to take place
in the General Assembly, Governor Tyler suddenly became a candidate
for the Randolph seat. Offered a last-minute nomination to the post
by a group of anti-Randolph legislators, Tyler replied to their im-
portunity with a skillfully worded statement that denied any interest in
the position while strongly implying that he might indeed respond to a
draft. Not surprisingly, he was promptly placed in nomination for the
Senate the next day. Publicly he maintained that he had absolutely no
interest in the nomination. But he would not withdraw his name from
consideration. Randolph's partisans were outraged. Richard Morris of
Hanover County construed the unexpected Tyler candidacy as a clever
plot in which the wily governor had lulled Randolph's supporters into a
sense of false security while secretly conniving to have his own name
placed in contention. Tyler of course denied this. He called the Morris
charge "slanderous and false" and bluntly stated that he was fully
prepared to meet "all the consequences which may result from such
declaration." Neither Morris nor Tyler was a duelist at heart and it was
well that the matter ended there. The fact remains, however, that in the
78
sandbagging of Randolph, Tyler was forced to accept the votes of some
thirty Virginia legislators who actively supported the Adams-Clay party
and who were openly hostile to states7 rights. Joining with those mem-
bers who thought Randolph lacked the decorum befitting a Virginia
senator, this Ideological suspect group gave Tyler the necessary margin
of victory. By the slim count of 115 to no Randolph was retired and
Governor John Tyler became a United States senator.9
When Tyler reached Washington In December 1827 to take his seat
In the United States Senate he returned to the arena of familiar battles
still raging. He had already Informed Virginians of his attitude toward
the Adams administration. Shortly after his election he told a group of
his political friends at a Richmond dinner in his honor that his complete
disillusionment with Adams began as early as December 6, 1825, when
the new President had delivered Ms first Annual Message to Congress.
The Message was a paean to nationalism. Adams recommended a vast
federal Internal-improvements program, called for a uniform national
militia law, a national university, a national astronomical observatory,
and the national standardization of weights and measures. He also urged
national laws to promote manufacturing, commerce and agriculture, the
arts, sciences and literature. The implications of the speech took Tyler's
breath away:
I saw In it an almost total disregard for the federative principle — a more
latitudinous construction of the Constitution than has ever before been in-
sisted on. ... From the moment of seeing that message ... I stood distinctly
opposed to this administration. ... I honestly believe the preservation of the
federative principles of our government to be inseparably connected with the
perpetuation of liberty A war for [our principles] I shall be ready to
prosecute under any banner, and almost under any leader. It is a cause cal-
culated to awaken zeal, for it Is that of liberty and the Constitution; and In
such a cause I will consent to become a zealot.10
The Tariff Bill of March 1828 gave Senator Tyler his first oppor-
tunity for zealotry. It was a grotesque, cynical bill. As Calhoun admitted
a decade later, it was little more than a complicated Jacksonian plot
designed to wreck the Adams administration on the eve of the 1828 elec-
tion and advance the political prospects of Old Hickory. Its essential
feature was a proposed tariff schedule which at one stroke would dis-
criminate against New England wool manufacturers, subsidize the iron-
manufacturing interests of the politically vital Middle Atlantic states,
make the South's free traders happy, and provide the frontier states with
higher protection on those articles in which they were most interested.
The political strategy behind the new tariff was crude. Given the pro-
posed lower wool schedules, its sponsors were certain that New England
would oppose the legislation and that Adams would surely veto it if it
passed. Actually, the floor managers of the legislation did not want It to
pass. What they wanted was a campaign issue with which to flay Adams.
79
Thus they designed the protective clauses in such a way that if the bill
happened to pass and the President signed it, he was politically ruined
in the South and in New England. If it passed and he vetoed it, he
was damaged in the Middle Atlantic states and in the West. In either
event the Jacksonians would gain politically at his expense. As John
Randolph correctly sized it up, "The bill referred to manufactures of
no sort or kind, except the manufacture of a President of the United
States." n
Something in the Jacksonian strategy went wrong. Many New
Englanders, Webster among them, voted for the bill on the grounds
that it maintained the broad concept of protection even if it lowered
temporarily the protective tariff shield on woolens. In its final form the
bill was a high-tariff monstrosity spiced with sectional sweeteners. Few
legislators really wanted it. Nevertheless, it slipped through the House
105 to 94 and through the Senate 26 to 21. Adams promptly signed it,
and wails of anguish swept the nation, particularly in the South. It was
immediately and accurately dubbed the "Tariff of Abominations" in
the South and it was destined to trigger a series of events which nearly
disrupted the Union in 1833.
Tyler participated only peripherally in the 1828 tariff debate. He
wanted to see Adams destroyed and he did not inquire into the ethics
or tactics of those of his colleagues who worked toward the same end.
He had come to Washington a few months earlier prepared to enlist
"under any banner, and almost under any leader" to break the Presi-
dent. Within a few days of his arrival in the capital, after great soul-
searching, he cast his political lot with General Jackson and his devious
lieutenants. He was thoroughly convinced that the American System
nationalism of the Adams administration, supported as it was by Henry
Clay, was aimed at the political and economic consolidation of the
Northeast and West at the expense of the South. Adams, he bluntly
charged, "seeks to win us by roads and canals." The immediate future,
filled as it was with internal improvements and higher protective tariffs,
looked black indeed. Moreover, he feared that the re-election of Adams
in 1828 would surely result in Secretary of State Clay's succession to
the Presidency in 1832 and 1836, "And what possible chance have we
of making a stand for the Constitution during that period?" he asked
Curtis. "Rely upon it, none." In the long run he felt that "the Jackson
men will alone arrest" the march to higher tariffs and other American
System schemes favored by Adams and Clay. Thus when the 1828 bill
emerged from committee Tyler supported the measure. He too hoped
that by cramming it with features unacceptable to New England manu-
facturing interests the whole thing would go down in massive defeat.
He therefore opposed all "sundry villainous amendments"; and, he
pointed out, "Its fate rests on our ability to preserve the bill in its
present shape. If we can do so it will be rejected." When it was passed
80
and then signed by Adams, T\ier was stunned. Again lie had outwitted
himself.12
Tyler's decision to support Andrew Jackson for the Presidency In
1828 was not a reckless plunge. It was forced by the fact that Jackson
now seemed to be the only alternative to the hated Adams just as Adams
had been in 1824 the best alternative to the then-hated Jackson. Tyler
personally preferred the nomination of Governor DeWitt Clinton of
New York. who. he felt, was the kind of Northern leader Virginia could
trust and support. He had built the great Erie Canal with state funds,
proving to Tyler's satisfaction that large-scale internal improvements
could be constructed without federal money and interference. But
Clinton proved uncooperative. In 1827 he announced for Jackson and
Tyler was left without a candidate. Again Tyler was faced with a
dilemma. It was Adams or Jackson, "and we must make the best of our
situation. The people will choose between two latitudinarians "
Nor did the senator make his reluctant choice of Jackson without
embarrassment. News of his congratulatory March 1825 letter to Clay
leaked Into the Virginia press. "John Tyler identified with Henry Clay,"
screamed the Virginia Jackson Republican. "We are all amazement!!
heart sick! 1 chop fallen!! dumb!! Mourn, Virginia, mourn!!" Tyler
was furious at the revelation of his indiscretion. "Mr. Clay has be-
trayed me!" he shouted.13
The Virginia Jacksonians need not have pounded their breasts in
such anguish. Tyler had already rationalized his support of Old Hickory
though he was obliged to cling to some very soggy straws in doing so.
As early as December 1827 he had reported as fact a confused mixture
of hearsay , rumor , and supposition to the effect that Jackson was, deep
down inside, a strict constructionist and a states' rights man. The
General's "ardent advocates from Tennessee are decidedly, as far as
I can gather, in favor of a limited construction of the Constitution," said
Tyler. He was also convinced, although he had little evidence to sup-
port the notion, that Jackson would "surround himself by a cabinet
composed of men advocating, to a great extent, the doctrines so dear
to me." He therefore decided that the prospects of a Jackson administra-
tion were "bright and cheering" and he urged Virginia's states' rights
men into an "active support" of Jackson's candidacy. While there were
"many, many others whom I would prefer," he confided to Curtis,
"every day that passes inspires me with the strong hope that his ad-
ministration will be characterized by simplicity — I mean Republican
simplicity." Basically though, it was still a choice of evils. "Turning
to [Jackson] I may at least indulge in hope," Tyler confessed; "looking
on Adams I must despair." He decided to vote for Old Hickory in 1828
on the basis of the same rationalization he had employed in 1824 when
he opted for Adams. In neither instance was he deceived by others.
He deceived himself.14
81
The Jackson cause in the South in 1828 was strengthened by the
appearance on the Democratic ticket of John C. Calhoun as Vice-
Presidential nominee. Calhoun, his long honeymoon with Clay and the
American System ended on the rocks of the Tariff of Abominations,
was now a staunch states' rights advocate. He shifted from Adams7
faction to that of Jackson with all the skill and finesse of a Talleyrand.
Vice-President under Adams, he would soon become Vice-President
under Jackson. The so-called National Republicans, an amalgamation
of the followers of Adams and Clay and the remnants of the old
Hamiltonian Federalists, met in convention at Harrisburg and predict-
ably renominated Adams. His Secretary of the Treasury, Richard Rush
of Pennsylvania, was given the second place on the ticket.
The campaign began in the gutter and remained there. The issues
of the day received scant attention. The National Republicans portrayed
Jackson as an ignorant, drunken, quarrelsome, trigger-happy duelist,
murderer, and militarist who had committed bigamy with his wife
Rachel. The Democracy shrilly countered with the old charge of the
"corrupt bargain" and added the accusation that Adams had mis-
appropriated public funds for his personal use and had kept a "gaming
table'7 in the White House. To counteract the bigamy charge, one of
Jackson's more creative campaign managers, Duff Green, concocted
the story that Adams, while Minister to Russia, had encouraged the
Czar to seduce a friendless American girl there.
All this was hokum. It stirred up the voters, however, tens of
thousands of them recently enfranchised, and some 1,155,000 Ameri-
cans turned out to give the alleged bigamist a 647,000^0-508,000
margin over the alleged procurer. Compared with the 361,000 Ameri-
cans who had cast ballots in 1824, the election of Jackson represented
a major democratic upheaval. His personality excited both love and
hate, but it did excite. And with suffrage coming to most white Ameri-
can males who wished to exercise it, a revolution toward what Tyler
later called "King Numbers" was well under way. The masses swept
Old Hickory into office.15
Tyler took no active part in the campaign. He paid no attention
to the scurrility employed by both sides. He voted for the Jackson-
Calhoun ticket and sat back to await developments. "We are here in a
dead calm," he wrote a Charles City neighbor from Washington in
December 1828. "When the General comes we may expect more bustle
and stir." It was one of John Tyler's greatest understatements.16
Tyler had hoped that Jackson's administration would be charac-
terized by "Republican simplicity," but he was scarcely prepared for
the arrival of the drunken, fighting, unwashed hordes that descended
on the capital when Old Hickory rode into Washington. The streets,
the boardinghouses, the hotels — every available space — was filled with
82
rough, plain people come to see their champion safely Installed in the
White House. "I have never seen such a crowd before," wrote Daniel
Webster. u Persons have corne five hundred miles to see General Jack-
son, and they really seem to think that the country has been rescued
from some dreadful danger." 17
The details of the reception at the White House following Jackson's
Inaugural Address have long been part of America's democratic folk-
lore. Scrambling, surging, and elbowing, the crowd flooded into the
Executive Mansion to glimpse, to touch, to admire the Hero. Muddy
boots, crashing glass, fainting women, bloody noses, and ruined furni-
ture contributed to the pandemonium. Until the punch bow! was moved
out onto the lawn, followed closely by the thirsty frontier citizenry, it
seemed that Jackson would be crushed to death and the White House
laid waste. On March 4, 1829, the Voice of the People breathed the
strong odor of raw whiskey. To one dignified aristocrat the reception
seemed to herald the "reign of King Mob"; to another the General's
cheering section was a "noisy and disorderly rabble" reminiscent of the
French Revolution.18
There was nothing in Jackson's inaugural speech to stir men's souls
to this boisterous extent. It was a pedestrian address promising economy
In government, a proper regard for states' rights, and an overhauling of
the federal civil service. The main issues of the day — tariffs, internal
improvements, the Bank of the United States — were buried in verbal
fog. The General was not yet ready to tip his political hand. Behind
the scenes he was busily engaged in forging his "Kitchen Cabinet," those
practical politicians, publicists, and advisers who would build the Jack-
son party, organize the rural and urban masses behind it, and revolu-
tionize the whole conception of the role of the Executive in American
government. These insiders — Francis P. Blair, Duff Green, Isaac Hill,
Amos Kendall, Andrew J. Donelson, and William B. Lewis — were all
ambitious Democrats, men willing to employ intrigue and ruthlessness
in their desire to crush the political power of the moneyed and landed
aristocracy in America. In their prejudices, Ideas, and actions they
nurtured the first seeds of a concentrated attack on entrenched class
privilege in the United States. It is little wonder that the aristocratic
John Tyler would soon find himself, like All Baba, fallen among political
thieves.19
The first sure indication Tyler had that Jackson planned a major
assault upon the old order of things came in 1830 with the so-called
Spoils System, Old Hickory's policy of frankly bending the power of
patronage to party purposes. It was not a new idea. Thomas Jefferson
had employed patronage in this manner, with considerable restraint
to be sure, during his White House years. By 1830 it had become
standard operating procedure in the governments of several states,
notably New York and Pennsylvania. What Jackson did was to Intro-
83
duce the system openly and boldly into federal administration. He fired
civil servants friendly to the old Adams administration and he removed
others who were engaged in sabotaging the policies of his own.
During his first year in the White House he removed from office, for
political reasons alone, 9 per cent of all federal officeholders, replacing
them with men personally loyal to himself. Proportionately, this was no
greater number than Jefferson had removed, but it looked like a vast
purge. Jackson's intention in all this was to narrow the gap between
the government and the people. Official duties, said the President, should
be made "so plain and simple that men of intelligence may readily
qualify themselves for their performance." Only in this way could the
educated leisure class be shaken from its firm grip on the engines of
government.20
Tyler's principal objection to Jackson's appointment policy hinged
on the professional background of some of the appointees. He did not
oppose the use of patronage for party purposes as such; indeed, he
embraced the idea affectionately when he himself was in the White
House. His primary criticism of administration patronage policy
centered upon Jackson's appointment of a group of pro-administration
newspaper editors and journalists to public office. Tyler's feeling was
that "the press, the great instrument of enlightenment of the people,
should not be subjected, through its conductors, to rewards and punish-
ments." He did not consider the fact that many of the great newspapers
in the nation were already at the service of aristocratic elements hostile
to Jackson. Nevertheless, he feared that the free press would swiftly
be reduced to a mere trumpet of party by Jackson's policy. For this
reason Tyler voted in the Senate against the confirmation of pro-
Jackson journalists Amos Kendall, Henry Lee, James B. Gardner,
Mordecai M. Noah, and Isaac Hill.21
He similarly opposed Jackson's right to utilize recess appointments
of American diplomats as a device to avoid the problem of Senate
confirmation. The appointment power was clearly the President's under
the Constitution, but Jackson had not subsequently submitted the names
of his recess appointees to the Senate for its "advice and consent."
The President's position was that the work of the nation had to go
forward whether the Senate was in session or not and that the sub-
mission of the names of diplomats to the Senate after the completion of
the work they were appointed to do was an irrelevancy and a waste
of time. In this attitude Jackson was in violation of both the spirit and
letter of the Constitution, and Senator Tyler was quick to pounce on
him. In an able speech on the floor of the Senate in February 1831,
Tyler carefully read the wording of Article II, Section 2, Paragraph 2,
dealing with "advice and consent." Semantics were with him on this
issue and he knew it:
84
Sir, I take the simple, unambiguous language of the Constitution as I find it.
I will not inquire what it should be, but what it is, when I come to decide
upon it For myself the path of duty is straight, and I shall walk in it.
Shall I displease the President by doing so? If I do, I cannot help it I
have seen much in his career to applaud But if we were now forming the
government, I would add to the power of the President not even so much as
would turn the scales by the hundredth part of a hair. There is already
enough of the spice of monarchy in the presidential office. There lies the
true danger to our institutions. It has already become the great magnet of
attraction. The struggles to attain it are designed to enlist all the worst pas-
sions of our nature. It is the true Pandora's box. Place in the President's
hands the key to the door of the treasury, by conferring on him the uncon-
trolled power of appointing to office and liberty cannot abide among us.
A majority of the Senate agreed with Tyler, and Jackson's knuckles were
sharply rapped.22
Senator Tyler was not yet in opposition to Jackson. On the con-
trary, he found much in the Jackson administration in 1829-1831 to
command his support, and he was sincere when he said in February
1831 that he had seen much in Jackson's career to applaud. He feared
Clay and Ms American System more than he distrusted Jackson. In
March 1830 he had written his friend John Rutherfoord that while
a polyglot opposition to Jackson was beginning to form in Congress be-
hind the leadership of Henry Clay it was to the advantage of the South
to continue supporting the President:
. . . the South sustains him from the fear of greater ill under the auspices of
another. The opposition is united to a man and will carry on the most un-
sparing warfare. They produce the effect, which may be salutary, of holding
our heterogeneous materials together. ... At this time too the country is
peculiarly excited by the alarmists and fanatics, anti-Sunday mail, anti-
masonic, abolition societies, and last, tho' not least, the sympathy and mock
sensibility attempted to be created in behalf of the Southern Indians, all
conspiring to one end, viz: the overthrow of Jackson and the elevation of
Clay.
Nor in their personal relations was Tyler yet ready to fault Old
Hickory. A dinner at the White House in 1830 frankly impressed him.
"Would you old-fashioned Virginian believe it," he remarked in good
humor to Rutherfoord, "he even went so far as to introduce his guests
to each other — a thing without precedent here and most abominably un-
fashionable. At dinner he seemed to me to have laid aside the royal
diadem, and to have fancied himself at the Hermitage. . . . All satisfied
me that I stood in the presence of an old-fashioned republican." 2S
More important than social graces, Jackson's veto of the Maysville
Road Bill on May 27, 1830, drew Tyler and other states' rights politi-
cians to his banner with positive enthusiasm. The veto was a sharp
blow at the National Republicans and at Henry Clay, whose sup-
porters in the West and Northeast had rammed the proposal through
Congress. It was also an attempt by Jackson to bring the South more
closely to his support and head off defections in that section threatened
in the growing personal tension between himself and Vice-President
Calhoun. It represented, finally, the beginning of Jackson's shift, under
the urging of Martin Van Buren and others, to a more radical posi-
tion of attacking privilege by denying federal subsidies to private cor-
porations.
The bill authorized the government to buy $150,000 worth of stock
in the Maysville Turnpike Road Company to permit the company to
construct a sixty-mile stretch of highway located entirely within the
state of Kentucky. The President argued in his veto message that since
the proposed road lay entirely within the limits of Kentucky and was
not connected with any existing transportation system of an interstate
character, it was not properly a matter for federal concern. He also
suggested that the question of the constitutionality of future internal-
improvement proposals might well be solved by a constitutional amend-
ment specifically permitting federal expenditures for such purposes.
Tyler was extremely encouraged by the veto message. "This action
of the President," he exulted, "is hailed with unbounded delight by the
strict constructionists, and the two Houses of Congress resound with his
praise." Well might Tyler have been pleased with the veto. His own
speech in the Senate in April 1830 in opposition to the Maysville Bill
was a slashing attack on the whole concept of government-financed
internal improvements. The twisting of the Constitution had reached
the point in the Maysville proposal, he argued sarcastically, whereby
the dirt lane running past his Gloucester farm could be designated a
"national" road because it ultimately intersected a road that later
joined another road that ran from Virginia to Alabama.24
If Tyler remained reconciled to the Jackson administration, the
spring of 1831 found many states7 rights politicians in the South search-
ing for greener pastures. Chief among these was John C. Calhoun. Fol-
lowing the passage of the hated Tariff of Abominations in 1828, a
troubled Calhoun returned to his Fort Hill plantation at Pendleton,
South Carolina, to ruminate on the sad state of the nation and his
future role in it. While the citizenry was electing him once again to the
Vice-Presidency, Calhoun was calmly producing the explosive pamphlet
"South Carolina Exposition and Protest." In this revolutionary work
the Vice-President coldly and brilliantly argued the thesis that South
Carolina, as a voluntary member of the original compact of states,
retained the right under the Constitution of that compact to nullify and
declare void within her borders the operation of any federal law that
was unconstitutional — in this instance the Tariff of 1828.
Armed with this sputtering ideological bomb, Calhoun returned
86
to Washington to fight the states' rights cause. During the next two
years he permitted his personal and political relations with Jackson
to deteriorate to such a point that by 1831 the two men were scarcely
speaking. In the first place, Jackson was distressed to learn that Calhoun
had covertly criticized his conduct in Florida in 1818. The split was
widened when Calhoun and his haughty wife, Floride, refused to mingle
socially with Peggy O'Neale Eaton, the former Washington barmaid who
had married Jackson's Secretary of War, John H. Eaton., in 1829. Jack-
son's decision to champion the controversial Peggy disrupted the Cabi-
net and all Washington society. Only the urbane widower, Martin Van
Buren, Secretary of State, sided with his chivalrous chief and maintained
social intercourse with the outcaste Eatons.25
The political vacuum in the Jackson administration created by
Calhoun 's break with the President was filled by Van Buren. Indeed,
Tyler watched with fascination as the leader of the New York Democ-
racy and champion of the common man in the Empire State ingratiated
himself with Old Hickory and overnight maneuvered himself into the
position of chief heir to the Presidential succession. Tyler was no
admirer of the Little Magician. He considered Van Buren little more
than a slick opportunist. "I like not the man overmuch/' he con-
fessed to his brother-in-law, John B. Seawell, in January 1832. He
could see, however, that as Calhoun and his friends marched out of
the Jackson administration the New York liberals under Van Buren
were marching in. The political alliance of frontier agrarians and urban
artisans which would sweep all before it in 1832, and again in 1836,
was beginning to take form in the Jackson- Van Buren amalgam. "What
deeper game could any man have played?" Tyler asked. Nevertheless,
he was impressed with the New York politician's skill in moving his
cohorts into Jackson's inner circle.26
Tyler was unwilling in 1831-1832 to carry his states' rights orienta-
tion to the extreme of Calhoun's radical nullification doctrine. Nor
was he prepared to flail the Jackson administration without good cause.
For him, the glow of the Maysville veto lingered on. When Jackson also
vetoed the Bank Bill in July 1832, Tyler had no choice but to come
again to Old Hickory's support in the November canvass. As he ex-
plained his decision to his daughter Mary in April 1832:
You say that enquiries are often made of you as to my opinions on various
political subjects. If you knew them, upon many it might be improper to
divulge them. There are enough persons who would be inclined to turn your
declarations to bad account in reference to myself. Speak of me always as a
Jackson man whenever you are questioned, and say that in regard to Van
Buren, Calhoun, etc., etc., they are matters with which I do not deal; that
you have reason to believe that I am directed exclusively by reference to the
public interests, and not by men. In this way those who make enquiries will
be readily satisfied, and be no wiser than they were before questioning you.27
87
Following the Investigation of the second Bank of the United
States, in which Tyler had participated in 1819, the controversial in-
stitution had grown and flourished under the able leadership of Langdon
Cheves of South Carolina. Honesty and conservatism had characterized
its operations for a decade. It had provided a stable currency and had
served as a safe repository of Treasury receipts. Nevertheless, consider-
able ideological and political hostility to the Bank remained. States'
rights theorists still considered the institution unconstitutional. Western
debtors and land speculators favoring inflation and cheap money ob-
jected to the Bank's conservatism and its deflationary policies. Private
banking interests throughout the nation resented the Bank's monop-
olistic features. Jackson himself harbored the unsophisticated frontier
notion that paper money was a dangerous thing to have floating around.
Less naive was his view that the Bank was a monopolistic private cor-
poration of great power, wealth, and influence. Operating partially in
the public interest without public controls upon it, it was an octopus
among financial porpoises. Its leader after 1822 was the haughty Nicho-
las Biddle, a snobbish patrician from a social background the Old Hero
felt he could not trust. The more Jackson thought about the potential
threat of the rising moneyed aristocracy in America, symbolized by
Biddle, his rich friends, and the stockholders of the Bank, the more
convinced he became that a cancer of privilege was spreading among
the healthy tissues of the republican body social.
Nicholas Biddle wanted desperately to keep the Bank out of
partisan politics. Yet its charter would expire again in 1836 and he
felt it imperative to the economic well-being of the nation that it be
renewed. Conversations with Henry Clay convinced him that he should
push for charter renewal in 1832, four years in advance of the expira-
tion date — before Jackson could effectively organize anti-Bank forces
behind his own party. A lightning campaign for the Bank might prove
successful in Congress. But what if the unpredictable Jackson vetoed a
new Bank bill, Biddle wondered. "Should Jackson veto it/7 exclaimed
Clay, "I shall veto him!"28
Clay's motives in urging a premature renewal of the Bank charter
were political. As a longstanding champion of the institution in the
political arena, he felt that a revival of the Bank issue in 1832 might be
used to defeat Jackson in the November campaign. This, as it turned
out, was a serious miscalculation. Nevertheless, beginning in May 1832,
Biddle and Clay launched a massive propaganda campaign for im-
mediate charter renewal. All that money, pamphlets, newspaper edi-
torials, and crack lobbyists could accomplish was done. On June 1 1 the
Bank Bill passed the Senate 28 to 20, and on July 3 it cleared the
House 107 to 85. The General was outraged at the crude machinations
of the Clay-Biddle campaign. "The bank is trying to kill me," he told
Van Buren grimly, "but I will kill it!37 29
88
With Ms usual vigor Senator Tyler joined the new fight over the
Bank. He had fought the Institution and its predecessor steadily since
1811. Twenty years7 service in the anti-Bank ranks had made him an
expert on the question. His Senate speech of May 1832 revealed a firm
grasp of banking economics. He voted for every7 amendment brought
to the Senate floor designed to weaken the Bank and he opposed every
proposal aimed at strengthening the institution. Specifically, Tyler
spoke for a crippling amendment that would limit to 5 per cent the
legal interest rate the Bank might charge on loans. On the moral side
of the question he argued that any allowable interest rate above 5
per cent was a federal endorsement of usury. He spoke feelingly of the
vital importance of laws regulating the rate of interest; without them, a
nation becomes a nation of money-lenders. . . . The Mosaic regulation which
permitted usance to be taken of strangers, aided by the oppressions under
which they laboured, converted the Jews Into a nation of money-lenders. I
mention this not to their discredit. They are like all the rest of the human
family — no better and no worse — devoting themselves to the acquisition of
money, and seeking for their money such investment as yields the greatest
return. Into the same condition may the people of any country be changed.
Only make the profits on loans high enough: if six per cent will not do, take
ten; if ten does not, take twenty; in other words, make It more profitable
for the capitalists to loan out their money than to invest it in lands, ships, or
machinery, and the work Is accomplished. Government will have converted
the community into a nation of usurers.30
So eager was Tyler to expel the Northern moneychangers from the
cool temples of Jeffersonian agrarianism he could only cheer Jackson's
veto message. Written by the President with the assistance and advice
of Martin Van Buren, Amos Kendall, Andrew J. Donelson, and Roger
B. Taney, the veto had, a stunned Biddle explained to Clay, "all the
fury of a chained panther biting the bars of his cage. It is really a
manifesto of anarchy . . . and my hope is, that it will contribute to re-
lieve the country of these miserable people. You are destined to be the
instrument of that deliverance." Jackson's message indeed rang with de-
fiance and challenge, appealing to the economic and class interests of
the farmers and workers. If It was short on fiscal analysis it was full in
its condemnation of the moneychangers so hated by Tyler. "It is to be
regretted/' said the President, "that the rich and powerful too often
bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes . . . but when the
laws . . . make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble
members of society — the farmers, mechanics, and laborers — who have
neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves,
have a right to complain of the Injustice of their Government." Jackson
was well on his way toward a more radical democracy. Thanks to the
vigor of the veto and the skill of Jackson's campaign managers the
Bank question became the central one in the Presidential canvass. The
President rode it hard. "The veto works well everywhere," he announced
in August; "it has put down the Bank instead of prostrating me." 31
Tyler supported Jackson in the November election even though
the President's effort to ingratiate himself with the nation's small
farmers and mechanics was an appeal to American social classes with
which the planter aristocracy had little in common. Nonetheless, the
record of Old Hickory's first administration on internal improvements
and the Bank made the President eminently preferable to National
Republican Henry Clay. And while the slippery Van Buren was Jack-
son's running mate on the Democratic ticket, Tyler felt that the Mays-
ville and Bank vetoes left him not much choice in the matter. There
was also the practical consideration that Clay had small prospect of
victory. "Clay stands no chance," said Tyler in April 1832. "Jackson is
invincible." For Tyler it was again largely a choice of the lesser of evils
and once more he held his considerable nose, voted, and went home to
disinfect himself.32
Jackson ran hard against the "Money Monster" while Biddle and
Ms wealthy friends poured their money and time into the Clay cause.
The result was a Jackson landslide. The President received 687,502
popular votes and 219 electoral votes to Clay's 530,189 popular and 49
electoral votes. Clay carried only his own Kentucky and the high-tariff
states of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connnecticut, and Delaware.
Jackson swept the rest. If an American election was ever a popular
mandate for anything (the point is debatable), the election of 1832 was
a mandate against the second Bank of the United States.33
Soon after the election of 1832 states' rights radicals in South
Carolina brought the nation to the brink of a civil war. On Novem-
ber 24, 1832, a state convention (elected in October) officially nullified
the Tariff Act of 1828 and its milder brother, the Tariff Act of 1832,
and threatened secession if the federal government attempted to use
force to collect tariff revenues within the state. On November 27 the
legislature authorized the raising and arming of a military force to resist
any federal encroachments. To punctuate these provocative moves, John
C. Calhoun resigned the Vice-Presidency on December 28 and left for
Washington to assume the Senate seat he had won two weeks earlier in
the juggling of offices which sent Robert Y, Hayne from the Senate to the
Governor's Mansion. From his Senate vantage point Calhoun immedi-
ately launched South Carolina's defense of nullification.
Jackson's reaction to the threat from Charleston was that of the
carrot and the stick. The carrot was the recommendation in his Annual
Message of December 4 to lower tariffs below the 1832 level. This would
put tariff schedules far below the 1828 levels that had outraged the
South four years earlier. The stick was brandished in his Proclamation,
to the People of South Carolina, issued on December 10. The Proclama-
90
tlon minced no words. The whole doctrine of nullification, said the
President, was an "'impractical absurdity." Drawing on the views of John
Marshall, Alexander Hamilton, and Daniel Webster, he maintained that
the federal government was sovereign and indivisible. No state could
refuse to obey the laws of the land; nor could a state withdraw from the
Union. "Disunion by armed force is treason," the President stated
bluntly. He thus made it perfectly clear that South Carolina would be
crushed by federal arms if necessary. On January 16, 1833, he asked
Congress for the authority to use military force if necessary to uphold
the federal revenue laws in South Carolina. Angry and frustrated, he
confided to his closest aides that he would see that the leading nullifiers
were "arrested and arraigned for treason." Jackson was no man to trifle
with when he was annoyed.34
The major political effect of the President's Proclamation and his
Force Bill was to split the dominant Jackson party, so recently trium-
phant at the polls, down the middle. States' rights advocates in Virginia
were shocked to see their hero of the Maysville and Bank vetoes now
embrace extreme nationalist doctrine. Jackson's threat to use armed force
went far beyond anything the Founding Fathers had visualized in the
legitimate relationships between the states and the federal government.
The Virginians were not agreed, however, on the constitutionality of nul-
lification or secession. Theoretical confusion stalked their ranks. Some,
like Tyler's friend Henry A. Wise, argued that the nullification of a
tariff was illegal since the levying of a tariff was obviously constitutional.
Others accepted the nullification as a legitimate form of remonstrance
but denied the related right of secession. Some upheld both; some denied
both. Still others denied nullification and maintained the right to secede.
Thomas Ritchie, editor of the Richmond Enquirer and a strong Jackson
man, thought secession legal but called nullification a "mischievous and
absurd heresy . . . seeking to place a State in the Union and out of it
at the same time!3 35
Tyler was placed in an intellectual quandary by South Carolina's
revolutionary action and Jackson's militaristic reaction. He agreed that
the Tariff of 1832 was a bad business. Even though duties had been
scaled back to the 1824 levels, Tyler had opposed the legislation in the
Senate because there was in it no retreat from the basic principle of tariff
protection. And while he saw it as an improvement over the 1828 Tariff
of Abominations, he had delivered an impassioned three-day speech in
February 1832 attacking it. The protective tariff, he again argued, was
a form of robbery in which the mercantile class of the North picked the
pockets of agrarian consumers in the South. Indeed, the whole concep-
tion of protectionism was evidence of the new materialism that was
overtaking the nation, threatening to reduce Americans to mere money-
changers. "Man cannot worship God and Mammon," Tyler cried. "If
you would preserve the political temple pure and undefiled it can only
be done by expelling the money-changers and getting back to the
worship of our fathers." 36
But when it came right down to the legality of nullifying the Tariff
Acts of 1828 and 1832 Tyler was far less sure of himself. What he
attempted to do was discover and occupy a middle ground on an issue
which had no detectable middle. On one extreme of the question Cal-
houn maintained the legality of both nullification and secession and the
unconstitutionally of Jackson's Force Bill. Webster, on the other ex-
treme, consistently upheld the illegality of secession and nullification
and argued the propriety of using force in the circumstance. Tyler
upheld the right of secession while denying the right of nullification.
But he also denied the right of the federal government to employ force
against nullification when it occurred. Even firm states' rights Virginians
like Henry St. George Tucker could not accept this peculiar dichotomy
in Tyler's thinking. As long as South Carolina was actually in the Union,
argued Tucker, there was no such thing as nullification. It was a ques-
tion of either submitting or seceding, and since South Carolina had not
seceded, the federal government had no alternative but to compel the
state to comply with federal legislation. Anything less than this made
the whole idea of federal government a "farce." But Tyler's middle
way, however logically inconsistent it was, was supported in part by a
resolution of the Virginia legislature on January 26, 1833. The resolution
strongly urged compromise, pledged Virginia to a continuing support of
state sovereignty, and denied Jackson's right under the Constitution to
use armed force against South Carolina. When news of this action
reached Tyler in Washington he and his friend William F. Gordon
"both sprang up, caught each other in their arms and danced around the
room like children in a delirium of joy." E7
If the theoretical considerations remained complex for the terpsi-
chorean Tyler, the personality factor became clear to him. Even though
the Virginia senator was willing to admit that South Carolina's nullifi-
cation decree had been a terrible tactical blunder, he finally decided that
Andrew Jackson was the real villain of the piece. Thus Tyler informed
Virginia's Governor John Floyd on January 16, the day Jackson asked
for a congressional authorization of force, that
If S. Carolina be put down, then may each of the States yield all pretensions
to sovereignty. We have a consolidated govt. and a master will soon arise.
This is inevitable. How idle to talk of me serving a republic for any length of
time, with an uncontrolled power over the military, exercised at pleasure by
the President What interest is safe if the unbridled will of the majority
is to have sway?
By February 2 Tyler had warmed further to the theme that General
Jackson was seeking to establish a military dictatorship in America. The
old 1819 vision of the Man on Horseback returned. "Were ever men
92
so deceived as we have been ... in Jackson?" he asked Littleton
Tazewell. "His proclamation has swept away all the barriers of the
Constitution, and given us, in place of the Federal government, under
which we fondly believed we were living, a consolidated military despot-
ism I tremble for South Carolina. The war-ay is up, rely upon it
The boast is that the President, by stamping like another Pompey on
the earth, can raise a hundred thousand men." 3S
A few days later, on February 6, 1833, Tyler delivered his Senate
speech against the Force Bill. The visitors' galleries were packed. From
beginning to end the speech was an appeal to emotion. The oratory was
brilliant, but at no point in his address did he suggest to Jackson how
the Union might be preserved without the use of force. Faced with the
nullification of constitutional federal legislation, how else could Jackson
approach South Carolina save by force? That was the question. Either
the Union was or it was not. There could be no partial Union some of
the time when it suited the convenience of some of the parties to it.
Jackson, of course, wanted no civil war. But he could not permit the
Union to degenerate into a part-time half-Union. He had taken an oath
to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."
Whatever that Constitution was, whether it had created a nation or a
confederation, there was nothing in it specifically permitting nullifica-
tion. His was much the same problem Lincoln would face on secession
in 1861.
Tyler wanted no dissolution of the Union either. Unlike Jackson,
though, he had no plan to prevent dissolution. Instead, he spoke to the
Senate of preserving the Union by restoring mutual confidence and
affection among the states. He suggested the passage of a compromise
tariff act that would allow both sides to save face. He shied away from
the theoretical implications of nullification. At the same time he ripped
into the Force Bill with a ferocity unequaled in any other public speech
in his career. It was a speech aimed as much at the political factions in
Virginia as at those within reach of his voice. A few days later he would
stand for re-election to the Senate before the General Assembly in Rich-
mond. This test he won handily, defeating James McDowell, candidate
of the Virginia Jacksonians, 8 1 to 62 on the first ballot. Nevertheless, he
wanted to make his position on the Force Bill absolutely clear to
Virginians as well as to the senators who sat before him:
Everything, Mr. President, is running into nationality. You cannot walk along
the streets without seeing the word on almost every sign — National Hotel,
National boot-black, National black-smith, National oyster-house. The gov-
ernment was created by the states, it is amendable by the states, it is pre-
served by the states, and may be destroyed by the states ; and yet we are told
that it is not a government of the states The very terms employed in
the Constitution indicate the true character of the government. The terms
"We, the people of the United States," mean nothing more or less than "We
93
the people of the states united." The pernicious doctrine that this is a national
and not a Federal Government, has received countenance from the late
proclamation and message of the President. The people are regarded as one
mass, and the states as constituting one nation. I desire to know when this
chemical process occurred . . . such doctrines would convert the states into
mere petty corporations, provinces of one consolidated government. These
principles give to this government authority to veto all state laws, not merely
by Act of Congress, but by the sword and bayonet. They would place the
President at the head of the regular army in array against the States, and the
sword and cannon would come to be the common arbiter. ... To arm him
with military power is to give him the authority to crush South Carolina,
should she adopt secession.
He was convinced that if the crisis came to outright secession, economic
pressures alone would bring South Carolina back into the Union more
swiftly than the "employment of a hundred thousand men." As he would
do again in 1861, Tyler painted a grim picture of the bloodshed and
property destruction of civil war. He pleaded that Jackson not be given
the power to coerce South Carolina and thereby precipitate a civil war.
It was Jacksonjs decision, said Tyler, not South Carolina's:
If the majority shall pass this bill, they must do it on their own responsibility;
I will have no part in it Yes, sir, "the Federal Union must be preserved."
But how? Will you seek to preserve it by force? Will you appease the angry
spirit of discord by an oblation of blood? . . . Glory comes not from the blood
of slaughtered brethren. Gracious God ! Is it necessary to urge such considera-
tions on an American Senate? Whither has the genius of America fled? We
have had darker days than the present, and that genius has saved us. Are we
to satisfy the discontents of the people by force — by shooting some, and
bayoneting others? ... I would that I had but mild influence enough to save
my country in this hour of peril. ... I have no such power; I stand here
manacled in a minority, whose efforts can avail but little. You, who are the
majority, have the destinies of the country in your hands. If war shall grow
out of this measure, you are alone responsible. I will wash my hands of the
business; rather than give my aid, I would surrender my station here 39
On February 20 the Force Bill came to a Senate vote. Several
Southern senators left the floor rather than be recorded in favor of a
measure they could not stomach. It was clear by this time, however ; that
a compromise tariff might be worked out that would stay the hands of
both South Carolina and General Jackson. Neither side wanted blood-
shed. No one wanted to die for an ad valorem tariff. Better then, rea-
soned the practical politicians of the South, not to be counted on either
side of the Force Bill. Only John Tyler among them retained his seat,
and only Tyler had the courage to vote his convictions. Even Calhoun
was conveniently absent, as was Clay, who was leading the compromise
tariff movement behind the scenes. Senator William C. Rives of Virginia,
Tyler's colleague, abstained from voting although he had reluctantly
supported Jackson's course throughout the crisis, being, in Ms own
94
words, "anti-bank, anti-tariff and anti-nullification." The final vote for
the Force Bill was thirty-two; the vote against it was one. John Tyler
cast the only recorded dissenting vote — the vote he was proudest of for
the rest of his life. In 1839 he boasted in the Virginia House of Delegates
that "Against that odious measure my name stands conspicuously re-
corded. I say conspicuously, since it is the only vote recorded in the
negative on ... that bloody bill.7' 40
It was a courageous vote, but it was not quite so conspicuous as
Tyler later remembered it. The chronology of events indicates that the
prospect of a bloodless compromise was well advanced by February 6
when Tyler made his ringing speech against the measure. Although the
Virginian did not know the extent to which compromise negotiations had
proceeded in the cloakrooms and boardinghouse parlors, he did know that
South Carolina, in a gesture of conciliation, had temporarily suspended
the Ordinance of Nullification on January 21. By February 20, when
Tyler cast the lone vote against the Force Bill, the crisis had largely
passed. His concern for citizens being shot and bayoneted while blood
flowed in the gutters of Charleston was therefore a bit theatrical. His role
in the compromise tariff that averted bloodshed was far more construc-
tive than either Ms ringing speech or his stubborn vote. It was actually
one of his greatest services to his distracted country.
Throughout the entire agitation and debate on the Force Bill there
existed the underlying assumption, made clear at the outset by Calhoun
and other nullifiers, that a sharp reduction of the tariff duties of 1832
would provide the path of compromise through which all parties to the
dispute might exit gracefully and bloodlessly. Tyler was aware of this,
and he was a prime mover in the search for a compromise plan. As early
as January 10 he wrote John Floyd that the battle for tariff compro-
mise "is fought and won. My fears for the Union are speedily disappear-
ing." Some time earlier Tyler had seen Henry Clay privately. He "ap-
pealed to his patriotism77 and asked him to sponsor a tariff bill that would
save the Union. He urged Clay, who was openly supporting the Force
Bill, to consult with Calhoun, "the only person necessary to consult,"
and work out something agreeable both to Northern protectionists and
states' rights free traders. Tyler's patient efforts were successful. The
two statesmen were brought together for negotiations. The details of a
compromise tariff settlement could not quickly be ironed out, and by
January 16 Tyler was again beginning to despair. Jackson called for his
Force Bill that day, and Tyler told Floyd that "all prospect of settling
the tariff except through Clay is gone. From him I still have hope. If he
strikes at all, it will be at a critical moment." 41
Tyler was not disappointed. On January 21 rumors flooded Wash-
ington and reached South Carolina that a compromise tariff was in the
making. To facilitate this hopeful development the Charleston radicals
uncocked the pistol it held to the head of the nation by suspending the
95
Ordinance of Nullification. It was probably on this day, or the day be-
fore, that Clay and Calhoun reached a final understanding. Clay agreed
to a gradual reduction of all tariff duties over a ten-year period, and a
relinquishment of the entire principle of protection by 1842. Calhoun in
turn pledged South Carolina's acceptance of this arrangement and a
repeal of the Ordinance of Nullification. Tyler was not privy to this
agreement nor was he told about it. But he had done much to bring the
negotiators together. And he breathed a sigh of relief when, on February
u, the theatrical Clay, his eyes still riveted on the White House, rose
In the Senate and announced to a breathless chamber that he would, the
following day, introduce a compromise tariff bill. As Tyler recalled that
dramatic moment in the Senate from the vantage point of 1860: "Now
that years have gone by — now that my head is covered with gray hairs,
and old age is upon me, I recall the enthusiasm I felt that day when Mr.
Clay rose in the Senate to announce the great measure of peace and
reconciliation. I occupied the extreme seat on the left; he a similar one
on the right of the Senate Chamber. We advanced to meet each other,
and grasped each other's hands midway the chamber." 42
On the next day, to a cheering audience, Clay introduced a bill that
would progressively reduce tariff duties year by year until a level of 20
per cent ad valorem was reached in 1842. At that point all further duties
would be imposed only "for the purpose of raising such revenue as may
be necessary to an economical administration of the Government." Cal-
houn followed Clay's proposal with a speech extolling the beauties of the
Union. With this, the Compromise Tariff Bill of 1833 passed the House
119 to 85 on February 26 and the Senate 29 to 1 6 on March i. Tyler
voted for it with enthusiasm. So the crisis passed.
Just who won the contest cannot be stated with certainty. By
nullification and threatened secession South Carolina had blackjacked
the federal government into an immediate reduction of the tariff and a
promise to repeal the entire protective system a decade hence. On the
other hand, Jackson was satisfied that he had made his no-nullification,
no-secession point crystal clear by approaching the brink of military
coercion. What it seemed to prove to Calhoun and the Charleston hot-
heads was that a little bit of blackmail, judiciously exercised, could
accomplish for the South in Washington what an orderly legislative
approach there could not. This dangerous notion was still tragically alive
in 1860-1861.
The Senate adjourned on March 2 and Tyler returned to the Tide-
water in triumph. His constituents gave him a boisterous dinner at the
Gloucester County courthouse. Toasts were quaffed in happy celebration
of the great victories of states' rights on the Bank and tariff questions.
A toast to Tyler's lone vote against the Force Bill was eagerly proposed
and drunk. Tyler rose to his feet and gave a short and gracious speech
in reply. He reviewed his course of action on the nullification question
in Congress and reminded the celebrators again that he was "not the
apologist of South Carolina.'3 He simply objected, he said, to Jackson's
policy of armed coercion. The issue was not South Carolina's nullifica-
tion. It was Jackson's threatened military dictatorship.
The charge was overdrawn and alarmist, even wrongheaded, but it
was slowly and surely carrying Tyler into the anti- Jackson opposition
forming under the banner of the opportunistic Henry Clay. Tyler did
not know in March 1833 that he was becoming a Whig. He knew only
that he could no longer stomach Andrew Jackson. By November 1833 &e
could eulogize the once-feared Clay as the statesman and patriot who had
"rescued us from civil war, when those who held or ought to have held
our destinies in their hands talked only of swords and halters. Such is
my deliberate opinion." His gradual rapprochement with Harry of the
West was to make John Tyler Vice-President of the United States.43
It was only a question of time until Tyler faced an issue which
would make his break with the Jacksonian Democracy clear and final.
That issue was Jackson's removal of government deposits from the Bank
of the United States in an effort to undermine and crush the institution
even before its charter expired in 1836. He announced his decision on
the matter in September 1833 while Congress was in recess. Angered at
the Bank's intervention against him in the 1832 campaign, and convinced
that his landslide victory in 1832 was an anti-Bank mandate from the
people, Old Hickory began juggling Secretaries of the Treasury into and
out of his Cabinet like so many sacks of wheat until he found in Roger
B. Taney one who would sign the removal order and defend its legality.
By the end of 1833 the withdrawn federal funds had been distributed in
twenty- three state banks which were promptly dubbed "pet banks" by
the anti-Jacksonians. Whatever the economic wisdom of this move, it
was not unconstitutional and it was very close to what Tyler had urged
in 1819 when he characterized withdrawal and distribution as a sound
states' rights solution to the banking question. But this was not iSip.44
When the Senate convened early in December 1833, Tyler returned
to Washington in an ugly mood. The idea that Andrew Jackson was a
dangerous dictator now possessed him above all others. He was con-
vinced that if Taney could "locate [the] Treasury where he pleases
there can exist no security or safety for the public monies." Indeed,
Taney might even decide to locate public funds in "either his own or the
President's pocket." This unworthy suggestion pointed up the fact that
John Tyler once again found himself in a cruel dilemma. He hated and
feared what he felt were the dictatorial pretensions of Andrew Jackson.
He also feared and hated the Bank of the United States and the moneyed
aristocracy that was rapidly reducing America to a counting house. To
his way of thinking, the victory of either Biddle or the President in the
Bank struggle would mark a defeat for the national interest. An oppor-
97
tunity to ponder this dilemma and think matters through calmly was
presented Tyler by an illness which kept him in his quarters for ten
days in late December and early January. During this confinement Henry-
Clay delivered a slashing speech in the Senate which established the
political line the anti-Jacksonians, Tyler among them, would follow for
the next few months. To a hushed chamber and packed galleries Clay
threw down the gauntlet to Jackson in terms the states' rights men could
understand and applaud:
We are in the midst of a revolution hitherto bloodless, but rapidly tending
towards a total change of the pure republican character of the Government,
and to the concentration of all power in the hands of one man. ... If Congress
do not apply an instantaneous remedy, the fatal collapse will soon come on,
and we shall die — ignobly die — base, mean and abject slaves; the scorn and
contempt of mankind; unpitied, unwept, unmourned.
Clay concluded by introducing two resolutions of formal censure. The
first condemned Taney's role in the removal of the deposits; the second
and most important charged that "the President, in the late Executive
proceedings in relation to the public revenue, has assumed upon himself
authority and power not conferred by the Constitution and laws, but in
derogation of both." It was a damning indictment but one supported by
such diverse political personalities as Webster and Calhoun.45
When Tyler returned to the political wars on January 9, 1834, he
informed Littleton W. Tazewell that his opinion was a. . . decisively made
up on the subject of the deposits." He would support censure of Jackson
and the restoration of the deposits even though this would strengthen the
Bank and "render its spasms more disturbing and hurtful to the coun-
try." This decision was strongly urged upon him by a flood of petitions
and memorials from Tidewater merchants and by specific instruction
from the Virginia General Assembly. He was encouraged by the intense
hue and cry raised by Biddle and mercantile newspapers throughout the
country against Jackson. On February 17 he wrote Letitia his opinion
that "the Administration is evidently sinking, and I do not doubt that
in six months it will be almost flat I have not yet spoken, but
everybody seems anxious to hear me "
If he was somewhat premature in reading final services over the
grave of Jacksonian Democracy, he was not wrong in his estimate of
Senate anticipation. The Senate was indeed anxious to hear Tyler's in-
dictment of Jackson. He was recognized as one of the most articulate of
the states' rights spokesmen. When he rose to speak on February 24 the
chamber was filled. He made it clear at the outset that he was no friend
of the Bank and had never been; he had always regarded its establish-
ment an unconstitutional act, and he was certain the nation would sur-
vive its demise. The only question was how the Bank should die:
For one, I say. If It is to die let It die by law. It is a corporate existence
created by law, and while It exists, entitled to the protection which the law
throws around private rights. If its privileges can be lawlessly seized upon,
what security exists for individual rights? The rights of the bank are the rights
of Individuals. ... If the President had rested on Ms veto, the Bank was dead,
dead beyond the reach of surgery . . . was it necessary after the Pursey \_sic\
was dead for the President to imitate the conduct of Falstaff , and Inflict a new
wound upon its lifeless body, lest it should rise again? Yes, sir, this was
esteemed necessary; more justly speaking, he saw it in its agonies, produced
by the exertion of Ms constitutional authority, and yet he was not content. He
rushes upon It — seizes upon one of Its privileges, one of the limbs of this
corporate existence, and throws it Into convulsions. . . . My answer is that of
Virginia, spoken through her Legislature: if the Bank must die, let It die by
law then, sir By that I will stand.46
The opportunity to link the deposits question with a condemnation
of Jackson's use of patronage was too good to pass up and Tyler could
not let it slide by:
I ask if it be true that [Jackson] has used none of the public money for the
advancement of presidential power. Sir, all the revenues of the country are
devoted to this object by these proceedings; an army of retainers is created
in the officers and stockholders of the state banks Is the presidential
power only to be considered dangerous when he is at the head of an army?
Patronage is the sword and cannon by which war may be made on the liberty
of the human race They work silently, and almost unseen. They make
sure their advances by corruption Sir, give the President control over the
purse — the power to place the immense revenues of the country into any
hands he may please, and I care not what you call him, he is "every inch a
king."
Mercifully, it would seem, no one flung these words back in Tyler's face
in 1843 when he too, as President, attempted to build a personal party
with patronage and, like Jackson, insisted on an absolute conformity of
opinion between himself and his Cabinet officers. If patronage was in-
deed "the sword and cannon by which war may be made on the liberty
of the human race," Tyler would soon fondle the hilt of that sword
himself.41
Tyler suggested that the only way to remove the vexing Bank ques-
tion from partisan politics once and for all was by a constitutional
amendment specifically legalizing or proscribing the institution. "The
question of bank or no bank has been always made a political stepping-
stone ... it is the last subject which ought to be handed over to poli-
ticians." In the meantime, he thought the deposits should be restored.
Because there was no likelihood that a constitutional amendment on the
subject could be passed through the Congress by a two-thirds majority
or through three-fourths of the state legislatures, Tyler's somewhat im-
99
practical solution to the problem was less significant than the political
implications of his speech. Throughout his long address there were
clear suggestions that Henry Clay was really a great patriot after all
and that the Democratic Party, dominated by the "despotism" of King
Andrew I, could no longer serve as the Tyler political home. Without
hesitation, Tyler at last walked boldly into the Whig opposition forming
under the leadership of Clay, Calhoun; and Webster. He spoke openly
now of his "Whig principles," a phrase beginning to circulate in Wash-
ington to designate the views of the anti- Jackson bloc. As for the Demo-
cratic Party dominated by Jackson and the spoilsmen, Tyler renounced
it:
To this party do I belong, not to that nondescript, patch-work, mosaic party
which meets in conventions, and calls itself the Republican party; not to that
party which changes its principles, as the chameleon its color, with every cloud
or ray which proceeds from the presidential orb — which is one thing today,
another tomorrow, and the third day whatever chance may make it; nor, to
the Republican party which . . . denounces the tariff, and yet votes for and
sustains the tariff of 1828 — that Bill of Abominations; not that Republican
party which denounces the Bank and upholds the proclamation [to South
Carolina]; which denounces the Bank and sustains the Force Bill; which
denounces the Bank, and even now sustains the President in his assumption
of power conferred neither by the laws nor Constitution. No, sir, I belong not
to that "Republican party"; its work is that of president-making. Even now
it is in motion. Before the President is scarcely warm in his seat, not yielding
to what decency would seem to require, not even permitting one short year
to elapse, that party is in full march, calling conventions, organizing com-
mittees, and seeking by all manner of means, at this early day, to commit the
people.48
Tyler could not have made his secession from the Democracy more
plain. The Democratic-Republican Party of Jefferson had been sub-
verted by Andrew Jackson. The new democratic political techniques
introduced by Jackson — national nominating conventions, political or-
ganization and agitation at all levels, pragmatic accommodations to
appeal to the greatest number of voters, and the sagacious use of pa-
tronage— were not to the aristocratic tastes of John Tyler. The dawn of
the new democracy, the advent of King Numbers, was not for him. It
was not the way of gentlemen.
Nor was it a way for the Commonwealth of Virginia in 1834. State-
wide elections in the Old Dominion in March produced the elevation of
Littleton W. Tazewell to the Governor's Mansion and the routing of the
Jackson faction in the new General Assembly. Tyler was pleased and
encouraged by this result. He was close personally to Tazewell and had
done much to engineer his nomination and election. The defeat of the
Jacksonians in Virginia also buoyed the hopes of the informal Whig
grouping in Washington. Clayites, Calhounites, and Websterites alike
100
sounded "notes of triumph'7 in the capital. But Jacksonianlsm in Virginia
was not yet dead and Tyler cautioned Tazewell, lest the new governor
grow overconfident, that "it requires numerous strokes of the axe to
bring down the oak, and the exposure of every encroachment committed
by a popular administration on constitutional rights is absolutely neces-
sary for preserving free government." 49
When the new General Assembly in Richmond instructed Tyler and
Ms colleague, Senator William C. Rives, to vote for Clay's resolutions
censuring Taney and Jackson, an order which caused Rives to resign his
seat rather than comply and Benjamin W. Leigh to be appointed in his
stead, Tyler was sure that sanity was returning to America. He voted
for the censure of Jackson with enthusiasm and he has was cheered when
the Senate condemnation of King Andrew I passed on March 28 and
was formally entered in the Senate Journal* He paid no heed to the
solemn oath taken at that portentous moment by Senator Thomas Hart
Benton of Missouri. "Old Bullion" Benton, leading Jacksonian in the
upper chamber, swore he would never rest until the censure of the
President of the United States had been expunged from the Journal.
Ben ton's wordy gesture impressed Tyler not at all. Senate censure
was the least punishment he had a right to expect. Jackson, after all, had
converted the federal government into a "mere majority machine/' and
Tyler was certain that the continued growth of the "mere majority
principle" could lead only to many political embarrassments and defeats
for the South in the years ahead. Nevertheless, by June of 1834 Tyler
began dimly to realize that politics in America would never be quite the
same after Andrew Jackson. He began to see that the real and lasting
source of Jackson's strength lay with the power of the unwashed as ex-
pressed in the ballot box. "We have a great work before us," he told
Tazewell, "a work of real reform. Without the people we can do noth-
ing " Just how a majority of the people were to be alerted to the
dangers of the "mere majority principle" Tyler did not say. It was an-
other dilemma.50
101
JOHN TYLER: THE MIDDLE YEARS
In the consciousness of my own honesty, I stand firm
and erect. I worship alone at the shrine of truth and
honor.
JOHN TYLER, 1834
Throughout these years of political advancement from the House of
Delegates to the Governor's Mansion and on to the United States Senate,
John Tyler's private life was complicated by too many children and too
little money. Between 1820 and 1830 Letitia bore him five more chil-
dren, bringing to eight the mouths to be fed, bodies to be clothed, and
minds to be educated in the burgeoning Tyler household. Letitia came
along in 1821, followed by Elizabeth ("Lizzie") in 1823, Anne Contesse
in 1825, Alice in 1827, and, finally, Tazewell ("Taz") in 1830. In spite
of the added burden each new arrival brought Tyler great joy. When the
sickly Anne Contesse died in July 1825 after a bare three-month hold
on life, Tyler was crushed. Retiring to the quiet of his study he wrote a
lament for the dead child which began:
Oh child of my love, thou wert born for a day;
And like morning's vision have vanished away
Thine eye scarce had ope'd on the world's beaming light
Ere 'twas sealed up in death and enveloped in night.
Oh child of my love as a beautiful flower;
Thy blossom expanded a short fleeting hour.
The winter of death hath blighted thy bloom
And thou lyest alone in the cold dreary tomb. 1
As the decade of the Tyler population explosion opened, the young
lawyer and politician was "so cashless and really straitened for re-
102
sources" that lie was reduced to dunning Ms friends and relatives for
payment of debts as trifling as thirty dollars. Much of his financial prob-
lem was of Ms own manufacture: Tyler was not a brilliant steward of
money. In 1820, for example, lie lent his brother-in-law Henry Wagga-
man almost all his available cash reserve. In the same year he advanced
other relatives upward of six thousand dollars borrowed from the various
estates he managed as legal trustee. This was a dangerous practice since
Tyler was invariably forced to stand personal surety for these loans.
Like so many other Tidewater planters, Tyler was land-rich and cash-
poor. Most of the cash income from his law practice and from the salaries
of his public offices was poured back into the Greenway plantation and
— after 1829 — into his 63oacre farm on the York River in Gloucester
County. His need for additional livestock and for slaves was constant,
Even under the best conditions, most of the James and York River plant-
ers experienced seasonal shortages of cash; John Tyler was certainly no
exception.2
But unlike many of his more prudent neighbors, Tyler managed
money loosely and he often lent his cash to friends and relatives at the
drop of a tear. In May 1828 he experienced "unfortunate bank trans-
actions" which prompted an appeal to Henry Curtis for a loan to tide
Mm over. He told Curtis at that time that he was "fixed immutably in
my determination to get clear of the world ... in other words to be my
own Executor. I do not feel as a free man should, with these encum-
brances hanging over me. Nay, I am ready and willing to sell slaves . . ,
if I could find a purchaser." 3
Unhappily for John Tyler, his entire life was spent under the
shadow of various "encumbrances." Until Julia brought her own financial
reserves into his life in 1844, Tyler's personal economic existence was a
marginal proposition. And save for the brief 1845-1851 period, when the
businesslike Alexander Gardiner took over the supervision of his financial
affairs, it remained marginal until his death, in debt, in 1862.
The necessity of having to sell a favorite house slave, Ann Eliza,
to raise cash to move to Washington in 1827 was a sad experience for
Tyler. He «had a genuine fondness for the Negro woman, and he sin-
cerely regretted having to part with her. But he had no choice. "My
monied affairs are all out of sorts," he confessed to Curtis; "my necessi-
ties are very pressing, more so than at any previous period, and the time
has arrived when I must act definitely." First he tried to sell Ann Eliza
to Curtis, knowing that with him she would have a good home. When
Curtis declined the purchase, Tyler tried without success to sell her in
the immediate neighborhood. Under this arrangement either he or Curtis
would be certain to learn of any ill-treatment at the hands of her new
owner. Only as a last resort did Tyler finally instruct Curtis "to put her
in the wagon and send her directly to the Hubbards" auction block in
Richmond.4
103
While the ultimate fate of Ann Eliza is not known , it is certain that
Tyler did not have the heart to accompany the poor woman to Hubbard's
pens. When he felt he had to deal in human flesh he usually bought
slaves from his friends, relatives, or neighbors. When necessary, he
quietly disposed of them among the same intimate group. He often
preferred to hire seasonal labor from his friends rather than buy new
slaves on the market. Another Tyler practice was to lend and lease
slaves within the family. As noted, his treatment of his Negroes was uni-
formly kind and considerate. His philosophy of slave management was
best summed up in 1832, a year after the bloody Nat Turner slave revolt
in Southampton County resulted in the wanton butchering of fifty-seven
whites and the retaliatory slaughter of nearly a hundred Negroes. "I
trust that all will go on smoothly in harvest," he wrote. "My plan is to
encourage my hands, and they work better under it than from fear. The
harvest is the black man's jubilee." 5
No statement from Tyler on the tragic Nat Turner affair has sur-
vived. Nor did Tyler participate in the Virginia Convention of 1831-
1832 which debated the slavery question and narrowly voted down sev-
eral emancipation schemes. It is clear, however, that Tyler identified
himself with those Virginians who interpreted slave unrest within the
Commonwealth in terms of abolitionist propaganda filtering into the
state through the United States mails. Speaking in Gloucester in 1835,
Tyler lashed out at this menace by mail. In his most intemperate speech
on the slavery question he pointed out that
The unexpected evil is now upon us; it has invaded our firesides, and under
our own roofs is sharpening the dagger for midnight assassination, and excit-
ing cruelty and bloodshed. The post-office department ... has been converted
into a vehicle for distributing incendiary pamphlets, with which our land is at
this moment deluged. A society has sprung up whose avowed object is to
despoil us of our property at the hazard of all and every consequence It
has established numerous presses. ... [In these publications slaveowners] are
represented as demons In the shape of men; and by way of contrast, here
stands Arthur Tappan, Mr. Somebody Garrison, or Mr. Foreigner Thompson,
patting the greasy little fellows on their cheeks and giving them most lovely
kisses. They are the exclusive philanthropists— the only lovers of the human
race — the only legitimate defenders of the religion of Christ
As a Christian Tyler was particularly disturbed, he said, to learn that
some Northern clergymen had taken up the cry for slavery abolition:
Standing as pastors at the head of their flocks, teaching the divine truths of
religion, they are entitled to all respect and reverence; but when abandoning
their proper sphere, they rush into the troubled waters of politics— when,
instead of a mild and meek observance of their religious rites and ceremonies,
they seek to overturn systems— when, instead of being the ministers of peace
and good will, they officiate at the altar of discord, and contribute their in-
fluence to excite general disturbance and discontent, they deserve the scorn
104
and contempt of mankind. Did their and our Divine Master commission them
upon such an errand? When He bade His followers to "render unto Caesar the
things that were Caesar's/7 He taught a lesson to rebuke the present agitators.
But when all was said and done the fate and welfare of Virginia's Ann
Elizas troubled Tyler deeply.6
He was also troubled, in quite a different way, by the cheerless
existence afforded him by Mrs. McDaniel's boardinghouse in Washing-
ton. After Ms return to Washington in 1827, Senator John Tyler of
Virginia was often a homesick man. Letters from his beloved Letitia and
Ms growing cMldren were eagerly awaited, gratefully received , and
speedily answered. Enforced separation for long months on end brought
Tyler closer to Ms children. He did not take them for granted, and in
his letters to them he entered into their many adolescent problems with
patience and understanding. "My children are my principal treasures,"
he confessed to Ms daughter Mary, "and my unceasing prayer is that you
may all so conduct yourselves as to merit the esteem of the good. In
that way you will crown rny declining years with blessings, and multiply
my joys upon earth." The family was always a close-knit one. When the
youngest of Ms cMldren, Tazewell (named for Ms friend Littleton >W.
Tazewell)3 was born in 1830, he solicited suggestions for a name from
the older cMldren. He watched sympathetically as his two older sons,
Robert and John, Jr., navigated the stormy waters of their first loves.
He encouraged them to participate fully in the social life of Williams-
burg and Richmond and he sent them extra money to pay for subscrip-
tions to parties and balls. He was certain that such social experience
would give them that "polish and shape to manners which constitute
one-half the concern in our journey through life. I have known persons
possessing only ordinary capacities getting on better than others who
were in intellect greatly superior, simply for force of manners." 7
The proper education of Ms cMldren concerned Tyler above all
other family considerations. Private tutors were engaged to instruct them
at early ages; evidence of sloppy penmanship, academic malingering,
and superficial thought brought instant paternal condemnation. The
education of his daughters was no less important to him than the edu-
cation of Ms sons. In 1830 he told Mary, then fifteen, that
Your resolution to attend to your studies and not to be led away by the vani-
ties of the world affords me sincere pleasure. Without intellectual improve-
ment, the most beautiful of the sex is but a figure of wax work. The world is
but a sealed book to such an one; and to eat, to drink, to dance, to sleep, to
gaze upon objects without seeing them, and to move in creation with scarcely
a sense of anything, is the poor existence which they pass. The mind has been
compared to the marble in the quarry, ere the light of science has shed its
rays upon it; but when instructed and informed, like that same marble formed
into a beautiful statue and polished by the hand of the artist.
105
So insistent was lie with his children on the importance of education that
Ms second daughter, Letitia, felt it politic to link an urgent request that
she be permitted to attend a ball in Williamsburg (she desperately
wanted to wear her anew silk") with assurances that her studies in
philosophy and chemistry were progressing well.8
Both Robert and John, Jr., were urged by their father to attend
William and Mary, and, following that, to read law. It was Tyler's sub-
conscious desire to recreate his older sons in his own intellectual and
professional image. With Robert he was more successful than he was
with John, Jr. Indeed, his namesake eventually rebelled against the
parental regime imposed on him and for a number of years in the 18405
and 18503 he led a checkered existence that brought no credit to the
family.
Robert was his father's favorite. This bias, however innocent its
origin, was sensed by John, Jr. Certainly Robert received more atten-
tion from Tyler than did his younger brother. While he was at William
and Mary he was the recipient of many special favors. He asked for and
received extra spending money from his father even when Tyler was
under extreme financial pressure and unable to meet bills he owed the
college. In 1836, when Robert precociously decided he would write a
history of the American Revolution, Tyler encouraged him with a
promise to pay the cost of publication. Yet he instructed his historic-
graphically inclined son that he "should by no means suffer it to interfere
with your college studies, nor should any more time be devoted to it
than cannot be otherwise more usefully employed." Under such stric-
tures, it is not surprising that he never wrote the book, though he later
wrote some competent poetry. He was a good student and Tyler followed
his progress in philosophy, metaphysics, chemistry, and mathematics
with interest and pride. "I would have you go into genteel company," he
advised his son, "when you can do so without neglecting your studies.
They must go on at all events." In spite of Robert's close attention to
his studies he did somehow find time enough to involve himself in a
quarrel with a classmate, one in which the words duel, honor, and chal-
lenge were loosely bandied about. When Tyler heard of it, he instantly
quashed any bellicose plans Ms son entertained. "In advanced life," he
told Robert, "very few occurrences can justify a resort to pistols or
duels; but at college nothing short of absolute disgrace can do so ... if
you should unfortunately be involved in a serious quarrel, let me know
the circumstances connected with it before things are pushed to any
extremity. Your honor will always be safe in my hands." 9
Tyler insisted that his sons abide by all the disciplinary rules in
force at Willam and Mary. As a member of the Board of Visitors he
could scarcely expect them to do less. He was also a personal friend of
Thomas R. Dew, William and Mary's prominent president and the
South's leading apologist for the idea that human slavery was a positive
106
good. Thus Tyler was thoroughly embarrassed In November 1836 to
learn that his own sons had joined their names In a student memorial to
the president and the Board of Visitors protesting a new series of
disciplinary regulations. Tyler's reaction to this distressing news suffered
nothing In translation:
I regard you as lying under the strongest obligations of honor to abide rigidly
by the college laws. Surely It Is no great matter to acknowledge their restraint
for the few months you have to remain at college. Remember always that I
am a visitor, and that the late enactments have emanated chiefly from me.
Surely, if my own sons cannot conform, obedience should not be expected
from others. ... Be affable and polite to all the students, without cultivating
extreme intimacy with any. Do not be too captious or prone to take offense
... a suavity of manners — a constant respect for the feelings of others, Is
Indispensably necessary for success in life. These remarks are designed for
you bothj and I trust you will give them full weight.10
During the years he sat In the Senate, Tyler regularly described the
social and political life of Washington to Letitia and the children. The
dull social seasons were compared with the lively ones, and the weddings,
dinners, and parties he attended were commented upon with good humor
and a flair for the descriptive detail he knew the family would enjoy. He
described the beautiful and diminutive Emily Donelson, Jackson's of-
ficial White House hostess, who attempted to add to her height by wear-
ing "three waving ostrich feathers" in her bonnet. Henry Clay carried
his head "very loftily" although "age has bleached it very much." When
Washington Irving visited the capital in June 1832 Tyler sketched him
for Mary's benefit: "His face is a pretty good one, although it does not
blaze with the fire of genius. It is deeply marked with the traces of hard
study, and although sometimes lighted up with a smile, is for the most
part serious and contemplative." The senator moved through the relent-
less cycle of Washington society, from party to party, reception to re-
ception, dinner to dinner. Much of the social life of the capital bored
him. Yet he made the expected rounds. "I must see the folks, you know,
and make myself agreeable." u
There were times Tyler was shocked at what he considered the
loose morality of Washington society. During the 1827 Christmas season
he attended a dinner dance at the home of Cary Selden, brother of a
James River friend and neighbor, residing in Washington. There he
saw the waltz danced for the first time and the sight disgusted him. He
told Mary that it was "a dance which you have seen, and which I do not
desire to see you dance. It is rather vulgar, I think." He constantly
worried lest some breath of scandal besmirch the reputations of his
young daughters. "The world is so censorious," he reminded Mary, then
sixteen, "that a young lady cannot be too particular in her course of
conduct." He missed few opportunities to alert his girls to the existence
of that "swarm of busybodies, who are found everywhere, and whose
107
whole concern and chief delight consist In talking slander and indulging
in Injurious whispers." He constantly advised them to emulate their
mother ("You never see her course marked with precipitation . . . her
actions are all founded in prudence" ), avoid vanity, and watch their
tempers. Thus when Anne Royall, in her book Letters Prom Alabama,
described Mary In 1830 as a "little sylph" with a "smooth fascinating
way" who "fairly beguiled me of my senses/5 Tyler told her bluntly that
"Mrs. Royall's praise is of very little value; and, therefore, you are not
to be rendered vain by it." Young ladies of good breeding, he instructed
Mary, should also exhibit no temper. " Remember the maxim of Mr.
Jefferson, In which he bids you, £If you are angry count ten, if very
angry count an hundred,5 before you speak." Mary Tyler absorbed all
this advice; she was delivered to her bridegroom unencumbered by
scandal. When she married Henry Lightfoot Jones in December 1835,
In an elaborate wedding that rocked Tyler financially, the senator
warmly approved her choice. Jones was a young Tidewater planter of
comfortable means who possessed Inherited lands in North Carolina.12
At no time during his career in the Senate did Tyler permit his
children to be uninformed about the great political Issues of the day. He
patiently explained to them his thinking on all questions. His growing
distrust of Andrew Jackson was constantly made explicit to them. He
did not, however? solicit family advice or opinion on political matters.
His letters home were mainly an opportunity for him to think aloud
before a friendly audience. When he felt that the Virginia press had
done him an injustice on some Issue or underestimated the importance
of his personal role in some Senate decision, he would hastily correct the
impression in a letter to the family. It is not surprising, then, that the
Tyler children grew up firm in their father's states' rights political faith.
He took them into his confidence at an early age, and he patiently ex-
plained his political decisions and actions, even the sacrifice of his Senate
seat, to their satisfaction. "Retirement has no horror for me," he wrote
Robert of Ms struggle with Jackson and Benton in December 1834; "for,
come when it may, I have the satisfaction to know that I have been
honest in the worst of times."
Indeed, his personal sense of political honesty was so stringent that
he would not allow his franking privilege to be used for private mall
within the family. Yet he was perfectly willing to use his influence to
secure patronage jobs for members of his clan. He pushed his brother-
in-law, John B. Seawell, for a clerkship in the Land Office, and he was
instrumental in getting Ms nephew, John H. Waggaman, clerkships in the
Postmaster General's Office and in the Land Office. Still, he prized the
nickname "Honest John" throughout his political career, and it seemed
no contradiction to him that he spent much of his public life herding a
small army of his relatives, in-laws, and personal friends into public
office.13
Like Ms political views, Tyler's religious views were also trans-
108
milled to Ms children. That he was a firm and lifelong believer in Jeffer-
son's doctrines of religious toleration and the separation of church and
state there is no doubt. Any connection between church and state he
felt was "an unholy alllance7 and the fruitful source of slavery and op-
pression." While he was nominally an Episcopalian, there Is no evidence
that Ms was ever a denominational approach to God. Nor did his Protes-
tantism choke off a tolerant curiosity about the Roman Catholic Church
and its doctrines; he was, if anything, somewhat pro-Catholic. Certainly
John Tyler joined no holy crusade of one Christian group against an-
other. He had nothing but contempt for hate-filled movements like the
Anti-Masons of the 18303, the Native Americans of the 18405, and the
Know Nothings of the 18503. He preached religious toleration — and he
practiced it. He believed the church and the clergy should stay strictly
out of politics; particularly the politics of the slavery question. He saw
nothing in Christian theology that justified making the slavery contro-
versy the business of Institutional religion, and he rather thought
that the African Colonization Society, by restoring Christianized
American Negro slaves to Africa, could provide more spiritual and moral
uplift for all African Negroes than "all the foreign missionary societies
combined." 14
Like Jefferson before him, John Tyler was essentially a deist. He
accepted the Newtonian concept of a mechanistic universe in motion,
bound together by immutable natural laws. His interest in the new
physical sciences was profound, and he believed firmly in the existence
of "that invisible power which puts all things in motion, and sustains
them in their respective orbits." As he once told Mary, "the person who
justly contemplates the wise order of Providence [In the universe] can
alone possess a just idea of the Deity." This view of the cosmos led Tyler
to the corollary notion, almost fatalistic in its implications, that while
man was an integral part of the Creation, he had little or no control over
his own destiny. The truly good man, thought Tyler, could only strive
to attain pure morality, and in so doing he could expect to be reviled and
abused by men who sought not. As he explained this attitude in 1832:
The person who Is a stranger to sickness is equally a stranger to the highest
enjoyments of health. So that I have brought myself to believe that the
variableness in the things of the world are designed by the Creator for the
happiness of His creatures. In truth, what exists but for some wise purpose?
All our crosses and the numerous vexations which assail us are designed to
improve our moral condition. . . . The purest and best of men have heen
neglected and abused. Aristides was banished and Socrates was poisoned. We
should rather rely upon ourselves, and howsoever the world may deal with
us, we shall, by having secured our own innocence and virtue, learn to be
happy and contented even in poverty and obscurity 15
These theological views permitted Tyler to accept the order of
things as he found them in the world in which he lived — human slavery,
sharp class differentiations, prosperity and depression. His was not a
109
theology of revolutionary change. Instead, his philosophical attitudes
undergirded his acceptance of the status quo in America and justified
his own political efforts to maintain it. At the same time, it permitted a
battered psyche to withdraw occasionally from the arena of political and
sectional controversy with flags flying, secure emotionally and psycho-
logically in the belief that men as virtuous as Aristides had also been
forced from politics, and that even the immortal Socrates had been com-
pelled to drink the hemlock. It was not accidental that he used the
image of Socrates and the chalice of poison when he told Clay and Cal-
houn in February 1836 that he must resign his Senate seat on the
instructions question.16
Tyler knew he was in for political trouble as early as the spring of
1835, when Virginia's Jackson Democrats scored important gains in the
statewide elections. Thanks to an impressive demonstration of how to
organize and deliver votes at the grass-roots level, the Jacksonians and
their allies in the Old Dominion forged a working coalition of agrarian
and artisan voters and used it successfuly to seize control of the House
of Delegates and the state senate. With the radicals firmly in the saddle
in the General Assembly, they determined to "instruct" the aristocratic
John Tyler and his junior colleague, Benjamin W. Leigh, right out of
their Senate seats on the expunction question and replace them with two
senators more friendly to the Jackson administration — a power play pure
and simple.
On March 28, 1834, Senator Thomas Hart Benton first sought to
make good his pledge that he would not rest until Clay's resolution of
December 26, 1833, censuring Andrew Jackson for removing the Bank
deposits, was stricken from the written record of the Senate. On that
day he introduced a motion to "expunge" the censure resolution from
the Senate Journal* Defeated on the resolution in 1834 and again early
in 1835, Benton tenaciously reintroduced his motion in December 1835.
To the senator from Missouri, "expunge" meant the physical mutilation
of that page of the Journal on which tie censure appeared. The Consti-
tution explicitly stated, however, that "Each House shall keep a journal
of its proceedings, and from time to time publish the same " Thus to
emasculate that Journal, or to establish a precedent for emasculation,
states* rights senators argued, was unconstitutional. Technically it repre-
sented a denial of the absolute constitutional command to "keep a
journal." Rescind or repeal a resolution, yes; physically expurgate an
entry, no. This argument may have added up to so much semantic non-
sense, but throughout human history semantic nonsense has split
churches, launched crusades,, and triggered great wars.
Since his enthusiastic vote to censure Jackson in the first place,
Tyler had done nothing to ingratiate himself with the Jacksonians or
-with "Old Bullion" Benton, the President's strong-willed hatchet man
no
on Capitol Hill. On the contrary, lie had antagonized Benton and Ms
friends further In 1834 by participating in another of the interminable
congressional investigations of the Bank. This particular investigation
was politically motivated from start to finish. The five-man committee,
which Senator Tyler headed, was stacked four to one against the ad-
ministration. There was much truth, therefore, in Benton's angry charge
that it was a "whitewashing committee," little more than "a contrivance
to varnish the bank" and blacken the Jackson administration. Not un-
expectedly, the Tyler committee brought in a report mildly favorable
to the second Bank of the United States. This lengthy document ad-
mitted that there was evidence to substantiate the meddling-in-politics
charge (the point on which Jackson had built the essence of his anti-
Bank case in 1833) j but ft denied that the Bank had attempted to bribe
and corrupt newspaper editors. This charge Tyler had earlier voiced
himself. The report argued too that the Bank was financially stable and
safe, that there had existed no cause for withdrawing government de-
posits on the grounds that it was weak and mismanaged. It also accepted
at face value Biddle's contention at the time that Bank credit had been
tightened in 1833 solely to prepare the institution for winding up its
affairs and going out of business in 1836, not as a device to produce a
recession politically embarrassing to Old Hickory.17
Benton's reaction to the Tyler report was to denounce the members
of the committee as pliant tools of Nicholas Biddle and to charge that
the criticisms of Jackson in the document were "False! False as hell!"
Tyler was quick to deny the imputation. Reminding the Senate of his
long hostility to the Bank, he declared that "I can not be made an instru-
ment of the bank, or by a still greater and more formidable power, the
administration In the consciousness of my own honesty, I stand firm
and erect. I worship alone at the shrine of truth and honor." Profane
allegations and pompous denials aside, it is clear that John Tyler had
become no tool of Biddle and the Bank. He had, however, become so
antipathetic toward Andrew Jackson that what the President opposed
Tyler could almost support. For this reason he appended his name to
what was indeed a whitewash of Biddle and the Bank. In so doing he
clouded his long-standing attitude toward the Bank question.
Nevertheless, his apparent pro-Biddle stance on the Bank investi-
gation in 1834 gave rise to suggestions that Tyler might make an accept-
able Vice-Presidential nominee on the Whig ticket in 1836. In fact, the
Whig-dominated Maryland legislature formally made such a nomination
in 1835. But whatever his motives in the Biddle whitewash and the rela-
tion of these motives to his personal future political ambitions, his role
in the original censuring of the President was enough by itself to make
the Virginia senator fair game for the Jacksonian counterattack that
came from Richmond in December of that year, when the Benton
expunging resolution came up again.18
in
On December 14, 1835, Colonel Joseph S. Watkins, a leading
Goochland County Democrat, introduced a resolution in the House of
Delegates instructing Senators Tyler and Leigh to vote for Benton's
expunging resolution. It was a neolithic political move, so transparent in
intent that some Virginia Democrats saw it could make a political
martyr of Tyler and force him irrevocably into the outstretched arms
of the growing states' rights Whig faction in Virginia. With the \Vatkins
resolution, therefore, came covert feelers from Richmond suggesting to
Tyler that if he resigned his Senate seat without a fuss he might have
permanent assignment to the circuit court judgeship temporarily being
occupied by Letitia's brother John B. Christian. This attempted bribe,
aside from the family considerations involved, outraged Tyler. "To
accept any retreat from my station would be dishonorable," he thun-
dered. "I throw the offer from me, and am ready to abide any storm
which may come." 19
The storm was coming, and Senator Benjamin W. Leigh had already
decided how to weather it. As early as July 1835, when it was apparent
that the Jacksonians would control the next House of Delegates, Leigh
had written Tyler that he would not resign if instructed to vote for
expunction. Like Tyler, he had long supported the concept of instruc-
tion, but he was determined he would not supinely hand his seat over to
the Jacksonians. "I will not obey instructions which shall require me to
vote for a gross violation of the Constitution," he said bluntly. He
would vote for the Benton resolution only "when I shall be prepared to
write myself fool, knave and slave, and not before." Leigh stood firmly
by Ms guns. He refused to be instructed to support a measure that in his
view was unconstitutional; he also refused to resign.20
Tyler might very easily have taken~the same position. He had little
to gain and much to lose by resigning his seat. Psychologically, he en-
joyed being a United States Senator. He also needed the salary the posi-
tion paid. He could certainly have rationalized a decision to follow
Leigh's course. He had long held that his constituents had no right to
require him to violate the Constitution, and he had often argued that he
alone^ reserved the right to decide when a violation was being demanded.
In this instance he fully agreed with Leigh that Benton's resolution was
unconstitutional.
^ There were several considerations that caused Tyler to postpone a
decision on what he would do in the matter until January 20, 1836, and
then to withhold announcing that decision publicly until mid-February.
Pleas from friends in Virginia to follow Leigh's course, to consider the
larger political interests of the state's anti- Jacksonians in the November
1836 elections, gave him pause. So too did his personal financial worries.
His eldest daughter Mary had just married Henry L. Jones during the
Christmas holidays of 1835. "I have large debts to pay," he told his son
Robert, "and your sister's marriage has drained me pretty well of
112
money.'* Therefore during early January he remained silent about his
intentions. When asked by his friends whether he planned to "abandon
the Constitution" by resigning, he kept his answers "enigmatical." He
toved with a suggestion that he and Leigh retain their seats and appeal
their decision directly to the people of Virginia in the April 1836 state
elections. But he abandoned this idea as "extremely hazardous" for two
reasons: He feared the effect an April defeat on the issue might have on
the anti-Jackson cause in Virginia In November; and he did not like the
precedent that would be set, too democratic to suit Tyler, of by-passing
the legislature that had elected him by going directly to the people. So
he hesitated and he pondered. While he leaned strongly toward resigna-
tion by mid-January, he would tell Robert little more than not to repeat
Ms thinking on the question "out of the family" and to "rely upon my
firmness, unmixed with obstinacy." 21
The advice that poured it upon him emphasized the point that Tyler
and Leigh should act in concert whatever their decision might be. If the
two men divided on the issue, the whole doctrine of instructions, a
popular one among states' rights politicians in Virginia, would be brought
into disrepute. Nor would the Virginia Whigs (as the anti- Jackson
Democrats in the Old Dominion were now being called) be able to pre-
sent a united front on the expunging-bill question against the Jackson
party in November. Maryland Whigs even threatened to rescind their
Vice-Presidential nomination unless Tyler followed the position chosen
by Leigh. Typically, Tyler absorbed all this advice, weighed it, and re-
mained the individualist. As will become apparent, he did not act In
concert with Leigh, he did resign, and his decision to surrender his seat
seriously embarrassed the Virginia Whigs In the November 1836 elec-
tions. Van Bur en carried the state.22
By January 20, 1836, he had made up his mind to stand with his
principles regardless of cost. He had favored the doctrine of instructions
since 1811 and he could not now easily or with consistency shift Ms
position. He wrote Mary Tyler Jones on January 20 that his inclination
was "to quit promptly and at once." He doubted that anything would
"turn up to vary my present resolves." As for pending legislation in the
Senate in which he was Interested, he would simply have to "make hay
while the sun shines" and let It go at that. Flattering talk of a possible
nomination for Vice-President by Virginia Whigs, on a ticket with
Senator Hugh L. White of Tennessee, failed to stay his decision to re-
sign. While he thought such a nomination might garner him a "good
vote/' he knew that he could not carry Pennsylvania. And he would
need that state to make any respectable showing. With a characteristic
shrug, he decided to "make no calculations, but leave things to take care
of themselves." ^
On February 10 the punitive Watkins motions cleared the Virginia
House of Delegates and senate and Tyler was formally instructed by
the General Assembly to vote for the Ben ton resolution. To discourage
his resignation and to persuade him to stay on in Washington, the Vir-
ginia Whigs that same day nominated Tyler for the Vice-Presidency.
Again advice descended upon Mm. Most of it pointed out that the
prospects of his election to the Vice-Presidency in 1836 were "very
flattering'7 and that his friends were "quite sanguine" of his success.
Since Vice-Presidential nominations for Tyler on Harrison and White
tickets were expected in several states, he was urged to delay his resigna-
tion until some face-saving unanimity with Leigh could be arranged.24
These Importunities failed to move Tyler. His decision to resign
was firm and absolute. On February 10 he informed Robert Tyler that
"My resolution is fixed, and I shall resign. ... I cannot look to con-
sequences, but perhaps I am doomed to perpetual exile from the public
councils." Three days later he was looking beyond politics, praying that
his health would permit him ten years of activity "which can be devoted
to making worldly acquisitions." His immediate hope was that his sons
Robert and John would join him in a family law practice from which
all three might prosper. As for the Vice-Presidency, he professed little
interest in it and no "hope of success,7 } were he to become a serious
candidate for the post. He would therefore observe the coming national
campaign with "as much nonchalance as I can assume," and he urged
Robert to adopt a similar course of silent reserve with regard to it. "Say
as little about it as needs be," he counseled. Nevertheless, he suggested
that Virginia Whigs and anti- Jackson Democrats should arrange a mass
rally to condemn the instructional act of the General Assembly, one that
would trigger a "general burst of indignation from the Ohio to the
Atlantic." Such mass activity, he felt, would ensure Whig success
throughout the state in November.25
When it became generally known in Washington that Tyler would
resign and that Leigh would pay no attention to the General Assembly's
instmction3 Whig senators in the capital expressed their "decided op-
position" to a decision they believed unnecessarily sacrificial. Clay and
Calhoun were quickly deputized to see the stubborn Virginian and per-
suade him to change his mind. The two statesmen called upon Tyler,
carefully marshalled the case for nonresignation and waited hopefully
for his response. "Gentlemen," Tyler said firmly, "the first act of my
political life was a censure of Messrs. Giles and Brent for opposition to
instructions. The chalice presented to their lips is now presented to
mine, and I will drain it even to jhe dregs." Calhoun stared incred-
ulously at the Charles City Socrates. "If you make it a point of per-
sonal honor/' he said finally, Kwe have nothing more to say." 26
On February 29, 1836, Tyler wrote his formal letter of resignation
to the General Assembly of Virginia. In this lengthy epistle he argued
that the expunging resolution was entirely unconstitutional and that he
could not lift his hand against the Constitution by supporting it. To do
"4
so would require sheer hypocrisy. Rather than do this, he would resign,
whatever the persona! and professional costs. He was certain that the
precedent of expunging the Senate Journal was the first step toward
converting the Senate into a "secret conclave, where deeds the most
revolting might be performed in secrecy and darkness." The doctrine of
Instructions, he predicted, would soon "degenerate into an engine of
faction — an instrument to be employed by the outs to get in." With this
"salvo/' as he liked to called it, Tyler returned to Virginia.27
In many ways he was happy to retire again to the quiet of his
Gloucester farm and to his long-neglected law practice. Eight years in
Washington was too long. He felt he hardly knew his children or his
wife. It was nice to be home again for good. A few months after his
return to Gloucester he sold his farm, moved his family to Williamsburg,
and began practicing law in town again. His attention to the public busi-
ness since 1828 had produced such "utter disorder" in his private affairs
that for six months they required his "unremitting and undivided atten-
tion." His personal financial situation in 1836 was desperate, a fate, he
complained j shared by all "who like myself have made themselves a
voluntary sacrifice to public service, for the entire period of their man-
hood." He was almost grateful that his political enemies had forced his
resignation from the Senate, thus allowing him a "fit season to put my
house in order." 2S
In Richmond meanwhile, the confused Whigs and anti-Jacksonians
tried to devise a means of honoring both Leigh and Tyler for their con-
tradictory stands. The General Assembly had appointed William C.
Rives to replace Tyler in the Senate. That the anti- Jackson cause in
Washington was one vote weaker was a fact all Virginia Whigs could
understand. Thus the hilarity was forced and the embarrassment pro-
found when the Whigs collected at a dinner in Richmond in March to
cheer Tyler's great courage in resigning and praise Leigh's courage in not
resigning. This obvious contradiction was not allowed to pass unnoticed
by Thomas Ritchie, editor of the Richmond Enquirer. Ritchie sarcasti-
cally skewered the hydra-headed Whig leadership in the Commonwealth,
pointing out that it was a peculiar and opportunistic grouping of hostile
personalities and contradictory principles. Indeed it was. But if the
dilemma of the Virginia Whigs at the Tyler-Leigh banquet was great, it
was no greater than that faced by the emerging Whig Party at the na-
tional level,29
To call the Whig coalition a political party is to do it a service
above and beyond the call of historical accuracy. It was not a party —
not in the European sense, certainly, and probably not in the modern
American sense. It was, instead, a loose confederacy of warring factions
bound vaguely together by a common hatred of the new popular democ-
racy in general and of General Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren
in particular. The party grew out of that hatred in 1833-1835 and it
collapsed in the confusion of its own internal intellectual and factional
contradictions in 1853-1854. During its twenty-year history it elevated
two bewildered generals to the White House, William Henry Harrison
in 1840 and Zachary Taylor in 1848, and it nominated another — General
Winfield Scott — in 1852. These leaders were chosen to head the WThig
coalition primarily because they stood for nothing controversial antago-
nized no one, and because they could be sold to the voters, as Andrew
Jackson had been marketed in 182 8, wrapped in an aura of military
glory. Both of the aging Whig generals died in office, bringing into power
their Vice-Presidents, Tyler and Millard Fillmore. These men had little
in common politically with their chiefs, and they were in both instances
considerably more able than their predecessors. When in 1844 the Whigs
did nominate a man who stood for something, Henry Clay, the Demo-
crats beat him with James K. Polk, a political unknown. Party platforms
and statements of political principles were scrupulously avoided by the
Whigs for fear the brawling factions would disintegrate the party in a
gigantic internal explosion. It was on this unstable vehicle that John
Tyler of Virginia, no Whig himself really, backed into national politics
and into the White House.
The Whig Party was an opportunistic amalgamation of two major
factions. Foremost in its councils were the National Republicans, descend-
ants of Hamiltonian Federalism. Led by Henry Clay, Daniel Webster,
and John Quincy Adams, they supported the nationalistic American Sys-
tem— tariff protection, internal improvements, national bank — and they
were generally loose constructionists of the Constitution. They had no
use for slavery. Within the Whig Party the National Republicans were
the best-organized, best-led, and most influential faction. The humilia-
tion of their overwhelming defeat under Clay in 1832 ripened them for
alliances and arrangements that would give them a broader political
base. They most consistently represented the interests of the merchants,
shippers, and the new industrialists of the North and Northeast.
Second in power and prestige within the Whig coalition were the
states' rights Whigs of the South. Former Jeffersonian Democrats, they
were variously disenchanted with Andrew Jackson for his spoils system,
his Force Bill, and his removal of the Bank deposits, and they streamed
into the Whig coalition in 1833-1835 in search of a new political home.
They were much mollified by Clay's unexpected moderation during the
nullification crisis, by his work on the Compromise Tariff of 1833, and
by Ms statement that much of Jackson's proclamation against South
Carolina was £Ctoo ultra." They remained, however, strict construction-
ists, free-traders, and antinationalists, and they looked to the continued
domination of the national political process by gentlemen. Led by John
Tyler, Willie P. Mangum of North Carolina, and Hugh L. White of
Tennessee, the Southern Whigs chiefly represented the interests of the
116
slaveowning plantation aristocracy. They feared the growing political
power of the newly enfranchised white hill farmers, the upcountry
agrarians and "poor whites" in the South who rallied around Jackson.
Like Jefferson, most of them feared the proper tyless urban artisans to
whom both Jackson and Van Buren appealed. Indeed, in Virginia it was
said that the "Whigs know each other by the instinct of gentlemen."
Their hatred of the egalitarian Jackson and all his works was summed
up in Mrs. John Floyd's heated characterization of the General as a
"bloody, bawdy, treacherous, lecherous villain.'7 so
Lesser adherents to the Whig coalition in 1834 were the out-and-out
slavers and nuliifiers led by John C. Calhoun and a small coterie of
extremist South Carolina statesmen including Robert Y. Hayne, Francis
W. Pickens. and William C. Preston. There was also an anti-Jackson
contingent of Conservative Democrats, centered primarily in New York,
Pennsylvania, and Ohio, who had broken sharply with the General on
the threat of dictatorship they thought they detected in his Bank policy.
While most of the leadership element in this faction opposed slavery,
free trade, and strict states7 rights, they were opposed even more stren-
uously to Van Buren and to the machine politics of the urban working-
men's democracy known in New York as Locofocoism. Led by such
politically diverse and ambitious champions as John McLean of Ohio,
Lewis Cass of Michigan, and Nathaniel P. Tallmadge of New York,
theirs was an opportunistic movement of Democratic outs seeking to
make themselves Whig ins.
Finally, there were the Anti-Masons, that strange and emotional
sect that came bursting out of western New York and onto the American
political scene in 1831 with little more for a program than the naive and
half-crazy belief that Freemasonry and Americanism were somehow
incompatible. Skilled and practical politicians like Thurlow Weed, Wil-
liam H. Seward, and Francis P. Granger quickly moved in on this luna-
tic fringe and made of it an anti- Jackson, anti-Van Buren faction in the
Empire State, dedicated in its principles to the protective tariff and to
internal improvements.31
The practical problem in 1836 was how to bring the diverse Whig
elements together against Martin Van Buren, hand-picked by the Gen-
eral to carry on the Jackson revolution. Crowding protectionists and
free traders, Bank men and anti-Bank men, moderate and extreme states'
righters, nuliifiers, American System nationalists, Anti-Masons, planters
and manufacturers, businessmen and farmers into one political tent was
a trick John Tyler and the other Whig leaders pondered. Tyler's idea
was to nominate a man who could at least unite the entire South and who
would not be too offensive to anti- Van Buren Democrats and National
Republican Whigs in the North. His personal candidate was his good
friend Littleton W. Tazewell, a "Virginia Gentleman" who could, he was
sure, unite and carry the South. Tyler thus undertook in November 1834
117
to launch a Presidential boom in TazewelFs behalf, certain that "no
matter where his name may be first brought out, it will spread like light-
ning.3' When the Tazewell boom failed to spread at all, in Virginia or
elsewhere, Tyler began reluctantly to consider the possibility of nomi-
nating Judge Hugh L. White of Tennessee. To be sure, White's
estrangement from the Jackson administration was of recent date.
But, as Tyler pointed out to James Iredell, Jr.7 in January 1835, White
was certainly more desirable than Van Buren, and through White a
united South might hope to control the situation. "We could only take
him as a choice of evils/' Tyler explained, " [but] I desire to see the
South united, and to accomplish this I would yield much.73 32
Events were moving swiftly. In May 1835, at a Baltimore conven-
tion packed with federal officeholders, the Jackson Democrats nominated
Van Buren for the Presidency and Colonel Richard M. Johnson of Ken-
tucky for the Vice-Presidency. The nominations triggered a rush of
states' rights Whigs in the South to the candidacy of Judge White.
White had supported much of the Jackson program including the Force
Bill ("He has voted to support the admin, in all its measures/' admitted
Tyler) while insisting that his states' rights remained orthodox. It was
hoped that the very fogginess of this record might cut into Van Buren 's
strength in the North. The fact that the controversial Richard M. John-
son appeared with Van Buren on the regular Democratic ticket also
gave the Southern partisans of Hugh White considerable hope.
Johnson's nomination was designed to give the Jacksonless ticket a
genuine frontier flavor. Veteran of the War of 1812, comrade in arms of
General William Henry Harrison in the Indian campaigns in Ohio, Mich-
igan, and Ontario, Johnson's main claim to fame rested on his dubious as-
sertion that he had personally and heroically delivered the death blow to
the Indian chief Tecumseh at the Battle of the Thames in October 1813.
Whether the reputed "Slayer of Tecumseh" was a simulated hero or not,
It was a fact that he had long lived with a mulatto woman, fathered two
quadroon daughters by her, and had boldly sponsored the girls in polite
society. Miscegenation was scarcely a popular concept in the South in
1835, and when Johnson's nomination to the Vice-Presidency was con-
firmed at Baltimore, the Virginia Jackson Democrats at the convention
broke into catcalls and hisses. The United States Telegraph sounded
the alarm, calling attention to Johnson's "connection with a jet-black,
thick-lipped, odoriferous negro wench, by whom he has reared a family
of children whom he had endeavoured to force upon society as equals." 33
The anti- Jackson Virginians struck back at the Baltimore nominees
with speed. A meeting of Old Dominion Whigs was promptly held at
Charlottesville; it denounced the United States Bank, internal improve-
ments and the protective tariff, called Van Buren a "Federalist" (still a
dirty word in Jefferson's Virginia) , drew up a states' rights platform,
and nominated Hugh L. White for the Presidency. Within a few days, in
118
a letter to Colonel Thomas Smith dated "May 8, 1835, Tyler endorsed
White. The Tennessee senator, whom Tyler had accused four months
earlier of having '"voted to support the admin. In all its measures/7 was
transformed in Tyler's mind into a magnolia patriot who had "been
against the Old Democracy for two years only, and [only] on two or
three important subjects." Tyler's conversion to White was speedy, but
It was not related to rumors circulating in Virginia in May 1835 that
linked his own name with White's as Vice-Presidential nominee on a
states' rights Whig ticket. "I learn that there is an idle rumor aSoat
relative to myself," he told Colonel Smith. "I need scarcely say to you,
believe it not." 34
Meanwhile, the Whig campaign strategy, if strategy it can be called,
was beginning to emerge. It eschewed both a national nominating con-
vention and a platform statement of principles for fear the anti- Jackson
bloc would disintegrate. Thus the Whig leadership fell back on the device
of having various state legislatures and state nominating conventions put
forward sectional candidates. The idea was to repeat the history of 1824.
By preventing any candidate from receiving an electoral majority, the
decision would be plunged into the House of Representatives — where
bargaining by professional politicians might produce a Whig choice with-
out further reference to the people. Three Presidential candidates were
nominated with this plan in mind: Daniel Webster to appeal to the
Northeast and the old National Republicans in that section; Hugh L.
White to draw the South's anti- Jackson and states' rights groups to-
gether; and General William Henry Harrison, "Old Tippecanoe," a
Virginia-born Ohioan to appeal to the West.
Of the three major Whig candidates Harrison was by far the least
able and the most manipulatable. He was also perhaps the least con-
troversial. A soldier of mediocre talents, a failure in business, and a
regular suppliant at the fountain of public office, elective and appointive,
Harrison had made obscure public speeches and statements over the
years that had had that valuable political quality of saying nothing at
great length on all sides of many issues. It is doubtful that he knew
himself where he really stood on anything. One of his most perceptive
insights came in January 1835 when he informed a friend "I have news
more strange to tell you. Some folks are silly enough to have formed a
plan to make a President of the United States out of this Clerk and
Clodhopper 1" It was silly but it was good politics. A myth was being
built around the Clodhopper by his Ohio managers. Just as Jackson's
propagandists had created the image of Old Hickory a decade earlier, so
now did Harrison's associates create the legend of Old Tippecanoe, slayer
of Redcoats and exterminator of red Indians. A mantle of rugged frontier
simplicity and military glory was skillfully woven by Western Whigs
and Anti-Masons and draped on his threadbare shoulders. All this on
the theory, so often proved sound in American Presidential politics, that
119
the packaging tends to be more important than the product. In William
Henry Harrison the Western Whigs had an inferior product. But they
presented him in a bright and sparkling package borrowed from the shelf
of Andrew Jackson. Harrison was ail things to all men, the all- American
candidate.35
Tyler was not overwhelmed with enthusiasm for Harrison. Nor was
he at all convinced that the multiple-candidate approach was the wisest
one. But, given the nature of the Whig Party in 1835-1836, there seemed
no alternative. At the same time, however, he did nothing in 1836 to
advance his own political fortunes within the Whig alliance. He watched
the movement for his nomination to the Vice-Presidency with detach-
ment, neither encouraging nor discouraging the efforts of those who
were working to get his name on the ballot in various states. He had no
hope of his own election and little confidence in the chances of any of
the various Whig Presidential candidates. He evidenced no elation when
he was nominated on a Harrison-Tyler ticket in Maryland and on White-
Tyler tickets in Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia. He
apparently felt no particular depression when he lost a possible spot on a
Harrison ticket in Pennsylvania to Anti-Masonite Francis P. Granger.
Nor was he angered when he learned that Henry Clay, in a character-
istic backstage maneuver, had quietly severed the Tyler jugular at the
Whig state convention in Ohio, slipping Granger's name onto the Buck-
eye ticket with Harrison instead of Tyler's. The Clay operation in Ohio
was pure "humbug and trickery," snorted John G. Miller from Colum-
bus. Miller was more outraged by Clay's double-dealing than was Tyler.
Urged by his friends to campaign in "every man's house, talk to him
as tho' everything was in his power — flatter the wife and daughters and
praise the hogs," the Virginian was unresponsive. He was simply not a
wife-flatterer, baby-kisser, or hog-praiser.36
The Whig chaos of multiple Harrison-Tyler, White-Tyler, Har-
rison-Granger, and Webster-Granger tickets in various sections pro-
duced confusion throughout the entire nation — nowhere better revealed
than in Virginia. Having endorsed a White-Tyler nomination in Feb-
ruary 1836, the Virginia Whigs were soon deluged with demands from
the western counties for a Harrison nomination as well. This sentiment
they happily accommodated. A second Whig convention was called in
July 1836 which nominated Harrison and Tyler. In Virginia, therefore,
there were two Whig tickets, White and Tyler and Harrison and Tyler,
the arrangement being that in the event the Whigs carried the state, Vir-
ginia's electoral votes would go to the Presidential candidate, Harrison
or White, who polled the highest popular vote. The combined ticket in
Virginia was called the "Union Anti-Van Buren Harrison ticket/7 and
the party there labeled itself "Republican Whig." 37
The surprising thing about the election of 1836 was that the
multiple-candidate approach very nearly succeeded. Voters in Ohio and
120
Pennsylvania went to the polls earlier than in some of the other states
aad by October 27 it was certain that the Whigs had carried Ohio
and were running strong in Pennsylvania. Tyler was greathr encouraged.
For a brief moment he felt that Johnson's Vice-Presidential candidacy
was doomed and that Ms and Francis Granger's names would be the
two submitted to the Senate for a final decision. "If the Virginia vote be
sustained by the South, then my individual cause is neither desperate or
hopeless/' It was the only time during the campaign Tyler believed that
a combination of fortuitous circumstances might conceivably bring about
Ms election. Two weeks later he confided to James Iredell, Jr.7 that while
the vote in Virginia would be close, "I fear we shall be beaten by a small
majority." 3S
Tyler did nothing to aid his own cause. He did not campaign per-
sonally; he made no statements of a political nature; he praised no
hogs. He simply sat on Ms front porch in Williamsburg and waited to
see if the Vice-Presidential lightning would strike. It did not. Virginia
rejected the Whig coalition and went for Martin Van Buren? whose ap-
peal in the western mountain counties was powerful enough to offset
divided White and Harrison sentiment in the Tidewater and Piedmont.
In the final national count Van Buren received 170 electoral votes to
Harrison's 73, White's 26, and Webster's 14. Among the Vice-Presi-
dential candidates Richard M. Johnson received 147 electoral votes,
just one less than a majority; Anti-Mason-Whig-Democrat Granger col-
lected 77, and states' rights Whig John Tyler picked up the 47
electoral votes of South CaroHna3 Maryland, Tennessee, and Georgia.
Rather than cast Virginia's 23 electoral votes for the miscegenist John-
son, Virginia's Democratic electors cast their vote for William Smith of
Alabama. For the first and only time in American history, the Vice-
Presidential decision was thrown into the Senate. There, on February
8, 1837, to t^6 surprise of no one, the Democratic upper chamber chose
Johnson over Granger by a margin of 33 to 16. "The double-shotted
ticket killed us,5J said Tyler sadly.
Still, he was not long disappointed in the outcome. The total Whig
popular vote was 736,000, only 27,000 shy of Van Buren ys total and
206,000 better than Clay had done in 1832. A shift of 1200 votes in
Pennsylvania would have thrown the election into the House as Whig
leaders had planned. In addition, Tyler derived much from his losing
effort. Not only did he gain national exposure, but he ran well ahead
of White throughout the South, All in all, his performance and that
of the new Whig grouping was impressive. True, Tyler's decision to
resign his Senate seat on the expunging resolution had hurt the Whig
cause in Virginia — as Whig leaders there had predicted. So too had the
peculiar "double-shotted ticket." Yet in Maryland, the only other state
in which he ran on a Whig ticket with Harrison, Tyler won. Indeed,
Harrison and Tyler carried the Free State by a better margin than Clay
121
bad in 1832. Nor had Tyler compromised his states' rights ideals during
the canvass. He simply kept quiet about them.
Tyler chose to remain with the Whigs after the election although
he knew that the new party was dominated by its Northern nationalist
faction. No surviving word from his pen explains his decision. It can
only be surmised that he saw the Whig party in Virginia as the safest
political redoubt for propertied gentlemen, a bulwark against egalitarian
Jacksonianism and King Numbers in the Old Dominion. Certainly he had
little confidence in the political sagacity of Virginia's "mountaineers/'
those hill farmers west of Lexington who had rallied first to the popular
democracy of Jackson. It was his dedication to the political and economic
interests of the Tidewater aristocracy that very likely caused him to
remain a Whig when solid anti-Jacksonians like his friends Tazewell
and Gordon were returning to the Democracy. Ironically, Tyler's class
bias would make him President of the United States. He would owe
the office to hundreds of thousands of these same unwashed "moun-
taineers" who swept "Tippecanoe and Tyler too" into the White House
in i840.39
Whether Tyler personally voted for White or for Harrison in 1836
is not entirely clear. In 1840, when he and Harrison were running
together on a unified Whig ticket, Tyler vaguely demurred when it was
charged that he had voted for Hugh White in 1836. But he never claimed
that he had voted for Harrison. It was an embarrassing question in
1840 and Tyler, for good reason, preferred to remain as foggy as possible
on the subject. In all likelihood, however, he did vote for White, al-
though the evidence on the point is more suggestive than conclusive.
His correspondence in 1835-1836 shows a willingness to support White.
None of his surviving letters indicate any interest whatever in Harrison.
His May 8, 1835, letter to Colonel Smith specifically endorsed White,
it will be recalled. His statement in January 1835 that he would "yield
much" to see the South united in the campaign would also seem to pre-
clude his later support of Tippecanoe. Harrison's candidacy not only
split the an ti- Jackson vote in Virginia in 1836, it hurt the entire
Whig cause in the South. Shortly after the election Tyler complained to
Henry A. Wise that several leading Whig newspapers in the South had
"dropped" White and taken up Harrison, and he blamed the loss of
Virginia and North Carolina to Van Buren on this development. This is
not the protest of a man who had voted for Harrison,40
The loss of the Vice-Presidency in 1836 at least enabled Tyler to
remain at home with his family and rebuild his law practice. The next
few years were happy ones in Williamsburg, and Tyler's practice grew
steadily. His older children began to marry and produce Tyler grand-
children. Unfortunately several of these unions were unhappy ones, and
it took all the power of Tyler's near-fatalistic deism to reconcile him to
the ensuing disasters. What would be would be, his theology told him,
122
A case In point was the wedding of Letitia Tyler to James A. Semple in
February 1839. a joyous occasion at the time in the Williamsburg house-
hold. Semple was a James River neighbor well known to Tyler. When
he and Ms bride, a girl who was thought "very handsome, full of life
and spirits," settled down at Cedar Hill plantation In New Kent County
It seemed scarcely possible that within a few years the marriage would
amount to little more than an armed truce. In May 1844 Semple went
into the Navy as a purser (Tyler appointed him to the commission)
and remained at sea much of the time thereafter. Shortly after the
Civil War a separation was effected.
Similarly, the^October 25, 1838, marriage of John, Jr., to Mattle
Rochelle of Jerusalem (now Courtland) , near Franklin, Virginia, began
well and ended in failure. John Tyler encouraged the union, and he did
everything in Ms power to salvage it once the fact became apparent
in 1842 that it had moved onto shaky ground. Where the fault lay is
difficult to ascertain. It seems clear that young Tyler drank too much
and was unable to complete his law studies or much else that he set out
to do. In any event, Mattle refused to live in Washington with him
while he served Tyler as "White House private secretary. Tyler in turn
objected to having John, Jr., "live in a state of daily dependence" upon
the Rochelle family. "I desire therefore to see them placed in a different
situation/' he informed the Rochelles in October 1843. He proposed
specifically that the two families share the expense of purchasing a small
estate for John and Mattie near WasMngton, even stocking it for them
with a few slaves. He pointed out to Martha Rochelle, Mattie's mother,
that wMle Ms own large family made it impossible for him to make a
"heavy advance," he was willing to bear a fair share of the burden.
Meanwhile, he was paying Ms son a salary as Presidential secretary.
Tyler had already accommodated the Rochelles by appointing Martha's
son James a midsMpman in the Navy in September 1841. Neither this
gesture nor Tyler's recommendations to Martha bore fruit. The
Rochelles proved uncooperative, and by 1844 the couple were spending
more time separated than together. In September of the same year
the President fired John, Jr., from his secretarial post for his general
inefficiency.41
Much more happily founded was the marriage of Robert Tyler to
the lovely Priscilla Cooper of Bristol, Pennsylvania. The ceremony tool^
place in Bristol on September 12, 1839. Priscilla was a magnificent
woman with fine features, beautiful skin, and dark brown hair. She had
a wonderful sense of humor and a flirtatious devilment about her which
fascinated men. From 1841 to 1844 she graced the WMte House as her
father-in-law's official hostess, the only professional actress ever to serve
in such a capacity in the President's Mansion. Always a tower of
strength in the Tyler family, she had seen much hardship when she
first met Robert Tyler in March 1837.
Priscilla's background was anytMng but normal, although on her
123
mother's side she was directly descended from the prominent Major
James Fairlee of New York, staff officer with Baron von Steuben during
the Revolution, and from Chief Justice Robert Yates of the New York
Supreme Court. Her father, however, was Thomas A. Cooper, adopted
son of the English freethinker and social reformer William Godwin.
Actor3 gambler, drinker, Cooper was one of America's leading tragedians
when he married the respectable Mary Fairlee in 1812. The marriage
virtually severed her connection with her outraged family.
To this strange union Priscilla was born on June 14, 1816, the
third of nine children who arrived with annual regularity. She grew up
in Bristol in a house her father had won in a card game. There she lived
until her mother died in 1833. By this time a whole new generation of
actors — Edmund Forrest, Tyrone Power, and Edmund Kean among
them — trod the boards, cutting into Cooper's fame and earning power
with such severity that the large brood of motherless Cooper children
faced privation. Tom Cooper had no savings, of course, only sour mem-
ories of bad cards. Faced with this situation, Priscilla decided that
she too must go on the stage. Coached and trained by her father who
reasoned that a father-daughter team might revive public interest in the
Cooper name, Priscilla opened to mixed reviews at the Bowery Theater
on February 17, 1834, in Virginim, a tragedy by Sheridan Knowles. The
next three years of her life added up to a dreary succession of grimy
boardinghouses, dirty theaters, and dwindling audiences. She was not
a great actress. She was pretty and competent and tireless, but she was
no Charlotte Cushman. Constantly on tour, she played the coastal cities
from Boston to Charleston — as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, Beatrice in
Much Ado About Nothing, Juliana in The Honeymoon, Mrs. Beverly hi
The Gamester, Virginia in Virginius, and Desdemona in Othello. When
the panic and depression of 1837 virtually wrecked the American
theater, the Coopers experienced real hardship. On May 17 of that black
year Priscilla wrote her sister Mary Grace that
We had radishes and salad — not roses and strawberries. The latter I shall not
hope to taste this year, for economy is the order of the day. One pound of
butter lasts us two days. We eat rye bread, burn one candle. Pa gets shaved
once in two days and by the month. We wash ourselves only once a week as
the Delaware is red [muddy] , eat nothing but bacon and potatoes for dinner,,
with an occasional lone dumpling to give weight to the repast. Our business in
Baltimore was so utterly wretched that Papa could not afford to go for you
. . . our houses were most miserable Hard times, banks breaking, mer-
chants failing and strong fear of negro and Irish mobs. This latter keeping all
the fathers of families in their houses after nightfall. . . ,42
By the time Priscilla and her father reached Richmond on March
18., 1837, to play Othello, the young actress was tired and discouraged.
She confided to Mary Grace, half hopefully, half wistfully, that if some-
one "with a large country establishment in Virginia, a good family name,
124
and a handsome and good natured person," were to fall in love with her
and ask her to marry him, she would not think his proposal "to be
sneezed at" — a remark that was almost clairvoyant. The same evening
she met Robert Tyler. Robert had finished at William and Mary in
1835 and was engaged in the reading of law in the Williamsburg office
of Professor Nathaniel Beverley Tucker. The prospect of seeing the great
Thomas A. Cooper play Othello had lured him up to Richmond for the
evening. When Priscilla came on the stage as Desdemona, the patrons
rose to applaud. This was a mark of respect frequently paid young
actresses by courtly Southern audiences. Robert was transfixed at the
sight of the beautiful Desdemona and remained standing and staring at
Priscilla after everyone else sat down. After the play he went im-
mediately backstage, introduced himself to Tom Cooper, and asked
permission "to pay his addresses" to his lovely daughter.43
So began the romance which, after six proposals and a bundle of
poetic love letters, culminated in marriage at St. James' Episcopal
Church in Bristol in September 1839. All the Tylers encouraged
Robert in his anxious quest. There was no foolishness about taking an
impoverished actress into the family. As Robert told Priscilla, his mother
was "more glad that I shall marry you than anyone else in the world."
John Tyler was his son's best man at the ceremony and John Tyler,
Jr., served as a groomsman. Because of her recent stroke, Letitia Chris-
tian Tyler could not attend her son's wedding. After a honeymoon at
Woodlawn plantation, home of Henry and Mary Tyler Jones, the
couple returned to Williamsburg.44
Priscilla fitted easily and happily into the bosom of the Tyler
family. She truly loved Letitia, got on very well with John Tyler, and
enjoyed the Tyler children. She was a happy bride. She never looked
back to her grim days in the theater. It worried her sometimes that her
father, working alone again, was reduced in 1839 to playing such
backwoods tank towns as Montgomery, Alabama. But she had her own
life to lead now, and she threw her energies into her husband's career.
She helped him prepare his law cases and write his speeches to the
juries. "I write all the pathetic and romantic parts, and Mr. Tyler, the
law and reason," she informed her sister. She also transcribed his somber
poetry, mended his shirts, and tried to save money by making some of
her own dresses. Her clumsy efforts as a seamstress reminded her of the
two French towns, "Too Long" and "Too Loose." Nor did it take her
long to discover that the management of money in the Tyler household
was a casual affair. In August 1840 she wrote Mary Grace that
At present the situation is anything but comfortable. Mr. [Robert] Tyler
has nothing to do scarcely in Williamsburg, and his father won't send him
away. The family are very extravagant. The governor [Tyler] pressed for
money; consequently I never think of indulging in any little elegant super-
fluities, even to a yard of blue ribbon; in fact, never get a paper of pins
125
without waiting a week or two to see if I can do without them. The governor
is very generous though and has given me permission to have an account in
every store in Williamsburg, which of course I do not avail myself of.45
Priscilla was understandably worried. When she wrote this letter
she was five months pregnant, and she was beginning to wonder when
her husband was ever going to commence his law career seriously. For
all practical purposes he had given up the law early in 1840 to assist
in his father's campaign for the Vice-Presidency. Thus, when she and
Robert visited Tom Cooper in Bristol in August 1840, two months
before the election, she saw the two men she loved most in the world
staring poverty in the face.
It was not a successful homecoming. Robert did not get along
well with his crusty father-in-law, who was a staunch Van Burea
Democrat. "The Whigs stand no more chance than a cat in hell without
claws /' he told Robert. "Damn their bloods. They will cut their own
damn throats." While Robert laughed politely at these profane little
sallies, the fact remained that the men mixed, as Priscilla put it, "about
as much as oil and water." Fortunately for the economic well-being of
both of them, the Whigs did win the election. Thus when Tyler be-
came President in 1841 Robert promptly received a nfteen-hundred-
dollar-a-year sinecure in the Land Office and Tom Cooper was appointed
storekeeper at the Frankford Arsenal in Pennsylvania with the pay of
an Army captain. Priscilla finally caught the spirit of the Presidential
campaign to which her husband had sacrificed his budding law career.
She wrote to everyone she knew urging them to support the Whig ticket.
And when Harrison and Tyler were swept into office she literally danced
for joy.46
126
AND TYLER TOO
And we'll vote for Tyler y thereforej
Without a why or wherefore.
WHIG CAMPAIGN SONG, 1840
Tyler's return to active politics in April 1838, after an absence of two
years, was as predictable as it was inevitable. He could not long bear
being out of tie political stream. He had a real addiction to politics.
On April 26, 1838, he stood as a Whig for the Virginia House of
Delegates from the Williamsburg district and was swept into office. Al-
ready talk and speculation had revived throughout the South that linked
Tyler's name once more to the Vice-Presidential nomination for 1840
on the Whig ticket. The Virginian's election to the speakership of the
House of Delegates in January 1839 only increased this speculation. But
Tyler did not return to the political arena in 1838 to run for the Vice-
Presidency in 1840; he felt he had no chance in that direction. As ne
confided to Henry A. Wise in December 1838, "I dream not that any
Southern man with Southern principles is to be selected. This has
already been tested in my case. My election was certain [in 1836] if
Northern and Western men had come to my aid." *
Nevertheless, 1840 had all the earmarks of a Whig year. The de-
pression which stalked the nation had, by 1839, stimulated widespread
popular demands to throw the ins bodily out. Most Americans did not
understand just how Andrew Jackson's fiscal policies had triggered the
economic crisis, but they did understand seven-cent cotton, five-cent
sugar, and sixty-eight cents' wages for a fourteen-hour day at common
labor. They could not appreciate the fact that Jackson's destruction
of the Bank of the United States and the subsequent deposit of Treasury
funds in "pet" state banks had introduced a wild period of credit ex-
127
pansion, paper-money inflation, and speculation in 1835-1837. Center-
ing in the speculative buying and selling of public lands, the inflationary
boom sent food prices spiraling upward and soon caused great hardship
among urban workingmen in the North. This politically undesirable
development eventually encouraged Jackson to issue the ill-timed if not
ill-advised deflationary Specie Circular of July 1836 which demanded
that all public lands forthwith be paid for in silver and gold. The result-
ing dislocation in banking and currency circles quickly set off the dreary
cycle of depression — banks collapsed, credit dried up, commodity prices
dropped, wages declined, businesses folded, factories shut down, and
more banks collapsed. By 1838 some fifty thousand unemployed men
walked the streets of New York City alone.
The Van Buren administration inherited the deepening economic
crisis and could come up with nothing more inspiring to counter it than
the Independent Treasury plan, which, after two years of bitter political
wrangling and maneuvering, the distracted Democracy managed finally
to push into law in June 1840. The Independent Treasury had no ap-
preciable effect on the depression. It was a Democratic hard-money
scheme which sought to divorce the Treasury from the state banking
system once and for all by placing all government revenues in special
federal depositories. While this plan had the advantage of removing gov-
ernment deposit funds from the speculation-crazed hands of irrespon-
sible state-bank officials, its corollary stricture that obEgations due the
government be paid only in specie threatened further to reduce the sup-
ply of currency (and credit) at a time when the depressed state of the
economy called for a policy of controlled inflation.
Meanwhile, conservatives like Tyler were shaken by the rise of
Locofocolsm within the Northern Democracy. Centering in the urban
areas, particularly New York City and Philadelphia, the movement
began as the Workingmen's Party in the late 18203. At that time It
advocated nothing more radical than free public education, protection
f)f workers from the competition of prison contract labor, and the aboli-
tion of imprisonment for debt. But when it emerged again in New
York in 1834 as the Equal Rights party, its leadership was demanding
in addition abolition of business monopolies, legalization of trade unions,
the right to strike, hard money, stable prices, free trade, and a strict
construction of the Constitution. Enamored neither of inflation nor de-
flation, the workingmen of the North who complained bitterly about
the rising cost of bread during the inflation of 1835-1837 were, by
1839, an angry mob of unemployed ready to heed the Whig campaign
slogan: "Matty's policy: Fifty cents a day and French soup — Our
policy: Two dollars a day and roast beef."
The rise of these radicals and levelers (or so they seemed at the
time to the comfortable classes) in the mid-i83os split the Democratic
Party in New York into two factions. The Locofoco wing, led by Martin
128
Van Buren and Senator Silas Wright, mainly supported the aims of the
urban Equal Rights movement; the Conservative wing, led by Senator
Nathaniel P. Tallmadge, largely represented the Empire State agrarian
community. The Conservatives were willing to cooperate with the Whigs
on most matters of fiscal and economic policy. Both factions vied for
control of patronage-rich Tammany Hall, key to the New York City
political situation.
With the onset of the depression years in 1837, the miserable,
the hungry, and the jobless flocked to the Locofoco banner and marched
through the streets of New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Baltimore
chanting angry demands for bread and work. The picture they presented
was indeed a frightening one to conservative Democrats. That these
same workingmen also supported the deflationary policies of the Jackson
and Van Buren administrations (foolishly, it would seem) was proof
enough to the conservatives that the entire Democracy had been cap-
tured by its radical element. Actually, the Van Buren administration did
little to earn the allegiance of the unemployed workingman, and it
certainly had no solution to his problem. Suggestions that the federal
government intervene to combat the depression and alleviate human
suffering fell on deaf ears in the capital. Indeed, Martin Van Buren hi
his Annual Message of December 1837 criticized those who were "prone
to expect too much from the Government." Nor did the Whigs of 1840
have any idea how to produce "two dollars a day and roast beef" either.
But they were out and Van Buren was in and it was in a fine slogan.2
As it became apparent that the Van Buren administration was
destined to wrestle unequally and unsuccessfully with the disaster, and
that the Northern Democracy was fracturing into two hostile wings, the
Whig nomination for the Presidency became a prize eagerly sought.
Congressional elections in 1838 produced sharp Whig gains in the South,
particularly in Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, and Louisiana. No one
appreciated the rosy future of the shaky Whig coalition more than Henry
Clay. Denied in 1824, passed over in 1828, beaten in 1832, neglected
in 1836, the Sage of Ashland confidently looked to 1840 as the year
he would at last walk triumphantly into the White House. As a charter
member of the anti- Jackson crusade since 1828, no Whig deserved the
honor more than he. Yet the key to the nomination was held by the
states7 rights Whigs of the South. Without the support and good will of
men like Tyler, William C. Preston, and Hugh L. White he could not
hope to capture either the Whig nomination or the election. So it was
that Clay's slow canter toward an accommodation with the states7
rights Whigs, which began with the Compromise Tariff of 1833, became
a fast gallop after the elections of 1836 and 1838 demonstrated that the
strength of Jackson and Van Buren in the South was not that of
Hercules.
As early as September 1837 Clay commenced unloading much of
129
the American System ideological baggage that prevented the full con-
summation of a political love feast with the Southern Whigs. Speaking
on the expediency of re-establishing a Bank of the United States, he
retreated to the view that the Bank question was a closed issue until it
became demonstrably certain that a clear majority of the American
people desired the revival of such an institution. In February 1838 he
attacked the Independent Treasury from a states' rights standpoint. In
January 1839 ne finally secured Judge Hugh White's support for his
candidacy in a secret alliance negotiated through Henry A. Wise. By
the terms of this treaty Clay abandoned his entire American System —
Bank, tariff, and turnpike. As the Great Compromiser began to com-
promise his principles, Tyler could confide to Wise that in comparing
the abilities of Clay and Harrison, he felt the Kentuckian was by
far the more distinguished of the two leading Wlaig candidates for the
nomination. "Amid numerous errors," said Tyler in December 18-38,
Clay had "yet: contrived to build for himself a fame which will greatly
outlast the times in which we live. I have admired him always, and he
knows it." 3
In sum, John Tyler returned to active politics in 1838 as a sup-
porter of Henry Clay. Given the necessity of a sectionally balanced
ticket3 Tyler knew that the Kentuckian's nomination for the Presi-
dency would preclude any possibility of his own nomination for the
Vice-Presidency, The selflessness of his stand for Clay (indeed the irony
of it) was shown by the fact that Tyler remained a Clay supporter even
after Harry of the West had firmly planted a knife in his back during
the Tyler- Rives struggle of January 1839 in the Virginia General
Assembly.
The issue at stake was the United States Senate seat Tyler had
resigned in February 1836 and to which William C. Rives had been
promptly elected as a Jackson Democrat. With no prospect of a Vice-
Presidential nomination in the offing, Tyler announced Ms candidacy
for his old seat, partly as a vindication of his earlier stand on the
expunging resolution, partly because he wanted the position and needed
the salary. Meanwhile, in 1838, Rives had abandoned the Jackson-Van
Buren Democracy on the Independent Treasury question and was now
calling himself a Conservative Democrat, The state elections that year
produced in the Virginia General Assembly a count of eighty-one Whigs,
sixty-nine Van Buren Democrats, and sixteen Rives Conservative
Democrats. The latter group comprised men, like Rives, who had split
with Van Buren in 1838, but who had not yet become politically in-
tegrated into the Virginia Whiggery. To Henry Clay and to other Whig
leaders, it was vital that the Rives Democrats be speedily incorporated
into the Whig coalition. In a crucial swing state like Virginia, their
support of a Clay ticket in 1840 would be the key to success there.
For this reason Clay quietly passed the word to his Virginia friends in
130
December 1838 that lie was for Rives in the coming contest with John
Tyler. From Tylers standpoint, Rives was a Johnny-come-lately to the
Whig persuasion, a man who had "sustained Gen'l Jackson in all his
high handed usurpations and openly proclaimed that the executive
power was a unit, and who sustained that unit even unto the point
of blotting out the just censure of the Senate." Tyler could not bring
himself to believe that Virginia Whigs could support a man whose po-
litical conduct had been so ''obnoxious." 4
But support him they did, a fact which became quickly apparent
to Tyler when on the first ballot Rives polled 29 votes, twelve more
than his known strength. When Rives' vote increased to 43 on the
fourth ballot while Tyler's dropped steadily from 62 to 47 (Democrat
John Y. Mason holding at 68), it was clear that treachery of some sort
was afoot within the Whig fraternity. At this point Tyler's brother-in-
law, Judge John B. Christian, got in touch with Henry A. Wise in
Washington and instructed Wise to put the matter bluntly before Clay.
In a stormy interview with Harry of the West, Wise learned that Clay
was indeed secretly supporting Rives in the hope of carrying Virginia
in 1840. Then came Clay's quid pro quo. In Wise's words, Clay "agreed
that if Mr. Tyler's friends, who withheld Mr. Rives' election by the
legislature, would yield his reelection, Mr. Tyler should be nominated
on the Whig ticket for the Vice Presidency." 5
Tyler rejected the proffered bribe out of hand. He did not seek and
was not seeking the Vice-Presidency, and for personal reasons he would
not permit Rives' re-election. Rather than release his friends to the
Rives candidacy, Tyler decided to hold fast and thus deadlock the
contest. Under the circumstances, Rives could not command a majority
and the stalemate continued until February 23 when the General As-
sembly, after twenty-eight indecisive ballots, at last voted the indefinite
postponement of the election. So angry were Virginia Whigs with Tyler
over the Rives matter that they withheld from him their favorite-son
Vice-Presidential nomination. At their Staunton state convention in
September they endorsed instead New York Senator Nathaniel P.
Tallmadge for the second spot on a ticket with Clay.6
There is no evidence that Clay's patent double-dealing on the
Rives question angered John Tyler. On the contrary, Tyler apparently
accepted the situation as all in a good day's work, part of the political
game. Indeed, in mid-September, at the moment Virginia Whigs at
Staunton were pointedly passing him over for a Vice-Presidential
nomination, he wrote Clay a friendly letter reiterating his support. He
told the Kentuckian "I always regarded you as a republican of the old
school on principle — who had indulged, when the public good seemed
to require it, somewhat too much in a broad interpretation to suit our
Southern notions." Such venom as Tyler had stored in him in the
summer of 1839 (and with family wedding-bells ringing all around he
was in a cheerful frame of mind) was reserved for Martin Van Buren
for not having countermanded the removal of Tyler's nephew, John
H. Waggaman, from the position in the Land Office Tyler had earlier ob-
tained for him.7
Xor did Tyler give any indication that his disappointment in the
contest with Rives, if indeed there was any, would take the form of a
long sulk in Virginia's political tent. In the months preceding the na-
tional Whig convention at Harrisburg in December 1839, Tyler was
extremely active in the Whig cause in spite of the fact that only one
state (Mississippi) had seen fit to tender him a Vice-Presidential
nomination. The Southern Whig tide was running strong for Henry
Clay — Virginia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and North Carolina
all announced for him — and Tyler gave Ms time and energy unstintingly
to the Clay cause . In various precampaign speeches he ridiculed the ex-
cesses to which internal improvements had been carried, rang the tocsin
for states' rights, belabored the Force Bill, and eulogized the Com-
promise Tariff of 1833. In April 1839 ^e joined in a statement issued by
Whig members of the Virginia Assembly to the effect that internal
improvements, protective tariffs, and the Bank had all "ceased to be
practical questions." In July he addressed an open letter to the Whigs
of Louisville in which he variously criticized the Independent Treasury,
Van Bureif s use of patronage, the lack of and need for economy in the
government, and the Expunging Act.8
Thus when what was called the "Democratic Whig National Con-
vention" convened in Harrisburg on December 4, 1839, Tyler was
little more than an interested spectator and Clay supporter attached
to the Virginia delegation. Early in the proceedings Benjamin W. Leigh
informed the Virginia delegates that if Clay was passed over and either
Harrison or Winfield Scott nominated in his stead, Tyler would be ac-
ceptable to the convention for the Vice-Presidency, This prospect did
not excite Tyler. He publicly "disclaimed all wish upon the subject."
He was present, he said, only to see that Clay got the nomination; he
was not himself a candidate for anything.9
That Clay was not going to get the nomination for which he had
labored so hard and compromised so much soon became apparent. He
had a strong plurality of the votes in the convention but not the neces-
sary majority. So identified had he become with the Southern Whigs
since 1837 that he had alarmed and antagonized the Northern wing of
the party. Indeed, by December 1839 the Northern and Western Whigs
were ready to nominate almost anyone but Henry Clay. Led by Thurlow
Weed, William H. Seward, Thaddeus Stevens, and Daniel Webster, they
proceeded to do just that. No skveowning states' rights-oriented Whig
nominee like Henry Clay could possibly hope to carry New York or
Pennsylvania, they argued. Their alternatives to Clay were two amiable
hopefuls: the ever-available Whig generals, William Henry Harrison of
132
OMo and Winfield Scott of Virginia. Old Tippecanoe was still popular
in the West and he had done nothing since 1836 to jeopardize his con-
tinued availability. Genera! Scott, a mediocrity on the order of Harrison,
although more of a pompous windbag, also had the advantage of having
said little in public that was controversial about anything. He had a
personal following in western New York state and a scattering of sup-
porters in New Jersey and Vermont. "The General's lips must be her-
metically sealed, and our shouts and hurras must be long and loud/' said
Millard Fillmore to Weed. Sealed or gushing, Scott was not really a
major candidate. He had been temporarily embraced and used by
Thurlow Weed only as a stalking horse to hold the New York Whig
delegation together until such time as some reasonable anti-Clay coali-
tion could be forged at the convention.10
A coalition was quickly cemented by the supporters of Scott and
Harrison on the opening day of the convention. Their first victory — a
decisive one — was to secure adoption of a unit rule. Under this arrange-
ment all the balloting would be done secretly in a central committee
composed of three delegates from each state. The total vote of each
state delegation would be cast for the candidate favored by the majority
of the delegates of each state sitting in the central committee. In this
manner, Clay's considerable minority vote within the Ohio, Pennsylvania,
and New York delegations was completely nullified. Still, on the first
ballot the voting showed Clay with 103, Harrison with 91, and Scott
with 57. Several subsequent ballots failed to produce any substantial
change except that Clay dropped to 95 while Scott climbed slowly to 68.
The vainglorious Scott began to look more and more like a compromise
candidate in the likely event of a Clay-Harrison deadlock.
It was fear of Scott as a compromise choice that caused Thad
Stevens of Pennsylvania, Harrison's floor manager, to deliver the great
coup of the convention. Harrison's strength was derived principally from
the 30 votes of Pennsylvania and the 21 of Ohio. Clay's strength lay
largely in the South, where it was solidly underpinned by Virginia's 23
votes. Early in the proceedings the Virginia delegation had reluctantly
decided that their second choice, if Clay could not be nominated, would
be Scott. At least he was a graduate of William and Mary and had
been born near Petersburg. Of course, Clay and Harrison had also been
born in Virginia. To prevent any break by Virginia from Clay to Scott,
an act that would surely have stampeded the convention to the Gen-
eral, Stevens casually showed the Virginia delegates a letter the foolish
Scott had written to Francis Granger earlier in the year. When or
how Thad Stevens came into possession of this blockbuster is not known.
It is known, however, that the letter had enough antislavery sentiment
in it to cause the influential Virginia delegation to announce that their
second choice for the nomination was now Harrison. This announcement
triggered a stampede to Tippecanoe as the Scott candidacy swiftly col-
133
lapsed. Weed worked quickly to shift the New York delegation from
Ms stalking horse to Harrison, and on the next ballot the old Indian
fighter received a majority of 148; Clay had 90 and Scott garnered I6.11
Virginia and Tyler stuck with Clay to the bitter end. They shifted
to no one. The report soon went around the convention that when
Tyler heard the outcome of the final ballot he broke down and wept.
Tyler did no such thing, but the story became part of the Tyler myth.
It may even have aided his Vice-Presidential candidacy among dis-
gruntled supporters of Clay. In any event, it is clear that John Tyler
worked for and voted for Henry Clay on every ballot. It was this
practical evidence of loyalty to Clay (greater loyalty than Clay had ever
shown him) , not alleged tears, that brought Tyler the support of grate-
ful Clay forces at Harrisburg for second place on the ticket.12
Less legendary were Clay's tears of anger and frustration when
he learned that the convention had nominated Harrison, that the grand
prize had eluded him once again. Henry Wise was with him in his room
at Brown's Hotel in Washington when the unexpected news arrived
from Harrisburg. Clay had been drinking heavily in a somewhat pre-
mature celebration of his certain nomination, and the shocking intel-
ligence of Harrison's success sent him into a half-drunken rage. Stamp-
ing, cursing, and gesticulating, Clay paced the room hurling obscenities
at Ms enemies. "My friends are not worth the powder and shot it would
take to kill them!" he screamed. "It is a diabolical intrigue. . .which
lias betrayed me. I am the most unfortunate man in the history of
parties: always run by my friends when sure to be defeated, and now
betrayed for the nomination when I, or anyone, would be sure of an
election." 13
With Harrison as the Whig nominee, Tyler's selection as his run-
ning mate became a distinct possibility. He had run with the General
on Whig tickets in Maryland and Virginia in 1836, he had a national
political reputation, and his states' rights ideology and Southern back-
ground gave the ticket of the Whig coalition a sectional balance it sorely
needed. Of equal importance was the fact that there was a serious
shortage of available Vice-Presidential candidates other than Tyler.
John Tyler was also a powerful force in Virginia politics. He still held
the key to Rives' re-election to the Senate, that same key Clay and
other Whigs thought must be turned if the party expected to carry the
Old Dominion in 1840. But mainly it was a lack of other Vice-Presi-
dential hopefuls that attracted the lightning to Tyler's graying head.
The name of John M. Clayton of Delaware, a Clay stalwart, was
briefly considered by the convention managers, Stevens and Weed, in
their desire to pacify the Clay forces with the Vice-Presidency. Clayton
made it clear that he was not interested. Nathaniel P. Tallmadge of
New York was from the wrong state. So too was Daniel Webster, who
had no interest in the dead-end job anyway. Benjamin W. Leigh of
134
Virginia was apparently approached (how forcefully is not clear), but he
too declined the dubious honor. The name of Senator William C. Preston
of South Carolina was suggested but caused no ripple. And so it finally
worked down to Tyler, for whom there was little enthusiasm even within
the Virginia delegation. Certainly there was no effort on the part of
Virginia to obtain the nomination for him. Most of the members of the
delegation preferred Tallmadge; they had no second choice. Leigh, the
nominal leader of the Virginia delegation, favored Willie P. Mangum
of North Carolina. As Thurlow Weed later confessed, the nomination
went to Tyler by default. When his name was brought before the
apathetic convention, the Virginia delegation pointedly abstained from
voting for him; it "looked" better that way, several of them later ex-
plained in obvious embarrassment. The Rives matter still rankled
them.14
In accepting Tyler, the Whigs at Harrisburg asked him no ques-
tions about his views and required him to make no pledges. There was
no deal in any smoke-filled room. Tyler did, however, obligingly with-
draw from the deadlocked Senate race in the Virginia General Assembly
and permit the re-election of Rives. This act mollified Clay and even-
tually brought him into Virginia to stump for the Whig ticket. But at
no time was Tyler asked to define or change his opinions. On this point
he recalled later that he was "perfectly and entirely silent in that con-
vention. I was . . . wholly unquestioned about my opinions. ... In the
presence of my Heavenly Judge . . . the nomination given to me was
neither solicited nor expected." The Whig charge leveled against him in
1842 that he had surreptitiously sought the Harrisburg nomination by
whispering to some of the delegates of his conversion to the expediency
and constitutionality of a national bank was false. Tyler said nothing
at the convention and he did nothing there to advance his candidacy.
He was put on the ticket to draw the South to Harrison. No more, no
less. In asking him nothing of his views on the political questions of the
day the convention managers carried to a logical conclusion their de-
cision to avoid any formal statement of Whig principles for fear the
party would explode like a chameleon on Scotch plaid. Both Clay and
Tyler agreed with this tactic. "It is a safe general rule/' Clay said,
"that it is best to remain silent." So it was that the Whigs, their lips
"hermetically sealed," left Harrisburg to do battle for "Tippecanoe
and Tyler too." It was a great slogan. "There was rhyme but no reason
in it," said Philip Hone. Young Abraham Lincoln was less critical. He
thought the Whig slate "first rate." 15
Hone's "rhyme but no reason" remark sums up the history of the
Whig "Log Cabin and Hard Cider" campaign of 1840. Never before
in the United States, and seldom since, has a major political party
taken such cynical advantage of the political naivete of the popula-
I3S
tion. If it proved anything at all, it demonstrated to generations of
politicians who would follow the Whigs of 1840 that most of the people
can be fooled some of the time. They were fooled in 1840 by one of
the greatest political shell games in American history. It was a sleight-
of-hand approach which so embarrassed John Tyler that he made an
honorable effort to detach himself from it. Failing, he retreated to saying
nothing specific enough to damage the Whig cause and nothing at basic
variance with the states' rights principles for which he stood. In fine,
John Tyler walked a semantic tightrope during the great circus of
1840, but in so doing he too contributed something to the intellectual
fog that enveloped and sustained the Whig effort.
At the outset of the campaign Whig strategy was to keep Harrison
vague and Tyler quiet while the party managers whipped up enthusiasm
for their Janus in a carnival atmosphere of torchlight parades, slogans,
catchy campaign songs, and semi-drunken political rallies. That Harrison
and Tyler were not of the same mind on most of the basic issues of the
day was simply glossed over with
And well vote for Tyler, therefore,
Without a why or wherefore.
In the South the Whigs were for states' rights; in the North they
were for American System nationalism; in the West they stressed
Harrison's military record and fleshed out the 1836 image of the log-
cabin-born man of the people, Cincinnatus of the West, wearer of coon-
skin and drinker of hard cider. They contrasted this portrait of their
hero with a picture of Van Buren as an effete, cowardly, champagne-
drinking fop living in the regal splendor of the White House. For the
poor there were promises of "two dollars a day and roast beeP and
stirring damnation of "Martin Van Ruin.". For the rich there was the
charge that Van Buren was a Locofoco leveler. Whig businessmen
warned their hard-pressed workers that there would be fewer jobs if
Van Buren were elected. In Protestant areas the rumor was circulated
that Van Buren was secretly a Catholic; in Roman Catholic areas it was
hinted that there would be state funds for parochial schools if the
Whigs won. And in the West it was even reported that as the hens
laid their eggs they cackled "Tip-tip! Tip-tip! Tyler!" 16
Keeping Harrison vague was no problem at all. The man was born
vague. His campaign up and down the country was a schizoid per-
formance, a tiresome repetition of hazy cliches which looked North,
South, and West in bewildering succession. Vague on the Bank, fuzzy on
slavery, contradictory on the tariff and on internal improvements,
Tippecanoe said he favored "sound Democratic Republican Doctrines'
upon which the Administration of Jefferson and Madison were con-
ducted"—whatever that meant. He condemned Executive use of the veto
power, deckred that he would serve one term only, promised that as
136
President he would initiate no legislation, and maintained that cor-
ruption in government was really a very bad thing. Motherhood,
morality, God, and the flag he vigorously endorsed. All in all, his per-
formance was that of an acrobatic octopus doing eight simultaneous
splits.17
Keeping Tyler silent was not much more difficult than keeping
Harrison vague. The Virginian preferred not to campaign at all. Better
to sit quietly on his porch in Williamsburg and wait for the Vice-
Presidency to come to him than to mix with the unwashed multitudes
in the wild carnival atmosphere that was the Whig canvass of 1840. It
was not the kind of campaign a gentleman could get very enthusiastic
about. Thus as late as June 1840 Tyler turned down an invitation from
his friend, former Governor James Iredell, Jr., of North Carolina, to aid
the Whig cause in North Carolina with a speech at Raleigh. He could not
come to Raleigh, he said
without being subjected to assaults from the newspaper press which at this
time I feel desirous of avoiding. You have a warm political canvass going on
in your State for public offices which to a great degree is associated with the
presidential election. The desperation of party would cause ascriptions to be
made to me of objects and purposes in connexion with my visit, which how-
ever unjustly, would be made to bear on the politics of the country.18
In this decision Tyler had the full support of Whig campaign
managers. Early in the canvass, during the spring of 1840, they made it
quite clear to him that he was to say nothing on any controversial
issue. This decision was prompted when a group of Pittsburgh Democrats
wrote Tyler and asked him point-blank whether he could, under any
conditions, sanction the incorporation of a third United States Bank.
Tyler honestly answered that he had always thought the Bank un-
constitutional and that he would not and could not sanction one with-
out a specific amendment to the Constitution permitting it. This reply
he sent to Wise in Washington for clearance. Wise showed it to hor-
rified Whig members of Congress, who quickly decided it would be "im-
politic to publish it." Their argument was, as Wise later explained it,
"that Mr. Tyler's opinions were already too well known, through his
speeches and votes, to need a response, and that it would be unwise to
array them directly against the opinions of many Whigs, perhaps a
majority of the party, who were in favor of a bank." By suppressing his
views during the campaign, the Whig managers were quite willing to
risk the later charge that Tyler "had practiced concealment and de-
ception." Unhappily, Tyler went along with this fraud, and from this
point forward in the campaign he adjusted himself to the Whig strategy
of remaining as silent and noncontroversial as possible.19
Had it not been for an exceptionally successful speaking tour
through the West by Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate Richard
137
M. Johnson, Tyler might have remained quietly and comfortably in
Williamsburg until the end of the campaign. As it was, Johnson's impact
in the West momentarily frightened the Whigs and caused them to dis-
patch Tyler to Columbus to address a rally of Ohio Democrats For
Harrison. The main purpose of the trip, as the Whig top command
visualized it, was to demonstrate in the West that Harrison and Tyler
were really one and united in their political viewpoints.
From Tyler's standpoint it was a harrowing and distasteful ex-
perience. Moving slowly through western Virginia in late August and
September, he entered Pennsylvania and Ohio in early October. Politi-
cally, the tour went well on the Virginia side of the Ohio River. He re-
mained carefully noncontroversial.
But after leaving the state he was increasingly harangued and
heckled by Democrats in his audiences. Finally he was badgered into
firm statements, in Pittsburgh and in Steubenville, that he favored the
nonprotectionist Compromise Tariff of 1833. At St. Clairsville, Ohio,
he was forced to grapple publicly with the inescapable bank question.
Rather than be sandbagged as he had been at Pittsburgh and Steuben-
ville on the tariff, he retreated to quoting the vapid language employed
by Harrison in an earlier speech at Dayton in which Tippecanoe had
declared ambiguously, like a squid squirting ink, that "There is not in
the Constitution any express grant of power for such a purpose, and it
never could be constitutional to exercise that power save in the event
the powers granted to Congress could not be carried out without resort-
ing to such an institution.53 In a two-hour speech at Columbus Tyler
managed to avoid the bank issue altogether.20
In a final, almost humorous, effort to force Tyler to commit him-
self on the issues of the campaign and to demonstrate the broad ideo-
logical gap between the Southern Whigs and the Northern Whigs? a
group of Virginia Democrats publicly directed ten skillfully loaded
questions to Tyler and demanded answers to them. Tyler was never
more cautious. He either pronounced the queries irrelevant to the
canvass or noted his general agreement with foggy Harrison statements
covering the same points. His response to the inevitable bank question
was typical Asked whether, as President, he would veto a bank bill,
Tyler referred the questioning Democrats to his congressional speeches
and votes on the Bank in 1819, 1832, and 1834. He then quoted
Harrison's elusive Dayton statement on the bank, said it was his own
view, and went on to explain the meaning of Harrison's language:
The Constitution confers on Congress, in express terms, "all powers which are
necessary and proper" to carry into effect the granted powers. Now, if "the
powers granted" could not be carried into effect without incorporating a
bank, then it becomes "necessary and proper," and, of course, expedient: a
conclusion which I presume no one would deny who desired to see the exist-
ence of the government preserved, and kept beneficially in operation. Whether
138
I would or would not exert the veto, it will be time enough for me to say
when I am either a candidate for, or an expectant of, the presidential office —
neither of which I expect ever to be.21
So confusing were the Whigs on the bank Issue In the campaign
of 1840 that when the question came up again in early 1841 they could
not decide whether it had been an election Issue or, If It had been,
just where the Whig Party had taken Its stand. In the North, Webster
had campaigned for a United States Bank. In the South, Henry A.
Wise had campaigned against it. Harrison and Tyler had tiptoed
around It, and Clay had tried to bury it with the observation that "I
have no thought of proposing a national bank, and no wish of seeing
It proposed by another, until it is demanded by a majority of the
people of the United States."22
If the Whigs were successful In confounding the issues, the Demo-
crats were utterly frustrated in their efforts to point up the fact that
Whiggery was more a confused state of mind than a political party. The
Democracy was constantly on the defensive throughout the 1840
campaign. Their renominatlon of Van Buren had been a foregone con-
clusion. The presence of Richard M. Johnson on the ticket helped very
little. Still consorting openly with his mulatto paramour, Johnson did
not stir many souls in the Southern Democracy. Unable to keep him
off the ticket. Southern Democrats did have the satisfaction of seeing
their Baltimore convention produce a pro-South platform which forth-
rightly opposed internal Improvements, the protective tariff, and the
Bank of the United States. It also endorsed states7 rights and denied
the right of the federal government to interfere in any way with slavery
in the states. The appeal of this platform in the South was badly diluted
by Johnson's candidacy, whereas in the North Van Buren's proclaimed
anti-abolitionism condemned him as a "Northern man with South-
ern principles.3' Throughout it all the depression and widespread un-
employment continued.23
The Democratic campaign never got off the ground. They laughed
at "General Mum," quoted General Harrison to Candidate Harrison,
and complained that the whole Whig Party was a fraud. It was, said
Thomas Ritchie in the Richmond Enquirer, a "motley multitude, like
the monstrous image of Nebuchadnezzar . . . made up of such hetero-
geneous and ill-sorted materials, that they have no great principles on
which they can agree." Attempts to transfer the mantle of Andrew
Jackson to the shoulders of Van Buren and Johnson were not success-
ful. The charge that Harrison was a tired old man, physically and
mentally unsuited for the Presidency, struck no fire. When it became
apparent that Harrison would commit himself on absolutely nothing,
the Democrats frantically stepped into the gutter, producing an Indian
squaw who claimed that Harrison had fathered her children. It was
139
difficult to set slime to music, and the Democrats at no time matched
the catchy Whig fight song which asked:
What has caused this great commotion, motion,
Our country through?
It is the ball a-rolling on,
For Tippecanoe and Tyler too, Tippecanoe and Tyler too
And with them we'll beat the little Van, Van, Van
Van is a used up man.24
When the ballots were counted. Van was a very used-up man. He
carried a mere seven of the twenty-six states — Virginia, South Carolina,
Arkansas, and Alabama in the South; Missouri and Illinois in the
West; and New Hampshire in the North. In popular votes, however, he
trailed Harrison by only 150,000 of the 2,400,000 votes cast. He polled
400,000 more votes in defeat than he had polled in victory in 1836.
Thanks in part to a campaign in which both sides appealed to the
lowest common denominator, one which was carried out with all the
color and buffoonery of Mardi Gras, the popular vote was 54 per
cent higher than it had been in 1836. The key to Whig victory lay
in entertaining and bringing out to the polls hundreds of thousands of
new voters; Whig tacticians called them the ''hurrah boys." In "sum,
they expropriated the electoral techniques developed by the Jacksonian
Democracy, embellished and polished them, and hurled them back at
Van Buren with all the speed and deception of a fast-breaking curve
ball. The effectiveness of this strategy was demonstrated with particular
clarity in the South, where the Whigs cut deeply into the rural white-
farmer vote which had been largely Jacksonian since 1828. In the West
the Whigs were able to replace the frontier image of Old Hickory with,
that of Old Tippecanoe. In fact, Old Tippecanoe outhickoried Old
Hickory. The Whig victory was therefore produced by holding the
North while making deep inroads into the Jacksonian West and South,
Ironically, Harrison and Tyler, both born in Charles City County, Vir-
ginia, failed to carry their native state. Van Buren also lost his native
New York.25
Alexander Gardiner, who labored for the Whig cause in Suffolk
County during the campaign, was disturbed that the Whig margin of
iijOoo was not larger in New York. He ascribed this to the fact that
Governor William H. Seward had meddled and muddled in the religious
issue, recommending "that the Catholics be allowed a portion of the
School fund," and by "hiring a pew in a Catholic church." Happy
though he was with the Whig victory, Alexander, like most politically
literate Whigs, saw serious storms ahead for the party — specifically,
a struggle between Clay and Webster for the succession and a new fight
over the Bank. "General H. has declared that he considers the old
U,S. bank in some of its features repugnant to the Constitution," he
140
wrote Ms father In Europe, "and that he will not favor another national
bank institution unless it is very plainly demanded by the will of the
people. How far he will consider his new election a demand of that
nature is of course problematical. It seems as though some new scheme
must be brought forward " 26
John Tyler also worried about the Whig future. He had predicted
a Whig victory of 10,000 in Virginia and was much embarrassed when
the state fell to the Democracy. He correctly blamed the defeat of
the party in the Old Dominion on inadequate support from Rives'
Conservative Democrats and on the inability of the Tidewater to
balance Van Buren 's popularity in the western counties. It particularly
chagrined him that Virginia had "wheeled out of line'7 and joined New
Hampshire in sustaining Van Buren rather than following Southern
brethren like Maryland, North Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, Ten-
nessee, and Louisiana into the Harrison-Tyler fold. Disturbing also to
Virginia Whigs was Clay's postelection remark in December that "it is
not to be lamented that old Virginia has gone for Mr, Van Buren,
for we will not now be embarrassed by her peculiar opinions! " But most
worrisome to Tyler was the unstable and eclectic nature of the Whig
party on the eve of its taking power. Which of its several factions would
dominate the new administration? He explained his fears to Henry
A. Wise:
There are so many jarring views to reconcile and harmonize, that the work is
one of immense difficulty, and in your ear let me whisper what you already
know, that the branch of the Whig party called the Nationals is composed of
difficult materials to manage — they are too excessive in their notions, I mean
many of them, and are accustomed to look upon a course of honest com-
promise as a concession of something which they call principle, but which
dissected is nothing more than mistaken conviction I agree with you fully
in the importance you attach to General Harrison's first step. It is one, how-
ever, of great difficulty. I hope he may meet and overcome it. His language
should be firm and decisive to one and all. There should be no caballing, no
intriguing in his Cabinet. Every eye should be kept fixed upon the official duty
assigned, and never once lifted up to gaze at the succession.27
Tyler realized at the outset that the Whig Party might well be
dominated by its Northern wing. He was correct in seeing the difficulty
the states' rights faction would have preventing excesses on the part of
the "Nationals." But he was wholly unrealistic in his hope that Harrison
would prove strong enough to hold the factional alliance together and
prevent the explosion that was implicit in the Whig mixture. Harrison
had made it quite clear in 1836, and again in 1840, that he did not
intend to be a strong Executive — that so far as he was concerned the
Congress should and could run the country. The question, then, was
how long could the lingering hatred of Andrew Jackson and the demo-
cratic principles he represented, principles actually congenial to a
141
majority of the voters, serve as a cement for a coalition of ambitious
leaders , competitive factions, and contradictory ideas? And how would
this coalition, now that it had power, exercise that power evenly and
responsibly without the benefit of competent or powerful leadership?
The sudden death of Old Tip in April 1841 answered these questions
by bringing swiftly to the surface the political, personal, and sectional
chaos that was Whiggery. Nor when the explosion came could it be
denied that John Tyler had helped fashion the unstable anti- Jackson
compound and fasten it on the country. It was Tyler, not Harrison,
who would be blown up in the detonation.
These considerations seemed remote as Harrison prepared to take
office. That he was popular with the common people, if not with Whig
politicians who covetously eyed the succession, cannot be denied. When
he arrived in the capital on February 9, 1841 (his sixty-eighth birth-
day), to commence the ticklish task of selecting a Cabinet, so large
a throng turned out to greet him that the pickpockets on Pennsylvania
Avenue had a field day. They, perhaps, were the only group to benefit
economically from the short-lived Harrison administration.28
The state of Harrison's health had been much commented upon
during the campaign by friend and foe alike. Clay saw the President-
elect in Kentucky shortly after the election and remarked that the
aging Indian fighter looked "somewhat shattered." Littleton W. Taze-
well had predicted to Tyler before the canvass that were Harrison
elected he would not have the stamina to live out his term of office.
And Alexander Gardiner agreed with John Quincy Adams' view that
"no man of the General's age, without a constitution of most extraor-
dinary vigor, could survive so great a change of habits, and the cares,
burdens and anxiety of the office." The consensus within the Tyler
circle seemed to be that William Henry Harrison could not survive
the Battle of Washington. Indeed, when the General took leave of his
neighbors in Cincinnati to go to the capital he had some of the same
forebodings.29
Whatever stamina the old man had in reserve was quickly used
up in the raging menagerie that then characterized the process of ap-
pointment to federal office. Whig office-seekers, sniffing the fragrant
patronage trough for the first time, pressed in upon the General like a
wave of screeching Shawnees. Meanwhile, Henry Clay arrived from
Kentucky, confident that he would be the real power behind a fumbling
throne. So arrogantly did he urge the appointment of John M. Clayton
for the Treasury post that an exasperated Harrison finally exploded,
"Mr. Clay, you forget that I am President!" Clay had forgotten, and
so had most of the imperious Whig office-seekers. They surrounded
Harrison in such numbers and pressed their demands that holdover
Democrats be purged instantly from office with such shrill insistence
142
that the placid General was stunned. "So help me God/' he finally
shouted to a group of them, "I will resign my office before I can be
guilty of such iniquity.'7 On two occasions he consulted Tyler about re-
moval of incumbent Democrats from minor posts. Tyler rendered
judgments from Williamsburg that enabled the harassed Harrison to
outflank a few of his Whig tormentors with the remark: "Mr. Tyler
says they ought not to be removed, and I will not remove them."
Harrison wished the office-seekers would go away and leave him alone.
He wanted to stir up no trouble with purge and patronage controversies.
He hoped to be the respected head of a quiet, peaceful, orderly ad-
ministration. Nothing more. As he expressed his political pacifism to
Senator Ben ton, "I beg you not to be harpooning me in the Senate; if
you dislike anything in my Administration, put it into Clay or Webster,
but don't harpoon me." 30
Out of all the confusion in the White House a Cabinet finally
emerged. As a series of compromises looking toward all factions in
the WTiig constellation, it fully satisfied no one. Offered the State De-
partment, Clay turned it down to remain in and control the Senate.
Webster, who received State, was anathema to Southern Whigs. "He is
a Federalist of the worst die, a blackguard and vulgar debauchee/' cried
Governor Thomas W. Gilmer of Virginia. The appointment of North
Carolina Whig George E. Badger to the Navy Department quieted
some of the Whig grumbling in the South. Whig abolitionists in the
North were thrown a bone in the appointment of Francis Granger of
New York to the office of Postmaster General. Former Jacksonians who
had defected to the WThigs in 1840 were rewarded with the appointment
to War of John Bell of Tennessee. Thomas Ewing of Ohio was given
Treasury, partly to head off the capture of that post by Clay's candi-
date, John M. Clayton of Delaware, who was known to be a more
belligerent Bank man than Ewing. To pacify the Clay contingent, John
J. Crittenden of Kentucky was made Attorney-General. This blocked
the aspirations of former Kentucky governor Charles A. Wickliffe, whose
appointment to the Justice Department would have been a direct slap at
Clay. And so it went. The Harrison Cabinet was a political polyglot.31
In all this patronage manipulation Tyler played no role. Har-
rison neither consulted the Vice-President-elect on Cabinet appoint-
ments nor was he offered any suggestions on the subject by Tyler. So
far as appointments to key federal offices were concerned, it was Tip-
pecanoe, not Tyler too. Tyler hoped only that the Harrison Cabinet
"be cast of the proper material/3 and that within it "the voice of faction
will be entirely silenced, [and] . . . the question of the succession . . .
be shunned." Contrary to Tyler's hope, faction had been rewarded, not
silenced; and with the aging Harrison in the White House the vital
question of the succession loomed large indeed. Nevertheless, Tyler
offered no criticism of the General's patchwork Cabinet. He had had no
143
direct contact with the President-elect during the campaign, and when
Harrison visited Richmond briefly in late February 1841 the two men
had spoken nothing of politics. So far as minor patronage posts were
concerned, the Vice-President-elect spoke only when spoken to. He
pushed no one upon Harrison. Thus Tyler lingered in Virginia after the
election, casually making his arrangements to move to a Washington
hotel in time for the inauguration. Had William Henry Harrison lived^
John Tyler would undoubtedly have been as obscure as any Vice-
President in American history. As it was, he became the first American
elected to that lightly regarded post who succeeded to the President's
Mansion.32
On a cold, brisk Inauguration Day some fifty thousand excited,
cheering citizens jammed the frozen streets as the venerable General
rode "Old Whitey" up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol. Hat in hand,
without overcoat or gloves, the Old Hero waved and bowed to the crowd.
He was in fine spirits, "as tickled with the Presidency as a young woman
with a new bonnet." As the attention of the throng focused on the Gen-
eral's triumphal progress to Capitol Hill, John Tyler made his unnoticed
way quietly from Brown's Hotel to the Senate chamber. There, shortly
after the noon hour on March 4, 1841, he was sworn in as Vice-President
of the United States. His speech lasted barely five minutes. It was a
standard Tyler appeal for states' rights. Uninspired and largely unheard,
it was not one of the articulate Virginian's better performances. It is
just as well he put no more effort into it than he did, for while he spoke
Harrison circulated noisily through the chamber exchanging greetings
with well-wishers. No one was paying any attention to John Tyler. He
was like the clergyman at a fashionable wedding. When he finished his
brief remarks the assemblage moved outdoors into the chilled air. There,
on a hastily constructed frame platform, William Henry Harrison, ninth
President of the United States, delivered the worst inaugural address in
American history to the assembled throng.33
Reduced to its thin essentials, Harrison's rambling, two-hour speech
promised the nation four years of government by Congress. Not only did
the President renounce a second term as a step toward checking the
growth and abuse of Executive power, but he also specifically promised
no Executive interference in the business of Congress during his term of
office. The currency question, he felt, was strictly the business of Con-
gress. Nor would the Chief Executive interfere in any way in the elec-
toral process. On and on he maundered, abdicating the power of his
throne at the moment of his coronation. Nowhere did he suggest what
might be done about the depressed state of the economy. This too was
up to Congress. Bored politicians left their seats and roamed around the
platform, stamping their feet to restore circulation- When the Old War-
rior finally finished, when the last windblown cliche was wafted merci-
fully heavenward, he returned to the White House, took to his bed for
144
half an hour, and had Ms forehead and temples rubbed with alcohol. He
was very tired. Meanwhile, John Tyler returned to Brown's Hotel,
gathered together his belongings, and slipped unobtrusively out of
Washington and back to Wllliamsburg.34
At the instant he took power Harrison was already in trouble, a
trouble centering on Henry Clay's vaunted ambition to run the adminis-
tration from behind the scenes. Specifically, Clay had decided that it
would be he who would appoint the Collector of the Port of New York,
not Harrison or anyone else. Clay's candidate for the lush patronage post
was Robert C. Wetmore of New York. Webster had a candidate In mind
for the spot too, Edward Curtis. Curtis, however, had worked for Win-
field Scott at the Harrisburg convention and he was distinctly persona
non grata in the Clay camp. Unfortunately for Clay and Wetmore, Ab-
bott Lawrence of Massachusetts also supported Curtis. The fact that the
powerful cotton-mill capitalist had personally lent the impoverished Har-
rison $5000 shortly after the Inauguration somewhat strengthened his
influence at the White House. Not surprisingly, therefore, Edward Curtis
got the lucrative post. But not before Clay's continued insistence on
Wetmore produced a Harrison explosion: "The federal portion of the
Whig party are making desperate efforts to seize the reins of govern-
ment," he charged. "They are urging the most unmerciful proscription,
and if they continue to do so much longer, they will drive me mad!77 ^
Clay struck back at the President with a patronizing note to the
Wliite House, dated March 13, 1841, in which he insisted that Harrison
call a special session of Congress to deal with the nation's problems.
Without such a session there was no good reason for kingmaker Clay to
remain longer in the capital. Again Harrison erupted: "You use the
privilege of a friend to lecture me and I take the same liberty with you/'
he wrote the Kentucklan, "You are too impetuous . . . there are others
whom I must consult and in many cases to determine adversely to your
decision." 36
Now it was Clay's turn to be outraged. A friend found him pacing
the floor of his rooms. Harrison's note was crumpled in his hands.
"And it has come to this!" he shouted. "I have not one [office] to give,
nor influence enough to procure the appointment of a friend to the most
humble position! " Taking pen in hand he composed another unfortunate
letter to Harrison denying that he was attempting to dictate to the
administration. "I do not wish to trouble you with answering this note,"
he snarled in conclusion. With that parting shot Clay left town for Ken-
tucky. Only when he was safely en route home did Harrison finally de-
cide to call a special session of Congress to meet May 31. Fortunately
for the President he was seven weeks in his grave when Congress con-
vened. It was one of the stormiest and most disorderly in the legislative
annals of the nation.31
Overwhelmed by office-seekers, fatigued by social activities, dis-
I4S
couraged by Ms break with Clay, the OH Hero steadily lost strength
during Ms first weeks in office. On March 27 during his usual early morn-
ing stroll he was caught in a rain shower. By evening he was sick and a
physician was called in. Within a day the malady was diagnosed as
pneumonia. More doctors were called in. The diagnosis was cautiously
changed to "bilious pleurisy/7 a catch-all designation covering every
respiratory ailment from lung cancer to bronchitis. Various remedies
were tried. The President was bled, blistered, cupped, leeched, massaged,
poked, and otherwise battered. At 12:30 A.M. on April 4, precisely one
month after taking office, William Henry Harrison died. What the armies
of Tecumseh and the Prophet had failed to accomplish in a dozen cam-
paigns the medical profession had managed in one short week. No more
accurate a parting judgment was rendered on Old Tippecanoe than
Henry A. Wise's prescient remark that had poor Harrison lived until the
Congress met he would have been "devoured by the divided pack of Ms
own dogs." 3S
146
HIS ACCIDENCY:
THE DISADVANTAGES OF CONSCIENCE
Go you now then, Mr. Clay, to your end of the
avenue where stands the Capitol, and there perform
your duty to the country as you shall think proper.
So help me God I shall do mine at this end of it as
I shall think proper.
JOHN TYLER, 1841
As Henry Wise had correctly predicted, the cannibalistic Whig feast was
soon to come, but fate willed that the victim be John Tyler, at fifty-one
the youngest man to reach the White House in the brief history of the
Republic. Service in the Virginia House and Senate, in the House and
Senate of the United States, and in the Governor's Mansion in Richmond
had given him training in the art and science of government unmatched
by any other American President before or since. That he became the
missionary in Henry Clay's kettle can be traced almost exclusively to an
odd quirk in his character: Faced with a choice between political popu-
larity and the principles in which he sincerely believed, he chose the
principles. It matters little that those principles would become quaint
anachronisms in American history; it matters a great deal that he elected
to stand firmly for his beliefs when it was clear to him that his posture
would likely lead him down the road to political suicide and historical
obscurity. With John Tyler it was a question of conscience — and a
touch of stubbornness.
During the week of Harrison's illness no word was sent Tyler ap-
praising him of the gravity of the situation in the capital. Not until
Harrison had actually expired was Fletcher Webster, Chief Clerk of the
State Department and son of the Secretary of State, dispatched hastily
to Williamsburg to inform Tyler that by act of God he had become
147
President of the United States. At sunrise on the morning of April 5,
1841, young Webster reached Williamsburg after an all-night journey 3
and banged impatiently on the door of the Tyler home. A sleepy Vice-
President descended the stairs to find out what the commotion was
about. So it was that John Tyler, clad in nightshirt and cap (not playing
marbles), learned that he had become the tenth President of the United
States and the first Vice-President to reach the White House.
Out of such tense situations mighty myths grow. One has pictured
Tyler bursting into tears on hearing the news, so great was his affection
for the fallen President. Actually, Tyler scarcely knew Old Tippecanoe;
what little he did know he did not much like. Another story has Tyler
tarrying a full day in Williamsburg attempting to borrow several hun-
dred dollars from a friend to finance his journey to Washington. He was
always short of cash, but did not worry about it on this occasion; Tyler
did what any sensible man would have done in the circumstances. He
awoke the household, conveyed the news to one and all, ate his breakfast,
and then convened a family conference. At this conference it was de-
termined that Tyler should proceed immediately to Washington and that
Robert and Priscilla should follow northward within the week. Time per-
mitted no immediate decision on whether the partially paralyzed Letitia
should go to Washington or not. At 7 A.M., barely two hours after receiv-
ing notification of General Harrison's death, Tyler left Williamsburg for
the capital. Twenty-one hours later, at 4 o'clock on the morning of April
6, he reached Washington, having covered the two hundred thirty miles
by boat and horseback in near record time,1
The new President found the capital swirling in confusion and tur-
moil Since no Chief Executive had ever died in office before, the con-
stitutional situation was extremely fluid. Whatever Tyler elected to do in
the crisis would establish many important historical precedents. Later
Vice-Presidents who found themselves in the same unstrung situation —
Fillmore, Johnson, Arthur, Theodore Roosevelt, Coolidge, and Truman
— would be indebted to John Tyler for his swift and sure handling of
the basic constitutional question involved.
The Constitution provides that "in case of the removal of the
President from office, or of Ms death, resignation, or inability to dis-
charge the powers and duties of the said office, the same shall devolve
on the Vice President. . . ." Like so many other phrases in that won-
drously exact and inexact document, the words the same could be
interpreted to refer to the office itself or, more narrowly, solely to the
duties of the office. John Tyler, one of the nation's most prominent strict
constructionists, chose the broader of the two possible interpretations.
He assumed that the office itself had devolved upon him from the mo-
ment he arrived in Washington, and from the beginning he claimed all
the rights and privileges of the Presidency,
This was more than the resolution of a nagging semantic problem.
148
It defined for Tyler (and for all future Vice-Presidents) the exact status
of a Vice-President in the event of an elected President's death. Tyler
even insisted that there was no need for Mm to take a new oath of office,
arguing that Ms oath as Vice-President covered the new situation legally
and constitutionally. Nevertheless, he was persuaded to take another
oath to forestall any public doubts on the question. At noon on April 6,
in Brown's Hotel, Chief Justice William Cranch of the United States
Circuit Court of the District of Columbia, swore Tyler In. Nonetheless,
there were still those who argued that John Tyler was only the "Acting
President/' or the "Vice-President-Acting President," or, after he left
the office in 1845, ^e "Ex- Vice-President." Tyler paid no attention to
these degrading designations (he returned mail so addressed unopened)
and they all quickly dropped from usage.2
The political situation in Washington on April 6 was equally fluid.
At a lengthy Cabinet meeting that morning and afternoon, devoted
cMefly to the multitudinous details of Harrison's funeral (scheduled for
the following day) , Tyler made a decision he lived to regret. He decided
to retain Harrison's Cabinet intact. His motive was to avoid adding fur-
ther to the confusion that already prevailed in the novel transition of
power from one administration to another. His decision also had the
immediate advantage of holding together the various factions of the
Whig party until the chaos engendered by Harrison's death could be
resolved. Yet when Webster informed the President that Harrison's
practice was to have all policy decisions determined by a majority vote
in the Cabinet, Tyler quickly rejected continuance of the procedure. "I
am the President, and I shall be held responsible for my administration,"
he told the Cabinet bluntly. "I shall be pleased to avail myself of your
counsel and advice. But I can never consent to being dictated to as to
what I shall or shall not do When you think otherwise, your resig-
nations will be accepted." In spite of Ms declaration of independence to
them, Tyler's retention of the Harrison group was an error in that he
retained in his official family a political cancer that had already com-
menced gnawing on the vitals of the Old Hero and would soon turn on
the new President. "He has not a sincere friend in [the Cabinet]," Abel
P, Upshur worried.3
Tyler knew perfectly well that he had reaped the Whig whirlwind.
He was, in Ms own words, "surrounded by Clay-men, Webster-men,
anti-Masons, original Harrisonians, Old Whigs and new Whigs — each
jealous of the others, and all struggling for the offices." Under the cir-
cumstances he felt he had no choice but to proceed cautiously in an
attempt to "work in good earnest to reconcile . . . the angry state of the
factions towards each other." As he expressed Ms problem to Senator
William C. Rives on April 9:
I am under Providence made the instrument of a new test which is for the
first time to be applied to our institutions. The experiment is to he made at
149
the moment when the country Is agitated by conflicting views of public
policy,, and when the spirit of faction is most likely to exist. Under these
circumstances, the devolvement upon me of this high office is peculiarly em-
barrassing. In the administration of the government, I shall act upon the
principles which I have all along espoused . . . derived from the teachings of
Jefferson and Madison ... my reliance will be placed on the virtue and in-
telligence of the people.
Considering the political climate of 1841 ? the "virtue and intelligence of
the people" was a weak reed, as Tyler would discover to his sorrow.4
At Harrison's funeral in the East Room of the White House on
April 7 Tyler was observed to be "visibly affected." He was also con-
fused as to how he might best proceed with Ms new duties. Indeed, he
was so upset by the stark suddenness of his new situation that he toyed
briefly with the idea that national political harmony might best be as-
sured if he, like Harrison, utilized his inaugural address to announce that
he would not be a candidate for re-election in 1844. But as Ms friend and
confidant, Duff Green, correctly pointed out, such a statement "would
be taken as a plea of weakness" and would only be the "signal for the
organization of parties in reference to the next election." Thanks to
Green's intervention, no such self-denying remark appeared in the final
draft of the speech.5
Tyler's hastily written inaugural address of April 9 was both an
olive branch to the various Whig factions and a cautious trial balloon
to test the general political atmosphere. Couched in guarded language,
Tyler agreed that the depressed state of the economy demanded some
change in the fiscal policies of the government. He suggested no specific
changes, only that any approach to the problem be entirely "constitu-
tional."
As his thoughts on the matter took substance and form he decided
to adopt a defensive posture with reference to any fiscal changes. "Com-
ing so recently into power," he wrote Judge Nathaniel B. Tucker on
April 25, "and having no benefit of previous consultation with Gen.
Harrison as to the extra-session, the country will not expect at my hands
any matured measure, and my present intention is to devolve the whole
subject on Congress, with a reservation of my constitutional powers to
veto should the same be necessary in my view of the subject." In a
candid though friendly letter to Clay a few days later, he agreed that
Van Buren's Independent Treasury should be repealed. This did not sug-
gest to him, however, that the old Bank of the United States should
necessarily be re-established in its stead. "As to the Bank, I design to be
perfectly frank with you," he told the Whig leader; "I would not have it
urged prematurely." If Clay insisted on pushing ahead with a new
Bank project, Tyler hoped that he would
consider whether you cannot so frame a Bank as to avoid all constitutional
objections — which of itself would attach to it a vast host of our own party to
be found all over the Union I have no intention to submit anything to
Congress on this subject to be acted on, but shall leave it to its own action,
and In the end shall resolve my doubt by the character of the measure
proposed, should any be entertained by me.
That Henry Clay could be trusted to devise a Bank plan which avoided
"all constitutional objections" was more than Tyler had a right to
expect. The Great Compromiser was not that great and he was in no
mood for compromise. Nor was he blind. He saw at once that Tyler was
willing to surrender much of his Executive power to Congress on the
crucial financial question, retaining only the negative power of a veto.6
In sum, Tyler's excessive caution In the opening weeks of Ms ad-
ministration, his unwillingness to agitate the factional situation in an
unprecedented transition of power added up to the creation of a political
vacuum Into which the ambitious Clay walked boldly. The Kentuckian
was already convinced that "VIce-President77 " Tyler's administration
would be little more than a "regency," and that serious objection to the
constitutionality of a national bank was "confined to Virginia." To him
the accidental President was but a "flash in the pan/' to be neither
feared nor followed.
Nor was Clay disabused of this denigrating opinion when Tyler sent
a set of vaguely worded fiscal recommendations to the special session at
the end of May urging the Congress to repeal the Independent Treasury
and "devise a plan" for a new financial system themselves. Having no
clear program of his own to suggest, his function in the matter would be
limited, he said, to "rejecting any measure which may in my view of It
conflict with the Constitution or otherwise jeopardize the prosperity of
the country — a power which I could not part with even If I would "
While he did favor what he termed a "suitable fiscal agent capable of
adding increased facilities In the collection and disbursement of the
public revenues," he hoped that "the Southern members" of Congress
would be able to "mature a system void of offense to the Constitution."
Having thus opened Pandora's box, Tyler settled back to see what Clay
and Congress might devise. Within a few weeks he knew. Thanks to the
parliamentary skill of Clay, the specter of the old Bank of the United
States rose from its grave, took on flesh, and ascended to the Presidential
desk.7
In considering the Bank crisis of 1841 which led to Tyler's ex-
pulsion from the Whig Party, the resignation of his Cabinet, and the
virtual collapse of his administration, it is well to remember that the
economics of the Bank issue was always a secondary consideration. The
issue was essentially political, and it turned fundamentally on Clay's
attempt to seize control of the Whig leadership and drive Tyler back
into the political exile from which he had unexpectedly re-emerged in
1839. In this sense, the Bank crisis was a test of strength, prestige, and
personality between two strong and willful men, each loath to lose
"face" in the struggle as It developed and waxed hotter. No convincing
evidence lias ever been offered to show that the depressed state of the
national economy in 1841 demanded a national bank or any variation of
one. Xor can it be demonstrated that the general economic recovery of
1844 was related to the fact that there was no Bank. Certainly there
was no grass-roots expression either for or against the institution. It
had not been a clear-cut issue in the campaign of 1840. The people
seemed to understand neither the technical questions involved nor the
complex mechanics of the various Bank proposals that were brought
forward. The Bank crisis was manufactured solely for political purposes
by Henry Clay. And, although his audacity might be traced to the loose
grip with which Tyler picked up the Presidential reins, the fact remains
that the crisis of 1841 was at bottom a personal and factional political
battle In which Clay had the votes and Tyler the vetoes. Tyler's moral
position would have been stronger, and more sympathy might have been
his to command, had he seen fit to reaffirm his ancient hostility to the
Bank in clear and definite terms during the 1840 campaign. Instead, he
permitted the Whig managers to gag him on the question, and in so
succumbing to their vote-greedy importunities he compromised himself
on the whole issue. When the bitter game with Clay was over, the end
result was a scoreless tie from which the nation had gained little but
new sectional animosities. Less than two years after the celebrated Bank
upheaval of 1841 Daniel Webster could ask of it: "Who cares anything
now about the bank bills which were vetoed in I84I?3' Nobody cared.8
Tyler's personal feelings for Clay in May 1841 were not hostile. As
Secretary Ewing reported to the Sage of Ashland at the outset of the
crisis, "No man can be better disposed [toward you] than the President.
... He speaks of you with the utmost kindness and you may rely upon it
his friendship is strong and unabated. " This was not the viewpoint of the
"Virginia Clique/' a small coterie of extreme states' rights men from the
Old Dominion who were soon to dominate the inner councils of the
administration. They would also become key figures in what would
become the President's "Corporal's Guard" in the Congress. Such Vir-
ginians as Thomas W. Gihner, Abel P. Upshur, and Henry A. Wise had
little but contempt and hatred for Clay, and they were willing to force
the impending Clay-Tyler struggle to a bitter showdown in order to
destroy the Whig sectional coalition within which they felt Southern
constitutional principles were being steadily eroded. "I shall see Tyler
and urge him to tread the deck like a man," promised Gilmer. "Let the
factions devour each other," added Wise, "and let the Republicanism
left among us thrive by the contest!" 9
Clay's power position was the superior one as he girded for contest
with Tyler. The Whig majority in the Senate was 29 to 22; in the House
it was a comfortable 122 to 103. While Clay controlled the bulk of the
Whig vote in the lower chamber, there were in the Senate four or five
152
states' rights Whigs to whom he could not dictate. He was confident,
however, that he could balance the defections of this group by garnering
a few Democratic votes from the North and the West. As the special
session opened, the Kentucklan was confident and cocky, One observer
reported that he was "much more Imperious and arrogant with his
friends than I have ever known him and that you know Is saying a great
deal.5' So overbearing did the free-wheeling Clay become during his
conflict with Tyler that Ms friends became alarmed. "He must hereafter
remain a little quiet and hold Ms jaw" said R. P. Letcher. "In fact, he
must be caged — that's the point, cage him!" Unfortunately, Clay's ar-
rogant manner was not containable. On the contrary, he was convinced
that he had the power and skill to unify the great bulk of the Whig
Party on a platform of national bank and protective tariff. With this
organic and ideological unification the creaky Whig vehicle would be-
come stable enough, he felt, to carry Mm into the White House In i844.10t
The Bank feature of Clay's program was unacceptable to the Presi-
dent. In March 1841 Tyler had emerged from the fog of the 1840 cam-
paign to reiterate Ms Bank views to prominent WMgs. Conversations
with them took place in his room in Brown's Hotel when he was briefly
in the capital for the Harrison inauguration. During the course of these
informal exchanges he indicated a willingness as Vice-President to support
the WMte plan for a District Bank. First suggested by Hugh L. White
in 1836, this plan was unquestionably constitutional in that it proposed
a bank incorporated by Congress in the District of Columbia under that
provision of the Constitution empowering Congress to legislate for the
District. Such a bank, thought Tyler, might even take on a pseudo-
national character by establishing branches in the several states, but only
within those states whose legislatures specifically assented to the
presence of the branches. The Irreducible-minimum criterion, then, was
the voluntary nature of the branching process. Beyond this compromise,
Tyler could not and would not go. As he told Wise a few days after
Harrison's death, he was just "too old in his opinions to change them"
more radically than this.11
Not until Senator Clay intimated an interest in reviving the old
Bank of the United States did Tyler In mid- June finally set Mmself to
the "task of devising some plan which would lead to conciliation and
harmony/7 What he devised to fill the vacuum in the administration into
wMch Clay was moving was the WMte plan for a District Bank with
power to branch in states requesting branches. Tactically speaking, Tyler
might well have blanketed Clay's fire with such a scheme two months
earlier Instead of waiting for the Kentuckian to seize the initiative in the
matter. Had the District Bank plan been vigorously sponsored by the
CMef Executive In the first weeks of Ms administration its probable
adoption would have calmed tMngs considerably in the capital. Its
existence would have had no more deleterious effect on the national econ-
153
omy than a new Bank of the United States or no Bank at all. And in
addition to its essential harmlessness it had the advantage of being
politically and constitutionally acceptable to Southern Whigs. But to
Henry Clay, the Great Compromiser now threatened with compromise,
Tyler's District Bank proposal was a red flag. In a stormy interview in
the President's office, Clay made it brutally clear to the Chief Executive
that the Whigs could not accept a Bank plan so hedged with states'
rights qualifications. Tyler's patience snapped: "Go you now, then, Mr.
Clay, to your end of the avenue, where stands the Capitol, and there
perform your duty to the country as you shall think proper. So help me
God, I shall do mine at this end of it as I shall think proper." 12
With the support and encouragement of his entire Cabinet, Tyler
submitted his Bank plan to the Congress. Promptly taken up in the
Senate by a select committee, chaired by Clay, the administration's
District Bank bill was quickly mangled beyond recognition. The chief
feature of the Clay committee's counterproposal, dated June 21, was
that the assent of individual states not be required preceding the
branching process. The District Bank could establish its branches where
and when it wished. As Alexander Gardiner accurately evaluated Clay's
handiwork, it was "synonymous with National Bank." 13
Tyler could not accept the involuntary branching feature of Clay's
revised District Bank concept. He knew too that banking legislation as
such was no longer the real issue anyway. "I am placed upon trial," he
wrote John Rutherfoord in Richmond on June 23. "Those who have
all along opposed me will still call out for further trials, and thus leave
me impotent and powerless Remember always that the power
claimed by Mr. Clay and others is a power to create a corporation to
operate per se over the Union. This from the first has been the contest."
Tyler remained convinced that to depart from the White plan or "to
propose a scheme on my own would be the height of folly since I have
no party to sustain it on independent principles." He therefore looked
to his Cabinet to produce a new plan that would be constitutional.14
As Tyler began to search for an entirely different solution to the
Bank problem, Clay discovered that he lacked two votes in the Senate
to enact the legislation incorporating his involuntary branching con-
cept. To secure these votes he offered on July 27 a somewhat softer
version of the District scheme based on a compromise suggested by
Whig Representative John M. Botts of Richmond. Endorsed by a
Whig congressional caucus, the Botts compromise called for a District
Bank which could establish its branches only with the assent of the
individual states. But such assent would be presumed automatically
given unless the legislature of each state, during its first session follow-
ing the passage of the bill, specifically expressed opposition to having a
District Bank branch within its borders. Once they were established,
however, the branches could be expelled by the states only with the
154
consent of Congress. On July 28 the Senate passed the bill 26 to 23 and
sent It to the House. The lower chamber approved the measure on
August 6 by 131 to 100.
The Bolts compromise went far toward meeting Tyler's states*
rights objections; hindsight suggests that he should have accepted and
signed the measure then and there and been rid of the problem. The
Cabinet unanimously urged this course upon him. But in a private con-
versation with Botts before final Senate action on the bill, Tyler char-
acterized the compromise feature of the legislation as "a contemptible
subterfuge behind which he would not skulk," This, it now seems clear,
was a hasty and not carefully considered evaluation of the Botts pro-
posal. As it stood the measure was certainly no great threat to states1
rights. States objecting to the establishment of District Bank branches
could prevent such establishment without undue difficulty or inconven-
ience.15
Tyler felt the issue had now become solely a political reconnais-
sance by the Whigs and he was adamant. No longer was it a question of
acceptable fiscal legislation; it was now a personal power struggle with
Henry Clay. "My back is to the wall," he wrote Judge Tucker on July
28; "and . . .while I shall deplore the assaults, I shall, if practicable,
beat back the assailants." Nor would the President entertain pleas from
Ms friends to compromise on the Bank question so that there would
not remain "a ripple to disturb its smooth current during your term of
service.'5 16
The capital was rife with speculation as to whether or not Tyler
would veto the Botts-Clay version of the District Bank bill. The New
York Herald reported: "Politicians discuss it morning, noon and night —
in the Avenue, in the House, over their lunch . . . their coffee, their wine.
... It is a favorite topic with the hackney coachmen." Representative
Thomas W. Gilmer, charter member of the Virginia Clique, was con-
vinced that "The President will veto the Bank bill" and that "a dreadful
tornado will blow for a time." He was eager to see the Whig Party dis-
integrate on the issue. Then there could be a general reorganization of
its disparate factions along states' rights lines. On August 12 Robert
Tyler told a New York congressman in the lobby of the House that "to
suppose that my father can be gulled by such a humbug compromise as
the bill contains is to suppose that he is an ass." The President's
brother-in-law, Judge John B. Christian, had "no doubt he will veto it."
On the other hand, Whig Representative A. H. H. Stuart of Virginia
saw the President the evening before the veto message was submitted
and received from Tyler the impression that a "fair ground of compro-
mise might yet be agreed upon." He thought it a "rather bad omen,"
however, to discover the President then in conference with a "distin-
guished Democratic senator." Tyler himself said only that he would go
to church on Sunday, August 15, and "pray earnestly and devoutly to
ISS
be enlightened as to Ms duty." (On that same day he did sign the bill
repealing Van Buren's Independent Treasury, a repeal dear to Whig
hearts). He knew the consequences of a veto. As John M. Botts wrote
Mm on August 10, "if you can reconcile this bill to yourself, all is sun-
shine and calm: your administration will be met with the warm, hearty,
zealous support of the whole Whig party, and when you retire from the
great theater of National politics,, it will be with the thanks, and plaudits,
and approbation of your countrymen." 17
The announcement of the veto on August 16 triggered a political
explosion of massive proportions. While the message was being read
in the Senate, disorder broke out in the gallery. Democratic Senator
Benton of Missouri, seldom a Tyler ally, leaped to his feet demanding
that the Sergeant-at-Arms "arrest the Bank ruffians for insulting the
President of the United States." In Democratic circles there was jubila-
tion. A group of Democratic senators, among them Benton, Buchanan,
and Calhoun, called at the White House on the evening of the sixteenth
to congratulate Tyler on his "patriotic and courageous" action. A brandy
bottle appeared and the congratulations "gradually degenerated into
convivial hilarity." Less hilarious was the appearance later that evening
of a drunken mob of Whig demonstrators who arrived at the White
House armed with guns, drums, and bugles. The clamor they raised in
their denunciations of Tyler and the veto awakened the household,
frightened the ladies within, and contributed little to the health and
welfare of the stricken First Lady. After rousing the family they paid
Tyler the supreme political compliment. They burned him in effigy, an
incident which led directly to the passage of legislation establishing a
night police force in Washington.18
Against a background of these and other disorders Henry Clay arose
in the Senate on August 18 to castigate John Tyler. He demanded that
Tyler accede to the will of the nation as expressed in the congressional
vote on the Bank measure or do again as he had done in 1836 and resign
his post. He then introduced a motion to override the veto. Sustained
25 to 24, it was well below the necessary two-thirds margin required to
set aside a veto. The following day, August 19, Clay demanded an amend-
ment to the Constitution to permit the overriding of Presidential vetoes
by simple majority vote. This too came to nought. While these heavy-
handed blows were being delivered on the Senate floor, Clay blandly
maintained that there was no bad blood between the President and
himself. Any rift that might seem to be developing among the Wing
leadership he blamed on unnamed conspirators who were "beating up
for recruits, and endeavoring to form a third party, with materials so
scanty as to be wholly insufficient to compose a decent corporal's
guard.7' 19
Tyler expected the venom of Clay. He was more disturbed per-
sonally by the August 21 publication of the "Coffee House Letter"
IS6
written by his old political ally, John M. Botts. It came at the very
moment a second Bank bill — the Fiscal Corporation bill — was being
introduced in the House. Indeed, the temper and the timing of the Botts
letter convinced Tyler once and for all that all Whig fiscal proposals
were designed to accomplish no more than Ms political destruction. Ad-
dressed to the patrons of a Richmond coffee house and dated August 16,
the Botts communication was a savage attack on the President. It pre-
dicted that "Captain Tyler" would veto the District Bank bill in an
effort to curry favor with the Democrats. Insulting in both tone and
content, it suggested that the President would be "headed" and would
soon become "an object of execration with both parties." Botts charged
further that Tyler had "refused to listen to the admonition and en-
treaties of his best friends, and looked only to the whisperings of the
ambitious and designing mischief makers who have collected around
Mm.77 This was a reference to the same shadowy group Clay would
sarcastically designate a Corporal's Guard in Ms anti-Tyler tirade a few
days later.20
The letter stunned the President. Botts had been a trusted lieuten-
ant in the Virginia legislature in 1839 during the fight against the elec-
tion of Rives to the Senate. While Tyler was trying to understand the
reason and motive behind the unexpected outburst, Botts went a step
further. On September 10 he delivered a wild speech in the House charg-
ing Tyler with having supported the principle of a national bank during
the Harrisburg convention and in various speeches in western Virginia
and western Pennsylvania during the 1840 campaign. He claimed he
had had a personal interview with Tyler in June 1841 during wMch the
President had assured Mm that he favored a national bank. An allega-
tion that Tyler had attempted to bribe him to join in an effort to stretch
Ms Presidential span to twelve years completed the list of patent false-
hoods to which the irresponsible Botts treated a credulous House of
Representatives.21
Given the political and emotional context of the situation, Tyler's
veto of the Fiscal Corporation bill on September 9 was not wholly un-
expected. The new bank measure had appeared a few days after Tyler's
August 1 6 veto of the District Bank bill as amended by Clay and Botts.
In Ms first veto statement he had suggested that certain changes in the
District Bank concept might make similar legislation acceptable to Mm.
Hasty consultations between Whig emissaries and the President brought
forth legislation complexly titled "A bill to incorporate the subscribers to
a fiscal corporation of the United States." The actual framing of the
bill and the details of its submission and passage Tyler unwisely left to
Ms Cabinet. He made it clear to them, however, that he would approve
no banking legislation that did not clearly require state assent for the
establishment of branches (called "agencies'7 in the new legislation).
He specifically instructed Ewing and Webster to see to it that the Fiscal
157
Corporation bill incorporated this provision and retained it in its journey
through Congress. He even took the precaution of jotting down this
crucial reservation on the margin of the working paper that became the
basis for the Cabinet draft. He Insisted also that he be shown the final
wording of the bill before it was sent up to the House.
By a failure in communication within the top echelons of the ad-
ministration (whether accidental or intentional remains a mystery), the
finished bill reached the House before Tyler saw it. This slight infuriated
Mm and contributed to his developing thesis that a full-blown Whig con-
spiracy was in operation against him. He was especially upset when
members of his Cabinet, notably Webster and Ewing, stated publicly
that the new bill conformed to the President's opinions and bore his
imprimatur, although it was obvious that his marginal notations had
received no serious consideration within the Cabinet or in the Whig
caucus that endorsed it. Nor did the final form suit Tyler. In his opin-
ion, the right of the states to interdict the branches was not adequately
protected, and the powers given the Fiscal Corporation in the area of
discounting and renewing notes were excessive in scope and inflationary
in intent. More important, the Fiscal Corporation would be chartered
by Congress acting as the national legislature and not as the legislature
of the District of Columbia. From Tyler's standpoint the new legislation,
ostensibly the brainchild of his own Cabinet, was as unsatisfactory as
the vetoed District Bank bill had been.22
Nevertheless, the Fiscal Corporation bill sailed through the House
in late August by a 125^0-94 vote in spite of attempts by Henry A, Wise
and George H. Proffit of Indiana to amend it to reflect Tyler's objec-
tions. "It will be vetoed," Wise predicted. "Tyler is more firm than
ever. ... A second veto will strengthen him. Ten days will bring about the
denouement." Similarly, the measure passed the Senate on September 2
by a margin of 27 to 22. Although the Fiscal Corporation was not
national enough to suit Clay, the Kentuckian supported the measure,
eager to see if Tyler had the courage to veto it. "Tyler dares not resist,"
Clay exulted to James Lyons of Richmond; "I will drive him before
mel " Lyons could see that Clay was "very violent" on the subject. "You
are mistaken, Mr. Clay," the Virginian replied. "Mr. Tyler wants to
approve the bill, but he thinks his oath [to support the Constitution]
is in the way, and I} who know him very well, will tell you that when he
thinks he is right he is as obstinate as a bull, and no power on earth can
move him." Lyons understood Tyler better than Clay did.23
To head off the expected veto Clay combined liquor, persuasion, and
subtle threat in the hope of bringing Tyler around. On the evening of
August 28, as the legislation was making its way through the House, a
supper party was given at the home of Attorney-General John Critten-
den. Tyler had been invited but had politely declined. Late in the eve-
ning, as libations melted inhibitions and as the party became gay, a
158
tipsy delegation was dispatched to the White House to persuade Tyler
to join the mellowing group. Although the hour was Iate5 Tyler con-
sented. Arriving at Crittenden's, he was met at the door by Henry Clay.
"Well, Mr. President/7 Clay shouted, with obvious political implication,
"what are you for, Kentucky whiskey or champagne?" Tyler chose
aristocratic champagne. Slowly sipping it, he found himself regaled
by Clay with the lines from Shakespeare's Richard III on the dangers
of conscience:
Let not our babbling dreams affright our souls;
Conscience is but a word that cowards use,
Devis'd at first, to keep the strong in awe.
The political meaning of the gathering and the poetry was clear. In a
pleasant, half-drunken way Clay warned Tyler to abandon his friends in
the Virginia Clique and in his Corporal's Guard on Capitol Hill and sign
the Fiscal Corporation bill.24
As he considered the pending legislation in all its ideological and
political ramifications, Tyler decided to lift the whole issue above
partisan politics by including in his veto message a statement that he
would not be a candidate for re-election in 1844. However laudatory this
thought of flying up and out of the political jungle, Webster and Duff
Green dissuaded Tyler from making a statement that could only weaken
him further with the Whig leadership. Angered by the Coffee House Let-
ter, hurt by what appeared to be sabotage within his own Cabinet, stung
by Whig vilification of his first veto, importuned by his supporters in the
Virginia Clique and Corporal's Guard to hold firm, and convinced that
the Fiscal Corporation bill was at bottom unconstitutional, Tyler vetoed
the measure. He did this with full appreciation of the political implica-
tions of his decision. "Give your approval to the Bill," John J. Critten-
den had written him, "and the success of your Administration is sealed
... all before you will be a scene of success and triumph." Veto the bill,
continued the Attorney-General, and "read the doom of the Whig party,
and behold it and the President it elected, sunk together, the victims of
each other, in unnatural strife." 25
In his second veto message of September 9, the President pointed
out that he was pained to be "compelled to differ from Congress a second
time in the same session.'7 He noted that he had not had time enough in
office to fashion a financial plan of his own, and he hinted that he would
offer such a plan at the opening of the regular session in December. He
deplored the speed with which the special session had brought the bank
question to the fore. The veto message was a polite, almost apologetic
document which emphasized Tyler's objection that the Fiscal Corpora-
tion was designed to operate "per se over the Union by virtue of the
unaided and assumed authority of Congress as a national legislature, as
distinguishable from a bank created by Congress for the District of
IS9
Columbia as tlie local legislature of the District." As such it was clearly
unconstitutional. He would rather uphold the Constitution, Tyler con-
cluded, "even though I perish . . . than to win the applause of men by a
sacrifice of my duty and my conscience." Where government moneys
might legally be deposited, given the repeal of the Independent Treas-
ury and the vetoes of the District Bank and the Fiscal Corporation, was
an academic question to Tyler. "We have no surplus, nor are we likely
to have for some years, and may be regarded as living from hand to
mouth/7 he told Webster.26
The response to the second veto was even more violent, more
politically inspired, than the reaction to the first. Demonstrations and
protest meetings were whipped up by Whig leaders all over the country.
The President was burned in effigy a hundred times; scores of letters
poured in threatening him with assassination. Whig editors outdid one
another in contests of personal vilification. Editor John H. Pleasants of
the Richmond Whig, for example, told his readers that he "knew Mr.
Tyler well, personally, and had known him long, and I could not believe
that a man so commonplace, so absolutely inferior to many fifteen shil-
ling lawyers with whom you may meet at every county court in Virginia,
would seriously aspire to the first station among mankind." 2T
On September n? two days before the special session was to ad-
journ, the entire Cabinet, excepting Daniel Webster, resigned in a body.
Between 12:30 and 5:30 P.M. on that fateful day, five Cabinet officers
marched into Tyler's office and laid their resignations on his desk while
John Tyler, Jr., the President's secretary, stood by, watch in hand, re-
cording for posterity the exact moment of each resignation. The reasons
given by each departing Secretary varied in tone, clarity, and conviction,
but taken together they added up to a vote of no confidence.
This massive walkout was planned, calculated, and coordinated by
Henry Clay to wreck the Executive branch, punish John Tyler for his
Bank vetoes, and force his resignation. The latter result, if accomplished,
would bring Clay-adherent Samuel L. Southard, president of the Senate,
to the White House under the succession pattern then operating. The
resignations did not take Tyler entirely by surprise. As early as August
1 6 he had received intimations from Whig Representatives James M.
Russell of Pennsylvania and John Taliaferro of Virginia that the under-
lying purpose of the first Bank bill was to trigger the expected veto that
would isolate him from the Whigs, force a dissolution of his Cabinet,
and bring the Executive department to ruin. By the time the second
Bank bill was being forced upon Tyler, newspapers like the New York
Herald were saying of his Cabinet; "What treachery! What ingratitude!
Why do they not act like men, and at once give their resignations, and
suffer the President to bring to his aid such men as he has confidence
in?" Whatever Clay's object in producing the great Cabinet stroll, the
resignations did not paralyze Tyler's will to continue as President, "My
1 60
resignation," he wrote in 1844, " would amount to a declaration to the
world that our system of government had failed . . . that the provision
made for the death of the President was ... so defective as to merge all
executive powers in the legislative branch of the government. . . ." 2S
Webster had not joined the conspiracy or the resulting exodus. He
had no hand in the Cabinet disruption. He admired Tyler's integrity and
distrusted Henry Clay, whose fine Italian hand he saw behind the
Cabinet crisis. More significantly, he and Tyler were at that moment
deeply involved in the complex diplomatic negotiations with Britain that
would lead to the 1842 Webster- Ashburton Treaty, settling the Maine
boundary and other questions. Studies looking toward the dismember-
ment of the Mexican Empire in California as part of an Anglo-American
settlement of the Oregon boundary problem were also under review. It
was no time for upheaval in the State Department.
"Where am I to go, Mr. President?'7 Webster asked his chief during
the course of that hectic afternoon of September n.
"You must decide that for yourself, Mr. Webster," Tyler replied.
Webster considered the choice for a brief moment and made his
decision. "If you leave it to me, Mr. President, I will stay where I am."
Tyler rose from Ms chair and leaned forward, eyes flashing. "Give
me your hand on that, and now I wiU say to you that Henry Clay is a
doomed man." 2&
Webster's patriotic decision to remain on in the Cabinet distressed
New England Whigs and the Virginia Clique alike. Not only did Ms
continued association with the administration give it a political anchor
northward, it placed near Tyler a statesman of great national prestige at
a time when the renegade President desperately needed friends. The
embarrassment of the Massachusetts WMgs was therefore understand-
able. To Virginians like Wise, Tucker, Upshur, and Gilmer the retention
of Webster was a political blunder. "We are on the eve of a cabinet
rupture," Wise informed Tucker on August 29. "With some of them we
want to part friendly. We can part friendly with Webster by sending Mm
[as Minister] to England. Let us, for God's sake, get rid of Mm on the
best terms we can." In spite of tMs sentiment witMn the Clique, Webster
stayed on. He was a bulwark in an unpopular administration until his
resignation in May 1843. By that time he and Tyler were in sharp
disagreement on the Texas annexation issue and on the President's use
of patronage to build a third party to be employed as a foreign-policy
lever in the 1844 campaign. Nevertheless, they parted in 1843 on t^e
friendliest personal terms.30
The speed with wMch Tyler assembled a new Cabinet indicated
that he had given considerable thought to the matter before the crisis
matured. From a political standpoint, Ms appointments marked the
beginning of the President's effort to link the Conservative Democracy of
New York and Pennsylvania with states' rights WMgs who, like Tyler
161
himself, were inexorably moving back toward the Southern Democracy
from which they had parted in 1833-1836. The next three years would
see fourteen different men involved in the game of musical chairs which
characterized the unstable history of the Cabinet under John Tyler. But
in all these changes, shirtings, comings, and goings, the Tyler Cabinets
increasingly reflected a states' rights-Democratic orientation.
Dominating these alterations and mutations was Tyler's philosophy
that a Cabinet should be totally subordinate to the President and in
absolute intellectual harmony with him. There was to be no maneuvering
for the succession. Differences of opinion were neither encouraged nor
tolerated. Cabinet meetings would involve no more than friendly discus-
sions on how best to implement commonly agreed-upon principles. "The
new cabinet is made up of the best materials," Tyler happily wrote
Thomas A. Cooper in October 1841. "Like myself, they are all original
Jackson men, and mean to act upon Republican principles." There
would be icuo more jarring" within the official family; Tyler made this
clear to prospective appointees. He insisted that they "conform to my
opinions" on all subjects. As he explained his wishes to Webster, "I
would have every [Cabinet] member to look upon every other, in the
light of a friend and a brother.77 That this ideological togetherness would
have its limitations the President was soon to discover. By August 1842
he was complaining to his friend Tazewell that "I have been so long
surrounded by men who have now smiles in their eyes and honey on
their tongues, the better to cajole and deceive, that to be shown the
error of my ways, whensoever I do err, after a plain and downright
fashion, is a positive relief." 31
One final and curious indignity awaited the truculent President. On
September 13, 1841, two days after the Cabinet resignations, he was
formally and officially expelled from the Whig Party. To effect this
comic-opera touch some seventy Whig congressmen caucused in Capitol
Square and in all solemnity repudiated Tyler. In many ways it was like
firing a worker who had already walked off the job, since Tyler's
transient Whiggery had been born and reared in anti-Jacksonianism and
little else. Nevertheless, his expulsion from the party marked the first
and only time in American history a President was thrown bodily out
of the political organization which had nominated and elected him. In
Clay's triumphant words, Tyler was now "a president without a party/'
an observation which impelled young Julia Gardiner Tyler to remark
two years later that "If it is a party he wants, I will give him a party. "
She did.32
The expulsion did, however, encourage Whig pamphleteers to
launch a war of words on Tyler which lasted until his departure from
the White House in March 1845. While the pamphlets contributed little
that was constructive to the political crisis, they provided a therapeutic
outlet for splenic Whigs who saw Tyler as a "reptile-like" man who had
162
"crawled up" into the Presidency, there to betray the party that had
given him power. On the other side of the battle line, pamphleteers of the
states' rights persuasion saw in Henry Clay the snake-in-the-grass and
maintained that John Tyler was leading America's fight for true democ-
racy against the corroding influences of nationalism, Federalism, and
centralism. Called by his enemies an "Executive Ass," the "Accident of
an Accident/7 "a famished Charles City pettifogger," the "synonym of
nihil/5 or simply a man who should be lashed "naked through the world,"
Tyler at least had the distinction of exciting a strong point of view.33
Actually, the vituperation angered and disturbed him. Tyler did not
have the political hide of an elephant. The Whig darts stung him severely
and had the predictable effect of driving him more rapidly back to the
not eagerly outstretched arms of the Southern Democracy. At a different
level, the anti-Tyler campaign had the consequence of welding the Tyler
family into a solid phalanx. Throughout his trials and political tribula-
tions his kin stood solidly and protectively with Mm, strengthening Ms
sword arm against the Whig assaults. Some of this was automatic clan
defensiveness; some of it was related to an attempt by the entire family
to shield the sensibilities of the failing First Lady. Prisciila Cooper Tyler
was particularly helpful to the President during these trying months.
Tyler's brother-in-law Judge John B. Christian and his distant kinsman
Major Washington Seawell, then serving against the Seminoles in
Florida, wrote encouraging letters which buoyed Tyler considerably.
John Tyler, Jr., became an active pamphleteer and publicist for the
President's views and on one occasion walked to the field of honor to
defend his own and his father's reputation. Robert Tyler also aided his
father in many ways, most significantly as the Chief Executive's princi-
pal political liaison man with the Conservative Democracy in Phila-
delphia and New York City. In this task Alexander Gardiner enthusiasti-
cally joined after his sister's marriage to the President in June 1844.
Like the new Cabinet, the family functioned as a close-knit political unit
as Tyler's struggle with the Whigs broadened and deepened.34
Having vetoed two Whig Bank bills, Tyler felt a strong personal
obligation to devise a fiscal scheme of his own which would facilitate
interstate banking operations while remaining entirely constitutional in
structure and function. He was also under pressure from his friends to
produce a "substantive plan which [would] provide for the permanent
settlement of this question," a solution they hoped would make the
Tyler administration politically "impregnable." Thus the President left
the capital in mid-October for a much-needed rest in Williamsburg,
where he planned "to meditate in peace over a scheme of finance." By
December 1841, after considerable correspondence with Littleton W.
Tazewell on the subject, Tyler had worked out a plan which was basi-
cally a version of one Andrew Jackson had proposed in 1830. It was a
163
system in wMch state banks would play an important role, and Tyler
confessed to Tazewell that from a purely political standpoint he was
"greatly influenced by a desire to bring to my support that great in-
terest/7 S5
Tyler's idea envisioned a public banking institution directed by
a nonpartisan Board of Control in Washington, with agencies (some of
them state banks) located in principal financial centers throughout the
country. No capital was to be raised by private subscription, so there
would be no private stockholders. The agencies (branches) would
facilitate interstate commerce in being authorized to buy and sell
domestic bills and drafts. The branches could also receive deposits of
silver and gold from individuals and issue negotiable certificates for
these metals that would circulate as currency. Government moneys
would be deposited in the agencies and these deposits would permit the
government, through the issuance or recall of Treasury notes, to in-
crease or decrease the amount of sound paper currency in circulation
at any given time. It was a well-conceived system. It did not confine the
currency exclusively to specie as Van Buren's Independent Treasury
system had, and the sovereignty of the states was protected in the
provision that forbade the branches to transact any business of a private
character in conflict with the laws of the states in which they functioned.
In sum, the Tyler proposal combined a states' rights approach with a
national approach that would "relieve the Chief Executive . . . from a
controlling power over the public Treasury."
Tyler called it the Exchequer Plan and presented it to the Congress
in his Annual Message on December 7, 1841. The new Cabinet (par-
ticularly Webster and Secretary of War John C. Spencer of New York)
was enthusiastic about it. But by falling somewhere between the Demo-
crats' Independent Treasury and Clay's Bank of the United States it
satisfied the partisans of neither approach. Both attacked it, as did the
Wall Street lobby. "This city is filled with agents from Wall Street/7
reported Secretary of the Navy Abel P. Upshur, "who are endeavoring
to defeat every arrangement of the currency question. So long as they
can keep things in their present state, money will be valuable, and they
have money. This is another sore evil against which the administration
has to contend." The Exchequer Plan had no chance politically, although
it represented that vain search for a middle course that would character-
ize the remainder of the Tyler administration. In spite of a vigorous
fight for the Exchequer by congressmen Caleb Cushing, Henry Wise,
George H. Promt, and others of Tyler's minuscule Corporal's Guard
in Congress, the project was tabled without adequate discussion in the
1841—1842 session. It was soundly defeated the following year. Tyler
thus dropped the plan entirely in 1843, and that was the end of it.
Public moneys, such as existed, continued to repose in selected state
banks, much to the delight of old Jacksonians.36
164
By July 1842 the relationship between the Executive and legisla-
tive brandies had reached a stalemate. Whig strategy was to produce
legislation the President could not approve and then charge perfidy
and treason and Executive dictatorship when the expected veto was
delivered. Tyler? in tuna, continued to veto legislation he could not
stomach while vigorously defending Ms right to do so. "Executive dicta-
tion!" he excitedly wrote a group in Philadelphia:
I repel the imputation. I would gladly harmonize with Congress in the enact-
ment of all necessary measures if the majority would permit me Each
branch of the government is independent of every other, and Heaven forbid
that the day should ever come when either can dictate to the other. The
Constitution never designed that the executive should be a mere cipher. On
the contrary, it denies to Congress the right to pass any law without Ms
approval, thereby imparting to it, for wise purposes, an active agency in all
legislation.
In his relations with the Congress in 1842 Tyler constantly searched
for that "moderation, which is the mother of true wisdom/7 and found
little. "We have reached the turning point in our institutions," he re-
marked to Nathaniel B. Tucker in June 1842 with sadness tinged by
frustration. "I fear that more firmness and wisdom are necessary to
carry us safely through the trial than I can in any way lay claim to." 37
The Clay-dominated Congress was, Tyler fumed, a "do-nothing"
body whose sole function and aim was the destruction of the administra-
tion in preparation for the coming midterm elections. In his Annual
Message of December 7, 1841, Tyler had called for Ms Exchequer
Plan, a new tariff for revenue bill which would "afford the manufactur-
ing interests ample aid," and an expansion of the Army and the Navy.
By July 1842 none of these vital projects had been acted upon. "If
nothing has been done to accomplish any of these objects," Tyler said,
"the fault is not with the Executive." He thought it "particularly
abominable that this miserable Congress should not even yet [July]
have passed the Army or Navy appropriation bill," thus "subjecting
the country to be browbeat" by the Mexican dictator, Santa Anna. The
Congress had not "matured a single important measure/' agreed Upshur
in disgust. On the contrary, theirs was the "deliberate purpose to make
Henry Clay President of the United States, even at the hazard of revolu-
tion." The time had finally come, thought Upshur, for patriots in both
parties to "shake off their leaders, and come at once to the rescue of the
country."
Intelligence reaches us from all parts of the country proving that our do-
nothing Congress is fast falling into contempt with the people. It is the most
worthless body of public men that I have ever known or heard of. Clay is the
great obstacle to wholesome legislation. When he retires something may be
done, and not before.38
165
By the time David Gardiner brought Julia and Margaret to the
capital again in December 1842, the degree to which legislative decay
and partisan chaos had proceeded was a public scandal Congressional
activity, such as it was, seemed to the East Hampton visitor designed
only to advance "some man in respect to a presidential candidate.77
Both parties were "greatly divided/' The Congress had become im-
potent. As David Gardiner expressed it to his sons:
Of the different [banking] plans none will probably be adopted and Con-
gress after having undone all they have done during the last session will be
ready to adjourn without much hurry Most of the speakers are blessed
merely with a capacity of uttering sound and connecting most disconnected
sentences. Mr. Adams stands alone among them for ... great powers of mind.
... It seems to be the fashion even on the most trifling subjects, to rage with
violence. ... A speech of Cushing has called forth much political debate, but
I do not think has been fairly met, although most severely denounced by
both of the great political parties. The President was abandoned by the Whigs
for vetoing the Bank bill while they without reason . . . have protested with
greater inconsistency the bankrupt bill I am heartily tired of listening to
the debates. ... I think the Senate of New York when I was acquainted with
it, possessed in proportion to its numbers a far greater amount of talent
Those who loom the largest here from the distance diminish wonderfully on
contact. ... I see here all the old corrupt political lobby which in former years
infested Albany.39
As the government of the United States virtually ceased to func-
tion, Tyler became increasingly aware of the painful fact that the
Treasury was bare. A national debt of $5,650,000 had been left by the
Van Buren administration, along with an unbalanced budget for 1840-
1841 which ultimately raised the debt to $17,736,000 by January i,
1842. Indeed, the pay of the military and the civil service had on
occasion in 1841 been suspended by Tyler because the public coffers
were empty. Treasury notes declined steadily in value throughout 1842,
and the Home Squadron of the Navy was tied up as an economy
measure.
Faced with this critical financial situation, the President was not
averse to raising the tariff for the purpose of providing badly needed
revenue. He was loath, however, to tamper with the delicate economic
and political arrangements hammered out in the Compromise Tariff Act
of 1833 and he was vehemently opposed to the Whig plan to link
distribution to a higher tariff. Under the distribution scheme income
realized by the Treasury from the sale of public lands would be "dis-
tributed" to the several states. This, of course, would aid the financially
hard-pressed states survive the impact of the depression. The giveaway
would also reap obvious political benefits for the munificent Whig
distributors. But by dissipating sizable portions of the federal revenue,
166
distribution would inevitably force hikes in the tariff schedule to raise
revenues for the near-bankrupt government. The Whigs thus hoped that
by depleting the shaky Treasury with their politically negotiable dis-
tribution plan they could then logically call for higher tariffs. In this
manner they could gradually force the tariff schedule upward to the
point of outright protectionism — in the holy name of tariff for revenue
only. Tyler was not opposed to significantly higher tariffs in 1842 so
long as they were strictly revenue-raising in intent. The Compromise
Tariff of 1833 had made it plain that after 1842 any duties above 20
per cent ad -valorem would be levied only "for the purpose of raising
such revenue as may be necessary to an economical administration of
the Government." Nor was he opposed to the distribution of public-
land revenues so long as this did not force tariffs clearly into the pro-
tectionist range. Indeed, he had willingly signed Clay's Distribution Act
of 1841 when the legislation included a cut-off proviso that distribution
would cease if and when the tariff schedule went above 20 per cent ad
valorem. His attitude toward a tariff for protection as such had not
changed since 1832. He had always been a free- trade, tariff-for-revenue
man and would remain one until he died.40
For the purpose of embarrassing Tyler politically at a time when
the Treasury was bare, the Whigs on two occasions during the summer
of 1842 brought forth tariff bills which raised rates above 20 per cent
while providing for the continued distribution of government revenue
from public-land sales. Tyler promptly vetoed both measures, much
to the jubilation of Clay partisans. "If we can only keep up the feeling
that now exists," Crittenden wrote Harry of the West, "youx election
is certain. Tyler is one of your best friends; his last veto has scored us
all well; it has just reached the convention in Maine, which nominated
you and denounced him."
The Whig policy, designed to raise more Clay than revenue,
quickly shifted to the appointment of a House select committee to
investigate the reasons given by Tyler for his latest veto of the tariff-
distribution bill. Needless to say, the committee was carefully packed to
produce a predetermined result. Chaired by John Quincy Adams and
numbering in its heavy Whig majority such proven anti-Tylerites as
John M. Botts, the committee reported its findings on August 16, 1842.
The document went far beyond a pro forma criticism of the President's
veto of the tariff-distribution bill. It was a wide-ranging, free-swinging
attack on the Tyler administration and all its negative works from the
moment it came to power. It recommended an amendment to the Con-
stitution that would permit the overriding of a White House veto by
a bare majority vote, and it concluded with the observation that John
Tyler was a fit subject for impeachment proceedings. A dissenting
minority report, signed only by Democratic congressmen Charles J.
167
Ingersoll of Pennsylvania and James I. Roosevelt of New York, de-
fended the President's stewardship of the nation for the preceding seven-
teen months.41
Against a background of violent Whig editorial attacks — "Again
has the imbecile, into whose hands accident has placed the power,
vetoed a bill passed by a majority of those legally authorized to pass
it/' shouted the Daily Richmond Whig — Tyler dispatched a defense of
his behavior to the House on August 30 with a request that it be printed
hi the House Journal. The entreaty was refused, gleeful Whigs pointing
out that Tyler himself had voted to deny Jackson the same privilege
in i834.42
In the midst of this renewed assault, Tyler signed into law on
August 30 the controversial Tariff Act of 1842, a bill pushed through
by an alliance of protectionist Whigs and Democrats who pointed with
real alarm to the stark emptiness of the Treasury. In this sense it
was regarded by its proponents as a tariff for much-needed revenue al-
though it did in fact return the tariff schedule to the high protectionist
rates of 1832. And while no distribution rider was attached to it (Clay's
friends fought it for this very reason), Tyler's approval of the measure
was at variance with his longstanding hostility toward high tariffs. To
be sure, the Treasury was desperate for a new infusion of funds and
this consideration alone probably swung Tyler over. He undoubtedly
regarded it at the time as a tariff for revenue, even though the rates
were protectionist in 1832 terms. Unfortunately, he never explained his
reasons for approving the "Black Tariff/' as noxious to Southern anti-
protectionists as it was gratifying to American System Whigs. Or if he
did explain his thinking on the matter, the knowledge was lost to his-
tory when most of his private papers were burned in Richmond in
1865. Lyon G. Tyler accounted for his father's apparent surrender
on the tariff question of 1842 as part of the President's desire to build
a coalition of moderates to carry him politically and placidly between
the Scylla of Clay and the Charybdis of Benton. It was, he wrote in
1885, "the first legislative fruits of the policy of the President to depend
upon the moderates of both parties." This neat explanation has some
obvious defects. A broader basis of interpretation would include Tyler's
fear of the approaching bankruptcy of the federal government, Ms
psychological reaction to continued Whig poundings, his distress at talk
of his impeachment, concern for Letitiays peace of mind in her last days
(she died September 10, 1842), and a willingness — after eighteen
months of continual wrangling over banking and tariff matters — to
move on to other and more fruitful subjects. By August 1842 he had
matured the great Texas annexation plan by which he hoped to put an
end to faction, unify the nation, and rescue his historical reputation.
This object came to dominate his hopes and ambitions almost ex-
clusively after January i843.43
1 68
Whatever Ms motives in signing the 1842 Tariff Act, Tyler was
clearly unsettled and hurt by concurrent Whig talk of Impeachment.
He knew that the Whigs did not have the votes to accomplish such
a radical solution to their frustrations, but the chattering itself angered
Mm, frightened Mm a bit, and drove Mm ever closer to the Southern
Democracy for aid and comfort. The Impeachment movement began
on July 10, 1842. On that date a resolution was introduced in the
House by John M. Botts, calling for the appointment of a special com-
mittee to investigate the President's conduct in office with a view toward
recommending impeachment. Henry Clay agreed that "the inevitable
tendency of events is to impeachment ," but he felt that the timing and
introduction of the Botts motion was unfortunate. He held that the
politics of the situation called for a lesser punishment — a House vote
of "want of confidence" in Tyler rather than the institution of formal
impeachment proceedings. While he certainly encouraged the impeach-
ment movement from behind the scenes, Clay urged that it proceed with
great care. It had proceeded practically nowhere at all when Tyler
learned of it and fairly exploded. "I am told that one of the madcaps
talks of impeachment/' he wrote a friend:
Did you ever expect to see your old friend under trial for "high crimes and
misdemeanors"? The high crime of sustaining the Constitution of the coun-
try I have committed, and to this I plead guilty. The high crime of arresting
the lavish donation of a source of revenue [distribution] , at the moment that
the Treasury is bankrupt, of that also I am guilty; and the high crime of
daring to have an opinion of my own, Congress to the contrary notwithstand-
ing, I plead guilty also to that; and if these be impeachable matters, why
then I ought to be impeached I am abused, in Congress and out, as man
never was before — assailed as a traitor, and threatened with impeachment.
But let it pass. Other attempts are to be made to head me, and we shall see
how they will succeed.44
The ill-contrived impeachment attempt did not, of course, succeed.
On January 10, 1843, Botts7 resolution of the previous July was finally
brought to a vote in the House. It was soundly defeated — 127 to 83,
only the most extreme Clay and Van Buren men supporting it. "There
was/3 reported Senator David Gardiner, who witnessed the vote, "no
excitement and little debate, and this . . . foolish attempt will only result
in increasing the number of the President's friends." 45
If the Botts assault did not actually increase Tyler's friends, it did
obscure the fact that the President was not unwilling to accommodate
the Whigs on several important legislative matters. John Tyler, In truth,
made a genuine attempt in 1841-1842 to reach some accommodation
with the Whigs, consistent with his constitutional principles. On most
issues he was willing to meet them halfway or better. His signings of
the 1842 Tariff Act and the Bankruptcy Act of 1842 were clearly pro-
169
Whig. His acceptance of Clay's 1841 Distribution Act and Ms willing-
ness to see the Independent Treasury Act repealed in 1841 were also
pro-Whig gestures. On the controversial tariff question he agreed with
Upshur that "the free trade men of the South must relax their prin-
ciples a little.37 Indeed, Tyler's approval of the Bankruptcy Act, liberal-
izing the laws governing that unhappy condition, benefited the de-
pressed Whig business community to the extent that in November 1842
Alexander Gardiner, a recently converted Tammany Democrat, could
cry out that the legislation should be repealed immediately. It was, said
the President's future brother-in-law, a mockery of "the great Demo-
cratic doctrines of individual enterprise and freedom," destined only
to subsidize the improvident and speculative classes.46
The results of the midterm elections of 1842 seemed to Tyler to
support his side of his struggle with Clay and the Whigs. He inter-
preted the Democratic sweep as the "greatest political victory ever won
within my recollection . . . achieved entirely upon the vetoes of the
Bank bills presented to me at the extra session.'7 The Whig majority of
sixty in the House of Representatives gave way to a Democratic
majority of eighty. Whig reverses in New York, Pennsylvania, Georgia,
Mississippi, Michigan, Virginia, and Louisiana caused John Quincy
Adams to moan that the Whigs were "overwhelmed and the Democracy
altogether in the ascendant . . . the Tyler party are much stronger than
I could have imagined." Still, Tyler's loyal little Corporal's Guard was
all but wiped out in the election. Their support of the unpopular Presi-
dent had endeared them to the leadership of no faction or party. Thus
Representatives James I. Roosevelt, Henry A. Wise, George H. Promt,
Francis Mallory of Virginia, and Caleb Cushing of Massachusetts all
decided that retreat was the better part of valor and declined to stand
for renomination or re-election. Tyler appreciated immensely their great
sacrifices for him and made every effort to place them all in appointive
offices. Years later he still referred to them warmly as the "half dozen
gentlemen" who had stuck with him "when I had to sustain the com-
bined assaults of the ultras of both parties." In his memory they re-
mained the "six [who] stood by and beat back all assailants. Yes, beat
them back and foiled all their efforts." John Quincy Adams notwith-
standing, these doughty White Knights did not constitute a "Tyler
party" or any segment of one.47
There was as yet no Tyler party. Nor had the President's attempt
to unify moderates in both major parties on a domestic program that
sought a middle road between states' rights and nationalism met with
conspicuous success. Pro-Whig gestures had distressed the states' rights
group and pro-states' rights vetoes had triggered a Whig impeachment
movement. Thus the popular swing away from the obstructionist Clay
Whigs and their "do-nothing Congress" in November 1842 convinced
Tyler that the time was at hand for launching a third party "for the
170
sole purpose of controlling events by throwing in the weight of that
organization for the public good" during the 1844 campaign.
He had considered the possibility of a third-party movement as
early as October 1841. At that time he had discovered an issue on which
he hoped he might unite all moderate factions under his leadership and,
in so doing, salvage the prestige of Ms faltering administration. The
Tyler party, as he conceived it, would undertake nothing less ambitious
than the annexation of Texas and the filling out of America's continental
boundaries to the Pacific. So it was that on October n, 1841, while
vacationing at his home in Williamsburg, where he had retired to
"meditate in peace" over what became Ms Exchequer Plan, the Texas
thought struck Mm. "Could anything," he inquired of Webster,
. . . throw so bright a lustre around us? It seems to me the great interests of
the North would be incalculably advanced by such an acquisition. How deeply
interested is the shipping interest. Slavery, I know that is the objection, and
it would be well founded, if it did not already exist among us; but my belief
is that a rigid enforcement of the laws against the slave-trade would in time
make as many free States South as the acquisition of Texas would add of
slave States, and then the future (distant as it might be) would present won-
derful results.48
The happy results of the 1842 elections coupled with a growing con-
fidence in the patriotic rightness and political possibilities of his Texas
policy helped Tyler sublimate the great sorrow he experienced when Le-
titia finally passed away in September 1842. The excitement and activity
involved in organizing Ms tMrd party also proved therapeutic in this
regard. Thus when Julia Gardiner walked into Ms life in December of
that year he was politically more confident and self-assured than he
had been since the beginning of his ill-starred administration.
Nevertheless, with the exception of Texas annexation (a large ex-
ception, to be sure), the Tyler administration in 1843—1845 was a
caretaker government. Thanks in part to the increased revenue under
the Tariff Act of 1842, the budget was balanced and the public debt
significantly reduced. Efficient fiscal administration also permitted a
reduction in the size of the annual budget. In truth, "Mr. Tyler found
the currency *sMn-plasters'; he left it gold and silver and Treasury
notes at par." Well-managed as it was, Ms administration still remained
a caretaker operation. No significant domestic legislation was passed.
NotMng more important emerged from Congress than the $30,000
appropriated in March 1843 to assist Samuel F. B. Morse test his
telegraph. And from the White House came no act more stirring than
the appointment of writers WasMngton Irving and John Howard Payne
to diplomatic posts abroad. In foreign affairs, however, it was a much
more successful story. So too was it in the social life of the WMte
House.49
171
COURTSHIP AND CATASTROPHE
Shall I again that Harp unstring
Which long has been a useless thing,
Unheard in Lady's bower?
JOHN TYLER, MARCH 1843
While John Tyler's administration collapsed noisily about his ears,
the social life of the White House went forward from triumph to
triumph under the able direction of Priscilla Cooper Tyler. Priscilla
had not sought the post. Indeed, Tyler's elevation to the Presidency had
come so suddenly and unexpectedly that no provision had been made,
or even contemplated, for the purely festive and ceremonial side of
White House living. But within a week after Tyler's hasty departure
from Williamsburg in April 1841 to take up his new duties in the capital,
it was decided that Letitia should join her husband in Washington even
though she could do little to help his administration in a social sense.
Priscilla, Tyler determined, would perform the First Lady's duties as
White House hostess. Letitia was far too weak to take on this burden.
On only one occasion did she feel strong enough to be helped from the
privacy of her bedchamber and downstairs to the White House re-
ception rooms.
Actually, the beautiful Priscilla inherited her responsible station
by default. Letitia's older daughters, Mary Tyler Jones and Letitia
Tyler Semple, had husbands and homes of their own to maintain
in Virginia. Thirteen-year-old Alice Tyler was too young to assume the
duties of hostess, and eighteen-year-old Elizabeth was too inexperienced
socially to do much more than assist Priscilla.
Happily, Priscilla was ideal for the demanding task. As an ex-
perienced actress she knew how to play a role with dignity, restraint,
and good humor. For her the White House became a great stage. She
172
set the scenery, chose the cast, and read her Hues with consummate
skill. In al! this she sought the advice of the elderly Dolley Madison.
Throughout the sixteen years of the Jefferson and Madison administra-
tions Dolley had served as White House hostess. She knew everything
worth knowing about social Washington. She was a jolly, buxom woman
who dipped snuff and rouged her face like a Paris streetwalker. But
she was much loved by the Tylers and was quickly taken into their con-
fidence. Her assistance to Priscilla as producer-director of the White
House theater was invaluable. Elizabeth Tyler also helped her sister-in-
law until her marriage to William N. Waller in January 1842, when her
departure left Priscilla with the sole responsibility of the post until
March 1844. At that time Robert Tyler gave up his patronage slot
in the Land Office and moved his wife and their two daughters to
Philadelphia to begin a belated practice of law. With Priscilla's de-
parture in March 1844 the vacancy as acting First Lady was temporarily
filled by Letitia Tyler Semple, whose semi-estranged husband James
had been helped off to sea as a purser in the Navy by Tyler. Julia, of
course, inherited the position in the summer of 1844 and filled it until
the Tyler administration ended in March 1845. Like her immediate
predecessors in the post, she depended much on the experienced Dolley
Madison for advice and counsel.1
Priscilla enjoyed every minute of her novel role in spite of the fact
that the First Family was always surrounded by a genteel poverty and
the grim realization that Letitia was slipping toward her grave. This
was an intimate, depressing side of the Tylers' life in the White House
that was kept strictly private. Julia, for instance, neither saw nor sus-
pected it during her first extended visit in the capital in January and
February 1842. But it was there nonetheless, and Priscilla learned to
Eve with it. Her general attitude was not unlike that of Pope Alex-
ander VI: Now that we have the Presidency, let us enjoy it — as best we
can. Shortly after her arrival at the White House from Wilh'amsburg
she marveled at what fate had cast before her:
Here am I [she told her sister] , nee Priscilla Cooper . . . actually living, and
— what is more — presiding at the White House! I look at myself like a little
old woman, and exclaim: Can this be I? I have not had one moment to myself
since my arrival, and the most extraordinary tMng is that I feel as if I had
been used to living here always; and receive the Cabinet, ministers, the diplo-
matic corps, the heads of the army and navy, etc. etc., with a facility which
astonishes me. "Some achieve greatness — some are born to it." I am plainly
born to it. I really do possess a degree of modest assurance that surprises me
more than it does anyone else. I am complimented on every side; my hidden
virtues are coming out. I am considered "charmante" by the Frenchmen,
"lovely" by the Americans, and "really quite nice, you know," by the English.
It was quite a new world for a struggling young actress who a scant
four years earlier had bathed in the muddy Delaware and had eaten
173
"nothing but bacon and potatoes for dinner, with an occasional lone
dumpling to give weight to the repast." 2
Priscilla's new position as White House hostess entailed coping
with incredible pressures. While Congress was in session she was ex-
pected to supervise and preside over two formal dinner parties each
week. At the first of these twenty guests were regularly invited, men
who were visiting Washington and who had shown "respectful atten-
tion to the President and his family." At the second there were usually
forty at dinner, drawn from the upper echelons of the government,
the military, and the diplomatic corps. Each evening until ten o'clock
the White House reception rooms were opened to informal visitors.
These too required Priscilla's presence although Tyler frequently
escaped by pleading the demands of his office. In addition, the Tylers
occasionally sponsored small private balls. And once a month during
the congressional session the White House was the scene of a grand
public levee. Well over a thousand people generally attended these
affairs; the crush of bodies made dancing almost impossible. The com-
pany at the levees was, recalled John Tyler, Jr., "less select as to true
worth than was altogether agreeable." Select or not, Priscilla enjoyed
them. Special receptions on New Year's Day and on the Fourth of
July and weekly Marine Band concerts for the public on the south
lawn of the White House on mild evenings rounded out the formal
events over which the official hostess was expected to preside. For Priscilla
it was a grueling schedule. With one exception, the young lady whom
Tyler lauded as the "presiding genius of the White House for more than
two years" rose to every occasion.3
Her lone failure occurred one evening in May 1841, early in her
White House tenure. It was the night of her first formal dinner for the
officers of the Cabinet. Priscilla was fatigued with the strain of manag-
ing her four-month-old daughter, Mary Fairlie, and she was already
pregnant with her second child. The baby was sick and had been
squalling and fretting all day, as Priscilla rushed about the Mansion
trying to supervise the extensive dinner preparations and comfort her
unhappy offspring at the same time. By evening she was exhausted.
When the guests finally arrived, Secretary of State Webster escorted
her in to dinner. Priscilla was the only woman present. For a time she
chatted easily and amiably with the great Webster, whose imposing
countenance and booming voice often reduced less poised acquaintances
to awed silence. Priscilla was nervous and she was bone-tired, but she
was not overwhelmed by the commanding presence of the "godlike
Daniel." She was, after all, a woman who had often been strangled in
her bed by Othello. It took more than a mere Secretary of State to
faze the onetime Desdemona.
Yet on this particular evening, as the dessert was being served,
Priscilla grew deathly pale. Suddenly she fell back from the table in a
174
faint. Webster moved quickly from his seat, gathered her in his arms,
and gallantly carried her away from the table. At this point Robert
Tyler converted mere confusion into absolute chaos by Impetuously
dumping a pitcher of ice water on both the hero and the swooning
heroine. As Priscilla recounted her embarrassment a few days later, the
Ice water ruined her "lovely new dress, and, I am afraid, produced a
decided coolness between myself and the Secretary of State. I had to be
taken to my room, and poor Mr. Webster had to be shaken off, dried
and brushed, before he could resume dinner.77 The generous Webster
quickly forgot the Incident and soon became Priscilla Js favorite person
in the Cabinet. They chatted and gossiped every time they met and he
undertook the education of her palate, advising her on foods and wines
he thought she might enjoy.4
Following the opening-night disaster, Priscilla's social productions
as White House hostess were an unbroken series of successes. She
managed to tame — Indeed charm — the haughty Chevalier de Bacourt?
France's ambassador to the United States and one of Ms nation's most
distinguished and accomplished snobs. The fine party she arranged in
June 1842 for the British plenipotentiary, Lord Ashburton, may not
have advanced the tedious Webster-Ashburton conversations on the
Maine boundary dispute one whit, but It was proclaimed — even by the
crusty John Qulncy Adams — a great and glittering affair, "all that the
most accomplished European courts could have displayed." So too was
the White House reception in October 1841 for the Prince de Joinville,
son of King Louis Philippe. At this time Priscilla was six months
pregnant with her second daughter. So uncomfortable was she that
Letitia Tyler Semple came up from Virginia to help out. The whole thing
finally went off with great eclat.5
Priscilla's greatest triumph came early in 1843. On the shortest
possible notice she hastily organized a White House reception for Count
Henri Bertrand, former aide to Napoleon Bonaparte and onetime Grand
Marshal of the Emperor's court. It was a solo performance. The
President was visiting in Virginia. Robert Tyler was on hand to assist
in the preparations, but he was, said Priscilla, "only Prince Consort.""
The Cabinet was hurriedly summoned to the White House at eight
o'clock to greet the distinguished Count, who was a hand-kisser of the
most impulsive continental sort. Priscilla was so amused by his ex-
aggerated caricature of feudal chivalry that upon his departure, "as the
last mustachioed Frenchman left the room, I turned a pirouette on
one foot, and then dropping a low curtsey, said I begged the cabinet's
pardon; whereat Mr. [Robert] Tyler was exceedingly wrathy, though
everyone else said it was the sweetest thing I had done all evening." &
A few days later a more formal social gesture was extended Count
Bertrand and his mustachioed entourage. Again Priscilla was equal to
the occasion. She prepared a glittering state ball for two hundred care-
175
fully selected guests. Clad in a "rose-colored satin trimmed in blond
lace flowers and a charaiing headdress of white bugles/7 she stationed
herself
... at the head of the blue centre room near the window. As the Marshal
arrived and walked through the hall, the band struck up the Marseillaise. The
guests fell back on either side of the end of the room, leaving a wide path
for Bertrand to advance to where Josephine — I mean, I — stood surrounded
by the Cabinet. To describe the references he made, followed by his son and
each of Ms suite in turn would be vain. I returned them with grandmama's
old-fashioned curtseys, such as must have existed in the days of the Empire.
... No party ever went off better. Father with Ms usual kindness had given
me carte blanche before he left. My supper was splendid. (It is so easy to
entertain at other people's expense.) . . . When the Marshal led me into sup-
per, he seemed completely overcome, and putting Ms hand over Ms heart, said,
"Ah, rnadame ... all zis for me?" The only contretemps that occurred was
that I cave Mm with a sweet smile a most splendid looking sugarplum with-
out looking at the picture on it, wMch I afterwards discovered to my horror
to be that of an ape.7
The official social events at which Priscilla performed so graciously
and efficiently set a high standard for Julia and First Ladies after her
to follow. Some of these functions were not always as pleasant as the
Bertrand reception and ball. At the WMte House reception on New
Year's Day, 1842, for instance, Priscilla stood for three wearying hours
in the Blue Room shaking hands with the thousands of citizens who
trooped in to catch a glimpse of their controversial President. "Such big
fists as some of the people have," she remarked, "and such hearty shakes
as they gave my poor little hand One great hearty countryman gave
me a clutch and a shake I almost expired under." 8
Tyler also ran the risk of being crushed at these public affairs.
He generally stationed Mmself in the center of the oval Blue Room to
receive his guests, the ladies of the White House retiring to the com-
parative safety of the side walls. Centrally located as he was, he became
the focal point of a milling throng which seethed and writhed like a
gigantic octopus. It was what Priscilla termed the "rush of the sovereign
people," and the President was thoroughly jostled and pushed about as
the citizenry sought to shake his hand or even touch his coat. In all this
physical contact Tyler maintained his equanimity and good nature,
much as a victorious prizefighter surrounded by his fans must do at the
end of an important bout. Still, it was a trying experience. When Julia
became First Lady in 1844 one of her first reforms was to move her
husband from the direct line of fire to the protective custody of a side
wall. There he received and shook hands with his guests as they filed by
in an orderly line. During Priscilla's tenure, however, Tyler took Ms
chances. With all the Whig talk of assassination going around, the
176
wonder is be was not shot down by his enemies or mashed to death by
Ms friends.9
Behind the surface glitter of these forma! receptions for important
diplomats, dashing noblemen, bejeweled ladies, and brocaded officers
stood the harsh fact that the Tyler family was, as usual, in serious
financial difficulty during the White House years. Tyler was not a poor
man, but the social obligations of his office created financial demands
well above the capacities of a Virginia lawyer and planter. Money,
or the lack of it, was a constant concern. When Priscilla on one
occasion saw Madame Bodisco magnificently attired in a pink satin
and lace dress, her throat ail but hidden by "splendid diamonds," she
could say of the magnificent stones that she "really envied them, not for
their luster but for their value. Mary Fairlie's education might be
purchased by them/' 10
Thanks to a politically vindictive Congress, the sums normally
appropriated for the upkeep of the President's Mansion were not forth-
coming. As a result, the President himself bore much of the cost of the
lighting, heating, and essential maintenance of the establishment out of
Ms own pocket. And since his pockets were scarcely overflowing, the
New York Herald in November 1844 could correctly say of the WMte
House that
TMs building bears the name of the "White House" ; but, alas ! how changed
since the days of yore: its virgin wMte sadly sullied — its beautiful pillars
disgustingly besplattered with saliva of tobacco — its halls deserted by day —
and gloomily illuminated triweekly by night — the gorgeous East Room re-
flecting, from its monstrous mirrors, patched carpets, the penury of "Uncle
Samuel" — and the three inch stumps of wax lights in the sockets of mag-
nificent chandeliers, attesting to the rigid economy observed by its present
possessors — the splendid drapery falling in tatters all around time's rude
hand, the fingers of visitors having made sad havoc with their silken folds.11
The furniture also deteriorated during Tyler's tenure of office. It
was, said F. W. Thomas, the New York Herald's irate WasMngton
correspondent, "a disgrace — a contemptible disgrace to the nation.
Many of the chairs in the East Room would be kicked out of a brotheL"
Even when Gardiner money was added to the President's modest re-
sources in 1844 it was spent on more opulent entertaining rather than
on needed refurbishing. Tyler, of course, had no private funds for
renovating or reupholstering the mangy furniture. The cost of food
alone was a burden to Mm. "I am heartily tired of the grocers here
who exact extravagant prices for everytMng," he complained. So high
was the relative cost of living in Washington that he was ultimately
reduced to ordering groceries in wholesale lots and at wholesale prices
from New York and from his relatives in Charles City.12
Additional demands witMn the family circle increased the Presi-
177
dent's numerous financial burdens. Thomas A. Cooper, Priscilla's father,
was given a patronage position, that of military storekeeper at the
Frankford, Pennsylvania, Arsenal. This prevented him from becoming
entirely dependent upon the Tylers, but the prodigal old actor would
not or could not make ends meet on the pay of an Army captain. The
standard of living he furnished those of Priscilla's younger sisters still
at home was so marginal that she was forced to invite them to the
White House for frequent and extended visits to keep them from going
hungry. Tyler accepted this added cost of running the Mansion with-
out complaint. Nonetheless, he attempted to ease his financial situation
by appointing his son Robert to a fifteen-hundred-dollar-a-year posi-
tion in the United States Land Office. At no time did the financially
harassed President consider the appointment of Tom Cooper or Robert
Tyler as nepotistic raids on the public treasury. Their patronage posi-
tions were absolute economic necessities to the family.13
To the Gardiners and to the American public in general nothing
of this constant financial concern ever appeared on the surface. The
Tylers graciously played their expected social roles in the White House
without giving outward signs of the scrimping that was always going
on within the bosom of the family. Nor did Tyler give any indication of
his despair as he watched Letitia die. Instead, he buried himself in his
work, arising at sunrise and remaining at his desk without break until
3:30 P.M. After a midafternoon family dinner he returned to his desk
until dusk. Interviews, social functions, and more desk work occupied
the evening hours until he retired at ten o'clock. It was a punishing
schedule. Abandoned by many of his old friends, castigated by his
political enemies, pilloried in the press, threatened with assassination,
John Tyler was faced with the varied emotional and physical pressures
of an administration in crisis, a wife who was dying, and a personal
life of financial discomfort. It is not surprising that he often searched
for solace in frantic attention to his official duties.
When there were few duties to perform, or when his desk was
momentarily clear, he turned to correspondence with his children. This
was something in the nature of therapy, and it served to bring father
and daughters closer together during the months preceding and follow-
ing Letitia's death. Thus on one occasion he urged daughter Mary
not to concern herself with the vicious anti-Tylerism that spilled over
and threatened to engulf all the members of the family. "Never give
a thought to them," he advised her of his political critics. "They are
entirely unworthy of giving you the slightest concern ... go along as if
they did not exist. In that way you obtain mastery over them." 14
There were, of course, light and happy moments within the family
circle during 1841-1843, although they were relatively few. One of these
was the White House wedding of Elizabeth Tyler to William Nevison
Waller of Williamsburg on January 31, 1842. Save for the presence of
Dolley Madison, members of the Cabinet, and a few Intimate friends,
it was a family affair. It marked the only occasion Letitia- emerged
from her sickroom to make an appearance downstairs in the President's
Mansion. Tyler knew little about young Waller. But he approved
the match on learning that the prospective bridegroom was an "artless,
unsophisticated, generous, honorable man of pure and sound prin-
ciples— ardent and affectionate in his attachment to all his Relatives."
He would, in sum, make a good husband. Lizzie looked "surpassingly
beautiful'' on her wedding day, "lovely in her wedding dress and long
blond-lace veil; her face literally covered with blushes and dimples."
The affair pleased everyone.15
When Letitia finally died on September 10, 1842, the White House
was plunged into the deepest gloom. Priscilla had gone to New York
for a brief visit with her sister and Letitia, sensing that she was dying,
hurriedly sent Robert north to bring her home. They both arrived back
in Washington too late. "My poor husband suffered dreadfully when
he was told that Mother's eyes were constantly turned to the door
watching for him/7 Priscilla agonized. "Nothing can exceed the loneli-
ness of this large and gloomy mansion, hung with black, its walls^
echoing with sighs." In the words of the Washington Intelligencer,
Letitia Christian Tyler was "loving and confiding to her husband, gentle
and affectionate to her children, kind and charitable to the needy
and afflicted." Few obituaries have been so accurate. She was sorely
missed.16
Crushed by grief, the President plunged himself even more vigor-
ously into the everyday duties of his exacting office, into his Texas
idea, and into his third-party plan. When the Gardiners returned to
Washington in December 1842 for their second season in the capital
they found the somber household in deep mourning. Priscilla gave no
parties. Instead, she invited Julia and Margaret to the White House for
a "quiet whist game,77 and to help roll back the surrounding gloom she
implored Julia on one occasion to "bring her guitar with her." 17 *v
Following the death of his wife Tyler increasingly concerned him-
self with the life he would lead after his departure from the White
House. Letitia 3s terminal illness turned his thoughts more positively to
his eventual retirement and in the fall of 1842, after she was buried, he
purchased from his neighbor, Collier Minge, for $10,000, the property
in Charles City County known as Walnut Grove. It was located within
two miles of Greenway, the old Tyler estate where the President had
lived as a boy. No sooner had the purchase been effected than Tyler be-
gan extensive remodeling and expansion. No detail of this architectural
transformation escaped his interest. It was a good diversion for him from
his grief, although the added financial burden was a great one. The loca-
tion of rooms, the construction of chimneys, the pitch of stairways all
captured his attention. Plans, sketches, drawings, and suggestions were
179
sent regularly to the site. By early 1843 Tyler had renamed the property
Sherwood Forest in whimsical reference to his outlaw status in the Whig
Party. He loved the place from the beginning, and during his courtship
of Julia in 1843 his letters to her were filled with word-pictures of the
emerging beauty of the estate, the magnificent view of the James River
from his lawn, and his plans for the continued expansion and improve-
ment of the plantation.18
Such was the situation at the White House and in the personal life
of John Tyler when the Gardiner family arrived in Washington again
on Sunda3r, December 4, 1842, occupied their chambers at Mrs. Peyton's
boardinghouse, and began preparations for the coming season. The fol-
lowing Wednesday, James Keating, a servant brought along from East
Hampton for the campaign, carried the Gardiners' cards to the White
House, to the homes of all the Cabinet members, and to the residences
of New York friends and acquaintances known to be in town. This was
accepted etiquette and little could be expected to happen until these
small billboards had been posted around the city.19
Within a week Mrs. Peyton's parlor was filled with callers who came
to welcome the Gardiners. Among the first to pay their respects were
General and Mrs. John P. Van Ness, Secretary of State and Mrs. Daniel
Webster, Jessica Benton3 congressmen James I. Roosevelt and John
McKeon of New York, Senator James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, and
Richard R. Waldron, the young naval officer from New Hampshire.
Julia thought James Buchanan particularly engaging. Not only was he
"a candidate for the presidency/3 he was also "a young bachelor of 50
... a great beau among the young ladies ; one of the first families and
very * wealthy." At the ripe old age of fifty James Buchanan was ob-
viously too ancient for Julia, who was much more titillated by the atten-
tions again paid her by young Waldron. A protege of New Hampshire
Senator Levi P. Woodbury, he had sailed with the famous Wilkes Ex-
pedition. He was a man of charm and intelligence, widely traveled and
well read. Without too much encouragement from Julia's ever-flirtatious
eyes, Richard Waldron again volunteered for the happy shore duty of
escorting the Gardiners about town.20
In some respects life at Mrs. Peyton's house was not satisfactory.
While the family could take their meals in their own rooms (the obliging
James Keating carrying the steaming dishes up from the kitchen), they
were forced to use the downstairs public parlor to entertain their neigh-
bors and callers. Julia and Margaret considered this a wonderful arrange-
ment. "There are quite a large number of gentlemen boarders/' Julia ex-
plained. But Juliana was not so sure. "Society here is a strange medley
when you come to analyze it," she informed her sons in New York.
"Many are introduced and called that we know nothing about except the
names and dare not ask lest exceptions should be taken to the question.
i So
In company yon must be as civil to one as another and dance with those
who ask first without respect to persons otherwise you will make enemies
enough. Pride must be laid aside as liberty and equality and true
democracy prevail and make no mistake." 21
Julia and Margaret were quite willing to lay aside as much pride as
the situation demanded. They enjoyed nightly whist games in the parlor
with their visitors and fellow boarders, and they enthusiastically joined
in the spontaneous Informal dances which developed when Mrs. Peyton
engaged a violinist for an evening's entertainment. "These little dances
are kept a profound secret so that none may go In but the boarders and
their friends/5 Julia reported. She found them "perfectly delightful" If
for no other reason than that "I had more than half the beaux In the
room surrounding me all the while." Occasionally Julia would produce
her guitar and sing. The common parlor thus provided excellent oppor-
tunities to see and be seen. Clear weather permitted casual promenades
on Pennsylvania Avenue and afforded still another means of social ex-
posure, as did regular appearances in the galleries of the House or
Senate. Senator Gardiner enjoyed the high-level political conversation in
the parlor with the "influential politicians" who resided at Peyton's,
particularly with Duff Green of South Carolina, formerly a prominent
Jacksonian, now a Tyler partisan.22
Nevertheless, from a purely social standpoint Mrs. Peyton's estab-
lishment was not adequate, especially after Julia's name was romanti-
cally linked with John Tyler's. The crush of callers became so great by
kte January 1843 that the Gardiners were obliged to engage an addi-
tional room which they used as a private parlor. This enabled the family
to return their social obligations with a bit more style. "We did not find
the public parlor as pleasant as we anticipated/7 Margaret finally ex-
plained to her brothers. "The ladles not as agreeable, the company not as
select!' The change also afforded the Senator some privacy. The addi-
tional room did not, however, solve the noise problem. The walls were so
thin at the boardinghouse that Julia and Margaret were "sometimes
regaled" with the activities and conversations of the gentlemen in the
adjoining rooms. While this unintentional eavesdropping undoubtedly
provided certain educational advantages for the girls, it was distract-
ing.23
Nor, after some contact, did the family find all the male boarders
at Peyton's socially eligible — or available. Maxwell Woodhill, a young
naval officer from New Jersey, owned property enough, but he was fright-
fully ugly and, more relevant, he was about to be married. "You cannot
conceive the horrors of his visage!" exclaimed Julia, writing him off as a
hopeless case. John Haines of South Carolina was a well-traveled young
man who played a good hand of whist, but Margaret's determination to
charm him by being "very insinuating" came to nought. He soon left
town, anyway. Too bad. He had been entertained in some of the best
181
castles in France and England and was, thought Juliana, "a perfect little
gentleman/' although he was small, asthmatic, and he sniffled. Colonel
Thomas Delage Sumter, on the other hand, was a Peyton resident all
the Gardiners liked instantly. His many services to them the season
before were gratefully remembered. The thirty-three-year-old West
Point graduate and South Carolina congressman was an obliging escort
on many occasions.24
Some of the young lady boarders at Peyton's were predatory and
otherwise ill-behaved by Juliana's puritanical lights. Ruth Woodbury,
daughter of Senator Levi Woodbury of New Hampshire, for example,
was jealous of the attention paid Julia and Margaret, and they in turn
thought her "not very refined." She attended rowdy parties at the homes
of various Locofoco Democrats, a political species well beneath the
contempt of the Gardiners, and she tried to "monopolize the beau [x] "
in the Peyton parlor. In addition, she had numerous gentleman callers,
so many that Julia and her sister "never knew who called to see us and
who the W[oodbury]s," The private-parlor arrangement finally solved
this dilemma.25
Refined or not, Miss Woodbury was not considered wanton by the
Gardiners. That dubious honor was accorded solely to Miss Sarah Low
of New York. She and her merchant father had rooms at Mrs. Peyton's
and when Low was called back to New York on business, often for sev-
eral weeks at a time, it was his practice to leave his daughter in the
charge and care of his friend, Representative Thomas Butler King of
Georgia. King, however, was soon observed to be "carrying on such a
desperate flirtation" with the lady that "very few gentlemen pay her
much attention." Since King had a wife and seven children at home,
and because Miss Low was of "low origin" (her father had once kept a
needle-and-thread shop in New York City), Juliana naturally assumed
the worst. The King-Low relationship raised a "great talk" in Washing-
ton, so great in fact that the Gardiners were determined to have "nothing
to do with her." More than that, they shunned anyone who maintained
social contact with the lowbrow Lows. Those who conformed to the
Gardiner boycott of the much-gossiped-about New Yorkers, like Colonel
Sumter, were thought to possess great "penetration in having a respect
and admiration for us and hatred of Miss Low." Even Mrs. Peyton
ultimately got revenge for the odium brought upon her establishment
by the Lows. She sharply overcharged them for their stay.26
The alleged indiscretions of Congressman King and the New York
belle were among the subjects discussed excitedly behind fans in the
galleries of the House and Senate. The Gardiner girls frequently at-
tended the congressional debates, not so much to listen to the death
rattles of the Tyler administration as to be seen and to exchange the
social patter of the day. Actually, there was not much worth hearing on
Capitol Hill. The lame-duck session of the Twenty-seventh Congress
182
was a dreary affair, devoid of political significance and interest. Never-
theless, Julia's visits to the Senate and House of Representatives were
mystifying experiences. "I was about as wise when the speaker finished
as to who voted upon either side as when he commenced," she com-
mented on one occasion. She was intrigued, however, by the appearance
and the forensic energy of John Quincy Adams and Henry A. Wise.
"They are unsparing in tender epithets," she remarked, "and I under-
stand nothing but the age of Mr. Adams prevents them at times coming
to blows on the floor. Mr. A [dams] has the reputation of professing
every sense but Common Sense and the persona! appearance of Mr. Wise
I think vastly unprepossessing." 2T
Margaret agreed that the debates were dull and the excited ex-
changes on the floor transparently contrived. She found only Caleb
Cushing to her liking. At forty- two , the tall, handsome congressman from
Massachusetts was "mild and agreeable/' with a voice "manly and
distinct." She was impressed that Cushing "does not allow himself to
become excited like Wise who looks as if he had one foot in the grave."
After she met Cushing socially, however , she decided he had a "hand-
some face but bad figure, and is very awkward in company." It sur-
prised her, therefore, to hear the rumor that the maladroit Mr. Cush-
ing was engaged to a Baltimore belle, "rich and thirty." When the rumor
proved false, Julia moved in herself for a casual flirtation with Cushing.
In return for singing him a song, she received a sonnet from him — "a
fair exchange," she termed it. She found him very personable and quite
brilliant, "the most studious member in the House . . . high on the road
to fame — a widower with no children." He would do. Not so Henry A.
Wise, the homely Virginian. While Margaret discovered that Wise was
"quite disposed to have a flirtation" his face was "as wrinkled as an old
man's of seventy and he looks as if he had actually worn himself out."
The thirty-six-year-old Wise was scarcely worn out. Twenty-two years
later he was energetically commanding the Confederate defenses at
Petersburg. He lived until 1876. Appearances could be deceiving.28
When the debates were not actually boring to the sisters, they were
incomprehensible. Julia had no luck whatever following the exchanges
on the resolution to repeal the Bankruptcy Act of 1842; and Margaret
had too little background in American history to make much sense of
the Senate debate on a motion to end the joint Anglo-American occupa-
tion of Oregon. She was impressed only with the fact that Senator
George McDuffie of South Carolina spoke humorously and eloquently on
the Oregon question while holding himself painfully upright at the side
of his chair "owing to his having received a ball in a duel which has
never been extracted." 29
To counteract their boredom and their ignorance of the political
issues of the day, Julia and Margaret chatted with congressmen who
circulated in the galleries while the debates dragged on below. Repre-
183
sentatives Cushing? Edmund W. Hubard of Virginia, Ira A. Eastman of
New Hampshire, Richard D. Davis of New York, and Francis Marion
Ward of New York frequently made their way to the side of the Gardiner
sisters to exchange pleasantries while "the orators of the day . . . jumped
and screamed and perspired and foamed and as usual made much ado
about nothing.'' If the lawmakers were too busy to pass the time of day
in gallery gossip. Purser Waldron could always be counted upon to pro-
duce an admiring coterie of young naval officers to surround and amuse
the ladies. For Julia and Margaret the House gallery became a virtual
reception parlor for their friends and acquaintances. It was a pleasant
place to pass a "delightful morning." The social advantages were obvious
even if they learned little about the American political process. When
Congress adjourned on the evening of March 3, 1843, and ladies were
admitted directly to the floor of the House for the first time in many
years, Julia and Margaret were conspicuously present. Taking seats near
that of their friend Representative Thomas F. Marshall of Kentucky,
the girls soon "had no less than twenty-one gentlemen" clustered
around them. These included Representative Francis W. Pickens of
South Carolina and Supreme Court Justice John McLean of Ohio, both
of whom were desperately in love with Julia at this time. In spite of the
romantic distractions Margaret reported that the "admittance of the
Ladies to the floor . . . kept the house in excellent order." 30
These occasional visits to the House and Senate gallery produced
great social dividends. Within a month of the Gar diners7 arrival in the
capital the Peyton parlor was filled with congressmen and senators who
came to flirt, dance, and play whist with the young ladies from East
Hampton. By December 16 the Washington correspondent of the New
York Herald could write of Julia, much to her delight, that
. . . the beautiful and accomplished Miss Gardner \_sic\ of Long Island, one
of the loveliest women in the United States, is in the city, and was the
"observed of all observers" during her promenade on the avenue today. She
had a very distinguished escort from the Capitol to her residence after the
adjournment, of members of the House, grave Senators not too old to feel
the power of youth and beauty, Judges, officers of the Army and Navy, all
vieing [sic] with each other to do homage to the influence of her charms.
This flattering notice produced a decided "sensation" among the fash-
ionables in New York City — or so brother David Lyon reported.31
In spite of her exposure to Washington's sophisticated political set,
Julia's political views remained naive and superficial. To be sure, Mad-
ame Chagaray's quaint curriculum had ill prepared her to wrestle with
the subtle intricacies of fiscal and foreign-policy legislation; but maneu-
verings of various hopefuls for the Presidential succession were not
subtle. Julia nonetheless exhibited nearly total ignorance of this phase
of the political life of the capital. Her candidate for the White House
184
in 1844 was Invariably the last aspirant she had spoken or danced
with. First it was Buchanan. After meeting Senator Ben ton at a Christ-
mas Eve party she came out enthusiastically for "Old Bullion.*' For a
brief week In mid-December she was for "Capt. Tyler." This endorse-
ment she soon shifted to the urbane John C. Calhoun. When Calhoun
heard JiiHa had "nominated17 him he was amused and flattered to the
extent of hurrying around to Peyton's to pay his respects to such a lovely
and politically perceptive lady.32
Richard Waldron agreed with Calhoun's analysis of Julia's charm-
ing qualities, but from motives indicating that he was In love with the
young woman from Long Island. He had squired her about town the
previous season, it will be recalled. She had enjoyed Ms company and
had appreciated Ms social usefulness. But that was as far as their rela-
tionsMp had gone. Waldron was a youth of twenty-three who had fol-
lowed the sea since the age of fourteen. In June 1837 he had been ap-
pointed midshipman In the United States Navy, and In January 1840 he
had been aboard the frigate Vincennes when she attempted to put an
exploring party ashore In Antarctica. He was a fine seaman and an
interesting person and he had a wealth of stories to tell. By December
1842 he had decided he would like to marry Julia and he launched a
serious romantic campaign to that end.
Waldron's whole approach, however, was boyish and unsopMsti-
cated. Perhaps he had been too long at sea. In any event, his endeavor
of the heart turned on introducing Julia to important and interesting
people In Washington. It was an attempt to overwhelm a small-town girl.
Among these notables was Prince TImoleo Haolllio of Hawaii — "Tim-
othy Hallelujah," Julia called Mm — who was briefly in the capital in
December 1842 for the purpose of alerting the Tyler administration to
the Machiavellian designs of the French on the Sandwich Islands. He
also discussed with Tyler the possibilities of Hawaiian annexation to the
United States. AccompaMed by a dour American missionary who served
as Ms interpreter, Prince HaoMHo was a unique visitor to the city and
he was much sought after socially. Waldron had met the Prince In the
islands wMle attached to the Wilkes Expedition, and it was quite a
coup for Mm to be able to bring "Hallelujah" to Peyton's parlor to meet
young Julia. She was Impressed. "His complexion is about as dark as a
negro,33 she reported, "but with Indian hair though at a distance being
short and tMck it seems the true wool. He was in an undress military
uniform and Ms manners were modest and graceful — quite the man of
the world in comparison with Ms Interpreter." 33
Continuing to employ the travelogue route to Julia's heart, Waldron
escorted her to the Patent Office to see the collection of curiosities
brought home by Captain Charles Wilkes. Again Julia was Impressed,
but Waldron's gesture was like that of a small boy showing a little girl
Ms pet caterpillar. "The scalp of the Fijee [sic] cannibal who was
brought to this country is there exhibited — his head must have been
three times the size of an ordinary man. A perfect Cyclops!" she ex-
claimed. Since Waldron had had an island in the Fiji group named for
Mm, he was understandably partial to this particular exhibit.
Somewhat more conventionally, Waldron danced with Julia at the
Peyton parlor informals? sent her flowers, dropped in for evening whist
games, escorted her to the Assembly balls, and made himself generally
useful to Julia's father in arranging his invitations to the White House.
"I 'opened the ball' with Mr. Waldron," Julia wrote of one of the small
dances at Peyton's. "Mr. W. has it in his power to be very useful. He
is intimately acquainted with all the people of influence here, particu-
larly with the President's family and the Websters."
Waldron was useful — and he was used. He was genuinely in love
with Julia, and it was unkind of her to say of him after her return to
East Hampton in March 1843 that he had been "very presuming"; that
his continued pursuit of her after her connection with Tyler had become
general knowledge was designed merely "to make himself of some im-
portance— nothing like the cunning of a New Hampshire Yankee!"
Waldron, it would seem, was never in serious contention, a fact it took
him some time to discover. Nevertheless, Juliana liked him and she
encouraged his attentions to Julia. At one point, in December 1842, she
was fairly certain that "an engagement" to Julia was in the offing.34
Less seriously in contention than Waldron was Representative
Richard D. Davis of Saratoga County, New York. "Old Davis," as Julia
dubbed him, was a creaky forty-three (Julia spoke of him as an "in-
vincible old bachelor of 50!") but still spry enough to follow her around
like a frisky bird dog. He pursued her relentlessly at the informal little
dances in Peyton's parlor. His attentions embarrassed Julia greatly,
although the other congressmen who attended the affairs laughingly en-
couraged Davis in his eager quest. "His deferential manner of approach-
ing me is the greatest source of amusement," Julia complained. "One
would think he was addressing a Goddess." Still, the practical Juliana
thought it would be a good idea to "make particular inquiries concern-
ing him as he has the reputation here of being very wealthy.'7 One had
to be sure of such things. Alexander was thus commissioned to run a
confidential Dun & Bradstreet on Richard D. Davis. While this was in
progress Representative Davis became the bane of Julia's existence. No
sooner would she take her seat in the House gallery than the homely
New Yorker would leave the floor and appear at her side. "I was bored
to death — by old Davis," she protested on one occasion. "I wish him
in Africa a hundred times." It became a joke among other congressmen
on the floor to see Davis scurry up to the gallery to talk to Julia when-
ever she attended the debates. One day when she appeared in the House
wearing a lavishly plumed hat, designed something on the order of a
frightened flamingo, Davis, as usual, departed his legislative station and
186
headed for the gallery. A few minutes later the ayes and nays were taken
on a minor bill. "Mr. Davis?" Intoned the teller. No answer. "Mr.
Davis?" he repeated. At this point all eyes turned to the gallery. There
was Davis chatting with Julia, her untamed hat nearly covering both of
them. £kMr. Speaker/' said Representative Roosevelt, "Mr. Davis has
gone to the gallery to study horticulture." This produced much merri-
ment in the chamber, and for Julia much embarrassment. Snubbing the
gentleman produced no relief from his unwanted attentions. As Margaret
explained the problem to her brothers:
On Wednesday evening we had a little dance in the Parlour, in which as
luck would have it (Davis said) he was a participator, and danced with
Julia and I \sic\ . She put Mm off three cotillions, but he very quietly waited.
We understand he says he cannot sleep at night from excess of love and
having inquired about our family, with a satisfactory result, intends popping
the question. The requisites are beauty, riches? youth, and family, in return
for which he offers a rabbit face, with one foot of shirt-collar, comical figure,
tu'o front teeth, and two hundred thousand dollars. I am sure it will kill you,
to witness Ms movements in the dance. He created a fund of merriment among
the gentlemen.
If Davis ever did "pop the question" the fact is not a matter of record.
It can be safely asserted, however, that Julia demanded more in a hus-
band than a rabbit face and two front teeth, even when the deal included
"two hundred thousand dollars." 35
Representative Francis W. Pickens did ask for Julia's hand. He was
a handsome, cultured, wealthy plantation owner from Edgefield, South
Carolina. At thirty-seven he was already a nationally prominent states7
rights legislator and a leader of the Calhoun faction in the House. His
principal drawback, as the Gardiners collectively assessed him, was that
he was a widower with four children. That Tyler was a widower with
seven children would later seem not quite so important. Whether Julia
seriously considered Pickens as a prospective husband cannot be deter-
mined with certainty. She did, however, skillfully use his love for her as
a lever in her courtship with John Tyler. She used Justice John McLean
in much the same manner. And she constantly pitted Pickens against
McLean and both of them against the President. It was the way these
things were (and still are) done.
Julia met the courtly South Carolinian at a reception at the Daniel
Websters7 on January 2, 1843. Introductions were performed by her
escort. Colonel Thomas Sumter, a friend and colleague of Pickens. On the
way back to Peyton's in Sumter's carriage they passed Pickens on
Pennsylvania Avenue.
"There goes Mr. Pickens/7 said Sumter, pointing him out.
"I see/7 Julia replied, "but I should not know him again. I am such
a miserable hand to recollect faces."
"Oh, but I just introduced him to you at Mrs. Webster's," protested
187
the Colonel. "You must remember him, for lie said one of the prettiest
things of you today I ever heard." 36
From then on, Julia remembered. Within a few days Pickens had
become one of the regular visitors at Mrs. Peyton's. By mid-February
the South Carolinian was reputed "dead in love with Julia." He certainly
missed none of the "whisto-musicales" sponsored by the Gardiners in
their chambers. These were informal evenings at cards which ended with
Julia playing her guitar and singing such ballads as "A Soldier's Tear'7
while the guests consumed great quantities of champagne, hot whiskey
punch, and raw oysters. By early March the perceptive Pickens realized
that he had a great deal of competition for Julia's hand and he pressed
his attentions on her more vigorously. Not only was there the formidable
challenge of the President of the United States, but there was also that
of Supreme Court Justice McLean. Pickens was " exceptionally jealous"
of McLean, Margaret reported ; and on one occasion when the two men
were monopolizing Julia, he "interrupted the conversation continually
for fear [McLean] might prove too entertaining." 3T
In spite of the competition, or because of it, Pickens pushed his suit
with great energy and determination. On March 4, the day after Con-
gress adjourned and just before his scheduled departure for South Caro-
lina, he proposed marriage to Julia. He had waited too long. By that
time Julia was involved with John Tyler, and she was still flirting con-
spicuously with Justice McLean. She politely but firmly declined the
offer. Margaret relayed the news of the Pickens proposal to her brother
Alexander with a rare economy of words: "Mr. P. has offered and been
rejected — of course. The particulars when we meet. Today we are going
to the Supreme Court, Julia to court in earnest. She is resolved to lay
siege to Judge MacClean [sic]."BB
Pickens did not give up so easily. After Julia had returned to East
Hampton in March, Pickens repeated his proposal, suggesting in a
lengthy and tender letter on May 8 that Julia come share his "southern
home where flourishes the pomegranate and orange, where luxury sur-
rounds, and reign Queen." He assured her that as mistress of Edgewood
plantation she would be waited upon and made happy by "ever so many
niggers and step-children." From the perspective of East Hampton it was
indeed .an attractive offer, and everyone hi the family gratuitously
voiced an opinion on it. "It's one of the best/' said Senator Gardiner
flatly. "Such an offer is not presented every day." Juliana was less en-
thusiastic: "I don't like his principles altogether or his three or four
children," she snorted. Brother David Lyon decided that "Distinguished
Southerners are more than common, and if it was not for his principles
and his children I should advise [acceptance] , but as the case stands it's
another affair." Margaret simply told Julia to "do just as you please."
And Julia did precisely what she pleased; she always did. She was still
not interested in Pickens' offer. She had a better one from John Tyler.
188
"What think I?'7 she asked her brothers. "Just nothing at all and think
about [It] as much." She finally wrote PIckens that while she would
"fain preserve" his valuable friendship, her own "friendly esteem" for
him would be considerably strengthened were he to "change the tone of
Ms consideration." She hoped this would prove "no difficult task" for
him, and that he would not "eradicate my Image entirely from [your]
mind." A later generation would call it a "Dear John" letter. In this
polite brush-off of PIckens she had Margaret's full approbation. Her
sister. It seemed, did "not exactly consider him a man of the world." 39
A fresh barrage of poetry-filled letters from Edgewood plantation
failed to change JuHa?s mind in the matter. Not that PIckens was much
of a poet:
Oh! come to the South,
The land of the sun;
And dwell in Its bower.
Sweet, beautiful one.
"He at least deserves the credit of being persevering," Margaret granted.
At length the poetic PIckens tired of his hopeless quest. By August 1843
Alexander was curious to learn if he "gives up the ghost, or only the pur-
suit— whether he makes further overtures or asks a return of missives —
whether he Is offended, determined or resigned." Three months later It
was clear that Pickens had graciously given up the ghost. He was neither
offended nor embittered. He was a South Carolina gentleman; as a
gentleman he was an affable loser In an affair of the heart. His relations
with the Gardiners remained cordial and friendly.40
Judge John McLean was also a good loser, although he had the ad-
vantage of his age (fifty-seven) as a rationalization when he too stepped
out of Julia's life. She in turn had never had more than a passing
interest in the distinguished Ohio Democrat who had served as Secretary
of War in Jackson's Cabinet. He was a charming and sophisticated man,
a perennial candidate for the Presidency, and he was naturally flattered
by the attentions of an attractive and sought-after woman of twenty-two.
She flirted with him outrageously during the 1842-1843 season and he
returned the courtesy. Actually, Julia was using McLean only to pique
and sustain the interest of Tyler and Pickens. She also flirted with
Supreme Court Justices Smith Thompson and Henry Baldwin, but of
the three jurists who were treated to her wiles only McLean "laughed
bewitchingly" back at her. Indeed, McLean was soon telling Baldwin
that were he "twenty-five years younger he'd cut the P [resident] out if
he could." 41
After Julia's return to East Hampton McLean tried to put into writ-
ing what he had ^apparently had difficulty putting into words in Wash-
ington. His first letter to Julia, containing "some tender traits if no open
avowal/' was read aloud around the family tea table and "made the
189
house resound with laughter." It titillated them all to learn that McLean
was "quite jealous of his rival the President/7 Julia's carefully phrased
response to Mm was less cruel than the tea-table hilarity. In his reply to
her, dated April 19, McLean sadly noted
If it were not sinful, I should rebel against the law of my species and ask,
why is it that a disparity of years makes so little change in the susceptibilities
of our nature. . . . To overcome this powerful tendency and follow the dictates
of a sober judgment all the firmness of the highest mental attitudes are re-
quired. Miss Julia saw something of this struggle at our last interview when
I signified to her the concern I felt at my being more than twenty five or
thirty years of age. For the first time in my life I desired to be young. This
I know was a selfish and a vain feeling, that I should not have indulged.
The temptation to the wrong, if it was a wrong, was so strong, indeed, so
overwhelming, that I could not resist it. Ah! Julia suffer me to say to you
that in my eyes you are the most fascinating and lovely creature that exists
on earth ... if I had it in my power to gain more than your friendship, which
I have never imagined, it would be improper in me to do so. I did not bring
myself to this conclusion without many wakeful and anxious hours of the
deepest feeling; and at last I yielded to the imperious conviction of propriety
which should never be disregarded. Were I only thirty years of age, there is
no being this side of heaven that could be so important to my happiness. In
ten years I shall be quite an old gentleman while Miss Julia will be still
rising in the beauty and bloom of her nature. I have therefore on the fullest
consideration made it the greatest sacrifice of feeling to principle in coming
to the above conclusion that I have ever done. Miss Julia will not suppose
that I have for a moment been vain enough to believe that however recent
my aspiration for her affections might have been, I could have succeeded.
Such a calculation did not enter into my mind or influence my decision. I
could not under the circumstances have been so presumptuous. After saying
this much in the utmost frankness, Miss Julia will suffer me to say that I
am. solicitous to be numbered among her best friends — nay will she not give
me in this pre-eminence To be remembered kindly by one who stands
pre-eminent among the most intelligent, elegant and beautiful young ladies
of the age cannot but be highly appreciated
Julia was deeply touched by McLean's kind and pensive remarks: "A
more beautiful letter, more honorable for himself or more flattering to
me could not have been written, as all acknowledge — it was great
throughout." A century and a quarter later it was still among her papers,
carefully preserved.42
A month later news reached East Hampton via the New York
Express that McLean had suddenly married. Julia thought the idea
terribly amusing, especially since her consolatory answer to McLean's
tender missive of withdrawal must have reached the Justice within a few
days after his wedding to the widow Sarah Bella Garrard. "Ah! Alexan-
der, and now who do you think is married — yes, married. . . . Hymen's
torch is consumed and I have dropt an hysterical tear on its ashes . . .
it is Judge McLean!!! He has married a widow and I conclude a rich
190
one. . . . Three days a bridegroom and he must have received my reply.
. . . What was his expression when he recognized the handwriting! Oh,
what wouldn't I have given to have witnessed it at such a time — do you
think he let his wife read It?" 43
To Julia It was very humorous. Indeed, her rather callous flirtation
with the aging McLean revealed her one of Eve's truly extroverted
daughters. She tripped lightly through her young life leaving behind a
trail of broken hearts — aged twenty-three to fifty-seven. She was a great
belle In an era of great American belles. Her conquests were legion.
The fields of romantic combat on which she jousted were strewn with the
bodies of old men and boys. McLean was merely another notch on her
parasol handle. At every ball she attended In Washington she was a sen-
sation, her presence immediately felt. Her appearance, dress, and popu-
larity, combined with her wealth and social background, made her the
marriage catch of the season. She represented a challenge John Tyler
could scarcely resist.
Paced by their home-grown Aphrodite, the entire Gardiner family
made a decided Impression on the capital. Dress was vitally Important in
this effort and no economy was practiced by the Senator when It carne to
clothing the Gardiner women for their ostentatious sallies into society.
"Jfulia] and I with Ma and Pa went to the Assembly/' Margaret wrote
of the ball of January 12. "J. was dressed In white with her Greek
[headdress]. Ma In velvet with white toke and I in white with silver
ornaments. I never saw a more perfect display of taste, rich dresses and
beauty . . . the company was unusually select.77 When Alexander came
down from New York for the fourth and final Assembly ball of the
season on February 27, he was first given detailed instructions on how
he should clothe himself. It was important also that reigning belles not
be seen at social functions sponsored by those of dubious social or politi-
cal background. For this reason the Gardiners would attend no parties
given by such Locofoco Democrats as editor F. P. Blair; nor would they
risk being linked with the likes of the controversial and celebrated Peggy
Eaton. "We shall not attend Mrs. Eaton's ball until we hear a favorable
account of her standing here. Previously to her residence ... it was not
very fair." 44
Instead, they limited themselves to the subscription Assembly balls
— Julia and Margaret were escorted to these sparkling affairs by ac-
ceptable Army and Navy officers, congressmen, and diplomats — and to
private dances and receptions at the homes of the Websters, Upshurs,
and Wickliffes. At the more exclusive private functions the young
Gardiner ladies were accompanied by or received the flattering atten-
tions of Robert Tyler and John Tyler, Jr. Frequent invitations to the
White House rounded out the pattern of their social life in the capital
during the early months of i843-45
This rarefied social atmosphere produced in Juliana no feeling that
191
Washington society was In any way superior to New York society. "The
society here is quite provincial," she confided to Alexander, "tho' ... I
think it is perhaps the best place for young ladies who wish to mingle in
the gaieties of the new coast." Matchmaking aside, she was amazed that
people with no social background in New York could make such a splash
in Washington because of their political importance back home. There
was, for example, Silas M. Stilwell, the United States Marshal in New
York City, much sought after when he visited the capital, who "kept but
a few years since a shoe store in the Bowery." It distressed her to pass
New York acquaintances on Pennsylvania Avenue and discover that the
women they were with were not their wives. And it angered her that a
lady of the quality of Mrs. Charles Stewart, wife of the famous Com-
modore, would attempt in Washington what would never have been
undertaken by any fashionable person in New York — the use of teatime
in her parlor to negotiate a loan for five hundred dollars from David
Gardiner. There was a provincial streak in Washington to which Juliana
never really adjusted. "I don't think I should like Washington as a resi-
dence," Margaret agreed. "It's very well for a winter or so but wonder-
fully provincial." *6
The least provincial features of the capital were the White House and
the Tylers. Within a week of the Gardiners' arrival in Washington John
Tyler, Jr., had called at Peyton's to pay his respects to the much-talked-
about Gardiner ladies. Two days later, December 15, Waldron escorted
the Senator to the President's Mansion for an interview. The President
was busy that day, but Gardiner spoke with John, Jr., who urged him to
return the following afternoon and greet the President. When he re-
turned he found the President looking "very unwell." But their chat was
a pleasant one, and Tyler invited the Gardiner family to take dinner at
the White House on Christmas Eve. Accompanied by Representative
and Mrs. Robert McClellan of New York, Purser Richard Waldron, and
Colonel Thomas Sumter, the family was received in the "most modest,
affable, unassuming manner." Julia found John, Jr., to be "quite hand-
some and distingue in his person — and ah! how interestingly sentimental
was his conversation. He laid quite a siege to my heart." So intensely did
young John flirt with Julia that he quite forgot to mention to her that he
was married. The fact that he had lived with Mattie Rochelle only a few
months after their marriage in 1839, and had since tried to arrange a
divorce was, however, common gossip in Washington which Julia had
already heard. She was not swept away by his performance. He was soon
bombarding her with bad poetry ("I excuse all bad poetry where I am
the subject," Julia allowed) and sending the Gardiners "very handsome
French confectionaries" from the White House kitchen. Julia was still
cautious. On the other hand, she found Priscilla Cooper Tyler "pretty
and interesting" and Mrs. William Tyler, the President's sister-in-law,
192
"a little country looking." So many various Tylers seemed to be present
that Christmas Eve that Waldron guessed "there [are] some fifty coun-
try cousins 'come to town' to spend holidays with their great relations
and [are] . . . stowed away in some of the closets to await New Year's."
Entertaining Ms numerous "'country cousins73 at the White House was
another expense John Tyler bore uncomplainingly.47
The Christmas Eve dinner went very well. Three days later Robert
and Priscilla Tyler called on the Gardiners at Peyton's, and the Senator,
thanks to the manipulation of John, Jr.? was signally honored by an in-
vitation to another White House dinner. At this affair the President
made a special effort to flatter him. On New Year's Day the family "at-
tracted universal attention'3 at St. John's Episcopal Church. Like most
good and fashionable Episcopa!ians? they arrived at the church after the
services had begun. Looking for an unoccupied pew, they were "perfectly
astonished" to see the President rise from his seat, bow several times?
move into the aisle, and graciously usher them into his own pew. "Even
the minister stopped Ms proceedings and lost his place," so great was the
general astonishment. Unfortunately, Julia was not present for this
coup, being confined to her room with a bad cold. Margaret was certain
that the affair had created "bitter envy among our young lady boarders,"
and for this she was extremely grateful.48
Julia recovered her health quickly. On January 2, 1843, she was well
enough to attend the public levee at the White House. After a great
effort to get herself "sufficiently festooned" for the occasion, she sallied
forth on the arm of Colonel Sumter, he "sumptuously equipped —
whiskers brushed to a turn — [in] a dashing vest of black velvet." The
rooms were jammed. It required a full hour before she and the Colonel
could make their way into "the presence of his majesty.75 As the moment
of truth approached, Julia worried to Sumter that "He surely will not
recognize me, you know I have seen him but once in the evening and
then with a different hat." But Tyler did remember her, and he reached
over several shoulders to grasp her hand. "I hope you are very well/' he
said warmly. Julia was highly flattered, and as she moved on to chat
with Calhoun and Lewis Cass the climax of the evening had already
passed for her. She took no offense when Ambassador Bodisco, "the old
representative of all the Russias, scanned me from head to foot with the
eye of a conneissuer [sic] ." The ambassador's reaction to her appear-
ance she never learned. Margaret could only hear Bodisco say, as Julia
passed him, "She has nice teeth, but " Remarks like this apparently
worry women, and Julia worried.49
She need not have. The Gardiners had arrived, been seen, and had
conquered. Family calls at the White House and return calls at Peyton's
by Robert and John, Jr., became regular events. By kte January the
two families had become so intimate that Juliana had to warn Alexander
that his appearance in town at that moment would only be construed as
193
a crude "pursuit of office." And Robert paid so much attention to
Margaret at the Wickliffe ball on January 31 that a dozen young men
crowded forward seeking introductions to the popular sisters, apologiz-
ing profusely for not having called upon them earlier. "The influence
of power was very apparent," remarked Juliana, who was at last con-
vinced that the Tylers measured up socially. "We all like the Tylers/'
she confessed to her son David. "They are noble in their mien and
possess much genius and gallantry. They are superior to political trick-
ery, and I sincerely hope John Tyler will be re-elected President." 50
Robert Tyler was a particular favorite of Julia and Margaret. Dur-
ing February he became a fixture at the Gardiner whisto-musicales. He
played whist indifferently enough to permit the sisters to win numerous
pairs of gloves from him, and he invariably brought along his latest poem
to read to Margaret. She in turn listened and frankly gave her opinion of
his efforts. He was a competent poet in the incompetent Victorian man-
ner. Much of his work turned on somber death themes. As he read to
Margaret and Julia from his Death; Or, Medorus' Dream, which
Harper's published the following month, he consumed whiskey punch
and oysters in great quantity. The next morning he complained of what
he delicately described as a "nervous headache." Margaret found Robert
"not handsome." He possessed, however, a "pleasant countenance" and
his manner was "subtly amiable and agreeable." When Robert appeared
in the Gardiner parlors on February 6 to read from his recently pub-
lished Ahasuerus. A Poem, Margaret made the same political decision
her mother had made a week earlier. She too "adopted the Tyler ban-
ners" for i844.51
So it was that when the Gardmers went to the White House on the
all-important evening of February 7, 1843, the political tide in the family
was running strong for the President. It was a small gathering of
thirteen. Quite mixed socially, the group was dominated by New York
politicians chosen, thought Margaret, "from the unavoidables , from
politicals.33 Only the James I. Roosevelts and the Gardiners were invited,
she felt, from "congenial motives." Also present that evening were
Robert and Priscilla and Priscilla's father, Tom Cooper. The Red Room
of the White House was ice-cold and the sisters had all they could do to
maintain circulation in their fingers. Two tables of whist were organized,
but the frigid air made it difficult to hold the cards. Tyler finally came in
at nine-thirty to chat with his guests. He was in an exceedingly good
mood. First he teased Margaret to tell Mm how many beaux she had.
When she coyly demurred, he jestingly demanded an official answer
in the name of "the President of the United States." Margaret replied
that she had "a dozen or more," but that Julia had even more than that.
Turning to Julia, the President began teasing her about her numerous
beaux. Then he asked her to play cards with him. Just the two of them.
"He had quite a flirtation with J[ulia]," Margaret reported, "and played
194
several games of All fours with her." The sight of this easy familiarity
on the part of the graying President toward the twenty-two-year-old
Julia was too much for the worldly Thomas Cooper. uDo see the Presi-
dent playing old sledge with Miss Gardiner/7 he exclaimed. "It will be in
the Globe tomorrow." It did not appear In the Washington Globe or any
other newspaper. Perhaps it should have. The resulting humanizatlon of
John Tyler might well have commanded the votes of all those humble
citizens who enjoyed a good fast game of old sledge.52
After the other guests had departed the Gardiners were invited into
the warmth of the President's chambers upstairs. For several hours they
sat and chatted In front of the fire. It was at this moment that John
Tyler decided he wanted to know Julia Gardiner much better. Late that
night, as the family was talking leave of the courtly President, "What
does he do but give me a kiss" Margaret wrote excitedly.
He was proceeding to treat Julia in the same manner when she snatched
away her hand and flew down the stairs with the President after her around
chairs and tables until at last he caught her. It was truly amusing. Putting
the cold out of the question we had a delightful evening — the President
escorting us quite to the carriage, and Mr. [Robert] Tyler promising to call
today and read to us Ms new poem 53
It had been very amusing. More importantly ; it marked the begin-
ning of still another serious courtship for Julia. Waldron, Pickens, Mc-
Lean— now Tyler. The social life of tie Gardiner sisters was moving into
high gear. In fact, the young ladies began to experience real fatigue. By
mid-February their father worried about their ability to maintain the
killing pace. "We were out four evenings last week and up until after
one o'clock every night this/' Margaret reported. "Every day and every
evening Is occupied in these gay scenes/' the Senator wrote Alexander.
"I think your sisters when the spring passes will not object to the quiet-
ness of our summer residence." The girls were of different mind. They
had no doubt of their ability to cope with their demanding social calen-
dar and the thought of returning to sleepy little East Hampton was not
a congenial one. The morning after the "All fours" party at the White
House they began imploring their father to let them remain on for a
while in Washington after Congress adjourned on March 3 and the social
season more or less ended. Meanwhile, to prepare themselves for each
evening's new tax on their energy they adopted the simple device of
staying longer and longer abed in the morning.54
Tyler was fascinated by Julia and he pushed his suit as relentlessly
as was proper for a widower of five months. He was a lonely man after
Letitia7s death, and he responded eagerly to the sparkle and excitement
of the winsome Julia, On Sunday, February 12, he walked the Gardiners
home from church, the first time he had appeared publicly on the Avenue
with them. This courtesy naturally caused a great deal of speculation and
195
gossip. "Many jokes are already being passed around about our being
in such favor at the White House/7 Juliana informed Alexander. "The
President is a fine man," she continued, "amiable and agreeable and
independent. He has been shamefully abused by those not to be com-
pared with himself in any respect. You must be a Tyler man as I believe
his measures are wise." 55
Whether his measures were wise or not, the President had come to
the conclusion in mid-February that he wanted to marry Julia Gardiner.
To court her properly he was forced to contrive various stratagems to be
with her — meetings that would occasion a minimum amount of gossip.
Thus he insisted that the sisters stop at the White House en route to
the Webster ball on February 13 that he might see their new dresses. He
was still in mourning for Letitia and thus was not yet going out socially
himself. When they arrived that evening for inspection the President,
in Margaret's words, "admired our dresses and passed innumerable com-
pliments. He was extremely affectionately inclined — Julia declared he
was rather too tender for he gave her three kisses while I received only
two. In truth we did look very well for our dresses were entirely new for
the occasion.'7 56
On the evening of the Washington's Birthday ball at the White
House, February 22, 1843, Tyler could contain himself no longer. Julia
was dressed in a white tarlatan and on her head she wore a crimson
Greek cap with a dangling tassel. She was radiant. The President spied
her dancing with Waldron. When the music stopped the young naval
officer was on the verge of leaving the floor with his partner when the
President suddenly appeared at his side. "I must claim Miss Gardiner's
company for a while/' he said, drawing Julia's arm through his own.
Waldron gave his Commander-in-Chief a black look, but wisely gave no
-voice to his injured feelings. For a few minutes the President and Julia
promenaded the rooms. Then John Tyler asked her straight out to
marry him. "I had never thought of love," Julia recalled years later, "so
I said, 'No, no, no/ and shook my head with each word> which flung the
tassel of my Greek cap into his face with every move. It was undignified,
but it amused me very much to see his expression as he tried to make love
to me and the tassel brushed his face." Julia was probably not as sur-
prised by the President's declaration as she later remembered. In any
event, she decided not to tell her father about Tyler's proposal. "I was
his pet/' she explained, "yet I feared that he would blame me for allow-
ing the President to have reached the proposing point, so I did not speak
of it to anyone." 57
It was impossible, of course, to halt the rapidly mounting gossip
however close-mouthed Julia chose to be about Tyler's address. Robert
Tyler called so frequently at Peyton's, relaying messages and invitations
from his father, that the boarders there began buzzing that the Presi-
dent was "doing business by proxy." Representative Hubard had in-
196
formed Hie family on February 15 that the House was ain an uproar all
day In consequence of news having reached there of the President's
having fallen in love with Julia.'7 And as the rumors spread, old New
York friends eased forward in hope of using the growing Gardiner in-
fluence at the White House for political purposes. Ogden Edwards of
New York, for example, insisted that the Gardiners help him gain ap-
pointment as a bearer of diplomatic dispatches to Mexico, a thought the
family found "provoking." J. J, Bailey was ready "to fill any office,
where I may enjoy a great deal of dignity and honor, with plenty of
money and nothing on Earth to do." To the wry amusement of East
Hamptonians and the mild embarrassment of the family, distant
Gardiner cousins from Long Island suddenly appeared in Washington
to share the limelight.58
From the family's standpoint, if anyone was to benefit politically
from the Tyler connection it was to be young Alexander. There was no
substance to rumors in Washington that David Gardiner was interested
in the Collectorship of the Port of New York for himself. He did, how-
ever, push Alexander forward and his son was not reluctant. Urged also
by his mother to be "a Tyler man," Alexander wasted no time. On Feb-
ruary 15 the New York Post carried his anonymous letter to the editor
praising the Tyler administration. Two copies were clipped and sent to
Senator Gardiner in Washington, who in turn gave one to Robert Tyler.
Robert had already received a copy of the article from John Lorimer
Graham, Postmaster of the City of New York. He had shown it to Tyler
and the President had ordered it reprinted in the Washington Madhonian
of February 17. When he discovered that Alexander Gardiner was the
author of the piece he was "surprised and gratified" and remarked that
it was written by one "who understands the course of politics well,7' The
time had finally come, thought David Gardiner, for his son to come to
Washington. Alexander arrived on February 24, in time for the last
Assembly ball three days later. He immediately began making himself
known to the key figures in the Tyler administration.59
He accompanied Ms parents and sisters to the White House for tea
en famille on the twenty-fifth and witnessed in amusement what Mar-
garet called "a real frolic with the P [resident]":
Julia and I raced from one end of the house to the other, upstairs and down,
and he after us. Waltzed and danced in the famous East Room, played the
piano, ransacked every room and in fact made ourselves as much at home as
the occupants. At half past seven we went to the concert and prevailed upon
the P [resident] to accompany us It was the first time he had been out
this winter, and to be seen gallanting Julia was a matter of great specula-
tion we were seated in the most conspicuous part of the room with the
eyes of all directed to us.60
Tyler had wisely decided to drop all pretense and subterfuge. He
would be seen publicly with Julia regardless of the gossipmongers. By
197
March 8 rumors that he and Julia were engaged swept Washington, and
the subject was being openly discussed, even in Tyler's presence. Both
Pickens and McLean were frantic to learn the truth of the matter. Ac-
tually, the reports were premature. While his ultimate intentions were
known to Julia, they were not yet public property. They soon entered
that realm, however, or very near it. On March 8 Tyler penned a verse
in Julia's autograph album which rhetorically asked :
Shall I again that Harp unstring,
Which long hath been a useless thing,
Unheard in Lady's bower?
Its notes were once full wild and free,
When I3 to one as fair as thee,
Did sing in youth's bright hours.
Like to those raven tresses, gay,
Which o'er thy ivory shoulders play,
Were those which waked my lyre.
Eyes like to thine, which beamed as bright
As stars, that through the veil of night,
Sent forth a brirny fire.
I seize the Harp; alas! in vain,
I try to wake those notes again,
Which it breathed forth of yore.
With youth its sound has died away:
Old age hath touched it with decay;
It will be heard no more!
Yet. at my touch, that ancient lyre
Deigns one parting note respire.
Lady, it breathes of heaven
The secret might still have been kept had not Julia foolishly (or pur-
posely) permitted Supreme Court Justice Baldwin to carry her auto-
graph album (and the President's poem) to Capitol Hill. She wanted to
add a few more important autographs before the Justices and legislators
left town for the summer recess. Knowledge of the President's romantic
exercise in iambic tetrameter thus spread quickly around Washington.
McLean read it, wrote in the album a "few prozy lines" of his own, and
fervently wished he were thirty again. "The Judges have resolved to put
their heads together next winter and try to outdo the P [resident] in
writing poetry. It is not amusing," snapped Margaret.61
During the first two weeks of March Congress adjourned, the social
season ended, and the capital took on a "deserted air, quite melancholy. "
Robert Tyler departed to the South with Priscilla, and a thoroughly
fatigued David Gardiner, longing for the peace and quiet of East Hamp-
ton, said he felt like the "last man." Even Margaret began to "think of
the north." But on March 15 Tyler again spoke of marriage to Julia,
this time in Margaret's presence. Julia's proposal from the President
198
could no longer be kept secret from her parents. At last they were told.
They were extremely pleased with the news and they determined to linger
on In the deserted capital until some definite understanding had been
reached between Julia and the President. Plans to leave Washington on
March 17 were set aside, and the family did not actually depart for
East Hampton until March 2j®2
On the afternoon of March 15 the President conducted Julia and
Margaret to King's Gallery to view the paintings and other objets (Tart.
Driving back to Peyton's in the Presidential carriage an enboldened
Tyler
. . . began to talk of resigning the Presidential chair or at least sharing it with
J[uKa]. J[uUa], to excite Ms jealousy, whispered that he must drink to the
health of Judge McLean. It had the desired effect, and made Mm as uneasy
as you please — but the drollest part is to come. On reacMng Mrs. Peytons the
P [resident] alighted to help us out and just at that moment the door opened
and out came Col. S[umter]? Mr. Stevens and another gentleman. The
P [resident] colored up to Ms eyes. They looked astonished and bemused.
Scarcely waiting to say good bye in he jumped and Md himself behind the
curtain, and when we turned to give a parting nod not even his shadow was
to be seen. To cap it all, who should call this afternoon but Judge McL [ean] !
to invite us to accompany Mm to the self same picture gallery! We told Mm
the P [resident] had anticipated him; nevertheless we said we would go and
now what do you think the P [resident] will say when he hears of it? 63
Just what the jealous President did say of McLean's continuing
pursuit of Julia is not known. There is, however, evidence that before
the family's departure for Long Island on March 27, Tyler again pro-
posed marriage to Julia and suggested to her that the wedding take place
before the beginning of the next social season in Washington — probably
in November 1843. ^ is definitely known that Juliana blocked this pro-
posed schedule of events. She insisted that her daughter wait a few more
months to make sure of her feeling for the President, and in this advice
Julia reluctantly concurred. In any event, the family returned to East
Hampton secure in the knowledge that an informal "understanding" had
been reached between Julia and the President of the United States. The
only remaining question was the exact date of the wedding. The season
had obviously been a great success. "When I think of all that has oc-
curred/' wrote Margaret, "... I feel highly gratified with the attention
we have received. We have certainly great inducement to return." 64
Margaret had had nowhere near the good romantic fortune of the
more extroverted Julia. Her most constant companion in Washington
was Robert Tyler. He was happily married, although he did from time
to time during the summer of 1843 write her mildly flirtatious letters to
buoy her spirits. While she was definitely on the prowl for a husband,
none of Margaret's "insinuations" in Washington bore fruit. It was her
bad luck to get stuck at dances with highly ineligible men like Senator
199
Ambrose H. Sevier of Arkansas, or be pursued by the likes of a Mr.
Marsh of New York who had "light hair and lisps," or a Mr. Fry of
New York who was a "decided bore." Her flirtations with eligible
widowers and bachelors like Henry A. Wise, Caleb Gushing, and Colonel
Thomas Sumter led nowhere. There was, briefly, a Mr. May of Boston,
"tall, with a splendid figure and handsome face," but after one or two
calls at Peyton's he stopped coming. It was Margaret Gardiner's great
misfortune in life to be hidden in the shadow of the effulgent Julia.65
The Gardiners arrived back In East Hampton on March 30 to find
the little village agog with speculation about Julia's romantic triumph in
Washington. Rumors linking the local beauty with the President of the
United States circulated everywhere. Parson S. R. Ely's wife was so
impressed with Julia's new status she was literally rendered speechless;
and Mrs. Dayton told Margaret "it was generally believed around town
that Julia was to be mistress of the White House next winter and that
she had heard of it a half a dozen times during the last fortnight.77 To
Julia's delight the same speculations also made the rounds of the fash-
ionable set in New York City.66
It was rumored too that the President and his family would visit
East Hampton during the summer of 1843. In these reports there was
some truth. The Gardiners had invited Priscilla and Robert to visit them
after Priscilla's return from Alabama in June. Priscilla accepted the in-
vitation, but the Gardiners rather hoped the proposed visit would not
occur. Julia had also invited the President and his daughter, Mary Tyler
Jones, to stop in East Hampton when the Chief Executive came north
in June en route to the dedication of the Bunker Hill monument in
Boston. She promised him "pure air with sea bathing that can not fail
to invigorate." In extending the invitation she was fairly certain that the
ailing Mary would feel too weak to make the trip, and that once in New
York City Tyler would not be able "to break from his friends.77 As it
turned out, none of the Tylers made an appearance in the hamlet that
summer, much to the disappointment of the townspeople. Of the Gardi-
ners, only Alexander saw the President when he passed through New
York on his way to Boston.67
Tyler's love letters to Julia that summer were read aloud to the
whole family and then sent "for perusal" to David Lyon and Alexander
in the city. In these, the President spoke of Julia as his "fairy girl." All
of his communications were filled with romantic sentiments, said Julia,
about "setting suns, stars peeping from behind their veils, the soul,
music and memories, my raven tresses, brightest roses, gay morning of
life, summit of the hill of life, his feet directed to its base, view of the
setting sun, and James River from his house . . . etc.77 He spoke too of the
"faery spell" Julia had left behind her in Washington and of his "dreamy
anticipation" of her letters to him. He still worried about Pickens and
200
the dogged efforts of the South Carolinian to "transplant the fair rose of
East Hampton to that sunny clime.7" As for himself, the President felt
that a summer of quiet repose at Sherwood Forest would "compensate in
some degree for the abuse I have met with at the hands of vile politi-
cians." These declarations of his love raised Julia's spirits considerably.
"We drank his health In a glass of champagne today at dinner," Mar-
garet reported. £%We don't often indulge in such luxuries but were testing
It." 6S
Knowledge of Julia's correspondence with Tyler soon spread
through East Hampton, the hangers-on at the post office keeping a care-
ful check on the number of letters flowing between East Hampton and
Sherwood Forest. u Yesterday evening I sent off a letter of 5 pages to
the President,'7 Julia Informed Alexander In early April. ^They have had
all today at the taverns to talk about It. I am curious to know the sur-
mises." There was natural!}' much local speculation about her plans. She
was amused to learn, for instance, that rumor In New York City and
Washington had it that she had accepted an offer of marriage from Tyler
but only on the condition that he be re-elected in 1844. Her part of the
bargain, so the story went, would be to campaign for Tyler at Saratoga
and in other of the fashionable watering places In the North where her
specific job would be to "win hearts" and *£ga!n popularity" for the
President. At the same time, two Tylerite politicians in New York,
Mordecai M. Noah and Collector of the Port Edward Curtis, together
with all the New York Customs House officials, would invade the South
to "drum up recruits there. JJ 69
As Julia moved closer to the bosom of the Tyler family she began
to take an increasing interest in the administration's political problems
and activities. She was stunned, for example, to learn that Robert Tyler
was instrumental in the appointment of one Jeremiah Miller to a clerk-
ship in the New York City Post Office. She knew the gentleman as "that
dissipated Jerry Miller," and she was certain he was dishonest. "What
a nice opportunity he will have to pocket a few thousands if any of the
letters feel particularly heavy," she protested to Alexander. Juliana was
more tolerant of such appointments than her daughter, understanding
somewhat better the difficulties Tyler was experiencing in launching his
third party. By her pragmatic standards all the President's appointments
were "great appointments!' Julia finally saw the logic in patronage. And,
since ripe political plums were being handed out by John Tyler, it was
her speedy reasoning that Alexander might as well have one of them.
"Why won't you write another piece for Capt. Ty.?" she suggested to
her ambitious brother. "It would not be trying very hard for a Secretary-
ship." Alexander accepted her sensible suggestion and within a few days
was hard at work on another pro-Tyler piece which predictably began:
"The Administration of John Tyler is destined to be one of the most
remarkable hi the civil history of this government " Etc.70
201
The summer of 1843 sped swiftly by. The law business engaged in
by Alexander and (occasionally) David Lyon picked up enough to give
promise of becoming self-sustaining. This relieved their father of the
necessity of paying the office rent. For a moment it even appeared that
Cousin John Gardiner, the wild man of the clan, was going to mend his
ways. A touring temperance lecturer sailed out to Gardiners Island and
persuaded him to sign "The Pledge," but John's reform lasted only a few
sober days. "He is a hopeless case/' sighed Margaret. James Keating,
the family servant in Washington, had to be discharged for forgetting his
proper station in life once the Gardiners had returned home. A new
Irish maid was engaged in New York and brought out to East Hampton
after being assured there were "no wild beasts about.7' 71
The sisters spent the summer preparing their already extensive
wardrobes for an August trip to Saratoga and for their return to Wash-
ington in the winter. A torrent of letters were poured forth to Alexander
in the city instructing him to buy this, buy that, and return the other.
So many purchasing commissions were piled upon him that his mother
began fearing for his physical ability to execute them all. "Do not run
about the city in the heat/' she advised him. "Hire a cab to do your
business." When not bothering Alexander with cloth, lace, dress, and
shoe commissions, the sisters bothered their father about moving into
New York. They insisted that he follow through on his earlier intention
to buy or lease a house in town. As Gardiner carefully negotiated for a
property on Lafayette Place, the girls urged more speed in the matter
and complained that the Senator would not let them exercise a vote on
the question. Not until November 1843 was it finally settled — a lease for
$1000 per year. Late that month the peripatetic family moved into the
house at 43 Lafayette Place.72
Julia was not nearly so interested now in the attractions of a town
house in New York as she had been before her conquest of Washington
and the White House:
I can now only judge from past experience [she wrote]. Place three winters
in New York and one at Washington in the balance and which will weigh
heaviest with agreeability? Whoever spent a more brilliant winter in W. —
brilliant in the first degree — than we? And next winter promises to be even
more so. The White House will be constantly thrown open — a new set of
members — and a long session. . . . New York contains the most abominable
set of people of any city in the world! Though I would not tell them so,
there are several exceptions. We'll see what Saratoga will bring forth.73
Saratoga brought forth very little. The family stayed at the Tre-
mont. There were the usual fancy-dress balls, the games of tenpins on
the lawns, and the interminable gossip on the verandas. Julia made her
usual stunning impression, and Tyler wrote to say he had heard in
faraway Virginia that she was the "observed of all observers" there.
There was, of course, some pleasure in discovering at Saratoga that the
202
Gardiner connection with the Tylers was beginning to excite increasing
envy among the elite families of New York. But the vacation was
clouded when the Gardiner family learned of the attempt on the life of
their good friend , Postmaster General Charles A. Wickliffe. The would-
be assassin was J. McLean Gardner, an unstable young man who had
read law in the same office with Alexander in Xew York in 1841-1842
and whom the Gardiners again had seen briefly in Washington the pre-
ceding winter. Wickliffe sustained a minor knife wound in an attempt
to protect the person of his daughter Mary, who was with Mm at the
time. While both Alexander and David Lyon were certain that the
thwarted assassin was an attention-seeking mental case, the episode was
no less distressing. Equally upsetting was the fact that the Saratoga
jaunt produced no husband for Margaret. "The harvest is finished, the
summer ended? and we not married!" she complained.74
No sooner was the summer over than the President began urging
the Gardiner sisters to return again to Washington. "Are you coming to
Washington this winter?'7 he implored Julia. "I am selfish in desiring
that you should, as I wish my levees attended by the fairest forms from
all parts of the country and who [are] brighter and fairer than you and
Margaret? Do you not make a curtsy for that?" Julia replied that there
would be a considerable delay in their leaving for Washington occasioned
by the projected move of the family from East Hampton to Lafayette
Place, but that they did hope to reach the capital by mid-February at
the latest. The Washington visit would be followed by another Grand
Tour of the Continent, preliminary plans for which the Senator had
already made. To raise the necessary cash for these ventures and other
expenses he negotiated mortgage loans on several of his wife's New York
properties for $68oo.75
The Senator and his excited daughters reached Washington once
again on February 24, 1844. As usual, Alexander and David Lyon re-
mained in New York to attend to their law business. Juliana also re-
mained behind. A series of painful migraine headaches had plagued her
throughout the winter. She was not feeling at all well. For Julia and
Margaret a vigorous social schedule began immediately. On the twenty-
seventh they attended a public levee in the East Room of the White
House at which they danced and flirted with their acquaintances of the
previous seasons.
The President was in a particularly fine mood that evening, "Ms
thin long figure and prominent proboscis were everywhere amid the
throng wheeling in ready obedience to the slightest pull of his coat-tail."
As he watched his beloved Julia swirl across the floor with her many at-
tentive partners he felt mellow and satisfied, for a moment almost
democratic. His political future looked brighter than it had for months.
Thus when the Washington correspondent of the New York Herald con-
203
gratulated him on the truly public nature of the company present, Tyler
said:
Yes, sir, I am somewhat proud of the innovation. I believe it has had an
ameliorative influence upon society here. ... It is a Virginia notion, sir, a
Virginia abstraction, if you please, but not a bad one, I think. It brings all
classes of people together — and at least for the time, it Americanizes them.
We must Americanize the people socially, as well as politically, if we would
escape the evil distinctions and false notions of the European monarchies.
We must subject their notions of superiority to our ideas of equality, to give
them the proper illustration of our free institutions.76
Amid all the gaiety and laughter of the levee no one could suspect
that the bloodiest tragedy of the Tyler administration was less than
twenty-four hours away, Julia and Margaret, in company with a great
number of those present at the ball that evening, were looking forward to
a gay excursion next day down the Potomac aboard the new steam
frigate Princeton, pride of the United States Navy. Robert F. Stockton,
captain of the Princeton, was present at the White House levee on
February 27, as were many of the 150 ladies and 200 gentlemen he had
invited to make the gala voyage. There was much talk and anticipation
of the morrow's treat. A high point of the outing would be the firing of
the great "Peacemaker," the world's largest naval gun.
A large and expectant throng boarded the Princeton late the fol-
lowing morning. The President, his son-in-law William Waller, Senator
David Gardiner and his daughters, Cabinet members, senators and
representatives, Army and Navy officers, foreign diplomats, and the elite
of Washington society (among them Dolley Madison) all packed them-
selves into the below-deck area which had hastily been converted into a
salon for the occasion. There they found food and drink in great
quantities. At i P.M. the vessel weighed anchor and proceeded slowly
down river toward Mount Vernon. Twice the huge "Peacemaker" was
fired, to the accompanying cheers of the guests who crowded tightly
around the great gun. It was quite safe. The weapon had been fired
several times be-fore on the Princeton's test runs down the Potomac, the
President himself having been aboard to witness one of the experiments.
Shortly after 3 P.M. the guests were gathered again in the salon for
a "sumptuous collation." Julia tarried on deck until a gentleman ap-
proached her and said: "The President wishes to take you into the
collation which is just served. I suppose you will have to obey orders."
Julia laughed, bidding her father to follow her below. Reaching the
salon, she was met by Tyler, seated, and given a glass of champagne.
The toasts began. Champagne flowed as the President toasted the Navy,
the "Peacemaker/7 and Captain Stockton. Other toasts followed in rapid
order. There was much hilarity. Some of the guests began to sing. When
"wit and mirth, and every circumstance of gratification pervaded,"
someone suggested to Captain Stockton that the mammoth gun be fired
204
just once more — in honor of George Washington, whose estate the vessel
had just passed. Stockton agreed and went up on deck, followed by a
group of gentlemen. The President rose from Ms chair to follow. Senator
Gardiner paused for a moment to chat with Mrs. Madison, with whom
Margaret was sitting. Then he went up on deck with the others. Tylzi
reached the foot of the ladder and stopped. Waller had broken into song
and the President tarried briefly to hear him out — a momentary hesita-
tion that may well have saved his life. Julia meanwhile was flirtatiously
engaging the rapt attention of John Potter Stockton, the captain's young
son. As Waller reached a line in his ditty which ran "Eight hundred men
lay slain/' the "Peacemaker" was again fired on the deck above. The
coordination of the blast with the words of Waller's song seemed "so
appropriate that the company joined in cheers," But within a few seconds
a distraught officer, " blackened with powder, rushed through the gang-
way and called loudly for a surgeon." Great billows of black smoke
began drifting into the suddenly sobered salon.
The breech of the great "Peacemaker" had exploded, spraying
Jagged chunks of red-hot iron around the deck like buckshot. Then came
the shout, "The Secretary of State is dead!" During the confused
moments of "woe, agony and despair" which followed, Julia tried with-
out success to make her way through the surging throng to the deck.
"'Let me go to my father! " she shouted in panic.
"My dear child., you can do no good. Your father is in heaven," a
comforting voice said. Julia fainted.77
David Gardiner of East Hampton was indeed dead. So too were
Virginians Abel P. Upshur, the Secretary of State, and Thomas W. Gil-
mer, Secretary of the Navy, Also lying dead near the twisted gun were
Virgil Maxcy of Maryland, former American charge d'affaires at The
Hague; Commodore Beverly Kennon, Chief of Construction, United
States Navy; Tyler's Negro body servant; and two seamen. Wounded
were Captain Stockton, who suffered powder burns, Senator Thomas
Hart Benton, whose right eardrum was punctured, and nine seamen.
The bodies of Upshur, Kennon, and Maxcy were badly mutilated.
Gilmer, however, retained a "natural countenance" in death. So did
David Gardiner, who was "comparatively little injured in his person or
altered in any respect." His glasses were unbroken. His watch had
stopped at the moment of the explosion. It read 4:06; Upshur Js read
4:15-
As Tyler reached the scene of the tragedy above, the dead were
already being covered with flags and blankets. The wounded were taken
below, where physicians attended them. At 4:20 the Princeton was
standing off Alexandria. Additional medical aid was summoned, and
the small steam vessel /. Johnson came alongside to take the shaken
and panicky survivors ashore. Tyler himself carried Julia across the
gangway to the rescue boat. At this point she regained consciousness
205
and, dazed, began to struggle so violently In Tyler's arms that "I al-
most knocked us both off the gang-plank. I did not know at the time . . .
that it was the President whose life I almost consigned to the water."
Tyler and Secretary of War William Wilkins and other friends of the
victims remained aboard the Princeton until eight-ten that evening,
keeping vigil over the bodies of the dead. Julia and Margaret were taken
to the White House where they spent the night.
News of the disaster was dispatched quickly by courier to New
York and to other sections of the nation. Juliana learned of her
husband's death the following evening. The initial reports reach-
ing New York Included no mention of the fate of Julia and Margaret,
only that David Gardiner was among the dead. With characteristic
fortitude Juliana drove in her carriage to the home where her sons
were dining that evening and personally conveyed to them the sad news
of their father's sudden passing. Alexander and David Lyon immediately
excused themselves and prepared to depart for Washington. They arrived
in the capital on Friday afternoon, March i. There they found their sis-
ters "though greatly afflicted and enervated, bearing our deep misfortune
much better than could have been anticipated." Alexander himself had
not eaten or slept for twenty-four hours.78
The bodies of David Gardiner and the other victims of the Prince-
ton disaster lay in state in the East Room of the White House. It
seemed scarcely possible that a few days earlier this same black-hung
room had been the scene of such gay festivities. Throughout Friday
some 20,000 people filed by the caskets. The following morning a great
funeral procession two miles in length was formed. Stores closed, bells
tolled, black cloth was everywhere evident. The President, joined by
all the civilian officials of the government, military officers, the diplo-
matic corps, and thousands of private citizens, conveyed the remains of
the fallen to Capitol Hill where impressive funeral services were held.
David Gardiner, his son reported, "was indeed buried with such honors
as perhaps never before fell to the lot of a private citizen." His body
was placed in the vault of Congress until arrangements for final burial
in East Hampton could be made. Returning to the White House from
the funeral, the President's horses ran away at full speed and the nation
was "again well nigh deprived of its noble-hearted Chief Magistrate."
Everything seemed out of joint. March 2, 1844, the day of the funerals,
was a dark day in the history of the Gardiner family. "Oh I . . . what
were all the pomp and circumstance of even such funeral rites to
us . . . ?" lamented the broken-hearted Alexander. The sudden, tragic
affair had badly shaken everyone in the tightly knit family. Twelve
years later John Tyler could still not "revert to that awful incident with-
out pain amounting almost to agony." T9
David Lyon and Alexander solemnly escorted their grief -stricken
sisters back to New York. It had been a short season in Washington
206
for them — less than two weeks. Letters of condolence flooded In. £iWou!d
that I could come to you and mingle my tears with yours/' wrote
Pastor Ely from East Hampton, "but that cannot be. I can only say to
you as one who knows how rich the consolation, go and tell Jesus."
In Washington, Tyler was faced with the always awkward task of com-
forting the widows of the deceased. This he accomplished with skill and
in good taste. He arranged with Washington morticians the grim details
of preparing David Gardiner's body for removal to East Hampton. He
urged Alexander to "perform this last pious duty at as early an hour
as possible/7 and offered him the hospitality of the President's Mansion
when he returned to Washington to escort the Senator's remains to
Long Island for interment. To Juliana he sent a small volume of poems,
a gift of condolence, together with a resolution of grief and regret passed
by the Michigan legislature. In every way he was tender and helpful.80
The fact that David Gardiner died far from poor, that his family
was left In comfortable circumstances. In no way lessened the shock
of Ms passing or shortened the period of grief felt by his wife and
children. Juliana went Into deep mourning.81
JuBa dreamed frequently of her father in the fortnight that fol-
lowed. She Imagined Mm at her bedside so often and "saw" him so
clearly that she would "sigh away the night In watching" for him. Within
a few weeks she decided that an early marriage to John Tyler might
help blot out the recurring Image of her dead parent and transport her
mind to happier thoughts. Within seven weeks of the Princeton dis-
aster, a month after David Gardiner's burial in East Hampton, Julia
let John Tyler know that she was ready to marry him. Perhaps she
needed a new father image to sustain her. "After I lost my father I felt
differently toward the President/' she remarked many years later. "He
seemed to fill the place and to be more agreeable in every way than any
younger man ever was or could be." Whatever the Freudian implica-
tions of Julia's decision? Tyler needed no urging. He talked the matter
over with Priscilla, John, Jr., and Henry A. Wise, received their ap-
probation, and after careful consideration decided to write Juliana the
formal letter of April 20 asking for Julia's hand.82
Saddened as he was by David Gardiner's death, vexed by gossip
about the state of his private relations with Julia, Tyler made haste to
the altar. His decision was conditioned by his own loneliness, Julia's
sudden departure from Washington on March 5 left him emotionally
depressed. His financial affairs were in disarray. His spirits had seldom
been lower. On March 24, two days before David Gardiner was buried
at East Hampton, he wrote his daughter Mary from the White House
that he had decided
to keep a bachelor's establishment for this year dismissing the Steward
and House Keeper on the 4 April — so that I might save as much money as
207
possible. In that way I could Mve for $5000 whereas the moment a Lady is
here the House becomes full and the expenses heavy. Our family connexion is
so extensive that they flock to us always in numbers. ... I shall have a lone-
some time unless someone is with me. This gossiping people have filled the
whole country with rumors as to myself and Miss G . They have had me
at one time in New York. Then I was to meet her in Philadelphia and on
two occasions they have had me married — and all this too before the re-
mains of her father had been buried and while she was laboring under an
agony of grief. How excessively cruel and stupid. I will not deny to you my
great admiration of her, but to this moment there exists no sufficient founda-
tion for all this, and I wish you and Letty to be assured that whatever might
come of it I should never forget my love for either of you, or fail to make
some suitable provision for you both. I say these things to put you entirely
at ease We are all recovering from the shock of the Princeton — and the
City becoming less gloomy.
When Julia suggested an early wedding date, June 26, Tyler agreed. He
had no desire to live in a "bachelor's establishment." 83
Julia's depression passed quickly after her wedding. Visions of her
father stopped haunting her. In November 1844 she alarmed her mother
with the suggestion that she be allowed to trim her black velvet
mourning coat in fur. During her "reign" in the White House she
usually wore black during the day and white or black lace over white
for evening wear. The diamond star she normally wore on her forehead
on formal occasions was replaced with a black onyx. By March 1845
she was shopping for "something pretty in the way of mourning silks."
Three months later she was complaining that the hot weather in Vir-
ginia was causing the black dye of her clothes to stain her neck and
arms. Protracted mourning could be very inconvenient.84
Alexander overcame his gloom by throwing himself wholeheartedly
into the politics of the struggling Tyler party. Beginning in April 1844
he became a leading, though often anonymous, publicist for the Presi-
dent and for those "independent Democrats" in New York state who
"in the midst of the contentions of parties yet retain minds free and
unshackled, patriotic and self-sacrificing, holding the public good supe-
rior to pre-conceived opinions and personal associations." This par-
ticular effort for his future brother-in-law was penned on April 27, 1844,,
the day the President was nominated by a convention of his friends
in Baltimore on a ringing platform of "Tyler and Texas!" Only a week
had passed since he had asked Juliana for Julia's hand in marriage.
With a young new wife in prospect and a nomination for the Presi-
dency in hand, John Tyler looked to the future with confidence. Shortly
after the explosion aboard the Princeton, Tyler had lamented the "loss
I have sustained in Upshur and Gilmer. They were truly my friends,
and would have aided me for the next twelve months with great effect."
Alexander Gardiner was determined to provide Tyler something of that
lost aid.85
208
TYLER AND TEXAS— AND TAMMANY
// the annexation of Texas shall crown off my public
life, I shall neither retire ignominiously nor be soon
forgotten.
JOHN TYLER, 1844
John Tyler first broached the Texas question in October 1841 In terms
of the "lustre" it might throw around an administration in serious po-
litical difficulties. He did not, of course, originate the Texas problem,
nor did he write finis to it. It began in 1836 when Texas threw off the
Mexican yoke in a revolutionary war; it ended only when General
Winfieid Scott's army finally stormed into Mexico City in 1847, What
Tyler did do was move the annexation issue off the dead center it oc-
cupied in 1843-1844, Since 1837 a Texan request for annexation had
languished in Washington, unattended for fear the whole subject would
further agitate the slavery issue. For reasons other than any personal in-
terest in slavery expansion — reasons that were essentially psychological
— Tyler was determined to bring the annexation proposition to a head.
The Texans wanted annexation, and it was clearly in the national
interest that annexation be effected. To accomplish this desirable goal
Tyler was convinced he must first have a sound political foundation
from which to proceed. It was therefore no accident of chronology that
Tyler founded his third-party movement in January 1843, *n February
was nominated for the Presidency by a small group of his friends in
Trenton, and then in March informed Isaac Van Zandt, Texan charge
in Washington, to "encourage your people to be quiet and to not grow
impatient; we are doing all we can to annex you, but we must have
time." *
Unfortunately, the Texans grew quite impatient. In July 1843 they
abruptly withdrew their offer of annexation and began ostentatious
209
negotiations with both the Mexicans and the British. Those with Mexico
turned on the possibilities of an armistice, a Mexican recognition of
Texan independence, and an end to the sporadic hit-and-run border
warfare that had dragged along since 1837. Those with London repre-
sented a snuggling up to Britain for the purpose of alarming Tyler
and forcing him into more positive and speedy action on the annexation
question. The strategy was successful. Tyler later remarked that Presi-
dent Sam Houston's "billing and cooing" with England was much more
than the "coquetry" the Texan called it; it was, he said, "a serious love
affair." Fearful that real peace might break out along the Rio Grande
with Mexican recognition of Texan independence and concerned that
British machinations in Texas might lead, as part of a rumored Anglo-
Texan alliance, to British commercial hegemony and the abolition of
slavery In the Lone Star Republic (although the White House knew
there was scant danger of abolition), Tyler and Secretary of State Abel
P. Upshur moved swiftly. In September 1843 ^ey decided to open
secret negotiations with Texas looking toward an annexation treaty.
The following month Tyler secretly made a firm annexation offer in
spite of a strong Mexican note in August identifying annexation con-
summated as ipso facto an act of war. By early fall, however, Tyler
was sure his third-party movement was well launched. He was ready
for any eventuality, war included.2
The Texas annexation issue was not drummed up to serve selfish
political ambitions. Tyler's hand-fashioned Democratic Republican
Party with its famous "Tyler and Texas!" slogan was not designed by
the President to secure his re-election on the Texas question. He never
had any hope of re-election. Instead, the party was created only to
force the Democrats to adopt a pro-annexation stance in the 1844
canvass. That accomplished, it was designed that the new party would
go swiftly and willingly out of business, pausing only to secure from
the Democratic nominee, whoever he might be, a guarantee that Tyler's
friends, particularly those who had fought most vigorously for annexa-
tion, would not be proscribed by the new administration. Nor did Tyler
rip the controversial Texas issue from an ideological context foreign
to his longstanding personal views on American diplomacy. If he wanted
annexation for the "lustre" it might throw upon an otherwise unim-
pressive administration, his personal psychological motive was not in
conflict with the fact that he had long supported Manifest Destiny.
As early as 1832 he had maintained that the destiny of America
was to expand westward to the coast and into the Pacific, "walking on
the waves of the mighty deep . . . overturning the strong places of
despotism, and restoring to man his long-lost rights." He was convinced
that the future greatness of the United States lay in its ability to pene-
trate the markets of the world, to compete successfully with Great
Britain for commercial empire. His free-trade views turned largely on
2IO
this consideration, and few projects occupied his attention as President
to a greater extent than the negotiation of commercial agreements
abroad. When, for example, the Senate turned down such a treaty with
the German ZoUverein in 1844, ^e boldly took it up atsain as a cam-
paign issue. He was particularly pleased when Caleb Gushing negotiated
the Treaty of Wanghia with China , opening the commercial doors of
the Middle Kingdom to American enterprise. Indeed, when news of the
Gushing Treaty reached the White House in December 1844, Julia
shouted, "Hurrah! The Chinese treaty is accomplished I thought
the President would go off in an ecstasy a minute ago with the pleasant
news.53 Similarly, he looked forward to the possibility of opening trade
with Japan as early as 1843. &&& when Commodore Matthew C. Perry
finally pried Japan open in 1854 Tyler accurately regarded his earlier
success with China as "the nest egg of the Japan movement." His at-
tentions to Prince Timoleo HaolIMo in Washington in 1842, and his
bold extension of the Monroe Doctrine to the Sandwich Islands at
that time, indicated a ready appreciation of Hawaii as a steppingstone
to the markets of East Asia. If any nation sought "to take possession
of the islands, colonize them, and subvert the native Government," he
warned the powers on December 20, 1842, such a policy would "create
dissatisfaction on the part of the United States." So was born the Tyler
Doctrine which found its way into the ideological arsenal of American
diplomacy where it was stored for future use by the United States in
the Pacific.3
It is not surprising, then, that he viewed the annexation of Texas
in commercial terms that would benefit the whole nation. Indeed, the
dismemberment of the rich Mexican Empire came to occupy his hopes
and his dreams almost exclusively in 1842. Stretching from the jungles
of Central America northward to the forty-second parallel, it was a cor-
rupt, weak, misgoverned nation, exploited by venal dictators and milked
by a decadent aristocracy. Like most Americans of the period, Tyler
had little but contempt for the backward Mexicans. In his view,
Dictator-President Santa Anna was never more than "the captive of
San Jacinto." Tyler also knew that Mexico was hi no position to defend
its vast territories which hung waiting to be plucked. The only ques-
tion was when and how the harvest would be gathered. In May 1842
Tyler attempted to gather in the Mexican province of California. This
would bring him just as much "lustre" as Texas annexation. As a
"window" on the Pacific, and from the standpoint of American commer-
cial expansion, it had much to recommend it.
With Webster's assistance he matured a scheme to partition
Mexico. Based upon an expectation of British good offices in the matter,
Tyler's plan visualized an exchange of two million dollars in American
claims against Mexico for all of California north of the thirty-second
parallel. This would give the United States the harbors of Monterey
211
and San Francisco, the "windows on the Pacific" so important to Ameri-
can commercial penetration of the Pacific. In addition, the United
States and Mexico would agree jointly to recognize the independence
of Texas. This trade consummated, Tyler demonstrated his willingness
to abandon the prospect of future Texas annexation. In payment for
British pressure on Mexico City to accept this uneven exchange,
Tyler was prepared to settle the Anglo-American Oregon partition ques-
tion at the Columbia River line, although this would give Britain a
chunk of Oregon between the waterway and the forty-ninth parallel to
which she had no firm claim. "I never dreamed of ceding this country
[Oregon] unless for the greater equivalent of California which I fancied
Great Britain might be able to obtain for us through her influence in
Mexico/3 Tyler later explained. He proposed that the whole California-
Texas-Oregon deal be wrapped up neatly in an Anglo-American-Mexican
tripartite treaty. "The assent of Mexico to such a treaty is all that is
necessary," the President maintained blandly; "a surrender of her title
[to California] is all that will be wanting. The rest will follow without
an effort" *
There was not much likelihood that Mexico would agree to such
a lopsided deal, but as long as the project was under discussion it was
imperative that outstanding differences between the United States and
Great Britain be resolved while London was being encouraged to play
the role of dishonest broker in Mexico City. For this reason Tyler and
Webster handled the complex negotiations on the potentially explosive
Maine boundary dispute with great delicacy. While they undoubtedly
gave to Britain somewhat more territory in the Northeast than London
was entitled to receive, the Webster- Ashburton Treaty of October 1842,
approved overwhelmingly by the Senate, at least put an end to talk of
war on the American-Canadian frontier. By smoothing Anglo-American
relations it served to isolate Mexico diplomatically. Only when his
tripartite-treaty plan disintegrated on the rocks of Mexican opposition
did Tyler abandon his California dream and return to the annexation
of Texas, secure now in the knowledge that Texas might be Incorporated
into the Union without serious British interference. The Webster- Ash-
burton coup, thought Tyler, was the high point of his administration to
date, and for it he felt himself entitled to "some small share of praise
as a set-off to the torrents of abuse so unceasingly and copiously lav-
ished upon me." 5
With the tripartite partition scheme in ruins, Anglo-American rela-
tions pacified, Mexico isolated, and his third-party movement gaining
sufficient headway to cause alarm among Democratic leaders, Tyler
boldly took up the Texas annexation question again in September
1843. His renewed effort was facilitated by the departure of Webster
from the State Department in May 1843 and the arrival there of Abel
P. Upshur in July. Webster had no heart for Texas annexation and
212
the slavery-extension implications Ms Xew England constituency would
certainly see in it. Upshur was all heart on the matter. As the Texan
charge in Washington explained this crucial shift in Department per-
sonnel, "Though friendly to us [Webster], is very much in our way at
present. He is timid and wants nerve, and is fearful of Ms abolition
constituents in Massachusetts, I think it likely Upshur will succeed
Mm ... it will be one of the best appointments for us. His whole soul
is with us. He is an able man and has nerve to act." It was an accurate
analysis.6
To advance the Texas project more safely vis-a-vis Great Britain,
Tyler accepted the forty-ninth parallel as the boundary for an Oregon
settlement since a territorial equivalent in California for the Columbia
River line now seemed out of the question. At no time did he seriously
embrace the irresponsible "Fifty-four forty or fight!" nonsense that
swept the nation after the campaign of 1844. He knew perfectly well
that American title to any part of Oregon north of the forty-ninth
parallel was nonexistent, and he wanted no unnecessary embroilment
with Britain in that quarter while gathering the Texas fruit on the Rio
Grande. Thus Ms carefully worded statement to Congress in December
1843 *hat i£after the most rigid and . . . unbiased examination of the
subject, the United States have always contended that their rights'1
extended north to 54°40/ was purely a political gesture designed to
allay abolitionist opposition to Texas annexation by presenting to
Northern and Western expansionists the prospect of additional free ter-
ritory in the Northwest. Tyler did not say that he believed in 54°4o/
personally, because he did not. Nor did he say that past contentions on
the subject were necessarily those of the present or future. On the
contrary, he suggested no particular action on Oregon at the time save
the continuing need for peace in the Northwest. In the same speech he
did maintain that in the interests of ''humanity" the United States had
the right and the duty to intervene in the sputtering Mexican-Texan
war in order to bring it mercifully to a close.7
Breathing fire on the Rio Grande and peace on the Columbia,
Tyler pushed forward with the secret negotiations for a Texas annexa-
tion treaty. In December 1843 Upshur took a quiet poll among the
senators and reported to the President that two-thirds of them favored
annexation and would vote for it. All that remained to complete the final
draft of the treaty agreement were assurances to the Texas govern-
ment that the land and sea forces of the United States would be de-
ployed near the borders and coasts of the Republic to offer aid and
protection should the Mexicans undertake to invade Texas during the
brief period between the signing of the treaty and the exchange of
formal ratifications. President Sam Houston was understandably tender
on this point, and two crucial months passed before Tyler and Upshur
could convince him that his demand to have these American forces
213
placed under the tactical command of Texas officials was an impossible
one from a constitutional standpoint. The Constitution nowhere per-
mitted the Commander-in-Chief to "lend" the military forces of the
United States to another nation, and no amount of loose construction
could deny that obvious fact. It was not until February 17, 1844, that
Upshur finally agreed to military dispositions that the security-conscious
Houston deemed adequate. With this, the last hurdle toward the treaty
was cleared. In none of these confidential arrangements was there any
concern in the White House for the morality of annexation. It was
simply a question of coordination, logistics, and timing.8
Tyler deemed the Mexican position on Texas annexation specious
and legalistic. From the point of view of Mexico City, the battlefield
Treaty of Velasco ending the Texas Revolution and recognizing the in-
dependence of Texas in 1836 had been extorted from the captured Santa
Anna under duress. For this reason it had been promptly renounced by
the Mexican legislature. After 1836, therefore, Texas was still tech-
nically a Mexican province in a continuing state of rebellion. While the
Texas Republic had received de facto recognition from Britain, France,
and the United States, that did not alter the fact — said the Mexicans —
that American annexation would constitute from a strictly legal stand-
point a hostile and unwarranted intervention in Mexican internal affairs.
Indeed, the Mexicans argued that annexation would be little less than
an act of aggression against their nation and under international law a
positive act of war.
To counter these arguments, and to put a somewhat better moral
face on what was essentially a territory grab, Tyler and other spokes-
men of the Manifest Destiny fraternity came up with the strained idea
that the annexation of Texas was really the "reannexation" of the ter-
ritory, since Texas had originally been included in the Louisiana Pur-
chase. This was of course patent nonsense. Texas was no more part of
the Louisiana Territory than was Manchuria; even if it had been, the
claim had long since been specifically surrendered in the 1819 Adams-
Onis Treaty with Spain. With more cogency Tyler and Upshur also
argued that since Mexico had been unable to subdue her rebellious prov-
ince militarily, Texas was by definition a free agent to contract such in-
ternational obligations as she pleased. Continuing bloodshed along the
frontier, Tyler maintained, was little more than an affront to all
humanity.
In sum, the Mexicans had numerous legal arguments and few
guns, while the Americans had dubious historical arguments and the
potential of many guns. This, then, was the unsettled situation as Tyler's
secret treaty negotiations with the Texas government came to a head
early in 1844. At this moment the explosion aboard the frigate Prince-
ton removed the brilliant Upshur from the scene. Upshur's death
brought John C. Calhoun into the State Department. This disastrous
214
change, cunningly foisted on Tyler by Henry A. Wise, introduced the
extraneous slavery Issue more forcefully into the Texas debate and
ultimately destroyed any hope Tyler had of obtaining a two-thirds
majority for this Texas treaty in the Senate in 1844.
Admittedly, Tyler was surrounded by men who viewed Texas an-
nexation as an opportunity to expand the ''peculiar institution77 of
slavery into new territories. Ritchie, Wise, Gilmer, Upshur, Calhoun,
and (in Upshur s view) the "entire South'' viewed annexation from a
sectional standpoint. Tyler later complained that the slavery feature of
annexation possessed Calhoun and Upshur "as a single idea," and it is
true that Calhoun foolishly put the issue before the nation on this
narrow basis. This was not Tylers view, however. If there was what
the Northern abolitionists Iked to call an "aggressive slavocracy"
operating in Washington in 1844, John Tyler was not part of it. He
had no confidence in Calhoun's view that slavery was a positive moral
good. He did not believe that the slave institution must expand or die.
He did not share the South Carolinian's fear that unless Texas was
speedily annexed growing British influence in Washington-on-the-Brazos
would lead to the abolition of slavery there, although he did admit that
were abolition accomplished in Texas that fact would further agitate
the slavery question in the United States. It would also provide a
convenient new haven for runaway Negroes. So far as it can be de-
termined, Tyler never endorsed Mississippi Senator Robert J. Walker's
comforting "safety valve" theory that a Texas annexed would, like
some giant magnet, actually solve the slavery question by draining the
Negroes out of the Old South and onto the virgin cotton lands of
Texas. As soon as the Texas cotton lands also began to wear out,
Walker argued, the simple economics of the situation would dictate the
gradual manumission of the slaves. Liberated, they would cross the
border into the torrid zones of Mexico and Central America where they
would disappear into the predominantly colored populations there.
Thus in seventy-five to a hundred years the problem would solve itself.
While Walker's far-fetched hypothesis had elements of the aboli-
tion-by-anemia argument Tyler himself had advanced in 1820 dur-
ing the Missouri Compromise debates, the President nonetheless de-
plored the employment of any slavery-oriented argument, pro or con,
in relation to the Texas issue. He did everything in his power
to keep such considerations out of the debate. He took instead a
broad national view of the matter. Again and again he emphasized
the commercial and economic advantages that would accrue to the
entire United States with the annexation. He stressed specifically in
this regard the inevitable expansion of America's foreign and domestic
commerce and the increase of her coastwise carrying trade. American
monopoly of world cotton production was also a fundamental considera-
tion in the President's thinking. In 1847 he said flatly that "so far as
215
my agency in the matter extended, I looked to the Interests of the whole
Union. The acquisition of Texas gave to the U. States almost a
monopoly of the Cotton plant, and thus secured to us a power of bound-
less extent In the affairs of the world," This monopoly would permit
Americans, said Tyler, 4*to hold control over the Issues of peace and
war'7 throughout the world. IB more extreme versions of the cotton-
monopoly theme, which he repeated In 1850 and again In 1861, Tyler
contributed to the evolution of the ''King Cotton" myth later so dis-
astrous to Confederate States diplomacy: that the cotton monopoly
achieved by Texas annexation would permit the South, merely by with-
holding or shipping the precious commodity, to control European dip-
lomatic behavior In the event of a civil war. But the speciousness of this
subsequent argument does not detract from the point that In 1844 Tyler
viewed Texas annexation In national-commercial rather than In sec-
tional-slavery terms.9
To a lesser extent Tyler also concerned himself with what would
later be termed the geopolitical Implications of British machinations
in Texas. While he was not Interested in slavery expansion Into Texas
per se9 he did fear an Anglo-Texan treaty of alliance which would bring
Texas Into Britain's diplomatic and economic orbit. This, he felt, might
effectively prevent all future American territorial expansion Into the
West and Southwest. He worried that with Texas in British lead-
strings the economic encirclement of the United States would be effected.
"The Canadas, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia, the [British] Islands
In the American seas with Texas . . . would complete the circle/7 he
warned. To prevent this there was no alternative save American an-
nexation. Anything less would only force a war- weary Texas, perpetually
threatened by Mexico, to "seek refuge In the arms of some other power."
Frequently, therefore, the ever-Anglophobic Tyler pointed with alarm
to the British "menace" in the Southwest. Actually, there was not much
of a menace there, but Americans could always be roused to furious
action by the suggestion that the Redcoats were coming.10
Unhappily for Tyler, the arrival of Calhoun in the Cabinet stamped
the word slavery all over the controversial annexation issue. On Febru-
ary 29, 1844, the day after Upshur's death aboard the Princeton,
Henry A. Wise approached South Carolina Senator George McDuffie
and wondered aloud whether the Senator's friend, John C. Calhoun,
could be persuaded to fill Upshur's place as Secretary of State. If so, Ms
name would "In all probability be sent to the Senate at once.77 Because
of Wise's Intimacy and almost daily contact with Tyler, McDuffie
assumed that the suggestion was nothing less than an informal sounding
from the President himself. Consequently, he immediately sat down and
wrote Calhoun of Tyler's Cabinet offer. The fact is that the Wise
action was In no manner authorized by Tyler, and Wise later confessed
that he was "guilty of assuming an authority and taking a liberty with
216
the President which few men would have excused and few would have
taken/" Yet lie was con \inced that the Texas question must be placed
in "safe Southern hands. *: Xor was there any question where his selected
instrument. John C. Calhoun, stood on the Issue. Secretary of the
Navy Thomas W. Gilmer had written Calhoun the preceding December.
In that communication Calhoun was brought up to date on the secret
negotiations then in progress with Texas, and was asked Ms confidential
view of the matter. Calhoun replied on December 25 that annexation
"in a political point of view , . . could not more than compensate for
the vast extension opened to the non-slaveholding States to the Pacific
on the line of the Oregon ... it would extend our domestic Institutions
of the South. . . ." "
Immediately after leaving McDuffie's parlor, Wise went to the
White House for breakfast. There lie met the President's brotliers-in-
law, Judge John B. Christian and Dr. N. M. Miller, the Second As-
sistant Postmaster General. Tyler was In a terrible emotional state
that morning, breaking frequently into tears as lie recounted to Chris-
tian and Miller the horrors he had witnessed on the Princeton the
afternoon before. It was while the President was In this extremely
distraught frame of inind that Wise calmly announced Ms presumptive
offer of the Department of State to John C. Calhoun. Tyler fairly
detonated at the news. "You are the most extraordinary man I ever
saw!" lie sliouted at Ms old friend, "the most willful and wayward, the
most Incorrigible!" While Tyler fumed, Wise replied that If the two
men were to remain friends Tyler must "sanction" Ms " unauthorized
act." 22
The last person Tyler wanted in Ms Cabinet was John C. Calhoun.
On two earlier Instances he had blocked movements seeking to elevate
Caifaoun to the Cabinet. Not only could Calhoun bring no political
strength to the administration, but Ms aggressive pro-slavery views
would only compromise and complicate the entire annexation question.
On the other hand, trie situation into wMch. Wise had put him was
frightfully embarrassing. To repudiate the conspiratorial arrangements
the Virginian had made would simply antagonize CaHioim3s friends In
the Senate when he most needed their votes for Texas. WeigMng ail the
factors Involved, the emotionally upset President made a decision wMch
marked the real beginning of Ms Texas troubles. "Take the office and
tender It to Mr. Calhoun," he instructed Wise. "You may write to Mm
yourself at once." 13
By April i, twelve days before the treaty was formally con-
cluded by Calhoun, Tyler knew that his great design was in deep
trouble. Two weeks earlier rumors of the secret Texas negotiations had
leaked onto the front page of the Whig National Intelligencer. As
slavocrat and abolitionist extremists began pounding their respective
drams for and against the measure, many of the forty-two senators
217
who had pledged Upshur their support of the treaty In December began
melting discreetly into the shadows. Tyler had hoped that the very-
secrecy of the negotiations would permit him to present the Senate with
a jait accompli, and that the completed treaty might slip quickly through
the upper chamber without getting involved politically in the coming
Presidential canvass.
This dream now blasted, there was no choice for Tyler save to
push as rapidly ahead as possible with Ms third-party movement in the
hope that its presence and function as a lever might force the Democ-
racy to announce quickly for Texas annexation. For this reason7 on
April i, 1844, he encouraged a group of his partisans, mainly post-
masters and mail contractors; to meet at the Globe Hotel in Washing-
ton. There resolutions were adopted which praised his Bank vetoes,
condemned Van Buren (who had a majority of Democratic delegates
already pledged to his nomination) as a certain loser against Clay,
called for the "reannexation" of Texas to the United States and the
"re-election" of John Tyler to the Presidency. The Oregon question was
carefully muted. Tylerite friendship feelers were extended to Andrew
Jackson who had that week strongly come out for annexation.14
The treaty was signed on April 12 and Tyler hesitantly submitted
it to the Senate ten days later. He had little hope now that It would
pass. On April 27 Henry Clay's so-called Raleigh Letter of April 17 was
published in the Washington papers. This communication placed him
solidly in opposition to Texas annexation as "Involving us certainly in
war with Mexico and probably with other foreign powers, dangerous
to the integrity of the Union, Inexpedient In the present financial condi-
tion of the country, and not called for by any general expression of
public opinion." This statement was followed a few days later by Clay's
unanimous nomination at the Whig Baltimore convention on a platform
which made no mention at all of Texas. More important politically,
from Tyler's standpoint, was the fact that on the same day that Clay's
Raleigh Letter saw print in the capital, Van Buren published a rambling
statement on annexation that took essentially the same position. By
April 27, then, both leading candidates for the White House in 1844 had
announced against Tyler's Texas project.15
During the next week both Clay and Van Buren began to crack
the whip to bring their supporters in the Senate to an anti-treaty
position. Thus it became Increasingly clear to Tyler, as the month of
May wore on, that the treaty was doomed. In a final effort to force
the treaty through, Tyler reluctantly reached for a political blackjack.
It was the only weapon he had handy. He instructed his friends to or-
ganize a nominating convention which would meet in Baltimore on
May 27, the same day the Democratic convention was scheduled to
convene there. He had already decided that under no conditions would
he permit his own name to be placed in nomination at the Democratic
218
convention, for if Van Buren was chosen "then I became bound to sus-
tain the nominee," and that "could not be." Instead, his Democratic-
Republican tMrd party would now be formally launched. aGo to
Baltimore and make your nomination/" he told his supporters, "and
then go home and leave the thing to work Its own results.71 His sole
aim In all this was to create and "preserve such organization until the
proper time should arrive for striking a decisive blow/' Had the treaty
approved by the Senate in April, or had Van Buren embraced it
prior to the Democratic convention on May 27. there would have been
no Tyler candidacy in 1844 at all. As it was, he had prepared a political
lever for just such a contingency and he would employ it now with
all the vigor at Ms command.16
Tylers third-party idea had had a long and uneven period of
gestation. As early as December 1841 the renegade President and Ms
new Cabinet had discussed the possibilities of forming a new party that
might attract to Tyler's small political entourage moderates from both
major parties. The new third party, as Tyler first conceived it, would
eschew all sectionalism and factionalism and would work only for broad
national goals. This course of action was strongly urged by Virginia
Clique men like Upshur and Gilmer, who argued that Texas annexa-
tion would be a worthy aim around which to construct a new political
grouping. But Tyler did not want Texas annexation as an issue on which
to build a third party. Quite the reverse, he wanted Texas annexation
for personal psychological reasons, for the "lustre" it would bring his
battered administration historically. He also wanted it, as has been sug-
gested, for the commercial advantages it would bestow upon the whole
nation. The new party, if it had to be formed at all, would be sub-
ordinate to its goals. It would not feed on them. Since there seemed scant
hope for annexation during the winter of 1841-1842, exploratory Cab-
inet conversations along these lines were abandoned.17
Instead, Tyler launched his ill-starred move toward an accom-
modation with the Conservative Democrats and the moderate Whigs.
In April 1842 he specifically turned down an offer from Alexander
Hamilton, Jr., to build a separate Tyler organization in New York City.
Tyler's attempt to rally a center group, an effort revealed in his Ex-
chequer Plan and in his acceptance of the 1842 Tariff Act, earned him
little but the distrust and calumny of the extremists in both major
parties. Clay and Botts talked impeachment, and the old nullifiers and
extreme states' rights men looked with undisguised horror on the new
tariff legislation. Upshur, meanwhile, patiently sought to outline to less
ultra citizens the political policies of the administration. "We have all
agreed/7 he explained, "without a single exception, that our only course
was to administer the government for the best interests of the country
and to trust the moderates of all parties to sustain us. ... We came in
219
against all parties . . . without any support except what our measures
would win for us. ... Perhaps we have erred ; the difficulties of our
position rendered it difficult to avoid error." Errors notwithstanding,
John Tyler honestly tried to organize the moderate center in 1842 and
bring it to his support. As a gesture of conciliation toward Old Hickory
and his followers, men who applauded his Bank vetoes and favored
Texas annexation, the President saw that Amos Kendall got a govern-
ment printing contract. For similar reasons Captain John C. Fremont,
Benton's son-in-law, was appointed head of the Army Topographical
Corps' projected expedition to Oregon.18
But by October 1842 Tyler felt that, save for the success of the
Webster-Ashburton Treaty, his expiable tactics had accomplished little.
Understandably, Ms new mood was one of despair. Thus he confided to
Ms friend, Littleton W. Tazewell, that
So far the Administration has been conducted amid earthquake and tor-
nado. The ultras of both the prevailing factions will not consent to ground
their arms Is there any other course for me to pursue than to look to
the public good irrespective of either faction? . . . My strong determination
sometimes is to hold, as I have heretofore done, the politicians of both parties
and of all parties at defiance But the difficulty in the way of administering
the government without a party is undoubtedly great. From portions of the
Democratic party I have received an apparently warm support; but while the
ultras control in the name of party, I fear that no good would arise from
either an amalgamation with them, or a too ready assent to their demands
of office.19
If in October 1842 Tyler was beginning to tMnk again in terms
of a third party, the results of the November gubernatorial election in
New York made the idea seem practical. As part of Ms campaign of
rapprochement with the Conservative Democracy of the Empire State
he instructed one of Ms partisans in New York City, Mordecai M. Noah,
editor of the Tylerite New York Union, to support the candidacy of
William C. Bouck, the Democratic nominee. TMs gesture of conciliation
had little actual influence on Bouck's subsequent victory. Nevertheless,
it was interpreted by the Van Buren machine hi Albany as a crude
attempt by Tyler to infiltrate and capture control of the badly divided
Democracy in New York. The Van Buren organ in WasMngton, the
Globe, made it perfectly clear to the President that if he was trying
to return to the Democratic Party he would have to crawl back on Ms
knees, his head covered with sackcloth. As editor Francis P. Blair sar-
castically put it:
Mr. Tyler ... at the moment the fortunes of the Democracy were straggling
with an accumulation of difficulties, separated himself from that party, and
became, to a certain extent, the instrument of its overthrow. But he has now
quarrelled with his new friends, and wishes to come back to his old If
Mr. Tyler wishes to return . . . let him return. But ... he must demonstrate
220
the sincerity of Ms repentance la a more satisfactory manner than he has
hitherto adopted. The treaty, the tariff, the bankrupt law, the exchequer . . .
the distribution bill, the repeal of the Independent Treasury and the com-
position of Ms cabinet are not sufficient pledges of Ms conversion.
Tills was not much of an Invitation, especially since Tyler believed
that Ills support of the Bouck candidacy in Xew York had proved the
decisive factor in that race. So Ms friends in Xew York City informed
him.20
As he carefully analyzed the sweeping Democratic victories in the
midterm election of 1842, Tyler came to the conclusion that there did
exist an anti-Van Buren Conservative Democratic bloc in the North,
particularly In Xew York and Pennsylvania, to which he might appeal
in a third-party movement. His plan was to ally this group with such
states5 rights Whigs and Democrats as he could muster in the South.
At this moment the Texans were again pressing the annexation issue.
As Tyler pondered the whole political situation in December 1842, he
finally concluded that — to gain Texas or anything else that would re-
dound to the lasting reputation of Ms administration — he would have
to create his own political base of operation. His idea was not to form
a third party on a truly national scale. He knew there was no chance
for anything as ambitious as this. Instead, he would construct hard-
core Tylerite factions in several crucial states, cadres large enough and
well enough entrenched in federal patronage to tip the Presidential vote
in these key states in any direction Tyler desired.
In Xew York City the foundations for such a cadre already ex-
isted although the Tylerites there were badly organized and politically
ineffectual. Their leader was Paul R. George, a small-bore politician
originally from Xew Hampshire, who was a close friend of Edward
Curtis, Collector of the Port. Through Curtis, George had a direct con-
nection with Daniel Webster, whose political protege the shady Col-
lector was. Webster's decision to remain in the Tyler Cabinet in Sep-
tember 1841 brought George and a small band of similar opportunists
to the nominal support of the President, a relationship that remained
cemented mainly in patronage favors. Chief among these Tylerites-by-
proxy were John Lorimer Graham, Postmaster of the City of Xew
York; Ogden Hoffman, District Attorney for Xew York; Silas M. Stil-
well, Marshal of Xew York City; Collector Edward Curtis (chief
patronage dispenser of the gang) ; Mordecai M. Xoah; and such lesser
lights as Louis F, Tasistro, Redwood Fisher, John O. Fowler, Robert
C. Wetmore, William Taggart, and J. Paxton Hallet, all of whom held
patronage jobs of some sort. As Alexander Gardiner correctly character-
ized them to Julia, they were people with whom one could take "no
great pride" in being connected.21
The first major venture of this group was the launching of a pro-
administration newspaper. An attempt by Robert Tyler to buy into the
221
New York Herald had failed In June 1841, and a subsequent working
arrangement with John L Mumford's New York Standard, effected by
placing Post Office and Customs House announcements exclusively in
the Standard, proved unsatisfactory. Mumford was for Lewis Cass. So
it was that Paul R. George brought into being during the summer of
1842 the New York Union under the editorship of former Tammany
brave Mordecai Noah. Noah was also appointed chairman of the Tyler
General Committee. George ran the paper from behind the scenes, and
it was largely financed by contributions from the faithful and by
capita! levies on civil servants owing their places to Tyler, Webster,
and Curtis.22
Noah proved an unhappy choice. His Tylerite orthodoxy was sus-
pect, and the fact that he was Jewish was thought to render him
politically unsuitable for Ms responsibilities. In the fall of 1842 a
factional struggle developed within the Tylerite clique to oust him.
This pitted an anti-Noah splinter headed by Graham and Stilwell
against a pro-Noah group headed by Paul R. George. In a series of
letters and conversations with the President and with Robert Tyler ,
Graham argued that Noah's religious background was damaging the
President's cause in New York and that unless he were ousted from
Ms editorship the Empire State could not be captured. In direct con-
versations with Noah, Graham suggested that, were he gracefully to
resign the editorsMp of the Union, he might expect to receive either
the Surveyorship of the Port of New York or the Consul GeneralsMp
in Constantinople. In January 1843 Noah finally resigned under the
mounting pressure, but no compensatory political plum was forth-
coming. In his own words, he had been "most disgracefully and vil-
lainously cheated, swindled, bamboozled." In anger Noah dissolved the
vest-pocket Tyler General Committee in March 1843 an(* returned to
Tammany.23
With Noah's resignation and subsequent walkout, the New York
Union was quietly merged into the New York Aurora, first brought
out under Tylerite auspices in February 1843. The Aurora was an un-
distinguished sheet. Its main claim to fame had been a fleeting notoriety
in charging Daniel Webster with the attempted rape of a lady visitor
to the State Department. Webster was undoubtedly perturbed to learn
that the irresponsible Aurora had become the Tyler outlet in New York;
this knowledge may have hastened his exit from the Cabinet in May
1843. In any event, Robert Tyler and Ms friend Dr. Joel B. Sutherland,
Collector of Customs and cMef Tyler patronage dispenser in Phila-
delphia, persuaded Thomas Dunn English of PMladelpMa to remove
to New York and edit the paper. Under English the Aurora was well-
conducted and respectable. It was dull and it always lost money, but it
was skillfully pro-Tyler and there were no more rape stories. On two
222
occasions, however, English and Graham were forced to carry' out capital
levies on Tyler officeholders to sustain the marginal sheet.1'4
One newspaper does not make a political faction, and Tyler still
had no more than a small claque In Xew York. What was frequently
headlined as a MONSTER TYLER SALLY or a GREAT TYLER MEETING In
the Aurora (faithfully reprinted as such IB the Washington Madisonian)
was often no more than Graham, Hoffman, George, and a few of their
cronies from the Customs House having a hot whiskey punch together
in a private room at Delmonico's. In early January 1845, ^°r instance^
a GSEAT TYLER MEETING IN CANAL STREET was attended by six of
Graham and Curtis' hacks and four small boys who stopped by to
heckle. A stirring speech was made, officers of the rally were elected,
and resolutions were duly passed while the "surging crowd" lounged
around on a few barrels, the adults smoking cigars.
Even when a legitimate throng could be gathered together the
results could be disastrous. In February 1843, f°r example^ Tyler's New
York friends worked diligently to fill the Broadway Tabernacle for a
major rally at which Corporal's Guardsmen CusMng and Wise were
scheduled to speak. Chaired by Mordecai Noah, the widely advertised
rally attracted hundreds of the Tyler faithful and near- faithful. The
auditorium was packed. Delegations from the various wards marched
noisily In, carrying Tyler portraits captloned "Old Veto." The crowd
was disorderly and out of control from the very beginning. Drinking,
laughing, whistling, stamping, and singing proceeded as Noah tried
vainly to establish some measure of decorum. When Cushing finally
rose to speak, the crowd began to clap and cheer for Henry Clay
and show the proper Cushing "some evidences of disrespect." Cushing
quickly quit the rostrum, the meeting, and the building in disgust,
whereupon resolutions were passed which condemned a national bank,
praised "Old Veto" for his vetoes, and called for the immediate an-
nexation of Texas. The chaotic rally concluded with nine cheers for
Henry Clay, nine cheers for Martin Van Buren, and three hurrahs for
"a celebrated lady who conducted a harem In one of the streets which
radiate from Broadway." The Aurora next day called this a GREAT
ENTHUSIASTIC TYLER MEETING; Its scrubbed account of the affair -was
duly reprinted In the Madisonian.2*
Supported though he was by such motley legions, the President
decided to plunge ahead with plans to organize Tyler factions in New
York City and elsewhere. He cared not whether his supporters were
Tidewater gentlemen or patrons of the "celebrated lady" off Broadway,
only whether they could deliver a pro-Tyler vote when called upon.
At a crucial White House strategy meeting with Noah early in January
i843j the President stated the opinion that his friends In New York
City were numerous enough and dedicated enough to give Mm the
223
balance of power in the Empire State. He pointed particularly to the
work being carried on in his behalf there by loyal men like George,
Graham, Fisher, Tasistro, and Fowler. At this enumeration of small-
time political hacks, patronage bums, and Tammany opportunists, Noah
was "struck dumb with amazement." But Tyler went on to argue, in
a statistical analysis lasting several hours, that in addition to New York
he had significant blocs of followers in Ohio, New Hampshire, Virginia,
and Pennsylvania — enough in total to produce a third party large
enough to exercise a controlling influence on the Democratic platform
and on the ultimate success or failure of the Democratic nominee in
1844. Tyler made it plain to Noah during this lengthy interview that he
"entertained no hopes of an election himself," only the aspiration that
his party would be large enough to influence the behavior of the Democ-
racy. A Tammany-trained professional and former editor of the New
York Courier and Enquirer, Mordecai Noah knew his New York politics
inside out. He agreed, he told the President, that
. . . the only hope you can have must rest on the chance of erecting a party
of your own. This you cannot do. You possess patronage, to be sure; and
you can use it, without violating any principle; but if it were ten times as
extensive as it is it would not enable you to create a party of sufficient
consequence to justify you in accepting a nomination even if you could obtain
one. The whole Executive Patronage is but a drop in the ocean.26
It depended on the size of the drop and the extent of the ocean, and
Tyler was satisfied that "the whole Executive Patronage" was a very
large drop indeed. He was now sure he could construct a sizable political
lever — one he would employ for the "sole purpose of controlling events
by throwing the weight of that organization for the public good!' And
by "the public good" John Tyler meant nothing less than the annexation
of Texas. His decision made, his optimism keenly alive, it was not sur-
prising that the confident President chased and kissed and flirted with
young Julia Gardiner a few nights later at the White House. He was in a
frisky mood. If he was a President without a party, he was still the na-
tion's leading patronage dispenser. With the patronage, he believed,
would come the party, and with the party would come the vehicle for
annexing Texas and salvaging the historical reputation of his administra-
tion. As Corporal's Guardsman George H. Proffit of Indiana explained
it to the House on January 10, the Tyler administration was "desirous
and anxious to go out of power with a good name." No more, no less.27
Late in the spring of 1843 ^e President launched a vigorous purge
of federal officeholders hostile to his administration and to his Texas
ambitions. It was a long-overdue housecleaning. On May 12, from
Charles City County, Tyler instructed Secretary of the Treasury John
C. Spencer to grease the guillotine:
224
We have numberless enemies in office and they should forthwith be made
to quit. . . . The movements ought to be numerous and decided. Let a number
be made and announced on the morning of the same day and this will
best be done by consulting with Mr. Wickliffe [Postmaster General] and
sending on your commissions and his by the same mail. ... In short the
changes ought to be rapid and extensive and numerous — but we should have
some assurances of support by the appointees. Glance occasionally at the
Marshals and District] Attorneys and let me hear from you In short my
D[ea]r Sir, action is what we want, prompt and decisive action, but what
I say is that we ought to know whom we appoint. . . . One word more — Poor
O'Bryan for a clerkship; the man is actually starving.
As a modest starter Tyler personally marked a dozen men for instant
proscription, suggesting their replacements. Among the latter, for ex-
ample, was his friend and neighbor Collier H. Minge, from whom lie
had purchased the Sherwood Forest property. Minge, he felt, should go
to Mobile as Postmaster, while John Finley of Baltimore should be axed.
Both men were related to Old Tippecanoe, but "Minge is Genl. Har-
rison's nephew, as true as steel," Tyler explained, "while Finley is
[only] a loth cousin." 28
As the heads rolled regularly into the administration's spattered
baskets, John Jones of the Madisonian sat by the blade demanding more
victims. "Look at the collectors, naval officers, surveyors, appraisers . . .
marshals, dictrict attorneys, registers of the land office," he shouted,
"the twelve or fifteen thousand postmasters . . . the whole diplomatic
corps abroad ... by whom are they filled? By the friends of the Presi-
dent or by his adversaries? Nineteen-twentieths of them are opposed to
him, and a large proportion of that number are known to be the avowed
advocates of his bitter revilers." 2d
So the bloodletting went forward, Tyler frequently and personally
concerning himself with new personnel for the most obscure offices.
Scarcely a sparrow fell from the federal firmament without the Presi-
dent's knowledge and encouragement. Whigs, Locofocos, Websterites,
Van Burenites, and Clay men fell by the wayside in hundreds. Not sur-
prisingly, the casualties roared and bellowed in pain like a herd of gored
bulls. Even Webster, who knew the patronage game better than most
politicians, wrote Tyler angrily from Boston in August 1843, charging
that it would be "an unhappy thing if your Administration should be
known and distinguished hereafter as one in which patronage of office
was relied on for political and personal support . . . your substantial
and permanent fame as President of the United States is in no small
peril. . . ." 30
The fact of the matter was that Tyler was actually engaged in
salvaging the "substantial and permanent fame" of his administration
after two years of ineffectual parleying with various political factions
225
more powerful than himself. And if he had once said, "Patronage is the
sword and cannon by which war is made on the liberty of the human
race ... if the offices of the government shall be considered but as 'spoils7
to be distributed among a victorious party ... all stability in government
is at an end," he might now be forgiven youthful hyperbole. That un-
fortunate statement had been made a decade earlier, when Jackson was
in power, and every politician had borrowed a little something from Old
Hickory in the intervening years. Indeed, as John Minge of Petersburg
reminded a now more politically realistic Tyler in 1844, the only road
to political power and influence, as Jackson had proved, was through
patronage. Why then, asked Minge, do you keep the important offices
"too much out of the line of your personal friends?" 31
Tyler needed no such aide memoire from his friend. Nor, actually,
did he withhold office from his personal friends. On the contrary, he ap-
pointed many of them, including nine members of his family, to various
posts. The heroic if ineffectual Corporal's Guard, all of whom had
earned political isolation and exile for their support of the President,
were also rewarded with federal appointments before Tyler left office.
So too were the stalwarts of the Virginia Clique. Tyler did not, how-
ever, follow in Jackson's footsteps by stuffing friendly newspaper editors
into office. This he had always considered a danger to the freedom and
integrity of the press. In only two known instances did he appoint edi-
tors to government posts. More typically, he denied federal office to
Mordecai Noah because Noah was an editor.32
In all his patronage appointments and proscriptions in 1843-1844
Tyler learned that for every new friend an enemy was made. A. G. Abell
was rewarded with a consulship to Hawaii for a very favorable and still
useful campaign biography, Life of John Tyler (1844). Hiram Cum-
ming, on the other hand, failed to obtain a diplomatic appointment to
St. Petersburg and slashed back in rage with his scurrilous Secret History
of the Tyler Dynasty (1845). It was in this pamphlet that Cumming,
onetime patronage hatchet-man for the Tylerites, conjured up the fable
that the lustful old President had deceived the innocent young Julia,
winning her fair hand by promising her he would enter and remain in
the 1844 Presidential campaign. Coupled with this were other tales of
gross political corruption, his "blasphemy and revelry" in the White
House and his "bacchanalian" debauches with his sons. "It is a tissue of
anathemas and so gross as to kill itself," snapped Julia when she read
it. "He wants to be sued for libel and slander I have no doubt in order
to bring himself into notoriety and further the sale of his book." Politics
could be a dirty business.33
It was also a business in which not all the President's friends could
hope to attain managerial positions. By September 1843 Tyler noted
with dismay that the Tyler Club in New Orleans numbered four hun-
dred supporters, all clamoring for public office. It was time to call a halt
226
to the purge. Therefore on September 2 he Instructed Secretary Spencer
that "we have done enough and should pause. This I am pretty much
resolved upon.'7 He was convinced that he now had "a firm grasp on the
reins." The purge, he felt, had nicely cleared the decks.34
The abrupt end of what Whigs called the "Reign of Terror" did not
please John Jones. The Madisonian editor argued that too many of the
President's new nominees had not or could not expect to receive Senate
approval, and that much of the purgation had been wasted effort. Jones
was right. An angry alliance of Clay Whigs and Van Buren Democrats
in the Senate blocked more than a hundred of Tyler's appointments.
Three of these were nominations to Cabinet posts. When a final count
was made in 1845, it revealed that the Senate had rejected more of the
appointees of John Tyler to federal office than those of any other Presi-
dent in American history. The record endures. "These men were re-
jected/7 wrote Tyler ruefully, only "because they supported my Admin-
istration." Jones also felt that the extent of the Tyler housecleaning had
fallen far short of the need. "The enemies of the President are [still] at
the head of almost every bureau in Washington . . . out of six hundred
clerks in the departments, scarcely fifty real Tyler men are to be found
— almost every important office in the great State of New York is in
the hands of these anti-Texas gentlemen," he complained.35
Tyler was determined to do something about New York and the
"anti-Texas gentlemen'7 there. His patronage manipulations meant little
unless his friends could exercise a decisive role in the pivotal Empire
State. His popular reception in New York City in June 1843, en route
with Priscilla and Robert to Boston to attend Webster's speech at the
dedication of the Bunker Hill monument, convinced him that the city
was the key to his entire political strategy. Priscilla wildly exaggerated
the size of his reception, but it was impressive:
When we arrived in New York [she wrote], there were four hundred thou-
sand people assembled to greet us. You see, I won't allow it was only for the
President. The bay was crowded with boats of every description. Seventy-four
men-of-war down to thousands of club boats. The yards of the ships were
all manned and cannons going off in every direction . . . bands of music were
playing and ten thousand troops [were] stationed round the Battery. I never
saw so magnificent a spectacle in my life The President had really showers
of bouquets and wreaths thrown upon him everywhere. Windows of the
houses . . . [were] filled with the most beautiful women waving their hand-
kerchiefs and casting flowers in his path. These latter demonstrations Mr.
Tyler takes as intended solely for himself.36
In essence, Tyler's New York strategy was to effect an alliance with
Tammany Hall, to infiltrate the Wigwam and bring Tammany to a pro-
Texas annexation stand. He did not think this would prove difficult.
Tammany and Van Buren's Albany Regency were at odds on many
patronage fronts and, as everyone knew, the Tammany leadership was
227
corruptible, usually for sale to the highest bidder. . Tyler had much to
bid with. In the Post Office, Customs House, and Brooklyn Navy Yard
were hundreds of patronage jobs which the Chief Executive controlled.
The President was in no hurry to capture Tammany in mid- 1843, k°w-
ever. He would wait to see what happened to his Texas treaty in the
Senate and what the nominating conventions the following spring would
bring. He was perfectly willing to wait, to let other Democratic factions
in New York weaken themselves in internecine combat before he stepped
in. "Prudence, my D[ea]r Sir, prudence is the word/' he instructed
Jones in September 1843. "Let your fire be directed at Clay Use my
name as little as possible in your paper." 37
Tyler's decision in May 1844 to hold his own Democratic-Republi-
can convention in Baltimore at the same time the Democrats held theirs
there was no more subtle than open blackmail. The President wanted to
force the Democracy, its nominee, and its platform to endorse his Texas
project. So it was that one thousand of his friends, most of them office-
holders in his administration, gathered at Calvert Hall in Baltimore on
May 27, 1844. There were no grave problems, issues, or divisions. The
stage was decorated with banners reading TYLER AND TEXAS and
RE-ANNEXATION OF TEXAS REJECTION IS POSTPONEMENT. The atmOS-
phere was carnival. From every state in the Union they came to whoop
it up for "Tyler and Texas!" and have a good time. "Large supplies of
brandy and water, whisky and gin" were passed around to stimulate the
enthusiasm. When it was suggested that the nomination be delayed until
the Democrats had acted, delegate Delazon Smith of Ohio objected with
the declaration, "Did you not come here to nominate John Tyler? Why
then wait for the action of any other body? We will not wait; we will
not allow any other body of men to steal our thunder, nor permit any
other man to use our pick-axe. They shall not take our vetoes, neither
shall they appropriate Texas to their own party uses." Tyler was
nominated in less than an hour, the annexation of Texas was demanded
in ringing tones, and many of the buoyant delegates drifted over to the
Odd Fellows Hall on North Gay Street to see how the Democrats were
doing. Tyler was the first into the field with a solid pro-Texas platform.
Even the crusty old Adams admitted that Tyler had played his political
hand "with equal intrepidity and address." 38
The Tylerites discovered that the Democrats on North Gay were
doing badly. While Van Buren had a clear majority of the delegates, he
did not have the necessary two-thirds. By the seventh ballot Lewis Cass
of Michigan had squeezed past him. There the voting and the conven-
tion deadlocked and a halt was called for the evening, the delegates
adjourning into dozens of smoke-filled rooms in search of a compromise
candidate. There over their shot glasses, surrounded by cigar haze, the
Democracy discovered James Knox Polk of Tennessee — slaveowner,
confidant of Old Hickory, former Speaker of the House, friendly with
228
Tyler, eager for Texas, and enough of a Locofoco on domestic policy to
suit Van Buren. He was relatively obscure but lie was a near-perfect
candidate. On May 28, on the ninth ballot, he became the first dark-
horse winner in convention history. The platform declared for "the
re-occupation of Oregon and the re-annexation of Texas at the earliest
practicable period." The Tyler strategy had worked.30
The President evaluated the Democratic candidate and surveyed
the Democracy's Texas stand In a twinkling, as rapidly as Samuel
Morse's new contraption had communicated the stunning news to the
capital. On May 30 Tyler issued an acceptance-of -nomination statement
to his own supporters that was a political masterpiece. In one breath It
blasted both Clay and Van Buren, called for passage of the pending
Texas treaty, and suggested to Polk that Tyler's withdrawal from the
race was negotiable:
My name has become inseparably connected with the great question of the
annexation of Texas to the Union. In originating and concluding that nego-
tiation I had anticipated the cordial cooperation of two gentlemen, both of
whom were most prominent in the public mind as candidates for the presi-
dency. That cooperation would have been attended with the immediate with-
drawal of my name from the question of succession. In the consummation
of that measure, the aspirations of my ambition would have been complete.
I should have felt that, as an instrument of Providence, I would have been
able in accomplishing for my country the greatest possible good. ... If
annexation is to be accomplished, it must, I am convinced, be done im-
mediately. Texas Is in no condition to delay If the present treaty should
be ratified ... at the present session of Congress, you will leave me at liberty,
gentlemen, to pursue the course in regard to the nomination . . . that my sense
of what is due myself and the country may seem to require The question
with me is between Texas and the presidency. The latter, even if within my
grasp, would not for a moment be permitted to stand in the way of the
first.40
There the matter stood until June 8. On that day the languishing
Texas treaty was finally and decisively beaten in the Senate 35 to 16,
two-thirds against rather than the two-thirds in favor Upshur had
counted back in December; a crushing twenty-eight votes short. Many
explanations were offered by Senators who switched their stands. Some
complained that Tyler's secret diplomacy was un-American; others said
the people should decide the question in November; still others re-
sponded to party discipline exercised by Clay and Van Buren. But over
it all hung the slavery question. And while the various excuses and ex-
planations were being made on Capitol Hill Santa Anna commenced
what appeared to be serious war preparations. Calhoun was so discour-
aged over the vote he advised Tyler to give up the Texas project entirely.
The nervous Texans, now on a very extended limb, asked that the mili-
tary assurances guaranteed by the treaty be put into effect at once.41
229
His Texas treaty beaten, Tyler now entered into the campaign with
zest. His plan was to convince Polk that he had enough power in a few
key states to compel Young Hickory to purchase Tyler's withdrawal
and endorsement with the coin of two basic guarantees: that the Demo-
cratic platform really meant what it said on Texas and that Tyler's
friends would not be purged from office in the event of a Tyler-Polk
amalgamation and a resulting Polk victory. Convinced that Polk had no
choice but to come to Canossa, Tyler waited confidently for Young
Hickory to make the first gesture toward an alliance. He did not have to
wait long. On June 2 he received tentative feelers from the Democracy
on a possible Polk-Tyler Union ticket. This pleased the President and
convinced him he could play a cool and deliberate hand. "The Demo-
crats ... are now looking to me for help," he told his daughter Mary.
"I can either continue the contest or abandon it with honor." With his
marriage to Julia but three weeks away, he was in fine fettle.42
Robert Tyler had joined his father's campaign with enthusiasm,
giving up his two-month-old law practice in Philadelphia to manage
Tyler's political affairs. This new political involvement by Robert suited
Priscilla not at all. She wrote her husband from Philadelphia on June 4
that
Of course the Polkites want a Union ticket. . . . They cannot succeed with-
out Father's assistance. With that, I have no doubt the Democratic party
will be successful, as they have stolen the Texas question, besides using
the veto issue and all of Father's ammunition. I should consent to the Union
ticket if I were in Father's place, but I should bargain for the protection
of my friends if I did. But the next best thing is to withdraw and be
disinterested and help the Democracie [szc] and get you a good foreign
mission The first wish of my heart, my dearest husband, is that you may
return [home] and decisively go into the practice of the law, giving up
everything else My dear husband, you must return to Philadelphia, give
up the life of political care and excitement in which you live [and] find
your dearest happiness in your wife and children. . . .
•"The advice you give Robert is excellent," wrote Tyler in the margin.43
But the President needed his politically knowledgeable son awhile
longer. Working with Dr. Joel B. Sutherland and all the patronage power
at the command of the Philadelphia Customs House, Robert began
building a Tyler organization in that city. On July 4, at a series of Tyler
rallies in Philadelphia, the decision was made to run a separate Tyler
slate for every office in Pennsylvania and thus split the Democratic vote
in the Commonwealth. Similar divisive plans were already afoot in New
Jersey and New York. When news of these developments reached Sen-
ator Robert J. Walker, the worried Mississippian reported to Polk that
"Our friends in Philadelphia and also in New Jersey and New York have
written to me in great alarm . . . the greatest distraction and distrust in
-our ranks would be produced by running Tyler tickets in Pennsylvania."
230
As consternation spread throughout the Democracy, the President re-
mained calm and confident. From his honeymoon retreat at Sherwood
Forest he instructed Robert: "Our course is now a plain one. Make
these men feel the great necessity of my co-operation." 44
On July 9 Senator Walker appeared suddenly at Sherwood Forest.
The time to open negotiations with Tyler had come, and Walker was the
logical intermediary. While he was acting on his own initiative in this
instance, Ms interest in Texas annexation on his Southern political
conservatism in the Senate had made him persona grata to Tyler. At the
same time, he stood high in the campaign councils of James K. Polk.
Nevertheless, he came to Sherwood Forest as a suppliant, and his three-
hour conversation with the President was a "disagreeable duty.75 Tyler,,
on his part, was relaxed and expansive. He spoke of Andrew Jackson "in
terms of deep affection/' expressed his "great anxiety that Polk and
Dallas should be elected," and hoped that he might withdraw from the
campaign and soon retire from the White House. Casually, in an almost
offhand manner, he estimated his national strength at "about 150,000
chiefly Republicans who voted for the Whigs in '40," and he sug-
gested that this considerable group could be added to the Polk total were
he but to give the word. Walker did not dispute the estimate. Nor,
given the stakes, did Tyler's terms for alliance with Polk seem out-
rageous or unreasonable. The President asked only that his political
friends "be assured on reliable authority that they would be received
with pleasure by you [Polk] and your friends into the ranks of the
Democratic party, and treated as brethren and equals." That assurance
given, Tyler pledged that he would "at once withdraw," throw his full
support to Polk, and render his victory "certain." 45
Walker assured the President that a bargain could be struck. He
left Sherwood Forest that same day and returned to Washington. Im-
mediately he wrote Polk that "the importance of this union and co-
operation cannot be over-rated. In my judgment it would be decisive
in your favor." Walker appreciated the fact that the face-saving element
in any arrangement with Tyler was an important one. Therefore, he
suggested that Polk write a private letter to a friend which might b,e
shown confidentially to Tyler, a letter inviting the President and his sup-
porters back into the Democracy "as brethren and equals." He thought
Jackson might write a similar letter, one which could be published, at-
testing that on Tyler's withdrawal his followers would be joyfully re-
ceived back in the Democratic bosom "on the same platform of equal
rights and consideration" with all other Democrats.46
After consultations with Jackson, Polk chose the indirect approach.
Were Polk to communicate in any way with Tyler his act, Jackson warned,
would be interpreted "just as the Adams and Clay bargain" of 1828. It
would be wiser if Jackson himself wrote the missive to be shown Tyler.
Privately, Jackson rated Tyler's strength a "mere drop in the bucket,"
231
but he hastened to execute the Walker recommendation. Within a few
weeks Tyler was shown a personal letter from Old Hickory to Major
William B. Lewis which urged Tyler's withdrawal "as the certain means
of electing Mr. Polk, and ensuring a consummation of all the leading
measures" of the Tyler administration. In this circuitous manner Jack-
son assured the President of his "strong conviction" that the Tylerites
"would be regarded as true friends of the country" by Polk and would
be "as favorably looked upon as any other portion of the Democracy."
Indeed, they would be "received as brethren ... all former differences
forgotten." And so in late July the bargain was well on the way to
consummation.47
While these face-saving arrangements were being worked out in the
Polk- Jackson camp, Tyler moved ahead with the organization of his
friends in crucial New York City. If and when he did decide to withdraw,
he wanted to be able to demonstrate in November that his self-sacrifice
was the primary factor in Polk's election. He also reasoned that the no-
purge promise would more likely be honored if the Tylerites could show
that they had delivered the Empire State into the hands of Polk. The
President turned the infiltration and seduction of Tammany Hall over
to Alexander Gardiner and Robert Tyler.
On April 27, 1844, five days after the President's letter seeking
Julia's hand had been received at Lafayette Place, Alexander had leaped
eagerly to Tyler's political assistance. Within a month, under a variety
of pseudonyms, he was bombarding New York editors with stinging criti-
cisms of Van Buren's "craven" renunciation of Texas, predicting that the
Democracy would meet defeat on the annexation issue. In these letters
he noticed the "strong tide running in favor of reannexation," con-
demned Mexican dictator Santa Anna, called attention to British in-
trigue in Texas, and wondered where in all the history of mankind "the
people anywhere [are] found adverse to any extension of territory."
Over and over he called stridently for the "reannexation" of Texas and
the election of John Tyler. He demanded "reannexation" on the grounds
that Texas was American territory under the Louisiana Purchase. Tyler's
election was urged with the argument that since annexation had been
the President's special project from the start, he should be returned to
power to carry it through.48
To assist Alexander in his labors for the Tyler cause in the Empire
State, in mid- July the President made a basic change in the dispensa-
tion of patronage in New York City. On the urgent recommendation of
Robert Tyler, Joel B. Sutherland, and Postmaster John Lorimer Graham,
he purged Edward Curtis as Collector of the Port of New York, replac-
ing him (on an interim appointment) with Judge Cornelius P. Van Ness,
former governor of Vermont. Curtis had originally been a Harrison-
Webster appointee and through the years had loaded the Customs
House, the Post Office, and the Brooklyn Navy Yard with Websterites,
232
Clay men, and other WMgs of dubious loyalty to "Tyler and Texas."
Tyler first asked Curtis to resign his post on May 9. When the Col-
lector bluntly refused, the President could do nothing but bide his time
until the Senate adjourned in July. He knew that the Whig Senate was
not likely to approve the dismissal of Curtis and the appointment of Cor-
nelius Van Ness barely four months before the election. It was no secret
in the capital that Judge Van Ness was a solid Tyler man. Onetime Min-
ister to Spain and Collector of the Port of Burlington, Vermont, the
Conservative Democrat was also the brother of the General John P. Van
Ness so admired by the Gardiner family during their 1842-1843 Wash-
ington visit.
After the Senate adjourned and Curtis was summarily deposed,
Collector Van Ness launched a ruthless "Reign of Terror" in New York
City. On July 15 he began cutting away the Clay and Webster vines that
clung to the walls of the federal agencies. Among the worthies marked
for instant proscription was Paul R. George, whose connection with
Curtis was his death warrant. In the first batch to go from the Customs
House alone there were sixty men. These vacancies, together with the
temporary three-dollar-per-day jobs created by Van Ness for the
duration of the campaign, brought forth applicants "so numerous that
they actually blocked up the streets leading to the Custom House . . .
the out-pouring and out-scourings? of all the political parties that ever
existed in this country." 49
Most of the appointments to these minor sinecures were made from
among various Roman Catholic immigrant groups — Irish, Polish, and
German. Tammany was particularly powerful among these new Ameri-
cans, and the Tyler leadership hi New York wanted a foothold in their
multilingual ranks for bargaining purposes in the Wigwam. More im-
portantly, it was certain that the new Native American party, a passing
phenomenon born in hatred, exclusionism, and anti-Catholicism, would
combine with the Whigs in November in a joint effort to crush Tammany
in the city. This opportunistic alliance represented a major threat to the
Hall and the Tylerite strategists appreciated the problem. To attract the
Irish vote to the projected Tyler-Tammany coalition, the President in
March 1844 expressed the "liveliest interest" in the Irish struggle for
freedom against England. Robert Tyler had also seen the political ad-
vantages of an identification with Roman Catholic immigrant groups. In
the same month he became president of the Irish Repeal Association in
Philadelphia on the eve of tie bitter anti-Catholic riots that swept that
city.50
Patronage distribution in New York devolved on Van Ness, Post-
master Graham, and Alexander Gardiner. A quick survey of the local
political situation convinced Gardiner that he could be very useful to his
new brother-in-law. He instructed Julia to advise the President "that no
changes be made in the public offices here before I can ascertain that
233
all is safe and to be trusted." It was indeed fortunate, he said, that a
member of the immediate family was on the scene. "I think that I can
make myself more useful in these matters than any other person in this
city," he explained to Julia, "having most at stake ... in our family in
the present and future honor and fame of the administration " 51
Alexander's newfound friends in the patronage-distribution busi-
ness— men like John Lorimer Graham — were not the kind of New
Yorkers with whom the Gardiners were in the habit of associating. When
Julia complained that they were a seedy group, Alexander agreed that
Although they are not persons of the best judgment, nor of very good
reputation in pecuniary affairs, nor of any weight of character in the com-
munity, they are yet open and avowed friends of the President, and doubt-
less capable of making themselves useful in a public sphere. I hope therefore
you have not given the President any particular concern about them.
Alexander was rapidly becoming a practical politician. As he sized
up the Gotham political arena it was the end result that counted,
not the means that had to be employed to attain it. For this reason he
lent money to his lowbrow associates — generally small sums of fifty dol-
lars or less — and he extricated them from various scrapes. He also saw
to it that they were included in the wedding reception aboard the ferry-
boat Essex after Tyler's marriage to Julia on June 26.52
Alexander Gardiner had no illusions about the success of the Tyler
faction in the November elections. He knew that the Tyler movement
was a holding operation — nationally and in New York — created only
to strike the best possible terms with the Democracy on Texas and
patronage and then leave the field. Therefore, at a private meeting
of Tyler leaders in Manhattan during the week of July 15 the decision
was made to place a Tyler slate in the field for every elective office in
New York state and to hold a public Tyler rally on July 23 at which the
President's nomination by his Baltimore convention would be ostenta-
tiously ratified.
This bold ploy galvanized the Tammany-dominated Democratic
General Committee of New York City into immediate action. On July
20, a Tammany Hall delegation approached Alexander Gardiner, Col-
lector Van Ness, and Postmaster Graham and suggested a Polk-Tyler
alliance as the only hope of defeating Clay in New York. Specifically,
they requested the establishment of a joint conference committee for the
purpose of "arranging difficulties'7 between partisans of the two candi-
dates. Alexander informed Tyler that an exploratory conference had
been agreed upon, but that "no definitive action will be taken without
approval at headquarters." Headquarters at that moment was the honey-
moon cottage at Old Point Comfort.53
A few days later, on July 23, the Tyler ratification meeting was
held, William Shaler presiding. It was a large, noisy, disorderly affair.
234
Strong-arm Tammany forces under colorful Mike Walsh arrived In num-
bers and attempted to disrupt proceedings. This tactic was defeated
only when Delazon Smith of Ohio managed to seize the speaker's stand
and hold it against all interruptions for two hours in an extemporaneous
eulogy to T}4er. When the Walsh crowd finally gave up (rigor mortis
must have set in), Thomas Dunn English and Judge Chesselden Ellis
spoke briefly7 and the rally then duly endorsed the Baltimore conven-
tion's nomination of Tyler. As Alexander explained the evening's excite-
ment and its political significance to Julia, "My only hope now is, that
the firm stand taken, may bring the friends of Polk to favorable terms;
for I cannot believe that we have either the men or the means to make
any general and effectual separate organization. ... I rejoice that the
nomination of the President has been ratified ... so that he may receive
proposals on equal terms." 54
Word came back to Alexander from honeymoon headquarters within
the week. Tyler informed his brother-in-law that he was ready to with-
draw, given a satisfactory patronage arrangement with the Polkites in
New York, On the strength of this notification, Alexander circulated a
confidential memorandum through the Democratic leadership in the city
on July 29 calling for a Tammany alliance with the Tyler! tes. Speaking
as a Tammany Democrat himself (he had been one for two years), he
bluntly reminded the party professionals that Tyler's friends in New
York were
— working politicians and hold offices of profit, and hence are able to give
us at once valuable personal and pecuniary aid. How is it, now? They are
kept in abeyance, and we holding no public patronage are now driven upon
our private means for support. How inadequate a reliance! If the friends
of Tyler are not embraced madness rides the land: we can lose nothing by
it, but we may gain much Whigs in office would be immediately sup-
planted by Democrats . . . the union acceded to / have it on the best authority
that the President will retire from the contest and throw his whole weight
in favor of Polk All that Mr. Tyler wants is justice and conciliation
Let us act quickly: we should this day have the aid of the public patronage
and be in the field with all our forces united ! 55
Tammany and the Polkites had little choice. It was win with Tyler's
aid or lose without it. On the evening of August 2 the bargain was struck.
Polk's spokesmen promised nothing less than equality of patronage
opportunity and open patronage covenants openly arrived at. For these
concessions they looked forward to the withdrawal of John Tyler from
the field "with credit, honor, and upon terms of much prospective im-
portance." With this agreement in hand, little more could be accom-
plished by the Tylerites in New York. "I speak with great diffidence,"
Alexander told the President, " [but] I cannot at present perceive that
anything particularly desirable could be achieved by a continuance in
235
the field, this point having been reached." Gardiner was right. Nothing
more could be achieved, and a few days later at the Carleton House the
eight members of the joint Polk-Tyler conference committee drew up
resolutions praising the Tyler administration and pledging their com-
mon support of Young Hickory since "the Democratic friends of Presi-
dent Tyler are committed to the same general principles as the support-
ers of Mr. Polk." A Tammany delegation departed shortly afterward for
Washington to urge Tyler's speedy withdrawal. Meanwhile, Joel B.
Sutherland and Robert Tyler arrived at the White House from Phila-
delphia to press the same course. Letters from Democrats all over the
country flooded into Washington pleading with the President to with-
draw and join with Polk in the certain humiliation of Henry Clay. On
August 2o? 1844, John Tyler finally issued his withdrawal statement, but
not before he got off a private letter to Andrew Jackson announcing that
a statement was forthcoming and that he counted "40,000 friends in
Ohio and a controlling power in Pennsylvania, Virginia and New Jersey,
which if it can be brought to co-operate will decide the contest." 56
Tyler's formal withdrawal statement, struck off hastily (in less than
three hours), was an extensive defense of his administration in general,
his vetoes in particular, his motives in the Texas matter, and his right
as an American citizen "to think for myself on all subjects and to act in
pursuance of n*/ own convictions." He again denied the charge that his
Texas treaty had any sectional bias. It was entirely a national measure,
designed only to insure "the annual expansion of our coastwise and
foreign trade, and the increased prosperity of our agriculture and manu-
factures." He admitted, however, that he felt personally "ambitious to
add another bright star to the American constellation," and that the
completion of annexation would furnish him "an unfailing source of
gratification to the end of my life." The ratification of the Texas treaty,
he confessed, was "the sole honor which I coveted, and that I now de-
sire." For his personal role in advancing the issue toward some solution
he could only "appeal from the vituperation of the present day to the
pen of imperial history." 57
Hailed by his followers as "decidedly one of the ablest productions
from the Pen of our friend," the withdrawal statement was generally
ridiculed in the Whig press, applauded by the Democratic press, and
smiled at indulgently in some sectors of both. The cautious New York
Journal of Commerce came closest to the contemporary significance of
the decision when it noted on August 22 that
Some have said the Tyler party is a minus quantity; and that its co-opera-
tion would be worse than its opposition. This will do for a joke, but in point
of fact, the Polkites will rejoice, and the Whigs regret, to see this new ac-
cession, small though it be, to the ranks of the democratic nominee. In some
of the Southern States where the votes of Whigs and Democrats are nearly
balanced, a deduction of a comparatively small number from the latter,
might entirely change the result.58
236
This too was the judgment of the Polk leadership. Andrew Jackson
was satisfied that Tyler's withdrawal had strengthened Young Hickory
significantly in Ohio, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, and Michi-
gan. "All's -well in N. York and Pennsylvania . . . ," said the old General
happily. Sutherland predicted a Polk majority in Virginia and a Polk
sweep in the Keystone State. Indeed, when news of Tyler's withdrawal
reached Philadelphia six thousand of his friends were crowded into the
Chinese Museum and voted to go over to Polk and Dallas in a body.59
So smoothly and quickly did the alliance fuse that by mid-Septem-
ber Tyler was persuaded that a Polk administration would really be but
"a continuation of my own, since he will be found the advocate of most
of my measures." He was positive that his friends would be treated with
"regard and attention,'7 and he was pleased that they "rallied en masse"
to Polk in Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and New England. This
unanimous rally, he predicted, would surely "secure the election" for
Polk. In sum, John Tyler was satisfied with the bargain. Rumors that
the arrangement involved his appointment to the Court of St. James's,
or that Tyler had insisted that Franklin P. Blair's Washington Globe
be cut off from any official connection with a Polk administration, were
entirely without foundation. In fact, Tyler and Polk had no direct con-
tact at any time during the campaign. All understandings were effected
through intermediaries.60
In New York City the Tyler faction began vigorous efforts on be-
half of the Polk ticket in early September. They, at least, would carry
out their end of the transaction with Young Hickory. Julia received
Alexander's instruction to send from Washington "a good bundle of the
Madisonian pamphlet that I might distribute them here." This she
quickly did, happy to contribute to the Polk campaign in any way she
could. As the summer drew to a close Alexander dispensed increasing
quantities of federal patronage in the city. Working through Van Ness
and Graham, he placed deserving Democrats of all factions — Tyler's,
Polk's, Tammany's, and even Van Buren's — into various jobs in the
Customs House, Post Office, and Navy Yard. He took special care of the
Long Island friends of his Uncle Samuel Gardiner. Gradually he came
to control patronage distribution for the administration in all of Suffolk
County. He also took a special interest in the seamen's vote on the docks
in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Just before the polls opened on November
5 he circularized all Democratic ward leaders to the effect that if they
knew of any "worthy Democrat" who needed employment, he could pro-
vide a full winter's work on the dry dock then building at the Brooklyn
Navy Yard. The response to the dry dock work offer was, to say the
least, heartening. Men came in droves, bringing their friends and rela-
tives. All were votes for Polk. Alexander was busy with the Polk cam-
paign from morning until night. "Alex has no peace with the constant
demand upon his time and purse" Margaret complained. "The door bell
is nearly worn out with ringing." 61
237
By the beginning of October Alexander Gardiner had become so
•enamored of the local political process that on Robert Tyler's suggestion
he decided to run for the New York State Assembly. Robert pulled the
strings within Tammany that assured Alexander a nomination on the
Democratic ticket. To provide himself additional prestige and a closer
personal connection with Tyler for campaign purposes, Alexander sought
an appointment as the President's honorary aide-de-camp. When Tyler
refused his request for a colonelcy the young lawyer complained to Julia
that the President was slow to "give his relations situations." But in spite
of Julia's pressure in her brother's behalf, the President stood firm.
Enough of his relatives were already in office. Disappointed but un-
bowed, Alexander plunged into the campaign anyway. He came out
strongly for Polk, Texas, and the "reoccupation" of Oregon. He was
against the use of convict labor in competition with the HONEST
MECHANICS OF THIS STATE.
This orthodoxy did not sway all the members of the nominations
•committee of the Democratic county convention. Young Gardiner had
been a Democrat for only two years and his services to Tammany had
not been noteworthy. As bread-and-butter professionals, some of Tam-
many's sidewalk sachems were not overly impressed with Alexander's
argument that he had, after all, "supported the various measures of the
party through the columns of the Globe, Evening Post and other papers."
A strong effort was therefore made to block his nomination. Thanks
to the labors of David H. Broderick, however, opposition to the Gardiner
^endorsement was beaten down in the nominations committee and upstart
Alexander's name was sent along with the rest of the approved list to the
county convention for ratification. Broderick was later rewarded by
Tyler with a patronage job for his loyal efforts. The nominations-com-
mittee incident of October n convinced Alexander that "there is a great
absence of friends in the Democratic Party." 62
Alexander entered the Assembly race with scant hope of victory. He
ielt that the Whig-Native American alliance would likely defeat all
Democratic candidates running, as he was, on a citywide ticket. Cal-
culating his chances as "more possible than probable," he was half-
angered, half-amused when a plot was sprung in the county convention
in late October to deny him the nomination. He was not without warning
that something of the sort was afoot. The New York Herald for October
13, commenting on his contested selection by the nominations com-
snittee, remarked that
The greatest possible commotion and excitement prevailed on Friday evening
[October n] in and around Tammany Hall, in consequence of the nomina-
tion of a highly respectable and wealthy young gentleman named Gardiner, as
one of the thirteen members of the Assembly. It seems that Mr. Gardiner is
wholly unknown in the Democratic party, and received his nomination mainly
"because he happens to be the brother-in-law of President Tyler, or as some
238
of the nasty politicians will have it, the brother-in-law of the Custom House.
Everybody seemed to be loud in the expression of disapprobation, and there
will probably be difficulty at the County meeting on account of his nomina-
tion, and another made at the same time.
The maneuver to head Alexander was a crude one — typically Tammany.
An anti-Tyler clique in the Wigwam, headed by Levi D. Slamm, hired
a dim-witted gentleman named Joseph T. Sweet, a member of the nomi-
nations committee, to testify publicly that Alexander and Robert Tyler
had used various improper methods — threats, bribery, and profanity —
to suborn his vote. According to Sweet's charges, these Gardiner-Tyler
importunities were aimed at denying Thomas N. Carr, a notorious anti-
Tylerite, nomination to the State Assembly in Alexander's stead. Sweet,
of course, was a liar, and he later signed a statement cheerfully admitting
this fact (Carr, it turned out, was behind the plot), but his charges
livened up the New York County Democratic convention meeting at
Tammany Hall on the evening of October 28, reducing it to the usual
state of chaos. In spite of Sweet's allegation, Alexander's nomination
was upheld in a chorus of shouts, boos, cheers, and hisses. Nevertheless,
his success did not lessen the outrage Juliana felt when Sweet's irrespon-
sible allegations were hurled at her son. She was sure, for example, that
her Alexander had "never made use of a profane word in his life." 63
Following Alexander's baptism in mud, the family watched with
interest as the Polk-Clay campaign entered its final phases. At best, it
became a name-calling exercise punctuated by political hokum of the
worst sort. Polk called for the "reannexation" of a Texas that had never
been annexed and the "reoccupation" of an Oregon earlier inhabited by
bears, beavers and other furry patriots. Clay, on the other hand,
straddled the Texas question and struggled to avoid the very Bank issue
with which he had joyfully smashed the Tyler administration three
years earlier.
The main problem that confronted Tyler and his friends and family
was how to interpret Folk's razor-thin victory when it ultimately ma-
terialized in November. Polk eased by Clay 1,337,000 to 1,229,000 in
popular votes and 170 to 105 in the Electoral College. From the Presi-
dent's standpoint it was imperative to demonstrate that his August with-
drawal had thrown the close election to Polk. In the first flush of family
enthusiasm over the Democratic victory, Alexander argued that Young
Hickory's slim margin of 5000 in New York state, nearly half of it from
the city, could not have been possible had the President not purged
Edward Curtis from the Customs House and applied the balm of Tylerite
patronage to the Polk cause. At first Tyler adopted this satisfying in-
terpretation without dispute. "That decisive act on my part secured the
State for Polk," he declared confidently. Alexander further persuaded
Tyler that the President's timely withdrawal had also tipped Pennsyl-
vania and Virginia into the Polk column. "Mr. Polk is beyond question
239
indebted to the President for his election," said Alexander with finality.
True, had either New York or Pennsylvania gone for Clay, James K.
Polk would have lost; and in Pennsylvania, thanks to Robert Tyler and
Joel B. Sutherland, Tyler had a substantial bloc of supporters who had
indeed gone over to Polk.64
The initial Gardiner-Tyler interpretation of Polk's victory in New
York did not, however, take into account the fact that James G. Birney's
strongly abolitionist and anti-Texas Liberty Party had polled 15,812 of
its 62,300 national votes in the Empire State. Had Birney and his splin-
ter group not been in the field, or had Clay campaigned strongly against
Texas annexation, the Kentuckian might well have commanded enough
of the Birney vote to have carried New York. Nor did the Gardiner-
Tyler explanation account for the fact that the strongly antiannexation-
ist Silas Wright led the winning Democratic ticket by 5000 votes in
New York in his successful gubernatorial bid. Having earlier declined a
Vice-Presidential nomination on the Polk ticket because he was anti-
Texas, Wright had consented to run for governor only on the urging of
Martin Van Buren, whose friend and ally he was. Since he ran so far
ahead of the Democratic ticket, some observers argued that he actually
dragged Polk in with him in New York. If this was a correct view of the
matter, then Wright (and Van Buren) had delivered the Empire State
to Polk. They therefore had a greater claim on his subsequent patronage
favors than did Tyler. Daniel B. Tallmadge, a Tylerite leader in the
city, admitted the logic of this interpretation in a confidential letter to
the President. He carefully analyzed the returns in every ward and
district in New York and concluded that many antiannexationist Demo-
crats had split their tickets, voting for Wright for governor and Clay for
President, cutting Polk. "It would in my judgment serve no good pur-
pose to have this matter made the subject of newspaper discussion," he
suggested to Tyler. "I deemed it proper however to bring it to the notice
of yourself, because you have been so identified with the question of
annexation and Polk's success." Polk's Texas annexationism probably
hurt him in New York as much as it helped him. He very likely lost as
many or more votes on the issue there than he gained from the alliance
with Tyler.65
As these considerations became apparent to the President, he
gradually abandoned the view that his withdrawal had swung New York
to Polk. Instead, he pointed to those of his friends in Philadelphia (6000
by his count) who had gone over to Polk, and he maintained that their
adherence to Young Hickory had swung Pennsylvania to the Democracy.
"I say nothing of the elections elsewhere, nor is it necessary," he told
Alexander. "The loss of Pennsylvania would have lost him the election."
This comfortable thesis also contained loopholes. It did not take into
account the possibility that the appearance of native son George M.
Dallas on the Polk ticket as the Vice-Presidential candidate did more to
240
tip Pennsylvania to the Democrats than had Tylerite support. In addi-
tion, the Pennsylvania Democracy took a decisive 23,ooo-to-i9,ooo lick-
ing in Tyler's Philadelphia stronghold from a Whig-Native American
coalition ("Oh! the defeat in Philadelphia!" Margaret moaned). It
could be argued, however, that Tyler's strength in the city, particularly
among Roman Catholic immigrant groups, had reduced expected Demo-
cratic losses there enough to allow Polk to slide through by 6000 votes in
the state as a whole. This, at least, became the Tyler-Gardiner view of
the matter and it remains a reasonable though speculative opinion.
In other states where Tyler had predicted his withdrawal would
exercise a decisive influence for Polk — Virginia, Ohio, and New Jersey —
Polk carried only Virginia. Had Virginia's seventeen electoral votes gone
to Clay, the outcome of the election would not have changed one bit. In
the final analysis, then, Tyler's much-negotiated withdrawal from the
canvass probably influenced the result in Virginia (and possibly that
in Pennsylvania), and the decision in the Old Dominion was not crucial
one way or the other. But dreams are not built on such pragmatic con-
clusions. In history, what actually happened is sometimes less important
than what is believed to have happened, and John Tyler believed until
the end of his days that his withdrawal from the 1844 campaign was
the decisive factor in the unexpected victory of James K. Polk over
Henry Clay. Whatever the truth of this belief, Polk undoubtedly owed
Tyler something other than the ruthless and cynical proscription he
carried out against Tylerite officeholders soon after he assumed power.66
Alexander Gardiner's try for elective office was not successful. All
thirteen Democratic nominees for the Assembly in New York City went
down to defeat. Alexander was beaten 27,487 to 26,183 by Harvey Hunt,
the Whig-Nativist candidate. His altercation with the Slamm-Carr-Sweet
clique in Tammany had certainly not helped his cause. Friends of the
three conspirators had retaliated at the polls. In fact, Alexander ran well
behind the Democratic ticket all the way. But the mild disappointment
he experienced was buried in the general elation the Tylers and Gardiners
felt over the election of James K. Polk. Like the President himself, they
all remained convinced that Young Hickory owed his success entirely to
John Tyler.67
From the President's point of view, Henry Clay had deliberately
wrecked the Tyler administration to advance his own selfish political
fortunes. The Bank issue with which he had accomplished the demolition
was a manufactured one. The Whigs of 1844 had not even mentioned the
fighting word Bank in their fuzzy platform. It was, therefore, with great
satisfaction that Tyler saw Clay beaten by a political dark horse. In a
larger sense, he viewed Polk's victory as a complete vindication of his
own administration, and he would have been a very unusual human
being had he not convinced himself that he had played the major role
in Clay's humiliation. Both he and Julia joined enthusiastically in the
241
victory celebrations in Washington at which "John Tyler was cheered
with burst upon burst." They were delighted to hear that a Democratic
victory rally in Charleston had hailed "Old Veto" with a "Well done!
thou good and faithful servant." And when the Reverend Gregory
Thurston Bedell told his predominately Whig congregation at the Epis-
copal Church of the Ascension on November 17 that the Whigs had
tried to buy the election in New York but that Jesus Christ had tipped
the scales for Polk, Juliana was convinced that she was in the presence of
L truly great mind. Bedell, she decided, "deserves to be admired" be-
;ause he always "aimed at truth It is a great privilege to hear him
)reach." Nor could young Julia contain herself. "Hurrah for Polk!" she
jxclaimed. "What will become of Henry Clay. . . . We shall have a very
pleasant winter here I can now promise." 6S
A very pleasant winter was indeed being planned. As the Washing-
;on correspondent of the New York Herald informed his readers on
November 21:
Had Mr. Clay been chosen by the people, gloom would have pervaded the
social metropolis. Now, preparations are in progress to make this the most
Brilliant season Washington has ever beheld. A round of magnificent enter-
tainments, commencing with the opening of Congress, will follow one another
in rapid succession ... the Executive Mansion will be thrown open under
the auspices of the President's bride, the most splendid and accomplished
lady of the age. Possessed of the highest order of beauty and intellect, and
of the most elegant and popular manners, she will draw about her a court
circle rivaling in charms of mind and person, that of Charles II or Louis le
Grand.
For all her enthusiasm, energy, and social poise, the twenty-four-year-old
Julia was still a relatively young and inexperienced girl, and her mother
was sure she would make mistakes playing her queenly role in the White
House. "You must not mind any objections made of you in the news-
papers," she warned her daughter. "You will not escape censure. Do your
best I should not be surprised at any ill nature." 69
With a splendid social season to look forward to at the side of a
beautiful young bride, Tyler could not remain angry at anyone very
long, even the despicable Henry Clay. "Leave off abusing Mr. Clay al-
together," he ordered the Madisonian. "He is dead and let him rest." As
far as he was concerned, his long battle with Prince Harry was over.70
242
JULIA REGINA:
COURT LIFE IN WASHINGTON
/ determined upon, and I think I have been success-
ful, in making my Court interesting in youth and
beauty. Wherever I go they jorm my train. . . .
JULIA GARDINER TYLER, 1845
F. W. Thomas, sometime Washington correspondent of the New York
Herald, predicted in November 1844 that the coming social season would
be the "most brilliant Washington has ever beheld" — for the penny press
an understatement. Nevertheless, all the psychological and social condi-
tions were favorable for an unusual display at the White House. Tyler's
withdrawal from the campaign and Folk's victory over Clay had left the
President "happy as a clam at high water." At his side was his vivacious
bride, bubbling and bursting with all the energy and imagination that
would make the Tyler administration long remembered for its social
sophistication if not for its political accomplishments. "This winter/7
Julia breathlessly informed her mother, "I intend to do something in the
way of entertaining that shall be the admiration and talk of the Wash-
ington world." Not only would there be the weekly White House levees
and the usual formal receptions, but also several special grand functions
that would be the marvel of all Washington. Julia planned to reign in
truly regal style.1
The White House remained an unlikely castle. It was still a fright-
ful mess. The chairs had been covered only once since the first Monroe
administration and they were all in a state of "perfect explosion at every
prominent point that presents contact with the outer garments of the
visitors." An 1844 bill to provide a sorely needed $20,000 for refurbish-
ing the moth-eaten furniture had predictably been defeated in Congress.
243
And since Tyler's private funds were now severely limited by the de-
mands of the Sherwood Forest remodeling, it was up to the Gardiners
to provide the cash for much of the planned brilliance. Julia was per-
fectly willing to bear any necessary expense. As her socially conscious
mother advised her, there had to be a "change in the domestic economy
of the establishment," an end to the marginal and near-threadbare
standard of living in the President's Mansion. Needless to say, there was
an instant change, one accomplished with Gardiner dollars/ No sooner
had Julia returned from her honeymoon in Virginia than she got her
White House coachmen and footmen into expensive new livery — "a suit
of black with black velvet bands and buckles on their hats." She was
determined to "roll about very comfortably for a little while." 2
As the opening of the new season approached with the return of
Congress in early December, the First Lady busied herself with last-
niinute preparations for her "auspicious reign." She persuaded the Presi-
dent to obtain for her an Jtalian greyhound, a fashionable breed she
believed would add Continental sophistication to the decor of her Court.
Tyler dutifully placed an order for the animal through the American
consul in Naples. Meanwhile, Margaret was instructed to procure a
"Heron's plume" in New York. "For one kind of headdress this winter,"
Julia explained, "I intend to have a sort of velvet cap with a Heron's
plume in front pinned on with my large diamond pin." She also thought
Margaret had better send her diamond star feronia and her two strings
of pearls to Washington. A rush order for a loose felt hat was quickly
canceled, however, when the au courant Margaret reported that they
were definitely out of style, "found nowhere but in the Bowery" and
were now called "monkey caps." 3
Definitely in style in New York was the new dance called the polka.
Juliana reported it all the rage among the fashionable young set in
Gotham, and Julia swiftly imported it to the White House in spite of
David Lyon's comment that it was "half an Indian dance and half
waltz." Aboriginal or not, both the polka and the suggestively daring
waltz soon became de rigueur at all White House balls although Tyler,
only a few years earlier, had found the waltz immoral and sternly for-
bidden his daughters to dance it or to associate with boys who did. John
Tyler, it would seem, was mellowing. Also ordered for the White House
at Julia's insistence was a quantity of good French wine and a number
of pieces of expensive French furniture. Tyler hoped that these might
arrive in time to be enjoyed at the President's Mansion before being sent
on to Sherwood Forest in March 1845. But the winter passed without
their appearance, and the President became increasingly anxious about
Ms purchases. "With two such cargoes upon the water," wrote Margaret,
"he compares himself to Antonio." 4
As befitted a reigning queen, Julia set Saturday as her Deception
day. The first one she held, a "recherche assemblage" on November 23,
244
attracted the French Minister and Madame Pageot, General John P.
Van Ness, and many others "who all came in grand toilette." At the
same time, the First Lady decided to have her portrait painted. This
charge was executed by E. G. Thompson of New York at a cost of $250.
But the finished product, thought Julia, was much too conservative. It
showed too little of her neck and throat. She therefore commissioned an
engraver, B. O. Tyler of New York, to execute a more decollete version
of the portrait. Fearing that the engraver might attempt to capitalize on
his name and on his commission, she warned her family that "The
President hopes you will not think B. O. Tyler is any ^ooth cousin of
his.3' 5
With less monarchical detachment she wisely decided that her reign
must have jLjjopd press, especially in socially decisive New York City.
To effect this pioneer effort by a First Lady in White House public rela-
tions, she and the ladies of her Court were uncommonly agreeable to the
Herald's part-time correspondent, F. W. Thomas. Privately, they all
found him a frightful bore and they were soon "quite sick of him."
Thomas was a minor novelist and politician with no lasting claim to
fame save through his friendship with Edgar Allan Poe. Indeed, Thomas
had endangered his welcome at the White House in March 1843 when
he brought Poe there in the hope of helping the rootless poet find a
place in the Philadelphia Customs House. Poe had become dead drunk
in the Presidential presence, an unseemly display that had ended his
patronage prospects and embarrassed his patron. Thomas, however, had
held on grimly to the outer fringes of the Tyler administration, and in
late 1844 Julia moved him into the White House inner circle as her press
agent. His Job, as Margaret explained it, was to "sound Julia's praises
far and near in Washington/7 This did not mean he was a political
intimate of the President. On the contrary, Tyler would tell him nothing
of his political plans. Thomas was made privy only to the social plans
of the White House. This being the arrangement, Julia expected nothing
less than rave notices from his pen, and when these fell below her con-
siderable expectations she became quite upset. She did not appreciate,
for example, Thomas' coy remark that "Her Excellency and Mistress
President" looked as "rosy and as fat as ever, and, if my eyes did not
deceive me, a little 'fatter.' " Nothing would have complicated her reign
quite so much as a pregnancy, actual or rumored.6
Fortunately, Julia had several opportunities to practice being a
queen before the new Congress convened on December 3. In late October
she attended the launching of the new sloop-of-war St. Mary at the
Washington Navy Yard. A large throng of people, "from prince to
peasant," had gathered for the colorful event. When the First Lady
finally arrived, a fashionable hour and a half late, she made a grand and
impressive entry. Trailed by dozens of Cabinet officers, ambassadors,
ministers, generals, commodores, and their ladies, she was, in her man-
245
ner, like Elizabeth I bidding her fleet Godspeed against the Armada. By
the time the little St. Mary had at last reached the water, Secretary of
the Navy John Y. Mason and Secretary of War William Wilkins were
bitterly arguing the relative military merits of ships versus militia, a
debate spurred on by a laughing First Lady and the giggling ladies of
her entourage. A century later the Pentagon would be built to provide
decent housing for this venerable American forensic activity.7
A series of small dinner parties in honor of her recent marriage
provided Julia additional opportunities to gain experience in her new
role before the social season was fully under way. At Secretary of the
Navy Mason's on November 26 (Tyler was not present) she found
herself seated between Secretary of State Calhoun and Attorney General
John Nelson. They were both "so exceedingly agreeable I cannot tell
which was most so, but I like Mr. Calhoun the best,'7 she happily re-
ported to her mother. "He actually repeated verses to me. We had to-
gether a pleasant flirtation." The thought of the courtly John C. Calhoun
whispering poetry of "infinite sweetness and taste" into Julia's ear was
too much for the amused President. "Well, upon my word," he exclaimed
to his bride when she recounted the incident, "I must look out for a new
Secretary of State if Calhoun is to stop writing dispatches and go to
repeating verses." Five months of marriage had not dulled Julia's sure
feeling for provocative flirtation. Nor did she intend to discontinue her
practice of the art form she knew so well. And yet it was true, as young
Alice Tyler reported, that the President and Julia lived together on
"dreams and kisses.7' They were indeed exceptionally happy.! When, for
example, they sat for a daguerreotype at the hands of Mr. Phimb of
Washington, they were seated so "lovingly together" that Margaret was
inclined to regard their cozy pose as a joke.8
By the time Tyler presented his fourth and final Annual Message
to Congress on December 3 Julia felt herself ready for anything from
dinner-table flirtation to Texas annexation. In his last Message, one of
the great imperialist state papers of the nineteenth century, Tyler re-
newed his political offensive for the annexation of Texas, once again
pointing out the benefits of the project to the entire nation. He de-
"manded that the Congress, lame duck though it was, act swiftly and
decisively on the matter:
The great popular election which has just terminated afforded the best op-
portunity of ascertaining the will of the States and the people upon it. ...
The decision of the people and the States on this great and interesting sub-
ject has been decisively manifested. The question of annexation has been
presented nakedly to their consideration A controlling majority of the
people and a large majority of the States have declared in favor of immediate
annexation It is the will of both the people and the States that Texas shall
be annexed to the Union promptly and immediately. It may be hoped that
... all collateral issues may be avoided. Future legislatures can best decide as
246
to the number of states which should be formed out of the territory when
the time has arrived for deciding that question. So with all others The
two Governments having already agreed through their respective organs on
the terms of annexation, I would recommend their adoption by Congress in
the form of a joint resolution or act to be perfected and made binding on the
two countries when adopted in like manner by the Government of Texas.9
Tyler's suggestion that the annexation of Texas could be effected
by joint resolution, a device that neatly circumvented the specific de-
mand of the Constitution that treaties be adopted by the advice and
consent of two-thirds of the Senate, represented the Virginian's second
major departure from the principle of strict construction. In April 1841
he had interpreted the imprecise language of the Constitution to read
that he was really the President of the United States, not the "Acting
President." Now he was willing to go a step further, saying that a treaty
might become law by simple majority vote of both houses. John Tyler,
like most states7 rights devotees of strict construction, had again come
upon a situation in which what he wanted as a person, as an American,
and as a President could not be squared with the fundamentalist written
word of the Constitution. When this happened, Tyler, like Jefferson be-
fore him on the Louisiana Purchase question, did not hesitate. He took
the elastic road home; and in so doing he benefited the nation while
compromising further the document to which the states' righters looked
for salvation from the multiple evils of Federalist- Whig nationalism.
Whatever the constitutional questions involved — and they were
numerous and complex — the joint-resolution tactic was a brilliant one.
Ultimately it got Texas into the Union, although latter-day wags may
argue that this was itself a national disaster. In any event, copies of the
President's forthright Texas message were distributed throughout the
Gardiner and Tyler families. Frank comments were invited. Julia re-
marked that it had created a "prodigious sensation" in Washington.
"Oh! if it will only have the effect of admitting Texas!" she exclaimed.
Alexander analytically surveyed the Northern press and informed the
President that the newspapers there had "generally . . . spoken very
highly of the Message." Meanwhile, congratulatory letters reached the
President from his friends in places as far removed from contemporary
civilization as Birch Pond, Tennessee, assuring him that a majority of
the American people stood solidly behind his annexation scheme. The
public reaction to and the continuing family enthusiasm for the project
were gratifying to the President. As he explained his deepest psychologi-
cal motives in the Texas matter to Alexander, "if the annexation of
Texas shall crown off my public life, I shall neither retire ignominiously
nor be soon forgotten." 10
Alexander, in support of his brother-in-law's dream, once again
sharpened his facile quill and began composing pro-annexation pieces for
the seaboard newspapers. "This piece of Alex's is glorious," said Tyler of
247
one of the young lawyer's better efforts. "I had not perceived he was
so strong a writer — why his style is of the highest and richest kind! . . .
[He] is destined to be a very distinguished man!" In his enthusiasm,
the President even suggested that Alexander run for Congress. Julia de-
murred. "For my own part/' she explained to her brother, "I prefer
[for you] a foreign mission of some conspicuous sort, and everyday it
occupies my mind and is often discussed by the President and myself."
In the renewed excitement for the Texas project John Tyler, Jr., also
contributed a few anonymous newspaper columns to the family effort for
annexation.11
While her brother and her stepson thus urged Texas annexation
with pen and ink, Julia fought for it with coquetry and persuasion. At a
White House dinner party early in the season the conversation, as it
inevitably did in those days, turned to Texas. When someone asked the
views of Judge John McLean on the matter, Julia interrupted to say
that she would "make it a matter of honor" with him that he support
annexation.
"There is no honor in politics," said Calhoun, laughing.
"We will see," Julia replied.
Taking a small slip of paper she wrote "Texas and John Tyler" on
it and passed it down the table to McLean with the request that he offer
the slogan as a toast. The recently wed Justice, still not immune to
Julia's charms, rose, bowed gallantly to her, raised his glass and said,
"For your sake." The toast was accordingly rendered. Remarking later
on the incident, Tyler was inclined to agree with Calhoun's cynicism.
"His sentiment may not have appeared a very poetic one," the President
told his wife, "but experience has taught me that politics is not the best
school for the propagation of the purest code of morals I" 12
Julia's personal identification with her husband's Texas ambition
was complete. She was thrilled to be part of such a grand project with-
out being overshadowed by it. One ditty which made the rounds in
Washington in 1844-1845 gave her particular pleasure:
Texas was the Captain's bride,
Till a lovelier one lie took;
With Miss Gardiner by his side,
He, with scorn, on kings may look.is
Julia worked diligently to create the social atmosphere she felt the
administration must effect if it hoped to achieve Texas or anything else.
She was a born ballroom lobbyist. No legislator was too obscure a target
for her persuasive charm. Buckskin familiarity was not, however, her
modus oferandi any more than it was the President's. "Last evening I
had a most brilliant reception," she informed her mother on one occasion.
"At least fifty members of Congress paid their respects to me, and aU
at one time. I did not enter the room until they had assembled. It really
248
presented an array, and it was imposing to see them all brought forward,
and introduced one by one." It was a question of keeping everyone in
Ms proper relationship to the "crown.77 She was determined to win
friends and influence people for the greater glory of the Tyler adminis-
tration, and she hoped to accomplish this by radiating a combination of
regality and charm. Votes might be influenced by awe alone. In the
spirit of Henry IV, Texas was worth a flirtation — or a reception.14
As First Lady, Julia was naturally the recipient of numerous gifts,
prerogatives, and appeals which increased her sense of importance and
heightened her feeling of usefulness to her husband. The President's
franking privilege was used by all the Gardiners while Julia was in the
White House. She received a fine Arabian steed from Commodore Jesse
D. Elliot, USN, in appreciation of Tyler's personal intercession when
the officer was under suspension from his command for having illegally
transported horses on an American naval vessel. Hundreds of appeals
reached her from citizens all over the country, begging clemency for their
condemned sons, military transfers and emergency leaves for their hus-
bands, patronage jobs for their luckless relatives. "One word from your
good mouth would make us happy and comfortable, and would forever
be remembered," wrote one East Hamptonian in search of a Customs
House job. Condemned criminals also asked her to influence the Presi-
dent on their behalf. Julia carefully screened all these requests, passing
what appeared to be the most deserving and legitimate to her husband
or to the proper Cabinet officer.
Juliana was much disturbed to learn that her daughter would
actually "receive letters and read them from condemned criminals. You
must not read them," she ordered. "It is a most fearful responsibility,
one that you should not have anything whatever to do with. The idea
to my mind is really appalling." To Julia's mind it was rather appealing.
She was never bored with pleas for her intercession or requests for her
autograph. And when "The Julia Waltzes" appeared in New York she
would not rest until she had procured copies of the sheet music.15
Julia was not entirely comfortable in her new station. She was still
unsure of herself and unwilling to launch her social ship of state until
she was surrounded by the young ladies of her family. These friendly
faces would comprise her "Court." Their presence would give her con-
fidence and their assigned functions would be roughly those of ladies-in-
waiting to a queen. She began assembling the group as soon as Congress
convened. Chief among them, of course, was her sister Margaret. The
other ladies of the royal household were Julia's young first cousins,
Mary and Phoebe Gardiner of Shelter Island, New York, daughters of
her Uncle Samuel; and Alice Tyler, at eighteen the youngest of the
President's daughters by Letitia/ Julia and Margaret were both very
fond of Mary and Phoebe and the four women remained lifelong friends.
249
Julia's relations with Alice were still tenuous but were improving. By
late December 1844 Julia had gathered her coterie of Court ladies
around her in Washington and felt much better prepared to commence
the season.16
David Lyon arrived in the capital a few days before Christmas, in
time to enjoy the holiday feast Julia placed upon the White House
table. The food was "a la Virginia [with] immense hams, rounds of beef,
veal, etc." Margaret had decorated the room and the table with wreaths
of evergreen. A portrait of George Washington, clad in holiday greenery,
gazed down on the festive scene. "We commenced the day with Egg Nog
and concluded with apple Toddy/' she reported. David Lyon was quite
overwhelmed by the White House. "For the first week," Margaret in-
formed Alexander, "he seemed to feel like the last man, wandering about
the mansion first to study out his room and then the way out of doors.
I am sure you would have been amused." Gradually, however, he be-
came acclimated, and by New Year's Day he was "beginning to enjoy
himself." His official White House function was that of general escort
to the young ladies of Julia's Court. He learned his duties quickly, and
performed them well. To provide him a suitable title for the occasion,
Tyler appointed him aide-de-camp to the Commander-in-Chief. From
that day forward David Lyon Gardiner proudly called himself "Colonel"
Gardiner, a simulated rank he carried to his grave.17
Juliana appeared on the scene soon after New Year's to chaperon
the First Lady's little retinue. Alexander remained in New York, hap-
pily involved in the politics of Texas annexation and the patronage
problems of the Tyler faction there. The reign, it became clear, was
almost exclusively a Gardiner show. Julia certainly did not want her
husband's married daughters underfoot during her finest hour. Their
initial reactions to her marriage had been so coldly formal Julia had
actually been hurt, and she was not yet ready to forgive them or forget
their hostility. "The President's daughters are all dying to come here
this winter," Margaret reported, "but Julia says they shan't come!'
Indeed, when William Waller arrived in Washington in mid- January, he
stayed at Coleman's Hotel. There was no invitation to the President's
Mansion, and it was the opinion within the Court that Lizzie Tyler
Waller had dispatched her husband to the capital "purposely to report
proceedings at the White House." Thus the Gardiners walked where
Tylers feared to tread.18
If there was a single spot on earth less promising romantically for a
young woman than East Hampton, Long Island, it was nearby Shelter
Island. Remote, isolated, cold, it was hardly the place for an exciting
winter — or for any excitement whatever. "We do nothing but read in
winter here," Mary Gardiner had complained to Julia in 1840. "Do
write [us] ... the news of the fashionable world The cold weather
has congealed all my ideas...." Not surprisingly Mary and Phoebe
250
Gardiner leaped at the unexpected invitation to join their prominent
cousin in Washington. Both girls had been polished and finished at the
Albany Female Academy. If their minds had passed through this ex-
perience unmarred by serious thought, their manners had been highly
refined. Like Julia before them, they too were ready for the final buffing
a season in Washington could provide.19
Twenty-year-old Mary was the quieter and more reserved of the
Shelter Island sisters. She was in love with and had half -promised herself
to the man she would marry in 1847 — Eben N. Horsford, from 1847 to
1863 Rumford Professor of the Application of Science to the Useful Arts
at Harvard College. Awaiting his return from a trip to Germany, where
he had gone to study chemistry, the patient Mary did not leap aboard
the Washington marriage-go-round with the same abandon as her eight-
een-year-old sister Phoebe. Mary was no wallflower. She was attractive,
and she was open to a flirtatious exchange, but by and large she took
Washington's fashionable young eligibles in stride while she pined for
Horsford.20
Not so Phoebe. Phoebe liked boys — old boys, young boys, and boys
in between, so long as they were taller than she and were competent
dancers. She thought her sister a perfect dunce to sit around mooning
and swooning for an absent man with whom she had no formal "under-
standing." A year earlier she had had a modest fling at young Horsford
herself and the resulting "scandal" had rocked Shelter Island. News of
It had spread into New York City, causing her alarmed father to assure
the East Hampton branch of the family that "the report that ^Phoebe is
engaged to Horsford or has countenanced his advances is without the
least foundation," Shelter Island, it would appear, was not hard to
rock.21
Phoebe was a delightful and engaging young lady, in temperament
much like her cousin Julia. Robert Tyler called her "Phoebe the Co-
quette." She was vivacious, flirtatious, and bright. She danced beauti-
fully, and she was always ready with a quick and clever retort. Privately,
,she liked to refer to herself as "The Poetess." This was a self-awarded
title which grew out of the fact that in 1842 she had somehow won the
annual poetry prize awarded by the Alumnae Association of the Albany
Pemale Academy. Her effort was a n 6-line nightmare titled "The
Dream," which began:
I looked into the miser's lonely lair,
The yellow heaps were still secreted there;
His icy hand, shriveled, and thin and old,
Still clasped unconsciously the shining gold
"What skill she lacked in writing verse was compensated for by her
faculty for romance. Indeed, Phoebe Gardiner flirted so openly, captured
beaux so easily, yet boasted of her emotional noninvolvement with men
251
so convincingly, that Robert Tyler pictured her future as that of a
shriveled old maid, despoiled of her charms by the passing years, while
Silently she sips her tea
Still boasting of her liberty.
Robert's prediction was almost correct. Phoebe did not marry until 1860,
when she was thirty-four; then it was to her sister's widower, the same
Professor Eben N. Horsford with whom she had flirted back in i843.22
Phoebe had been a member of Julia's Court exactly one week when
she received a proposal of marriage, a near-record for the Washington
course. The eager suitor was Fayette McMullin of the Virginia state
senate, a thirty-nine-year-old gentleman, later a United States repre-
sentative from Marion, Virginia, and after that governor of the Wash-
ington Territory. McMullin was "desperately smitten" with Phoebe's
"most interesting eyes." After a bare half-hour's conversation with her
he "offered himself in toto" He apologized for such unseemly haste, but
he explained to her that true Virginians always acted on heroic and hot-
blooded impulse. Since he was leaving that very day for home, he begged
Phoebe's permission to write her. Phoebe found him "very ordinary in
his appearance" and gave him no encouragement. Tyler found the whole
thing "exceedingly amusing/' laughed heartily, and guessed it was just
about "the speediest courtship on record." 23
With the McMullin conquest safely behind her and with the collec-
tive romantic reputation of Julia's Court enhanced by its blinding speed
and seriousness, "Phoebe the Coquette" turned her attention to a thirty-
one-year-old congressman from Illinois — Judge Stephen A. Douglas.
More accurately, Douglas turned his attention to Phoebe. He pursued
her at various balls, receptions, and levees with such singleness of pur-
pose that his campaign was remarked upon behind many a fluttering fan.
Phoebe liked Douglas. She found him a fine and intelligent man, but she
was convinced that he. was much too short for her. He was just over five
feet tall. Margaret assured her that it would "never do to be too
fastidious for times 'isn't as they used to was'!3' Margaret's analysis of
the affair was that Douglas appeared "desperately smitten." She urged
her flighty cousin to follow through toward something serious. But
Phoebe considered "The Little Giant" too diminutive, and in spite of
Margaret's continual goading that she could not expect "everything and
. . . might go a great deal farther and fare worse," she dropped Douglas
and turned her charms on the President-elect's brother, Major William
H. Polk of Tennessee. Douglas paired off with Miss Mary Corse of New
York, and the Court soon learned that the New York belle, an old
acquaintance of the Gardiners, was boasting of her "conquest, delighted
beyond measure at having cut Phoebe out." 24
The Polk interlude did not last long for Phoebe. The Major was in
the capital only for a short visit while making arrangements for his
252
brother's triumphal entry in late February. He too became interested in
Mary Corse, the lady he subsequently married. When he left Washing-
ton in mid- January Margaret reported the entire Court dejected. "We
are all in a terrible frustration here/' she wrote Alexander. "Mary and
I haint got no beaux at all. Mr. Polk has run off and left Phoebe broken-
hearted and Mr. Cushing hasn't been heard of in two days. David hasn't
found a mate — and something or another is the matter with John [Jr.]
for he hasn't been seen for three days except at breakfast yesterday morn-
ing looking like a rowdy with Papa's wedding coat on." 25
John Tyler, Jr., was involved at the time in the celebrated duel be-
tween Representatives William L. Yancy of Alabama and Thomas J.
Clingman of North Carolina which briefly occupied the attention of
official Washington and provided the ladies of the Court food for gossip.
John's role was limited to carrying messages back and forth between
the seconds, but in doing this he enjoyed acting in the most conspira-
torial fashion. The duel was fortunately a bloodless fiasco, as inept in
execution as it was foolish in origin. The principals spent most of their
time eluding local police in their search for a peaceful spot in which to
kill each other. The affair finally came off near Beltsville, Maryland.
Each legislator fired one wild shot, no one was hit, and the seconds
quickly stepped in and reconciled the dispute (which turned on an im-
pugnation of personal honor). Both parties appeared satisfied with the
result. John, Jr., thrived on excitement of this sort.26
Such excitement was denied well-bred ladies. For them it was
beaux or nothing, and Margaret Gardiner lacked beaux. Charles Wilkins,
son of the Secretary of War, flirted briefly with her but soon turned his
attentions to Alice Tyler. Caleb Cushing was attentive, but he was "as
awkward as ever" socially and in Margaret's view possessed "limited
powers of gallantry." A Mr. Allen of Providence, Rhode Island, appeared
briefly in her life. He was well-traveled and "positively worth over a
hundred thousand dollars," but he and his checkbook soon departed the
capital. For a short time a Mr. Piliot was "dead in love" with Margaret;
this too came to nothing. "Never say die," Margaret sighed wearily.
When Tyler impishly insisted that the ladies-in-waiting "must all be
married this winter," Margaret laughingly retorted that she had settled
upon the British Minister, the improbable Richard Pakenham, for her
husband. "If you have fixed upon Pakenham," Alexander teased her,
"don't fail to make sure of him!"27
Margaret would always have a problem with men. Her attitude
toward them made it difficult for her to attract or hold them. She had
a very quick sense of humor. More than that, she possessed a broad
sense of the ridiculous which many potential suitors could not abide.
She was too bright, too teasingly sarcastic, for most men. She enjoyed
talking only with those "that have some sense," and this bias sharply
reduced her choices. "I shall be very sure of what I am going to get
253
before any engagement," she told Alexander, "and should advise you to
do the same.77 Her standards in suitors were impossibly high. As she
confided to Julia on one occasion, " After talking over the supposition
of ... getting married I always conclude by saying nothing will satisfy
[me] after having known the President!" 2S
Juliana's marital ambitions for her children were loftier than their
own. Having married one daughter to the President of the United States,
she became convinced that most of Margaret's beaux and all the young
ladies in whom David Lyon and Alexander became interested were far
beneath the new Gardiner norm. So insistently did she enforce her
matrimonial views on her offspring that Alexander never married;
Margaret finally married John H. Beeckman in 1848 over her mother's
opposition (Juliana had talked her out of two better prospects) ; and
David Lyon waited until 1860, when he was forty- three, to marry his
distant cousin Sarah Gardiner Thompson, a New York lady of solid
wealth and respectable blood line. Had Juliana had her way, David
Lyon would not have married at all. Indeed, her possessiveness toward
her children, her strong desire to keep them at her side and under per-
petual maternal discipline, bordered on the compulsive.
Julia agreed with her mother's hymeneal standards. "I should like
to see David married to a rich, pretty, fashionable girl," she remarked
in December 1844. "But I don't know where except in the land of the
Imagination he will win them all combined. The first essential would
do better without the two last than the two last without the first —
don't you think so for David?" David Lyon never discovered the elusive
"land of Imagination." When he finally picked his wife he settled for
wealth, "the first essential/' Similarly, when Alexander evidenced a
passing urge to wed in 1844-1845, Margaret joined with Julia and
Juliana to ridicule his taste in women and suggest that he speedily
get over such an absurd notion as matrimony. He got over it.29
Understandably, then, David Lyon's flirtations in Washington dur-
ing his sister7s reign were foredoomed to failure. A passing interest in
the wealthy Miss Becky Delancy of nearby Alexandria ended quickly
when Margaret pronounced her "short and not pretty" and criticized
her tardiness in presenting herself "at Court." Alexander felt, however,
that "if David does not better himself among the ladies now that he
has every opportunity and . . . leave no stone unturned to secure Miss
Delancy I shall give him up. The golden moment is passing "*
David Lyon admitted that young Becky was "not at all handsome/' but
he thought her reputed wealth of five millon dollars "very magnificent.'*
He told Alexander that he had "promised Julia $100,000" if he were
successful in his suit. Julia never collected. Becky had but one of the
three essentials the First Lady and her watchdog mother deemed neces-
sary in a wife, and that was that.30
Nannie Wickliffe, daughter of the Postmaster General, "made quite
254
an impression7' on David. She was pretty, fashionable enough, and she
had been a maid of honor at Julia's wedding. Unfortunately she was
penniless. Thus when David "began very seriously to comment upon
her numerous attractions," his mother cut him off with one curt ob-
servation:
"She has no money.7'
"Pooh! I've got enough/7 replied the Colonel, with an unconvinc-
ing show of independence. But Mother had spoken and that was the end
of the impoverished Nannie.31
David Lyon's interest in Mary Corse was also of brief duration,
although he rushed her with considerable intensity during the season.
Julia admitted that Miss Corse had a "passion for David" and that
there was a certain "respectability in her Quakership." She certainly
had numerous beaux and "numberless conquests." Even Uncle Samuel
pronounced her "very rich," and he was something of an expert on such
matters. She attracted the romantic attentions of both Stephen A.
Douglas and Major William H. Polk ("on account of her money," said
Margaret cattily). It was too bad that she had one of those faces for
which the hands of time stand still. "Miss Corse will never never do,"
Margaret informed Alexander. "She is without exception the ugliest per-
son I almost ever saw — a hundred thousand [dollars] could not cure
it." Juliana thought her appearance quite "ordinary," and David him-
self admitted that his lady love was indeed "very plain looking." Exit
Mary Corse.32
Miss Lucy Henderson, Miss Mary Wright, and Miss Caroline Bayard
(daughter of the Senator from Delaware) all walked into and out of
David Lyon's life that season in Washington. Invariably, something was
found to be wrong with each of them, and David always deferred to
the superior judgment of his mother and his sisters in matters concern-
ing his romantic life. Juliana frequently reminded him that the basis
for a suitable marriage, like Rome, was "not built in a day." She
thought it wise that he remain a "general beau" for the duration of
the White House reign. As she explained her reasoning to Alexander,
"The more I see of Washington the more convinced I am that it is not
all gold that glitters." Juliana was fearful that fashionable Washington
was cluttered with chunks of iron pyrite, and she wanted no Gardiner
stuck with inferior ore. "David has not found a mate yet," Margaret
reported regularly. The whole family could laugh, however, over the
rumor circulating in the capital in January 1845 that David Lyon
and Alice Tyler were to be married within three weeks. That combina-
tion was simply ludicrous.33
Measured by sheer numbers of beaux and marriage proposals,
Alice Tyler was the undisputed romantic champion of Julia's Court.
At one levee she managed to collect six attentive escorts, and when the
season was over she received three solid marriage offers, all of which
255
she turned down. As Phoebe later remarked, with some show of jealousy,
"After all we said of her unpleasing appearance she seems to have had
more hearts than any of us at her control." Alice was not pretty, it is
true. David Lyon found her "tall and fat." But her height permitted
her to wear her clothes well, and both Julia and Margaret thought she
generally made a fine appearance. Juliana counted her " exceedingly
handsome. 3) That her popularity was enhanced in some measure by her
father's political position might be assumed.34
Alice posed a distinct personal problem for Julia. The First Lady
was only six years older than her stepdaughter, and at first Julia did
not know quite what their relationship should be. Her first instinct was
to pack Alice off to school in Williamsburg and postpone the question
until the few months of her reign had run out. Accordingly, Alice left
for Virginia in early November. But her letters to her stepmother were
so flattering to Julia, her desire to be friendly so apparent, that the
First Lady relented and permitted Alice to return to the capital for the
season. Juliana pointed out to her daughter that Alice had had "much
reason to feel neglected" since the wedding. While she could see that
Alice's presence in the White House "may be trying," she urged Julia
to regard the President's daughter as a "companion" and be as "amiable"
to her as possible. It was good advice. Not only did stepmother and step-
daughter begin to get along better together, but Alice contributed much
to the gaiety of the Court.35
Alice Tyler spent most of her waking hours during Julia's reign
trying to capture the affections of Charles Wilkins, son of the Secretary
of War — and escape the attentions of the forty-four-year-old Caleb
Gushing. Cushing, a widower since 1832, was very much in the marriage
market after his return from Ciina in December 1844. A distinguished
linguist, legislator, diplomat and lawyer, member of Tyler's ill-fated
Corporal's Guard, he was a suitable enough escort when one of the
ladies-in-waiting needed a beau on short notice, but he was generally
considered by all of them awkward, tongue-tied, and a bore. Alice had
a difficult task avoiding him as she maneuvered for Wilkins. She had
suitors other than Wilkins, to be sure, but she always came back to her
"Charlie." Margaret allowed that Alice was "desperately in love" with
young Wilkins, and had eyes for no one else "while Charlie is near her."
The romance even continued for a time after Alice returned to Sherwood
Forest. It finally sputtered out in late 1845 under the dual impact of the
nearby William and Mary boys and the truism of "out of sight, out of
mind." 36
There were too many young girls in the White House and too
much frivolity and noise there to suit Juliana. From the moment she
arrived in Washington in early January she began anticipating her
return to her quiet home on Lafayette Place. The recurrent migraine
headaches bothered her terribly throughout her stay; she became cranky
256
and short-tempered. Unimpressed by Washington society, she mixed in
it as little as was politely possible. She was determined to remain above
it. She was convinced, as she told Alexander, that Washington was
"vastly inferior to New York in point of wealth. All agree that very
little wealth exists here." The capital, she felt, was just not worth con-
quering. So Juliana McLachlan Gardiner kept to a large chair by the
fire in her room all day while the din of the young people crashed
around her throbbing temples. Although she was only forty-five, in
many ways she was already becoming an old woman. She was certainly
able to exercise no control over the high-spirited girls who raced
through the rooms of the White House with such a fearful clatter. They
enjoyed playing a noisy tag game which involved chasing "each other
all day with red hot pokers, and as if that were not enough [then]
throw the poker stands." In the middle of all the confusion would be
Margaret, egging the others on, shouting such atrocious puns as "Phoebe
has had the grandest Polk of all — Alice rejects the pokes and reclines
on Cus kings!" On more than one occasion the First Lady was forced
to break off her letter-writing because "my room is quite too noisy with
the many sallies of my little court to admit of my continuing further." 37
Juliana simply could not tolerate the confusion, turmoil, giggling,
and nonsense generated by four energetic young women, and she with-
drew from it all. When she was not secluded in her chamber reading her
Bible (she was convinced such devotion gave one "a very great ad-
vantage in society"), she was nagging Alexander by mail about losing
his purse or hanging up his clothes properly. "You see I think you re-
quire a few cautions," she told him. To her, he was still a little boy.
She did enjoy the occasional White House visits of a mesmerizer who
was invited in to amuse and hypnotize the girls. This, at least, was
a quiet activity. Juliana had a genuine interest in spiritualism, which
she equated with dreams, hypnosis, unexplained noises, and other pe-
culiarities on the fringe of the occult. Still, there was too much noise and
excitement in the White House for her, and her forehead pounded in
protest.38
On New Year's Day, her Court assembled, the duties and stations
of each member assigned, Julia gave her first large public reception
at the White House. The rooms were packed that afternoon. "It was
indeed a glorious assemblage," exulted Margaret, "and all acknowledged
with tongues and eyes that such a court and such a crowd was never
before seen within the walls of the White House After the shaking
of hands was over, the President and Julia made two circuits around the
East Room followed by her maids of honor, the crowd gaping and push-
ing to see the show. . . . Mama did not go down but gazed at the
multitude with wonder from the upper rooms." Julia was indeed at her
regal best; so much so that "Judge McLean looked all sorts of ways
257
at Julia . . . and made the P [resident] as jealous as you please." As for
Justice McLean, Mary Gardiner thought him "the handsomest man she
ever laid eyes upon." Mary and Phoebe were understandably ecstatic
over the opulence of Julia's display. It was, after all, a bit more stimulat-
ing than family teas on Shelter Island.39
The New York Herald correspondent naturally pronounced it a
glorious success. "Well," wrote F. W. Thomas, "President Tyler will go
out of the White House with drums beating and colors flying." He de-
scribed Julia's Court as "very comely to look upon, indeed; an ir-
resistible bodyguard of modesty and beauty." But for Julia herself
Thomas pulled out all stops. She appeared
beautiful, winning, as rosy as a summer's morning on the mountains of
Mexico, as admirable as Victoria, but far more beautiful, and younger, and
more intelligent, and more Republican, and quite as popular with the
people . . . does John Tyler possess that ancient relic of fairyland, the lamp
of Aladdin . . . that such a spirit of youth, and poetry, and love, and tender-
ness, and riches, and celebrity, and modesty, and everything that is charm-
ing, should come forth as at his wish and stand at his side, the guardian
angel of the evening of his days? . . . John Tyler is no fool, and his selection
of a bride clenches our assertions.40
The reception lasted from noon until midafternoon. If there was
an element of failure in Julia's first major effort, it was because the
Whig community in the capital studiously elected not to be present,
repairing instead to a competing reception at the home of John Quincy
Adams. It was probably just as well. There were more than two thou-
sand people present without them. The Mansion became so crowded
that the Herald commented in brisk doggerel:
I beg your pardon, General G.,
For trampling on your toes;
And, Lady T., I did not see,
My hat against your nose;
And Holy Jesus! how they squeeze us,
To that small room, where he,
Old John, attends to greet his friends,
This New Year's Day levee. . . .
And round and round,
We wound and wound,
Among the radiant belles,
And high and low subordinates,
And plain and fancy swells.
And every soul did seem perplexed,
And vexed as much as we,
That the music of the red-coat band,
And a single grip of Tyler's hand
And a squeeze in the crowd,
258
And a place to stand,
For the best grin that you could command,
For the ladies' smiles so warm and bland,
And a stare at the would-be great and grand,
And a sigh and a look-out for the land,
Made up old John's levee. . . .
WeU done, Old Veto, after all,
And to his winsome wife;
But few responsibilities,
And a long and loving life.
God bless our land — land of the brave,
The beautiful and free;
But if next New Year, Uncle Sam
Don't treat his friends to something jam,
A bit to eat, and a genteel dram,
We would not give a Cape Cod clam,
Or a single continental damn
For the President's levee.41
It was an impressive beginning for the First Lady. Perhaps too
impressive, for a week later at a private White House ball she smugly
limited the guest list so severely that all present complained that the
function was "unnecessarily select." (Her mother disagreed. She thought
it "unusually pleasant" because it was so quiet and "select.") Nor did
Julia's stunning appearance that evening entirely rescue the affair. She
was dressed in black embroidered lace over white satin, set off with black
and silver trim, and "a whole set of diamonds." A backwoods congress-
man from Ohio was literally transfixed at the sight of her. He stood,
stared dumbly at her for several minutes, and finally exclaimed, "Well,
now I'll go home and tell all about her." To be sure, there was nothing
like Julia in Columbus.42
Whether it was unnecessarily select or not, the ball produced some
useful gossip and information. The First Lady was relieved to learn
from Mrs. Calhoun that widower Francis Pickens was being married
in Charleston that very evening to Marion Antoinette Bearing, a lady
who possessed "every advantage of beauty, fortune, family and piety,
besides resembling very much his first wife." Tyler still showed evi-
dences of jealousy over his wife's former suitors, and from Julia's stand-
point the sooner they were all safely married off, the better. For the
First Lady the evening was a success in one respect: McLean did not
flirt with her, Pickens was being married, "Old Davis" was not present,
Waldron was at sea, and John Tyler was happy.43
Like every aspiring and hardworking hostess, Julia had her fail-
ures. A White House dinner on January 10 was certainly in this
category. The affair was designed to honor the justices of the Supreme
Court and their ladies. An orchestra was engaged and invitations already
259
extended when Julia learned to her chagrin that the Attorney General
had scheduled a dinner for the same evening and had earlier invited
more than half the First Lady's proposed guest list. Julia promptly
extended her rival an invitation, "a hint . . . [that] he ought to yield
to higher authority." Unhappily, the Nelsons did not take the hint.
They returned their regrets ("either from ignorance or obstinacy," said
Margaret), and their own dinner went off as planned. Tyler thought
the Attorney General and Mrs. Nelson "extremely unmannerly." Julia
was forced "to fill up the vacant seats with Senators and visiting
strangers." It was a flop.44
Saturday, of course, was her regular reception day, and Julia
could be much more certain of her arrangements on these occasions.
The First Lady, or "Lady Presidentress" as Thomas of the Herald
sometimes called her, was generally attended at these functions by
six to twelve maids of honor all dressed alike in white. These vestal
virgins included the members of her Court and other young ladies of
good family drafted for the weekly spectacle. Julia stationed them be-
side and slightly behind her in matching banks. Then the Queen seated
herself in front center on the raised platform. Wearing a headdress
"formed of bugles and resembling a crown," she received such guests,
friends, and tourists who chose to appear, file by, and pay their respects.
Tuileries on the Potomac.45
By mid- January 1845, after various experiments, Julia had at
last trained, composed, and deployed her Court as she thought eminently
proper. She was now ready to exhibit the finished product at every op-
portunity. "I determined upon, and I think I have succeeded," she
proudly told Mary Hedges, an old East Hampton friend, "in making
my Court interesting in youth and beauty. . . . Wherever I go they
form my train and their interest in the society which surrounds gives
it an additional charm for me." At the public levee on January 21 she
"upset all the forms" followed by previous First Ladies by ranging her
entourage in a line along the Blue Room wall opposite the fireplace.
This removed Tyler from the exposed center of the room and placed him
at the head of a formal receiving line. "As each were [sic] introduced,"
Margaret explained, "they fell back facing us until we could see a
crowd of admiring faces." It worked quite well.46
The President was in an exceptionally good mood on the evening
of January 21. The Texas Resolution was moving along well in the
House, and its prospects in the Senate gave him hope that annexa-
tion might be consummated before the session terminated. In addition,
the "fine appearance of his family put him in excellent spirits." Many
of the guests commented on his youthful appearance and relaxed mien.
Margaret thought he looked "uncommonly handsome . . . better than I
ever saw him." John Tyler was undoubtedly feeling mellow and self-
satisfied as he contemplated his escape from the burdens of his office
260
and his retirement to Sherwood Forest with his beautiful bride. And
Julia, as usual, looked superb. She was wearing a new white satin dress
overlaid with white lace, a white satin headdress with three white ostrich
feathers, and her set of diamonds. "She did not look as if she belonged
to this Earth," said Margaret breathlessly. All eyes were fixed on her.
She was "perfectly splendid/7 and Tyler was so proud of her he nearly
burst with delight.
The President was in ecstasies and in the fullness of Ms heart exclaimed
to David, "How glad I am Judge McLean is not here tonight!" You can't
imagine half how jealous he is of him — and actually made her stay home
from Church Sunday afternoon because the Judge looked at her in the
morning.
All the young ladies of the Court had admiring beaux, and all "received
compliments flattering enough to make ordinary people vain," The red-
coated Marine Band played polkas and waltzes. It was a gala evening.
Julia immodestly pronounced it "dazzling," and called attention to
"the lights, the beautiful faces, the court dresses of the foreign Ministers
and the showy uniforms of the army and navy officers . . . delight seemed
to pervade the rooms." 47
Nor did the First Lady abandon her regal attitude when she left
the White House to attend the parties around the capital that her
opulent example at the White House had stimulated in conspicuous
profusion. "Washington was never before so gay," said an exhausted
Margaret; "two or three parties every night." If Julia arrived too late
at these affairs to open the dancing, she declined to dance at all because
"the ball had already been opened." The Continental forms were to be
observed at all times. To these affairs away from the White House the
First Lady transported her entire Court, and she bade them stay
grouped about her during the evening. Her dress invariably occasioned
much favorable comment.48
Following her triumphal levee of January 21, a success repeated
with equal brilliance and eclat on February 4 and again on February
n, Julia began to consider and plan her final party — an affair so large
and splendid it would leave Washington limp. She was determined to
give "one grand affair" — one last magnificent fling before retiring to
the bucolic pleasures of Sherwood Forest. In mid- January the pre-
liminary planning for her swan song was well under way. It was im-
portant to her that her entire family be present. Alexander was en-
couraged to abandon his Customs House and Tammany intrigues for a
few days and come to Washington for the event.49
Julia was thus pondering the timing and arrangements of her
final levee when the President received the exciting news from New
York that Robert and Alexander had forced strong pro-Texas annexa-
tion resolutions through Tammany Hall, an act which enhanced the
261
political prospects of Tyler's great scheme. To Alexander Gardiner there
were many things more important to do in January 1845 than dress up
in white satin, diamonds, and ostrich feathers and dance the polka:
For the last four or five nights I have had little rest [he wrote Tyler at
midnight on January 24] : tonight I want not. We have had as glorious a
triumph as was ever witnessed within the walls of Old Tammany. We put
down triumphantly all luke warm resolutions, and all resolutions extraneous
to the immediate subject and carried unanimously two in substitution which
I enclose. Robert acquitted himself nobly well. . . . Van Buren's name was
received with hisses and groans, in the very Hall of the Regency My
part was probably prominent enough to lead to some public comment I
enclose all our resolutions They were printed and distributed among our
friends some hours before the meeting.50
Buoyed by Alexander's encouraging report from New York, reason-
ably sure now that Texas annexation would likely crown the political
achievements of her husband's administration, Julia doubled her efforts
on the social front. She selected Wednesday, February 18, as the date
for her final ball. She was resolved that social Washington would never
forget her or the Tyler tenure in the White House. For weeks the de-
tailed planning proceeded apace, every member of the Court eagerly
participating in the arrangements. Margaret was put to work com-
piling a guest list which came to number over two thousand. Hundreds
of letters were dispatched to prominent Virginia and New York families
requesting their presence. Close friends were asked to suggest the names
of people in or near the capital who might reasonably be invited. In her
laborious clerical task Margaret was assisted by F. W. Thomas.
Margaret, in effect, became the First Lady's social secretary, carefully
hand-copying each of the numerous invitations that went out. This em-
ployment of Margaret's chirographic skills was a tactical insight of
the highest order, since Julia's own handwriting was so poor it was often
illegible. (In fear that his wife would never learn to write properly,
Tyler procured O. B. Goldsmith's text Gems of Penmanship for her,
but Julia still failed the course.) Margaret's hand was clear and
strong, and the invitations from her quill were duly delivered.51
Julia was disappointed that Alexander saw fit to remain in New
York on the night of the ball. He was too busy with Texas and Tylerite
politics, he said, to waste several days in the capital just then. He would
arrive later, when the Texas Resolution was approaching its moment of
truth in the Senate. But Samuel Gardiner arrived from distant Shelter
Island to witness daughters Mary and Phoebe in their final White House
^action. And Juliana, who sorely wished to return to Lafayette Place,
was persuaded to stay over until after the ball. She was not in the mood
for much more frivolity and she had already made up her mind that she
would not have a good time at her daughter's gala function. Not sur-
prisingly, she had a wretched time.V'I must confess it did not dazzle
262
me," she later told Julia. Last-minute orders for lace and jewelry were
sped northward to Alexander as the Court prepared for the coming
jubilation. "Your ball to be is all the talk/7 Thomas informed Julia,
"and . . . many beautiful things said of the Lady Presidentress." 52
' The ball was a great success, although the irascible Juliana thought
the assemblage "very republican." /The fact that it was packed with
officers, foreign diplomats, high government officials, and representatives
of the fashionable set from Boston to Charleston did not impress her.
She allowed only that it was "no doubt as select as so great a con-
course would admit." Personally, she preferred "a few choice congenial
spirits" to the mob that descended on the White House on February
1 8. With this judgment Margaret demurred. "Those 'congenial spirits/
where are they to be found?" she wondered. "No! no I I quite agree
with you," she assured Julia, "the grand or nothing." 53 ^,.
Grand it was. Two thousand were invited; three thousand came.
"We were," said Margaret, "as thick as sheep in a pen." A hundred
additional lights were hung in the East Room, bringing to over six
hundred the flickering candles which expensively illuminated the four
rooms used for dancing and promenading. "The President reckons the
cost at 350 dollars which ... is no trifling sum," Margaret confessed.
A Marine band in scarlet uniforms supplied the music for waltzes,
polkas, and cotillions. Margaret herself arranged the buffet supper and
immodestly admitted that it was "superb . . . wine and champagne
flowed like water — eight dozen bottles of champagne were drunk witS
wine by the barrels"
Julia "opened" the ball with Secretary of War William Wilkins,
then danced with the Postmaster General and Calderon de la Barca, the
Spanish ambassador. Later in the evening the First Lady and the beauti-
ful Madame Bodisco attracted great attention when they joined in a
cotillion with the ambassadors from Austria, Prussia, France, and
Russia. They were, said Thomas of the Herald, "two of the most beauti-
ful women of that vast assemblage." As usual, Julia was magnificently
clad in a "white satin underdress embroidered with silver with bodice
en saile and over that a white [cape] looped up all around with white
roses and buds — white satin headdress hat embroidered with silver with
three ostrich feathers and full set of diamonds."
The President, Julia, and the Court received their guests in the
Blue Room. They were "arranged as usual along the side of the cir-
cular room and everyone was struck with the beautiful appearance of
the Court." At 10 P.M. supper was announced, and "such a rush, crush
and smash to obtain entrance was never seen before at a Presidential
entertainment." But in all the confusion near the tables "only two
glasses were broken," said Margaret, priding herself on her scientific
deployment of the food and wine. Observed immersed in the human
tide moving inexorably toward the meat and drink, trying to preserve
263
some semblance of military dignity in the process, were General Win-
field Scott, Commodore Charles Stewart, General Mirabeau B. Lamar,
lately President of the Texas Republic, and Commodore Edwin Ward
Moore, Chief of the Texas Navy. It was a rough voyage to the wine
barrels. The tables were emptied and refilled many times, but "by due
diligence and perseverance all were provided with the luxuries that
flowed in abundance." Congratulated on the success of the affair, the
President merely laughed and replied, "Yes, they cannot say now that
I am a President without a party!3'
The President-elect and Sarah Polk had been invited cordially
but made no appearance. This was both a "surprise" and a disappoint-
ment to Tyler and his family. Mrs. Folk's announced "indisposition,"
Margaret felt, was little more than an attack of virulent Van Burenism
brought on by pressure from Francis P. Blair and the Washington
Globe clique. Vice-President-elect George M. Dallas was on hand, how-
ever. Not so the capital's prominent Whigs. With the exception of
Maryland Senator William D. Merrick, whose son William Matthew
had recently married Mary Wickliffe, few Whig politicians chose to
attend. "They won't make up with Captain Tyler no how at all/' ex-
plained Thomas. Their absence did not ruin the evening for Julia and
her Court. The young ladies had beaux enough to staff a dozen balls,
and a few hundred more guests would have collapsed the walls of the
White House. "All acknowledge," concluded Margaret without ex-
aggeration, "that nothing half so grand had been seen at the White
House during any Administration, and fear nothing so tasteful would
be again." It marked, agreed the Herald, "an era in Washington
society.75 54
Thomas gave Julia a good press on her final social effort, but his
kind treatment paled in comparison with the piece Alexander penned
for the New York Plebeian, Working from notes supplied him by his
sisters, he wrote a long "eyewitness" account (anonymously, of course)
titled "Mrs. Tyler's Farewell Ball, or Sic Transit Gloria Mundi":
Whatever may be said of him, John Tyler always discharged the duties of
such occasions with high bred propriety, and never was the dignity and
urbanity of his manners more conspicuous. As to his beautiful bride, whom
I a stranger saw from time to time in foreign parts, I can scarcely trust
my pen to write of her. Burke apostropitized [sic] the Queen of France,
whom he saw "just above the horizon" ; but I have seen this lady above many
horizons. . . . Tonight she looked like Juno and with her sister, cousins and
Miss Alice Tyler constituted a galaxy of beauty, and I am told equal talent,
which no Court of Europe could equal More diamonds sparkled than I
have ever seen on any occasion in this country 55
Thanks to the cooperation of the Herald, the Madisonian, and
the Plebeian, Julia's farewell ball attracted national interest and atten-
tion. Perhaps too much. Ten months later Tyler was still answering the
264
criticisms of various prohibitionist Protestant churchmen who com-
plained about the flow of spirits at Julia's farewell salute, the evil danc-
ing that had taken place there, and the fact that the First Lady had
sponsored such a conspicuous fling less than a year after her father's
death. In a polite way, John Tyler properly told them all to go to
the devil. Julia went out in a blaze of glory, in "a flood of light" shed
by "a thousand candles from the immense chandeliers" of the East
Room, and that was what counted even though the additional illumina-
tion had cost $350. To John Tyler, the success of his wife's last enter-
tainment was almost as important as the achievement of his Texas
dream two weeks later.56
265
ALEXANDER GARDINER:
SAG HARBOR TO THE RIO GRANDE
/ am ready for any or all enterprises in love, politics,
or business!
ALEXANDER GARDINER, SEPTEMBER 1844
Julia flourished in a world of social display, glamorous gowns, per-
sonal flattery, and studied deference to rank. Her brother Alexander
thrived in an environment of seedy politicians selling and reselling their
political virtue. He understood that a few well-placed postmasters
could be more valuable to a President than a dozen white-clad vestal
virgins perched on a dais at a White House reception; he considered
patronage more important than the polka. And if Julia labored to
give "the President without a party" the kind of party her February
1 8 display had been, Alexander worked to give him a real political or-
ganization. Together, brother and sister, each in his own way, battled
to give John Tyler the annexation of Texas — Julia from her ballroom
and dinner table station on the Potomac firing line; Alexander from
his Tammany foxhole in New York. None of the Gardiners wanted
Tyler to "retire ignominiously nor be soon forgotten.'7 His fame was
their fame.
Alexander began combat anew in November 1844, convinced that
John Tyler's role in the 1844 campaign had been the decisive one; that
Polk owed Tyler his victory; and that a future Tyler-Polk alignment
in New York might be used to contain the political aggression of the
Albany Regency. The Van Buren Regency's antagonism to Texas an-
nexation on antislavery grounds was opposition to a project Alexander
considered vital to the nation's growth and welfare, important to the
historical prestige of the outgoing administration, and material to the
266
psychological well-being of Ms brother-in-law. He was certain, there-
fore, that if Tammany Hall could be induced to support Texas annexa-
tion the resulting political backlash would weaken the Van Buren-Silas
Wright faction in New York and go far toward insuring the passage of
the joint resolution in Congress. This analysis was correct. The way to
seduce Tammany, of course, was through patronage favors; the old
streetwalker was always willing. It was imperative also that Texas
annexation be consummated before Tyler left the White House.
Alexander believed further that a separate Tyler political faction
should be continued in existence in New York City. To be sure, the
Tylerites had thrown their strength and their dry-dock jobs into the
Polk candidacy after the President's withdrawal from the race in
August. But one never knew to what extent a Polk administration would
be impressed by these sacrificial oblations a year hence. Alexander was
not certain that the recent Tyler-Polk alliance, insofar as patronage
distribution was involved, could withstand the multiple pressures that
would surely be brought to bear on Polk once he took office in March.
To retain a Tyler faction within a larger Tyler-Polk anti-Regency
alliance in New York seemed both prudent and foresighted. Such a
faction might later be used as an anti-proscription lever in the Empire
State. More important, a Tyler group could serve as a political enclave
in New York if Tyler decided to make a try for the Presidency in his
own right in 1848. As Alexander Gardiner thus evaluated the situation,
it was obvious that men who were strongly pro-Tyler yet acceptable
to Polk, men who favored Texas annexation and distrusted the Albany
Regency, should be stuffed into as many key public offices in New
York City as possible before March 4, 1845. Among these right-thinking
citizens he naturally numbered himself, since only from such a vantage
point could he maintain liaison with the Tyler faction in the city and
help manipulate the terms of its continuing alliance there with the
Polkites.
That this political analysis by young Gardiner seems hopelessly
unrealistic in retrospect is not the point. In spite of the essential weak-
ness of the Tylerites in New York vis-a-vis both the Polk and Van
Buren factions, both Robert Tyler and Alexander Gardiner thought
the scheme worth a try. Tyler himself went along with his son and
his brother-in-law in the matter, although without anything approach-
ing their excited optimism. Ultimately, the whole family joined in the
design to maintain a Tyler faction in New York and use it to keep
Polk honest on his pre-election patronage promises to Tyler. It was vital
too to hold Polk to the Texas-annexation plank of the Democratic
platform. Julia, Margaret, David Lyon, and Juliana all actively in-
volved themselves in the patronage questions that arose. They also
served as a post-election family lobby for "Tyler and Texas."
Within the family circle, Alexander was the ringmaster and dis-
267
ciplinarian. In Ms capacity as family politician extraordinary he ob-
jected to the levity of Julia's reign. He was dismayed by the numerous
petty demands for dresses, laces, hats, yard goods, medicines, and
garters that came from Washington in his sisters' letters. He complained
that his communications to the White House concerning New York po-
litical affairs received inadequate attention, although he knew them to
be "of more consequence than the purchase of hats and dresses." At
times he thought Julia's regal approach to her duties "a little too
dignified" and aloof. He urged her to mix more with the bread-and-
butter politicians. At the same time, however, he sacrificed his private
life to the Tyler cause so completely that Margaret chided him for
being coldly "businesslike" in his relations with the ladies. "We live on
hope [of love] and die fasting," she teased him, "and you live on
Politics.3' Julia also thought him much too "full of business and politics."
It distressed her that during his "flying visits" to Washington in mid-
November 1844 and again for the White House levee of February 4,
1845, he spent all his time talking patronage. His refusal to attend
Julia's February 18 farewell ball was bad enough. But his imperious
demands for inside political information became tiresome to the White
House ladies. "My goodness," exclaimed Juliana in reply to one of
Alexander's impatient, fact-finding letters from New York, "we wish so
much to tell you some news of importance, but we ladies know nothing
politically unless canvassed before us." Actually, the ladies knew a great
deal.1
Alexander's political activity and his narrow dedication to Tyler's
career turned principally on his belief that the President should burn
no political bridges behind him in his retirement from Washington to
Sherwood Forest. On the contrary, he felt that Tyler should remain
available and open to the possibility of the Democratic nomination in
1848. The convention might deadlock and lead to Tyler's nomination
as a compromise candidate. There was always the possibility that
middle-of-the-roadism would again be popular in the Democracy. And
with the sensational Texas achievement behind the outgoing administra-
tion, lightning might well strike in Tyler's direction once more.
In spite of the President's desire to retire to the peace and quiet
of Sherwood Forest with his young bride, there are several indications
that he accepted Alexander's advice on remaining "available" for
1848. Having been constantly in public service since 1811, it was diffi-
cult for him to imagine life without public office. The call to political
battle never left him unmoved. As late as 1860 he was actively pursuing
the Democratic nomination. Indeed, when summoned again in April 1861,
Tyler, at seventy-one, emerged from retirement and was elected to the
Confederate Congress. He was a professional politician and remained
one all his life. Thus his remark to Nathaniel P. Tallmadge in Novem-
ber 1844 that he had been "so rudely buffeted by the waves of Party
268
politics for nearly four years past that I sigh for the quiet of my
country residence" was a passing attitude built on temporary fatigue,
not on an irrevocable decision to resign forever from the political
process. More revealing was his statement to Margaret in July 1844,
on the eve of his withdrawal from the Presidential canvass, about his
"cherished hope of returning to the White House in '48." After the
election he told Alexander confidently that the Polk and Van Buren
factions of the Democracy would surely kill one another off in patronage
struggles and that sooner or later "the country will look to a third
person for peace" and he was quite willing to feed this factional fire
to advance his own future political fortunes. By December 1844
Margaret was again alerting the family to Tyler's "political hopes for
the future." And within a few months after his retirement to Sherwood
Forest he was secretly at work trying to reorganize the old Tyler group
in New Jersey. Thus when the New York Herald charged in March
1845 that "bargaining, and jobbing and corruption of the most flagrant
character" had attended the filling of offices in New York City in the
last months of the Tyler administration, and that this was designed "to
make political capital for 1848," it came closer to the truth than it
realized.2
With one eye on Tammany and the fate of the Texas Resolutions
pending in Congress and the other on Tyler's political prospects in
1848, Alexander Gardiner returned to the odious New York City
patronage business with undisguised enthusiasm. Soon after the elec-
tion returns were in and it was certain that Polk had carried New
York City and the Empire State, however small the margin, Alexander
hastened to Washington for political consultations with Tyler. Return-
ing to New York on November 20, he sent the President a summary of
their conversations and a detailed patronage analysis of the local situa-
tion. "It is absolutely necessary," he concluded, "if we should retain
our strength here in opposition to the Van Buren faction that the most
important places should be filled by persons of sufficient insight to hold
them hereafter." He suggested that District Attorney Hoffman, Surveyor
of the Port Fowler, and U.S. Marshal Stilwell, among others, all be
replaced with solid Tyler men acceptable to Polk. While these men had
all supported Tyler in 1844, Alexander considered them too oppor-
tunistic and self-serving for the severe and perhaps discouraging trials
that lay ahead. Further, they had all initially been appointees of the old
Curtis regime in the Customs House. Gardiner urged the White House
that the new appointments "be made immediately," and that there be
no bargaining in New York with any faction but Polk's. It was also his
view that "the prominent Judges of this state are very generally friendly
one or more of them should be drawn out from the Bench into the
field of active politics." Specifically, he seconded Robert Tyler's sug-
gestion that Tyler kick Cornelius P. Van Ness upstairs to the United
269
States Supreme Court and make ex-Governor William C. Bouck Col-
lector of the Port in his stead. The Conservative Democrat Bouck, he
thought, was "doubtless a friend and it is desirable to keep him in posi-
tion." Another possibility was to elevate New York Supreme Court
Justice Samuel Nelson to the national Supreme Court, a promotion
which would produce "much local satisfaction" in the city. Alexander
also suggested that Tyler appoint Ely Moore to office. Moore, a former
leader in the old Workingmen's Party in the 18303, had anti-abolitionist
and other Conservative Democratic views acceptable to the Tylerites.
That he was a friend of Polk was an additional factor in his favor. By
and large, Tyler agreed with his brother-in-law's wide-ranging analysis.
He too saw the possibility and advantages of building a bloc of Tylerite
Conservative Democrats in New York. He differed with Alexander only
on specific names for specific jobs.3
Working with Robert Tyler and Collector Van Ness, Alexander
made ready in late November to fill all available New York City offices
with "persons of sufficient insight," As he evaluated the strength of
the 'Various cliques" in Tammany and considered how each might react
to given appointments, he began to suspect that Van Ness was not
handling the purge and patronage front in the city with sufficient dash
and decisiveness. He felt that the Collector was unduly nervous about
Senate confirmation of his own interim appointment and that his
anxiety in the matter had "somewhat deranged him." Alexander con-
fided to the President his concern that the frightened Van Ness had
"made but one appointment at my instigation." He could only hope
that when the Collector's appointment was approved by the Senate
"something better" would turn up. The longer he evaluated the New
York scene the more convinced he became that the Tylerites there were
"strongly established among the people and want only men of weight
of character as leaders." It was vital, therefore, to get such men into
office as quickly as possible.4
Throughout Alexander's correspondence and conversations with the
President on patronage matters, Julia acted as intermediary. She re-
layed names, jobs, and patronage decisions back and forth between
New York and the White House. Often she made clear her personal
preferences. In this activity she was assisted by Margaret and by her
mother, although Juliana's suggestions for specific appointments were
usually worthless, too frequently guided by emotion. She realized, of
course, that the President could not find appointments for "all his or
your [Julia's] good friends," even though they were "good democrats!'
Yet she hoped a Supreme Court post could be found for her friend
Judge Ogden Edwards because he was "very poor and I am sorry for it.
I wish he might be relieved in some way. Ohi this poverty and pride is a
trying thing indeed." Such economic considerations did not trouble
Alexander. His viewpoint was much more businesslike and realistic than
270
his mother's. Rich or poor, the prospective appointee had to be able to
help Tyler and to have some reasonable chance of Senate approval. For
this latter reason Alexander instructed Julia "to make as many friends
as possible among the Senators77 and gave her detailed advice on what
politicians in Washington were worth cultivating socially and which ones
were not.5
Julia's own analysis of the patronage process was not particularly
complicated. Shortly after she returned from her honeymoon in Virginia
she had been admonished by Margaret with the observation that the
family had "not heard of any gifts of offices from you and I fear the time
will slip by unheeded . . . [and] you will not be able to look back with
the satisfaction of having made a single person happy or grateful. You
do not seem anxious to exhibit your power " To make people happy
and grateful, and to demonstrate that she did have power over her hus-
band, the decisive influence that stems from the boudoir, Julia waded
briskly into the patronage pool. She was not always sure of the more
subtle political implications of her various recommendations, but what
she lacked in cloak-and-dagger sophistication she made up for in en-
thusiasm. "I will make as many friends as I can among the Senators/7
she assured her brother.6
Armed with Tyler's support and Julia's assistance, Alexander began
the task of creating a permanent Tyler faction in New York City. The
Brooklyn postmastership, he told the President, should go to his Uncle
Nathaniel Gardiner. "For political reasons, it is essential that we should
have a Post officer beyond peradventure in this vicinity for the next four
years 7> Nathaniel Gardiner was certainly "beyond peradventure,77 as
were several other men Alexander suggested for the job. But Tyler felt
that Polk should have a free hand on the Brooklyn appointment, if for
no other reason than to induce a fight there between the Van Buren
and Polk factions.7
By December 1844 Alexander was managing all patronage appoint-
ments, removals, and forced resignations for the Tyler administration in
Suffolk County. In addition, his iron hand, ill camouflaged by velvet
glove, was involved in so much patronage dispensation in Brooklyn and
New York that the Whig Courier and Enquirer bitterly compared him
with Robert Tyler, long accused by the Whigs of exercising the real
power behind his father's tottering throne:
Mr. Tyler's brother-in-law ... seems desirous to become a second Robert:
he is endeavoring to distinguish himself in the manner the latter young
gentleman was wont, before he went to Philadelphia to distinguish himself
at the Bar. Vain and impotent will be the undertaking! For how can he
hope, briskly as he may move in Robert's path, to rival the fame of that
young Astyanax! that hope of modern Troy! Still, the ambition is a laudable
one, and not to be resisted. We, therefore, must not be surprised to learn
that the young gentleman ... is assuming the management of the Custom
271
House . . . and requires the dismission of one inspector and the appointment
of another, on no other ground but his individual pleasure. One would sup-
pose he was part Tyler in blood, so naturally he falls into their agreeable
habits!8
Whatever the patronage habits of the Tylers, father and son, Alex-
ander freely admitted to Julia that "some of the applications made for
these places, and they are numberless, exhibit strange hallucinations on
the part of the applicants." He assured the White House, however, that
he would recommend for appointments only those persons "most worthy
of consideration." Still, in moving dozens of people into and out of office
Alexander made errors in judgment, and for these he was sharply criti-
cized by his closest friends. "The original friends of Mr. Tyler ought not
to be sacrificed to make room for those who became good 'Tyler men3
when no other party would have them" protested Alexander L. Botts.
"When needed most they fought against him, and not receiving the pay
from the opposite party they shouted (all too late) lustily for Tyler."
Alexander Gardiner's mistake (in this instance the accidental removal
of a loyal Customs House supernumerary) was repaired and suitable
apologies were speedily issued. More easily rectified was Alexander's
appointment of a distant cousin, Egbert Dayton of East Hampton, to
the United States Military Academy. In a sardonic note from Daniel
Dayton, the boy's father, Alexander learned to his chagrin that Egbert
was thirteen years old and scarcely ready to travel "the road to military
fame." 9
More embarrassing to the family, and certainly more public, was
the patronage mess Julia and Alexander managed to create at Sag
Harbor, Long Island, in their eagerness to get a few "safe" Gardiner and
Dayton cousins into minor sinecures before the Tyler administration
went out of power. In this instance, the in-fighting pitted Gardiners
against Gardiners and Gardiners against Daytons. Before the nasty fight
was over, Alexander and Julia were wondering whether they were really
cut out for ward-level political manipulation at all.
The Sag Harbor confusion began in June 1844 when John D.
Gardiner of that town, a cousin of Julia's, requested that Tyler appoint
his son, Samuel L. Gardiner, to the Collectorship of the Port of Sag
Harbor, replacing Henry T. Dering, At the time of the request young
Samuel L. Gardiner was serving as Solicitor in Chancery for Suffolk
County, a modest and unremunerative post. The Collectorship of the
Port was neither. The solicitation of the office was channeled through
Secretary of State John C. Calhoun, who had been at Yale with John D.
Gardiner back in 1804 (Julia's father had been in the same class).
Happy to accommodate another wearer of the Blue, Calhoun, with the
President's approval, promised young Samuel the lucrative post. Julia
seconded the arrangement enthusiastically. She had no love for Henry T.
Dering, The man had no poetic souL "I really think. . .[Gardiner]
272
deserves the CollectorsMp quite as much as Bering," she wrote her
mother from the honeymoon cottage at Old Point Comfort. Bering, after
all, "has never immortalized me in Rhyme/' and he was also "a thorough
Whig." Alexander was soon informed of the family decision in the
matter, and as Chief of the Tyler Patronage Bistribution Bureau,
Suffolk County Bivision, he heartily endorsed the appointment as a
'Very good one.77 Samuel L. Gardiner would be the next Collector of
Customs of the Port of Sag Harbor.10
Sag Harbor was not an obscure port in 1844, nor was the collector-
ship there a mean post; sixty to seventy whaling ships operated annually
from the town. As the New York Herald correspondent at Sag Harbor
put it, "We are growing rich and oily," and "in a short time we shall
outstrip New Bedford and Nan tucket, as we have done all other whaling
ports.'7 It was even boldly predicted in the town that "in a short time
we shall turn our attention to the arts, sciences and literature." While
not yet a cultural center, Sag Harbor was the political and economic key
to Suffolk County and the collector there controlled the turning of the
key with his power of patronage. The projected appointment of Tylerite
Conservative Samuel L. Gardiner to the office therefore threatened the
position of the Van Buren Bemocrats in the county, a group headed by
Br. John N. Bayton (also a Gardiner cousin), Br. F. W. Lord, and
Peletiah ("The Buke") Fordham, Postmaster of Sag Harbor. News of
SamuePs imminent elevation to the collectorship propelled this clique
into a frenzy of activity.11
This exertion took in form nothing less than a bargain, a conspiracy,
and a lie. In effect, the good doctors Bayton and Lord promised Ford-
ham, in July 1844, that if he somehow managed to persuade Alexander
Gardiner to substitute Bayton7s name for Samuel L. Gardiner's in the
nomination to the collectorship, the local Van Burenites would see to it
that "The Buke" was not purged from his postmaster ship. As a "rene-
gade Whig" and Webster appointee, Postmaster Fordham was in a pre-
carious position. With Van Ness, Graham, and Alexander casually lop-
ping off the heads of Van Burenites, Websterites, and Clay men to
further the Tyler candidacy in New York and force the Polkites into an
understanding with the President, Fordham had naturally begun to
experience a feeling of insecurity. Consequently, when Alexander visited
in East Hampton briefly in early August, two weeks before Tyler's
formal withdrawal from the Presidential canvass, Peletiah Fordham
hurriedly repaired there to speak with him. In the ensuing interview,
Fordham represented Samuel L. Gardiner as being violently anti-Tyler
and anti-Texas, unqualified for the office, unpopular in Sag Harbor, and
ardently for the Van Buren Regency. On the other hand, he portrayed
Br, J. N. Bayton as vigorously pro-Tyler in action and deed, sound on
every political issue of the day. He therefore urged Bayton's appoint-
ment as collector if the Tylerites had any interest in swinging Suffolk
273
County to Polk in the approaching elections. Meanwhile, the Dayton-
Lord clique had circulated petitions in Sag Harbor demanding the
nomination of Dayton.12
Alexander was bamboozled. Only in the most cursory fashion did he
bother to check Fordham's characterizations of Samuel L. Gardiner.
David Lyon stopped briefly in Sag Harbor in early September (after
Tyler's withdrawal), spoke privately with the Dayton-Lord forces (now
proclaiming themselves staunch Tylerites-for-Polk) , and reported to
Julia that Samuel L. Gardiner "has no influence whatever, nor have any
of his relatives; no confidence can be placed in any of them." He in-
formed his sister that he and Alexander would shortly "recommend
someone who has influence and character" 13
Not surprisingly, Dr. J. N. Dayton was soon recommended by
Alexander for the Sag Harbor collectorship. As a distant cousin of the
Gardiners he was eminently worthy. Nevertheless, Alexander's switch
decision in the matter placed Tyler in a "quandary" because Secretary
Calhoun had "gone so far" to secure Samuel L. Gardiner's appointment
in the first place. Alexander admitted that his own handling of the
problem had been equivocal, but he assured Julia that his actions had
been prompted solely by his concern for the President's "advantage in
Suffolk County." This concern took Alexander one step further. In
October lie was instrumental in obtaining Dayton's nomination to the
New York State Assembly on the Suffolk County Democratic ticket. By
election or appointment, Alexander was determined that Dr. Dayton
would have a political position. Dayton was elected to the assembly in
November.14
The President accepted his brother-in-law's spot judgment in the
Sag Harbor affair. On December i Assemblyman-elect John N. Dayton
was appointed Collector of the Port. In the meantime, the decision to
substitute Dayton for Gardiner had been carefully concealed from the lat-
ter, young Samuel L. Gardiner assuming until the very last moment that
the Presidential cornucopia would bathe him in the oil of office. At this
point, seeking to minimize the explosion that was sure to come, Alexan-
der made a crucial mistake. To propitiate Calhoun and the entire Sag
Harbor Gardiner clan, Alexander recommended to Tyler that he appoint
Ezra L'Hommedieu Gardiner Postmaster of Sag Harbor, replacing
Peletiah Fordham. This arrangement, reasoned Alexander, would pre-
vent "all difficulty and bad feeling" among the local Gardiners and
would satisfy all parties.15
Ezra was John D. Gardiner's second son. His appointment to the
postmastership was entirely an accident, a case of mistaken identity. In
recommending another of John D.'s sons for the post, Alexander intended
the appointment of John D. Gardiner, Jr., but he confused the numerous
Sag Harbor Gardiner brothers and ended up submitting Ezra's name by
mistake. He considered John D., Jr.3 "altogether the best of the family,"
274
but lie informed Tyler in mid-December that "if however his brother
Ezra has been already appointed the matter is not worth a second
thought." A Gardiner is a Gardiner is a Gardiner.16
When it became apparent to Samuel in early December that he had
been passed over for the Sag Harbor collectorship in favor of Dr. Dayton,
that he had been stabbed in the back by the Dayton-Lord-Fordham
clique, and that one of his brothers had been given the postmastership,
he immediately set off loud salvos of outrage and anguish. A hurried
trip to Washington and an interview with Tyler confirmed his worst
suspicion — that Alexander had indeed abandoned him on the basis of
Fordham's prevarications at East Hampton in August. No sooner had
he returned home to Sag Harbor than he persuaded his mother, Mary
Gardiner, to write to Julia and expose the whole plot. Within a few days a
heart-rending letter was received at the White House demanding justice.
The First Lady's intervention with her husband was urged in the most
emotional terms. Mary Gardiner reminded Julia of the Calhoun-Tyler
pledge of the office back in June; she assured Julia that her son had long
been an enthusiastic supporter of Tyler; and she recalled that her
husband "was a friend of your dear departed father, a fellow Townsman
and a fellow Classmate, through their whole academic and collegiate
course." 17
All of this was very embarrassing to Julia, who had endorsed
Samuel L. in the first place. No matter who got the appointment, one
Gardiner cousin would remain terribly unhappy. In quiet desperation
she contacted her brother to find out what had gone wrong at Sag
Harbor. Alexander, in turn, confronted Peletiah Fordham with the
charge that he had lied about Gardiner and Dayton during their August
interview at East Hampton, Since he had lost his postmastership to
Ezra L'H. Gardiner anyway, Fordham was quite willing to admit his
fraud and deception. He claimed that he had been most cruelly used by
Dayton and Lord. They were indeed Van Burenites, he confessed. Hav-
ing used him, they had done nothing to save his postmastership. He
admitted, further, that Samuel L. Gardiner was, as he had represented
himself, a true friend of the President and his policies. Fordham's con-
fession upset Tyler, who was distressed to learn that he had been a party
to what he correctly labeled a "real piece of intrigue." Julia too was
outraged. So was Juliana, who advised Alexander that "such people are
dangerous to speak with — the very least you have to do with them the
better. They are shocking." 18
Alexander agreed with his mother's viewpoint, but it was decided
within the family circle that John N. Dayton should not be openly
antagonized — at least not for a while. As a newly elected New York
assemblyman he could still help the cause of the Conservative Democ-
racy in Albany. Tyler had earlier appointed his New York friend and
ally, Senator Nathaniel P. Tallmadge, to the governorship of the Wis-
275
consin Territory. In January 1845 the state legislature at Albany would
select a new United States senator to nil Tallmadge's unexpired term.
The legislature was also scheduled to fill the seat of Senator Silas Wright,
elected governor of New York in November. It was this consideration of
two vacant Senate seats that caused Alexander to importune Dayton not
to resign as assemblyman to take his post as collector until he had first
struck a blow for Tylerism in New York. Dayton agreed. On January
19, 1845, ne reported to Alexander from Albany that "the long agony is
over and our friend Mr. [Daniel S.] Dickinson elected to fill the unex-
pired term of Mr. Tallmadge." The selection of Conservative Democrat
Dickinson was good news to Alexander, much better than the accom-
panying information that Van Buren Democrat John A. Dix had been
chosen to fill the Senate seat of Silas Wright.19
Whatever Dayton's Van Burenite proclivities actually were, he had
done for the Tylerites at Albany all Alexander had asked of him. He
had voted consistently for Dickinson and against Dix. Still, his shady
role in the Fordham misrepresentation marked him for proscription.
When his nomination to the collectorship came before the Senate for
consideration in early February, Tyler and Alexander quietly knifed
him. By this time the President had decided to liquidate the Sag Harbor
mess once and for all by restoring the nonpoetic Henry T. Dering to the
post of collector. The whole family in the meantime had grown heartily
sick of the Sag Harbor confusion. "I shall do nothing further respecting
the vacant Collectorship at Sag Harbor," Alexander informed Margaret
in disgust. For Juliana it provided an opportunity to make the larger
point that "If the Sag Harbor business is a specimen of politics I should
think you would be sick of the business. Don't pray place much con-
fidence in anyone. I do not — no not one. All the best are selfish and
politicians are intriguing. True honor is rarely to be found. Poor
politicians have no idea of it." 20
It did not take John Dayton long to realize that Peletiah Fordham's
mid- January confession of chicanery had been supplied to the Senate by
Tyler, or someone close to the White House, and that the administra-
tion's sudden loss of enthusiasm for his candidacy had caused his rejec-
tion by the upper chamber on February 10. Understanding the military
dictum that a setback often provides the best opportunity for a renewed
attack, he boldly suggested that the President send his name up to the
Senate again, or at least the name of Ms compatriot in the deception,
Dr. F. W. Lord. He blandly denied all complicity in the collectorship
machination, charging instead that he was the innocent victim of a
Fordham-Samuel L. Gardiner plot to discredit true Tylerism in Suffolk
County. This was a bit farfetched. Whatever his degree of involvement
with Fordham, his protestations of innocence were not rendered more
creditable when F. W. Lord cheerfully confessed the whole conspiracy
against Samuel L. Gardiner and again implicated Dayton as a charter
276
member. Lord defended ids own dishonest role In the matter on the
grounds that In politics, as in war, the ends justified the means. The
earlier Fordham confession he verified in all particulars. Since Samuel
L. Gardiner already held the office of Solicitor in Chancery, it seemed
fair, thought Lord, to ruin his chances for the collectorship, even if it
meant telling a lie or two. While all this was relatively small-scale chi-
canery, it was still gutter politics. Juliana was humiliated that "Alexan-
der's name should have been mixed up with all those people at Sag
Harbor. You do not wonder," she told Julia, "your father avoided con-
tact of any kind with them. I think they are shocking — so small." 21
Well above the Sag Harbor political level in the projected post-
election arrangement with Polk was the President's kindness to the
President-elect and his wife. This went well beyond the usual social
amenities, and it had a distinct bearing on Tyler's political look ahead to
1848. Not only did the President invite Polk to stay at the White House
when he arrived in the capital, but Julia exchanged several friendly visits
with Sarah Childress Polk after the Tennesseans reached Washington.22
It was through Tennessee State Senator Major William H. Polk,
Young Hickory's brother, that Tyler attempted most assiduously to
cement a permanent political and personal relationship with the new
President. Major Polk arrived in Washington on December 20, 1844, to
survey the political situation before the arrival of the President-elect.
Margaret found him "very plain in his appearance and manners," but
her mother was much impressed by the "tall respectable country men"
who comprised the Polk entourage. As noted in another connection,
Phoebe hurled herself romantically at the Major and for a brief time
captured his romantic and terpsichorean attentions. David Lyon met him
and thought him "a very clever man." He urged Alexander to call on
Major Polk when he later reached New York — this on the chance that
he "may be of some service to you hereafter." He also informed Alexan-
der that the Major had been "introduced to the girls, danced with them
at the Assembly, and has dined here and called upon the family several
times. The President thinks of giving him a foreign mission, maybe to
the south of Europe; you must not, however, mention it to anyone."
Alexander took his brother's advice. He made himself known to the
Major when he visited New York and took him to the opera. The two
men got on excellently together. William H. Polk thus received the full
Tyler-Gardiner treatment — from an armful of waltzing Phoebe to a
box seat at the opera and an offer of a diplomatic appointment23
Tyler first gave serious consideration to the appointment of Polk's
brother as charge to Naples as early as January i, a few days after the
Major's arrival in Washington. The initial idea was not Tyler's. The
request for a diplomatic post for William H. Polk came from the
President-elect himself in late December. Tyler, of course, was happy to
comply. He wanted the President-elect indebted to him. Further, he was
277
genuinely fond of the Major, who had skillfully served his brother dur-
ing the early stages of the 1844 campaign as a liaison man with the
Tylerites, Indeed, it was William H. Polk who had first suggested in
June 1844 that Tyler's withdrawal from the race would be rewarded
with a guarantee that no proscription of Tyler's friends would occur if
Polk won the election in November, To remind Polk and his brother of
this pledge; to accommodate and befriend the President-elect; and to
provide additional protection for Tylerites remaining in federal office
after March 4 (in this way salvaging a hard core of the Tyler faithful for
future political battles) the President gladly nominated the Major to
be American charge in Naples.24
The nomination immediately revived baseless speculation that Tyler
in turn would be appointed Minister to the Court of St. James's "where
his young and blooming bride can receive the compliments of lorded
nobility." Unfortunately, the Senate failed to act on Major Polk's ap-
pointment before March 4, and this forced the new President into the
embarrassment of having to renominate his brother to the Italian post.
Still, Tyler did the best he could for the President-elect. On the nepotistic
surface of things a renomination looked a little better than a nomina-
tion.25
While the President and Julia were striving to accommodate the
Polk family, Alexander was working diligently to purge Van Burenites
from various federal offices in New York and replace them with pro-
Polk Tylerites. Senate confirmation of Cornelius P. Van Ness as Col-
lector of the Port of New York in early January quieted the jumpy
nerves of the patronage dispenser in the Customs House and converted
him into a more confident wielder of the pruning shears. Heads rolled
and bodies twitched as he and Alexander lopped off the lower branches
of the Albany Regency. By early February, however Alexander was
calling on Tyler for more removals and new appointments than the
President could possibly make and see through the Senate in the short
time remaining to him. Even as the administration approached the last
two weeks of its fading grip on power, the eager Alexander was bombard-
ing the White House with demands and suggestions for dozens of "mid-
night" appointments. Only a few of these actually reached the stage of
a formal Presidential nomination and fewer still ever came to a vote on
the Senate floor. Alexander knew that only a handful of these last-
minute nominations could possibly slip through. But his was the buck-
shot-against-the-barn-door theory; throw in enough names and a few
might slide by in the rush of business at the end of a session. And if
none did, the very fact of the nomination inflated the ego of the nominee
and was often as valuable politically as a nomination that held real
possibility of confirmation.26
As the Tyler administration approached the end of its allotted span,
the inner circle in New York also debated the fate of its feeble printed
voice. What to do with the Aurora? The newspaper had long gobbled up
money faster than the Tylerites could raise it. On December 25, 1844,
Postmaster John Lorimer Graham told Alexander that the journal had
finally "come to a crisis," and that a heavy dose of new capital would be
needed to keep the sheet afloat for as little as six more months. On
January 9, 1845, Dr. N. T. Eldridge, one of the Aurora's tiny band of
angels, reported that the printer had not been paid for two weeks. He
recommended "a collection from friends as early as possible" to meet the
bill. Various contributions from Alexander Gardiner and editor Dunn
English, a $2000 personal loan from Collector of the Port C. P. Van
Ness, and a "forced loan" of $2000 from various loyal Tylerite office-
holders in New York had already disappeared into the belly of the hun-
gry Aurora with scarcely a trace. Debts mounted alarmingly. As much as
the Tylerites desired and needed a newspaper outlet in New York City,
there seemed no way to sustain the foundering journal. Thus when he
was asked in early January whether he wanted to keep the paper going
at any cost, Tyler responded bluntly that he did not "care a God damn
about it." He had his own problems, and he had little time or disposition
to worry about the Aurora's. The decision was therefore made to merge
the Aurora into Levi D. Slamm's New York Plebeian. There was appar-
ently no other solution. At least the Plebeian was anti-Van Buren, al-
though its pro-Tylerism was temporary, opportunistic, and quite rightly
suspect. Nevertheless, in return for a guarantee of printing commissions
from the Customs House and the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the Plebeian
absorbed the Aurora and its numerous liabilities.27
At that moment, in mid- January, the loss of the Aurora seemed to
the Tylerites more than compensated for by the progress of the Texas
Resolution through Congress. Into this final fight for Texas the Tylers
and Gardiners flung themselves with unity and vigor. For a brief period
in January and February of 1845 ^e alliance of the two families func-
tioned primarily as a lobby for Texas annexation. In Washington, the
Gardiner and Tyler ladies cajoled, wheedled, flirted, danced, entertained,
and otherwise stalked and buttonholed every walking vote that came
within polka distance. In New York, Alexander and Robert Tyler
labored to organize the Conservative Democracy for Texas annexa-
tion with patronage, persuasion, and pressure. In this effort the two
young politicians had no difficulty distinguishing their friends from their
enemies. As Alexander informed the White House, "The only division of
the Democracy in this state, sensible and founded on principle, is with
those who are favorably disposed to the Treaty of Annexation and those
who are not. There is none which so clearly designates those who are
with and those who are against us." 28
Chief among those in New York City who were "favorably dis-
posed" toward Texas was the colorful Captain Isaiah Rynders, leader
279
of the Tammany Hall-connected Democratic Empire Club. It was
through Rynders and his political roughnecks that Alexander and Robert
worked most effectively to bring the whole of the Wigwam to a pro-
annexationist point of view*
Isaiah Rynders was a thirty-eight-year-old, dark-complexioned,
over-middle-height man who was built like a bull. Born in Waterford,
New York, he grew up to the life of a deck hand on Hudson River sloops
and steamers. Duelist, gambler, traveler, patriot, Democrat, expansionist,
and soldier of fortune in the Texas Revolution, he eventually came to own
two small river vessels on the Hudson. From this accomplishment he de-
rived the title "Captain." In the words of the New York Herald, "women
and wine., fighting, sporting, dancing, and free living, all receive his due
attention." In July 1844 Rynders organized the Democratic Empire
Club to protest a municipal ordinance prohibiting the use of fireworks
and firewater in celebrations of the Glorious Fourth. The club quickly
became a tough, patronage-hungry outfit comprised largely of free-
swinging, hard-drinking Irish-American dock and river workers. During
the 1844 Presidential campaign Rynders affiliated the club with
Tammany Hall — for a modest ($3000) consideration. He served
gallantly in the Polk cause, specializing in breaking up Henry Clay
rallies with his roving squadrons of Empire Club street fighters. For
somewhat more formal and official ceremonies he dressed his goons in
snappy red jackets which attracted considerable attention. Mustering
well over two hundred head-banging and often unemployed patriots
(Rynders called them "The Boys"), the Empire Club was strongly anti-
Van Buren and anti-abolitionist; it was pro-Polk, pro-Tyler, and pro-
Texas. When Rynders went to Washington in late December to talk
patronage, politics, and Texas annexation with Major William H. Polk,
Ms presence in town stirred the Herald to remark that "important func-
tionary as President Tyler is in Washington, we assure you that Mr.
W. H. Polk is now the lion with Captain Rynders and the Empire Club
— the lion of placemen and men for place." When patronage was in-
volved, the dashing Captain was equally at home in either the Tyler or
Polk camp.29
Alexander favored the Empire Club with as much patronage as he
was capable of showering. The club, in turn, through member David H.
Broderick, helped secure Alexander's nomination for the assembly in
October 1844. More helpfully, Tammany Hall was packed with Rynder's
strategically deployed "Red Jackets" on the crucial evening of January
24, 1845, when the New York City Democracy debated the Texas ques-
tion in open convention. Robert Tyler treated the crowd to an emo-
tionally charged speech on the subject. Alexander, however, had arranged
the show. He drew up resolutions demanding the "immediate reaimexa-
tion" of Texas and an end to "fruitless procrastination." These resolu-
tions designated Polk's election victory a popular mandate for immediate
280
annexation, and called for American intervention in the Mexican-Texan
dispute under the provisions of the Monroe Doctrine. As Alexander
phrased the Monroe Doctrine rationalization, the United States was
"the parental source of the independence of every sovereignty in this
hemisphere, [and] has a right to regard herself as the natural protector
of their peace and welfare." These and similar propositions were offered
the Tammany Hall gathering of January 24 by Alexander, and by
Rynders and Broderick at Alexander's "instigation." The Gardiner
resolutions were quietly circulated among the Tylerites, Polkites, and
Red Jackets "some hours before the meeting/7 and when the time came
to debate them they were cheered, shouted, and stamped through in a
scene of pandemonium that concluded with "eight hearty cheers for
Honest John Tyler." It was a beautifully organized coup for Alexander,
and he was convinced that Tammany's action on Texas "had a material
effect upon the action of Congress." Undoubtedly it did have some
effect, although exactly how much cannot be determined. In any event,
the next day, January 25, the Texas Resolution passed the House of
Representatives with a twenty- two-vote majority, 120 to 98. "Rejoice
with me," exulted Tyler on the fact and size of the House vote. "I en-
tertain strong hopes that it will pass the Senate. A greater triumph was
never achieved than that already accomplished." 30
On January 26, Robert and Alexander hosted a lavish victory dinner
at Howard's Hotel for Rynders and other leaders of the Empire Club
and for various Tylerite functionaries from the New York Customs
House and Post Office. The House had passed the Texas Resolution the
preceding day and spirits around the banquet table were high. It was a
happy occasion "marked by most delicious cookery — excellent wines —
and the utmost brilliancy in the sentiments, toasts, speeches [and]
songs." The political tone of the evening was set by Robert's opening
toast to his father: "To John Tyler, President of the United States— ^n
honest man is the noblest work of God." Other toasts and the speeches
all cheered Texas annexation and hopefully linked the future political
destiny of Tyler with that of Polk. The Van Buren-Silas Wright faction
of the Democracy was roundly damned, hissed, and booed. The whole
affair, remarked the Herald, "will have a most important and interesting
bearing on the distribution of office under the new administration." 31
Alexander did not relax his pursuit of Texas annexation after the
House vote of January 25. On the contrary, he delivered speeches for
annexation, manipulated patronage for annexation, prepared pro-annexa-
tion briefs for the use of Tylerite speakers (briefs which carefully
avoided the slavery question), and urged Tylerite officeholders all over
the country to bend their energies and their voices to promoting the great
cause.32
In Washington the family fretted and worried as the joint resolution
made its way through Congress. Julia and Margaret followed the course
281
of the legislation with great care, reporting details of its daily progress to
Alexander in New York. David Lyon frequently escorted the ladies of
the Court to Capitol Hill to hear the Texas debate, most of which he
evaluated as "very indifferent." Yet he was certain that any "Democrat
who takes a stand in direct opposition to the wishes of the great mass of
the Democratic party will have [not] much to hope for hereafter at
their hands." Juliana, on the other hand, was fearful that the Van Buren
element in Congress was too strong, and that the Senate would probably
table the whole question as the session ended. The skillful floor fight for
the measure conducted by Senator Robert J. Walker, the Fabian tactics
of "Old Bullion" Benton in opposition to the resolution, the various
amendments, counter-amendments, arguments, pleas, and subtle political
exchanges on the issue were much too complex for the mother and her
daughters to follow: "Politically all seems confusion," Juliana wrote
Alexander. She was amazed at "how it seems to fluctuate — one day no
doubt of annexation; the next, all doubt." 33
After several weeks of alternate optimism and pessimism, Julia be-
gan to feel, by February 23, that the prospects for annexation now
looked "very encouraging." She was ecstatic in anticipation of a tri-
umphant outcome. "It is confidently expected to be passed this week/3
she told Alexander excitedly. "The prospect is quite bewildering; for it
is the President's last remaining desire." Alexander immediately came to
Washington to be on hand for the final push in the Senate. Happily for
John Tyler and his battered ego, his "last remaining desire" became a
reality on February 27 when the Senate approved the Texas Resolution
by the tiny margin of 27 to 25. The shift of a single vote would have
killed it. For this outcome Senator Walker was largely responsible. He
saved the day for the President with a bit of very fancy parliamentary
footwork. Specifically, he amended the House legislation to permit the
Chief Executive the option either of dealing with Texas under the joint
resolution or by negotiating an entirely new treaty of annexation. In so
doing, he strongly intimated that the second course would be followed.
Since Tyler's remaining time in office would obviously not permit him
the luxury of the new treaty approach, Walker's shrewd amendment
appealed alike to those anti-annexationists and anti-Tylerites who
wanted to defeat the whole scheme by delay, and to those Polkites who
would have been pleased to see Young Hickory receive the historical
credit for the act however it was consummated. Walker's tactic in-
fluenced a few key votes. Thanks also to his compelling advocacy of
his Texas "safety valve" slavery thesis, together with firm behind-the-
scenes political pressure from President-elect Polk, enough Southern
Whigs and Northern Democrats reversed the positions they had taken
in July 1844 to assure the success of the measure. The House approved
the Senate version as amended by Walker by a vote of 132 to 76.
It was a wonderful day for John Tyler. "All is glorification," Alex-
282
ander reported from Washington. When Alexander's glad tidings reached
New York (the Gardiner ladies had returned to Lafayette Place shortly
after Julia's final ball on February 18), the reaction was explosive.
"The girls [Mary and Phoebe] were here when news of the annexation
of Texas arrived/' Margaret wrote Julia. "We all cheered so vociferously
in the dining room that Mama hastened downstairs with the sure con-
viction that we had quite run mad, and such an advent seemed the
more natural to her from our continued merriment over the frothy events
of our winter." 34
Tyler signed the annexation measure into law on March i, three
days before he surrendered his office. It was, Julia recalled years later,
"the great object of Ms ambition" and there was no hesitation on his
part in rejecting the second of the Walker amendment options and
completing annexation himself. His Cabinet approved his egocentric de-
cision in this regard and Polk acquiesced in it. Tyler gave his wife the
historic pen with which he signed the legislation and Julia wore the "im-
mortal golden pen" around her neck like the Distinguished Service
Medal it was. Meanwhile, the President's nephew, Floyd Waggaman,
was dispatched to Texas with the documents necessary to consummate
the final details of the annexation.
On the evening of March 2 a brilliant Cabinet dinner was held at
the White House to celebrate the Texas victory. The Polks were present,
Sarah Polk wearing "black velvet and a headdress with plumes." Julia
was magnificently clad in "black blonde over white satin." The con-
versation, of course., was all Texas, as the outgoing and incoming Presi-
dents congratulated and toasted each other on the success of annexation.
Wine and champagne flowed. "Julia looked remarkably well," Alexan-
der reported, "and carried off the whole affair with much effect, quite
captivating Polk and Dallas." So it was that John Tyler left office in an
atmosphere of euphoric triumph, Julia as usual "captivating" the right
people right to the end.
No one in the family circle paid the slightest attention to the fact
that on March 3, 1845, *he Congress of the United States finally beat
"Old Veto" at his specialty. For the first time in American history the
Congress passed a bill into law over a Presidential veto. Even on this
issue, a minor one concerning two revenue cutters, Tyler's position was
sound. Still, who could get excited about revenue cutters when the
Republic of Texas had just become part of the American Union? Not
Tyler, certainly. To him, his administration was now a success. His
enemies could have the revenue cutters; he would take Texas.35
To Alexander Gardiner the Tyler administration was a triumph in
more ways than Texas. Indeed, as the annexation legislation wound its
involuted way into law, Alexander secured from the President the pa-
tronage appointment in New York that would provide him a safe re-
283
doubt from which lie could direct Tylerite political matters in the city
after the Chief Executive left office. There were also financial considera-
tions Involved in Alexander's hunger for office. He and David Lyon were
not successful lawyers in a financial sense. Their father, it will be re-
called7 had subsidized their struggling practice with regular cash in-
fusions until shortly before his death in February 1844. After the Sena-
tor died, his sons were forced to draw on the principal as well as the
income of the family estate to maintain a proper standard of living.
In early 1844 David Lyon stopped practicing law altogether and left his
brother to run the office alone. By January 1845 Alexander was com-
plaining bitterly to Julia that his law business was very slack. He had
received no legal commissions from the United States Circuit Court
since the April 1844 term. What he was owed by the Circuit Court for
work done prior to that term had not yet been paid. He was, of course,
too involved in local politics to do full justice to what practice he had,
and his mother frequently scolded him on this score. Thus, he wanted
and needed a steady income for day-to-day expenses. He did not want
to dip into Gardiner capital investments at a time when the 1837-1844
depression was lifting and stock and real estate values in New York
were beginning to show hopeful signs of appreciation. For this reason,
Juliana encouraged his quest for office, urging him not to become "dis-
couraged about some appointment." 36
Alexander first asked Tyler for a patronage post in May 1844, a
month before the President's marriage to Julia. Tyler was willing to ob-
lige the young lawyer, but he had nothing at that moment to confer, not
even an assignment as a special diplomatic courier ("The rapid and
facile intercourse by Steam Ships has almost entirely dispensed with the
necessity of special dispatch agents," he explained), or a lowly secretary-
ship in an overseas consulate. "How would a trip to South America
meet your views — the trip to last for some six months?" Tyler asked
him. "I anticipate an occurrence which may shortly render an agent
necessary." Unfortunately for Alexander, the "anticipated occurrence"
did not transpire.37
Nevertheless, the idea of a romantic foreign mission fascinated him.
In September 1844 he asked Julia about the vacant consulship at
Marseilles:
What is the consulship at Marseilles worth, and what do you consider the
dignity of the place? So far as health is concerned there could be no better
location for me; and I have long had a desire to visit "foreign parts." ... I
presume that Marseilles is no marrying place, but I do not perceive that
any immediate expectations in that way open upon me even here; unless,
indeed, you may find me a southern lady, rich and pretty. I must have them
both. High ho! Julia, what do you think of it? ... I am ready for any or all
enterprises in love, politics or business!
284
Julia encouraged his interest in a foreign mission aof some conspicuous
sort/7 but she crushed the Marseilles idea with the information that the
post paid no salary and "to make it truly profitable [you} must be con-
nected in commercial business. It would then be very lucrative." An-
other drawback of the Marseilles appointment was that "Alex must run
the chance of rejection by the Senate." 3S
Senate approval was a major consideration. So many of Tyler's
end-of-administration appointees were being rejected by the Senate that
Robert warned Alexander to seek only a position that did not require
Senate consent. The scent of nepotism was already in the air, an odor
Robert himself had raised in his unremitting efforts to get Priscilla's
father suitably placed in office before the Tyler administration expired.
Indeed, the Senate's stubborn refusal to confirm the old actor's nomina-
tion as Surveyor of the Port of Philadelphia could be traced to the fact
that Robert had lobbied so crudely and openly on Cooper's behalf.
Scalded on the Cooper appointment, Robert cautioned Alexander that "it
would be bad to risk your name before the Senate." With this advice
the President agreed, noting further that "if you [are] rejected it
would be a death blow to your future prospects." Specifically, Robert
suggested to Alexander that he take the post of Disbursing Agent of the
dry dock at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, but the job did not appeal to
Alexander. Nor was it on the patronage shopping Hst he had submitted
to the White House on January 8. It had only the advantage of not
being subject to Senate scrutiny:
As to office [he instructed Julia], tlie Liverpool Consulship would be highly
agreeable if I could get it consistent with the President's interests; the
Marshalship [of New York] I would not undertake; the Navy Agency I
would take though it is scarcely of a caste to which I should aspire. The
Navy Agency is worth in itself $2000 a year and is an easy, at least not a
difficult office. If I am to remain in New York, it would be probably as good
as any here excepting the clerkship of the U.S. Circuit Court.3d
The Liverpool consulate was vacant, and at various times in Jan-
uary and February Julia and David Lyon suggested that AJexander take
the post. He refused it, convinced now that Tyler's future political inter-
ests would better be served were he to remain in New York. The Navy
Agency position was also a possibility. It would keep him in the city,
but unfortunately it required Senate confirmation. Nonetheless, David
Lyon thought Alexander might have a try at it if Tyler's initial nominee,
James H. ("Cheap Jimmy") Suydam, was turned down by the Senate
(he was). After a careful evaluation of the job, Alexander decided that
the Navy Agency did not pay enough. With this belated discovery he
announced flatly that he was not interested in it. Nor was he interested
when William Gibbs McNeill, Chief Engineer of the Brooklyn dry dock
and a Tyler leader in New York, suggested that he might become a
285
"Special Agent" for the dry dock; or, that not appealing, an Inspector
of Live Oak for the Navy Department. McNeill informed Alexander,
when offering him a sinecure in the dry dock, that Congress would have
to come up with "a liberal appropriation and soon — for from the want
of it I am already constrained to limit my operations." For this reason he
urged Gardiner to "stir yourself among some of the Members on this
point" when he next visited the capital. For a few weeks the dry dock
appeared Alexander's best prospect, although his enthusiasm for the
post remained low. When he finally learned from the White House in
mid-February that neither a special agent nor a disbursing agent could
be added to the already overloaded table of organization in the patron-
age preserve of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, he began to get panicky. Tyler
had three weeks in office remaining and nothing had been decided. All
the possible patronage doors seemed to be closing, and Alexander ex-
pressed his alarm to Julia. "I do not forget you," Julia calmed him, "and
we shall see how things result." 40
Things resulted quite neatly. Since early December Alexander had
eyed the clerkship in the United States Circuit Court for the District of
Southern New York, a "very good and lucrative office" held by Tylerite
functionary J. Paxton Hallet. It required no Senate confirmation. When
Hallet expressed interest in the vacant Liverpool consulship in Decem-
ber, Alexander hastily wrote Tyler suggesting Hallet's appointment — an
appointment that would conveniently vacate the clerkship. In November,
however, the President had nominated Judge Edward Douglass White
for the Liverpool post in part payment for White's loyalty to him as
chairman of the Tyler convention in Baltimore in May 1844. He did this
in full knowledge that White's confirmation by the Senate was a dim
prospect. White was indeed rejected by that body on February 8. By
that date Alexander's anxiety for office had grown appreciably, and he
was quick to urge Hallet for the Liverpool job once again.41
The clerkship was a plum. It paid a comfortable $2600 per annum.
With various attached commissions, emoluments, perquisites, and op-
portunities for private practice outside business hours, it could be made
to yield upwards of $10,000 a year. That, at least, was the value Mar-
garet placed on it after careful research into the matter. Thus while
Senate approval of Judge White's nomination was still pending, Julia
urged her brother to "keep in view the Clerkship of the Court." She
thought Robert might help Alexander make preliminary arrangements
for the appointment at the New York end, and she wrote her brother
that if he secured the lucrative post "I shall expect a handsome pres-
ent." 42
The day after White's rejection for the Liverpool consulate (Feb-
ruary 9) , Juliana assured Alexander that he was "likely to get the Clerk-
ship" and she advised him that she thought "a very quiet course of
politics will be the best policy for you at present." It was high time, she
286
argued, that her son break off his "contact with the doubtful characters"
who surrounded the Customs House and Post Office in New York.
Alexander would not accept his mother's advice. Instead, he undertook to
persuade Hallet, a very "doubtful character," to resign his clerkship and
accept a nomination to Liverpool. This was no mean feat, since it was
likely that even were Hallet to win Senate approval (as he did), he
might swiftly be purged from his new post by Polk (as he was). Just
how Alexander and the President accomplished this persuasive coup with
Hallet is not known — probably by flattery, appeals to party loyalty,
references to the great dignity of the Liverpool office, and perhaps even
a small financial settlement. Hallet was a poor man, and he was uncom-
monly vain. In any event, at Alexander's urging, and with Hallet's con-
sent, Tyler nominated him for the Liverpool consulate on February 18.
Then with the help of Attorney General John Nelson and the interven-
tion of New York Chief Justice Samuel Nelson, whose own nomination
to the United States Supreme Court by Tyler had first been suggested
by Alexander, the clerkship matter was arranged. Alexander took Hal-
let's place as Clerk of the United States Circuit Court for Southern New
York on April 10, i845.43
When he first occupied the clerkship Alexander found himself in an
embarrassing financial condition. His law practice had lain neglected
for over a year. He had poured money into the Aurora and into his
own unsuccessful race for the New York Assembly. Contributions to
the Tyler party and personal loans to various of its hacks had further
reduced his reserves. Just how much covert financial grease he provided
from his own pocket to lubricate the rusty axles of ward-level Tyler
politics in New York cannot be determined. He was, however, frequently
approached for party contributions, and his pursuit of the clerkship very
likely required a dab or two of solvent. To ease his cash situation in
1845 ne borrowed money from Julia (the exact amount is not known),
promising her 25 per cent of the annual salary of his clerkship, or about
$650 per year until the loan was repaid. These moneys belonging to
his sister he carefully put aside, investing and managing them for her
over the years. By the summer of 1850 he told her that if he could hold
on to the clerkship for a while longer she would "soon be able to buy a
fine estate on James River or any other residence I [Julia] pleased."
When Alexander died suddenly in January 1851 without a will, leaving
Julia only his Kentucky coal lands in a verbal deathbed distribution of
his assets, she naturally protested Juliana's inheritance of that part of
Ms estate (representing 25 per cent of his clerkship salary for five
years) properly due herself.44
With the loan from Julia arranged, and his prospects for a com-
fortable future income from his clerkship assured, Alexander settled into
the routine of his new office, keeping a critical eye on the New York
political scene as Polk took charge of the nation. He beat off an intrigue
287
by ex-consul Hallet to recover Ms clerkship, and be withstood several
politically motivated attempts to slice into the economic fringe benefits
of his office. Margaret hoped that "now that he has something else to
occupy him ... he will abjure Politics which has only provided a bill
of expense and from which no advantage has accrued to him." With this
her mother agreed, returning to her old theme that the Gardiners had
never before associated with the kind of people Alexander played politics
with. "There is not one . . . you are brought into contact with that I
would be willing to endorse," she lectured him. To be sure, most of
Alexander's political cronies would have cut less than acceptable figures
at Newport, Saratoga, or White Sulphur Springs. But Alexander Gardi-
ner could no more "abjure Politics" than his sister Julia could abjure a
new dress, a glittering ball, or an innocently capricious flirtation.45
288
RETIREMENT TO SHERWOOD FOREST
The ball and the dance are all over. Goodnight to
them, lady! Goodnight! Now you will have hours to
indulge in that wonderful fancy of yours for the
beauties of nature.
MARGARET GARDINER, MARCH 184$
The brilliance of Julia's final ball and the triumph of Tyler's Texas
treaty provided a magnificent valedictory to the administration of the
tenth President. So successful were their last remaining weeks in the
White House that it was difficult for Tyler and his bride to move so
suddenly from the limelight of Washington to the relative political and
social obscurity of rural Virginia. There is nothing quite so peripheral
in American political life as a brand-new ex-President, a fact Tyler
readily appreciated. After much discussion within the family circle,
Julia's desire to remain in the capital for the Polk inaugural ball was
vetoed. Instead, Tyler decided that they would depart immediately for
Sherwood early on the morning of Inauguration Day, March 4. "The
President," Margaret explained, "does not like the idea of our going
from here [the White House] to a hotel." x
From the standpoint of the ladies of the Court, the few concluding
days of the social season could only be anticlimactic after Julia's fare-
well ball had passed into history. It was determined, therefore, to dis-
solve the Court. Within a week after the levee of February 18, Juliana,
David Lyon, and Margaret had returned to New York, and Mary and
Phoebe were sadly en route home to the barren fastness of Shelter
Island. To fill the void created by their departures Alexander appeared at
the White House on February 24 in time to cheer Texas annexation
289
through the Senate and help his sister pack and otherwise prepare herself
physically and psychologically for the retreat to Sherwood Forest.
It had been a grand season, a wonderful social experience for the
young ladies of Julia's entourage. "Together we have had a fund of
merriment," concluded Margaret in retrospect. Phoebe agreed. "I cannot
tell you how often I think of the joyous hours spent with you/7 she
thanked Julia. "Scenes of such excitement and gaiety were something so
new to me, and I mingled in them so constantly, that I now look back
upon them as a dream, long and bright, from which I have been sud-
denly awakened. I cannot realize that they were over." Juliana feared
that Julia, like Phoebe, would also have some difficulty awaking from
the White House dream, of adjusting herself to the sudden shift from
Washington to Sherwood Forest. She warned her daughter to accept the
situation with grace and dignity. "I trust all things will go well with
you, tho' it will probably take time to reconcile you to a life so new;
perhaps you may find it pleasant." 2
The departure was a sad one. A shipload of packing boxes, furni-
ture, and personal effects was sent off to Sherwood Forest on March i.
Two of Tyler's slaves, Burwell and John, were sent ahead with the
horses and carriage on the same day. Two days later, at 5 P.M. on
March 3, the President and the First Lady officially said good-by to
their many friends. Robert, Priscilla, and Alexander were on hand for
this gloomy event, as were the Cabinet officers and their wives. Some
three to four hundred people came to the Blue Room to bid the President
and his lady farewell. Tears flowed freely. Even so hard-boiled a politi-
cian as John Lorimer Graham was seen dabbing his eyes with a large
white handkerchief. Present also were a squad of Rynder's Red Jackets
and a uniformed detachment from the Tammany Hall White Eagle Club.
Both groups had come to Washington to cheer Tyler out and welcome
Polk in. Julia was dressed in a "neat and beautiful suit of black with
light black bonnet and veil." To Thomas of the Herald she was
"charmingly beautiful. ... I never saw any woman look more cheerful
and happy." She seemed "as though she had been imprisoned within the
walls of the White House, and was now about to escape to the beautiful
country fields of her native Long Island." Julia played her parting role
well.3
As the moment for the President's departure from the White House
for Fuller's Hotel approached, General John P. Van Ness stepped for-
ward and delivered' a brief eulogy of the Tyler administration. He
praised the President for his foreign-policy achievements and thanked
him and the First Lady for their social hospitality during the recent
months. He assured the visibly moved Chief Executive that the pen of
history would surely justify his administration. To these remarks Tyler
responded with a soft-spoken, extemporaneous speech:
290
In 1840 I was called from my farm to undertake the administration of
public affairs, and I foresaw that I was called to a bed of thorns. I now
leave that bed which has afforded me little rest, and eagerly seek repose in
the quiet enjoyments of rural life. ... I rely on future history, and on the
candid and impartial judgment of my fellow citizens, to award me the meed
due to honest and conscientious purposes to serve my country. I came to the
Administration standing almost alone, between the two great parties which
divide the country. A few noble-hearted and talented men rallied to my sup-
port, denominated a "corporal's guard," one of whom [Gushing] has just
returned having concluded an important treaty with a vast empire, and
thrown open the trade of more than one hundred millions of people to
American commerce. Another [Wise] is at this time performing the most
important services in Brazil for the prevention and extermination of the
American slave-trade. The day has come when a man can feel proud of being
an American citizen. He can stand on the Northeastern boundary, or on the
shores of the Rio Grande del Norte and contemplate the extent of our vast
and growing Republic, the boundaries of which have been settled and ex-
tended by peaceful negotiations. I am happy in leaving the government
to know it has come into the hands of a successor who has been elevated
by correct principles to take my place The acquisition of Texas is a
measure of the greatest importance. Our children's children's children will live
to realize the vast benefits conferred on our country by the union of Texas
with this Republic
There was, said Alexander, who witnessed the scene, "scarcely an eye
which was not suffused — tears dropping upon the cheeks of men . . .
little given to the melting mood." It was an impressive moment.4
After shaking hands all around, especially with the ladies, many of
whom were "bathed in tears," the President and Julia rode to Fuller's
Hotel. There they were to spend the evening prior to departing for Rich-
mond the next morning on the nine o'clock mail boat. At Fuller's the
President was met and cheered by a large throng of well-wishers, among
them members of the Empire Club and the White Eagle Club. Their
rooms were filled all evening as their closest friends came to bid more
lengthy and personal farewells. The early morning hours of Inauguration
Day were disturbed by renewed cheers for John Tyler from a crowd
gathered outside the hotel. A cannon salute from the playful White Eagle
artillery unit broke several of Fuller's windows. Shortly after 9 A.M. the
President and Julia, John, Jr., and Alice reached the dock, only to find
that the mail boat had already departed downriver.
It was embarrassing to have to return again to Fuller's and wait
for the night boat, but there was no alternative. Unfortunately for Julia,
Letitia Tyler Semple and her husband James had arrived in town two
days earlier to accompany Robert and Priscilla to Philadelphia. While
Alexander found Letitia Semple a "fine looking and accomplished
woman," her appearance in the capital severely discomfited Julia. The
291
two ladies were scarcely on speaking terms, and the tense confrontation
was awkward for both of them. The evening boat seemed a long way off.
Conveniently, the President's rooms rapidly filled again with noisy well-
wishers and the touchy situation was mercifully submerged. Professors
and students of Georgetown College arrived in a body to thank Tyler
for "having extended to the institution and the cause of learning in the
District more attention than any of his predecessors." Other callers came
and went. So the family remained occupied throughout the day. Only
Alexander attended P oik's inauguration ceremony at noon. Young
Hickory's cautious speech was delivered over the top of a sea of umbrel-
las, and Alexander remarked that he "would not go a half mile to see the
ceremony repeated." Nor had any of the family attended the inaugural
ball the previous evening, "the President deeming it more dignified and
proper that himself and Julia should remain at home." 5
At nine on the evening of March 4 the President and his family
finally left the jam-packed capital and boarded the 3 A.M. boat for Rich-
mond. No one accompanied their carriage as they rode to the pier, "not
even the tenderhearted Postmaster of the city and county of New
York was along/' sneered Thomas of the Herald. The scene had quickly
shifted to Polk, and the Tylers rode out alone. Julia's reign was over.
"The ball and the dance are all over. Goodnight to them, lady! Good-
night! " Margaret wrote her sister. "Now you will have hours to indulge
in that wonderful fancy of yours for the beauties of nature And
when there's little to tempt you abroad, dance with the President to
Alice's music." Still, Julia went out in a blaze. As she departed the town
a huge fire which leveled the National Theater and a dozen surrounding
buildings was at its height. Her last view of Washington was that of
Captain Isaiah Rynders and his Empire Club Red Jackets, scarlet coats
off, energetically fighting the blaze. It was a fitting symbol.6
Alexander remained in the capital for a few days to strengthen his
personal ties with the new President and to complete a eulogistic ac-
count of Tyler's departure for publication in the Madisonian on March
6. He called twice at the White House to chat with Polk and found him
"quite agreeable." He conferred also with those of "our political friends
[who] are endeavouring to form a Central Executive Committee to give
Mr. Polk a strong support" against the radical Van Buren wing of the
Democracy. But he confessed to Julia that he was "heartily tired of
Washington, which has lost almost every attraction since your departure.
I hear the same remark made by many others." On March 8 he returned
to New York. Margaret, meanwhile, demanded details of the family's
"evacuation day" from the capital. "Tell Alice I am expecting a letter
from her daily," she reminded Alexander on March 3. "She must not
wait until she arrives at home and then discuss the pigs and chickens." 7
The President and Julia reached Richmond at 2 P.M. on March 5
and went straight to the Powhatan House. Their presence there caused a
292
delighted commotion among the guests. Following their return from a
brief courtesy call at the Governor's Mansion ("where the President you
know used to reside," Julia told her mother), they returned to the hotel
to greet numerous friends and acquaintances who filled their parlor.
Among these callers were editor Thomas Ritchie, his wife, and his
daughters Ann Eliza and Margaret. Julia's campaign to charm the in-
fluential Tom Ritchie in the interest of Tyler's future political ambitions
began at that moment.
Early the next morning the Tylers embarked in the small river
steamer Curtis Peck for the short run down the James to Sherwood
Forest. At noon they reached a landing opposite their destination, and
the "agreeable company" on the boat gave them three loud cheers of
farewell when their dinghy touched shore on the Sherwood Forest side.
"How fortunate for us that Texas has passed and Clay is not Presi-
dent," remarked Julia of that scene. The annexation of Texas had
salvaged the reputation of John Tyler along the James River. Or so it
momentarily seemed. Actually, as he later told Edmund Ruffin, Tyler
was "received coldly, or worse, by nearly all his former friends and
neighbors, all such being his political opposers." Charles City was still
strongly anti- Jackson Whig territory. Tyler's break with the Whigs and
his subsequent endorsement of Young Hickory did not sit well with
many of his aristocratic friends in the Tidewater. As a first order of
business Julia was determined to break down this petty neighborhood
irritation with her husband's politics. This she eventually did, employing
in her effort weapons which had never failed her before — good food,
good wine, and gracious entertainment.8
In the interim, however, Tyler spent many anxious moments worry-
ing about his bride's adjustment to her new situation at Sherwood
Forest. He need not have been concerned. JuHa was an extremely re-
silient young woman and her initial reaction to her new life was one of
delight and adventure. Two days after her arrival, as the packing boxes
were being emptied and the draperies hung, she wrote her mother of her
happiness, and of Tyler's concern for her comfort:
The house ... is neat and beautiful and in all the arrangements I am very
much gratified. The house when we arrived was vacated and opened to us
by the servants. Some bedrooms were in order, but I went immediately into
the preparation of my own particular one commencing at two o'clock and
before night the carpet was nailed down, the bedstead up and all the rest of
the furniture in position I defy you to find so sweet a bedroom or
chamber in every respect as mine! ... I assure you Mama my house outside
and in is very elegant and quite becoming "a President's Lady/' You will
think it a sweet and lovely spot, and I am quite anxious to have you see
it with your critical eyes It is clean and sweet, cheerful and lovely here,
and you don't know how grateful the repose is to me. Perhaps it is the ex-
citing and sometimes wearisome routine of gaiety I have experienced that
293
throws such a charm around everything about me. The President is puzzling
his wits constantly to prevent my feeling lonely, and if a long breath happens
to escape me he springs up and says "What will you have," and "What shall
I do" for "I am afraid you are going to feel lonely!" My little bird hangs in
one of the piazzas and sings from morning until night
Julia was as happy and content as "Johnny Ty," the little canary who
sang from morning till dusk. She experienced moments of homesickness
and she hungered for the political news and social gossip of Washington
and New York, but by and large she found herself extremely pleased
with Sherwood Forest.9
There was still much to be done in the house, and Julia attacked
the problem of getting settled and arranging her belongings with char-
acteristic energy. "I hope you will not go on too fast in Virginia nor
undertake too much at once/7 her mother warned her, "as you will have
nothing to do in time to come." There was little danger of that, and
Julia hurried to make Sherwood Forest the showplace of all the estates
on the James. "I wish I had a magic wand/7 she confided to Margaret.
"I would make this place the most beautiful you ever saw by perform-
ing without delay what will now have to be gradually arranged.7' Since
there was still much carpentry going on in and around the house, Julia
daily supervised the workers, urging them forward with all possible
speed. From Alexander she requested Andrew J. Downing7s book on
landscape architecture, and she began planning the grounds, gardens,
fences, and gates of the estate. Two female statues were ordered from
New York to "preside over the garden/7 and two large reclining cast-iron
dogs were obtained for the north piazza.. So many demands for rugs,
curtains, furniture, yard goods, clothes, medicines, books, magazines —
and even guitar music — went to the family in New York that she finally
confessed to Alexander that "I suspect you think by this I will never
cease to want." She never did cease to want. Over the next fifteen years
much of her shopping for herself, her children, and her home was done
by mail through members of her family in the city. "You will think my
commissions neverending," she apologized to Margaret, "but I cannot
help it.'7 10
Among her New York purchases in 1845 was an expensive new
carriage. To do it justice she put her Negro coachmen and footmen into
resplendent new livery, "handsome light grey dress coats (livery cut)
with black covered buttons (made in uniform style) white pantaloons
and black hats." They cut dashing figures, almost as dashing as the
hearty sailors of JuhVs Navy, the four Negro oarsmen who manned
her "Royal Barge.77
This small boat was a farewell gift to Tyler from the family of
Commodore Beverly Kennon. It arrived at Sherwood Forest already
christened Pocahontas. Julia decided to rename the boat Robin Hood —
"the Robin Hood of Sherwood Forest/7 but she gave up the idea when
294
reminded that boats were "always of the feminine gender." Margaret
wanted her to go one step further in nomenclature reform and drop the
word Forest from the name of the plantation. (" 'Forest' seems associ-
ated with everything that is wild and unacclimated and remote," she
argued.) After consultations with Tyler on the problem, Julia decided
that "Forest" would stay and "Robin Hood" would go. Thus Poca-
hontas invaded "Sherwood Forest." Julia had the little craft painted
a bright blue and she lined its seats and thwarts with damask satin
cushions richly trimmed in matching blue. She had long had a weakness
for colorful uniforms, one dating back to her prom week end at West
Point in 1839. Her imagination was therefore at its creative height when
she designed the garb of her oarsmen:
Bright blue and white check calico shirts — white linen pants — black patent
leather belts — straw hats painted blue with Pocahontas upon them in white —
and in one corner of the shirt collar (which is turned down) is worked with
braid a bow and arrow (to signify the Forest) and in the other corner the
President's and my initials combined.11
Julia was certain that the Pocahontas could "carry you across the
ocean — she is so buoyant and light." On one of her first voyages, how-
ever, she barely made it across the James. Fitted with an American flag
that rippled proudly from her prow, and a canopy that warded off the
sun, "a ly Italian" [sic], the craft was made ready for Julia and the Presi-
dent to pay a mid- June call upon Mrs. George Harrison at Lower Bran-
don. Halfway across the river the trusty Pocahontas began leaking so
badly that Julia found herself perched on top of her seat to keep dry. But
her skilled oarsmen ("sailors and no mistake") brought the crippled ves-
sel safely to shore. Subsequent caulking and painting properly tightened
her seams, and on later social visits up and down the river to Brandon,
Weyanoke, Lower Brandon, Shirley, and the other nearby plantations
Julia, like Cleopatra, could in all security "stretch myself out on the
cushions of a much sweeter boat than our Gondola in Venice." The
Pocahontas survived all further challenges until 1864, when she dis-
appeared during the fighting around Charles City, "liberated" no doubt
by Union soldiers.12
Julia enjoyed visiting her new neighbors along the river. Whether
she traveled to their homes in her new carriage or in her bright blue
barge, she invariably arrived in style. She was soon integrated into the
plantation society of the lower James. She was a new face in the
neighborhood; pretty, young, vivacious, poised, she was the object of
much local attention. Everyone — Carters, Harrisons, Douthats, Seldens
— wanted to see the rich Yankee wife "Old Veto" had brought home
with him. Tyler, of course, was pleased to show off his attractive bride.
As Julia immodestly expressed his inordinate pride in her, "When he re-
turns from visiting anywhere he is more and more enraptured with
295
me and says I am 'different from everybody else in the world/ and
formed to be the admiration of everyone who has taste and wit, and
the wonder of all others — ahem! . . . only a little bit of flattery!" Julia
was different, and Tyler indulged her every wish and fancy. Her tastes,
however, were expensive.13
By October 1845 the high cost of her numerous household pur-
chases, combined with the expense of vacation trips to Old Point
Comfort j White Sulphur Springs, and New York, had brought the
former President into financial difficulty. These expenditures and the
continuing outlays for the remodeling of Sherwood Forest finally forced
a hard-pressed Tyler to negotiate a $2000 loan from Corcoran and
Riggs, the Washington bankers. As security for the loan he put up one
quarter of his interest in his coal and timber lands near Caseyville,
Kentucky, which he had purchased as a speculation in 1837. At the
same time he commenced preliminary negotiation for the sale of the
property on the banks of the Ohio, His financial situation was not
helped when a wandering note on which he had given surety for a friend
came home to roost in July. This act of kindness and accommodation
ultimately cost him $1400 he could ill afford. The friend had died and
his creditors successfully sued co-signer Tyler for the full amount of
the note. "Pray never go security for anyone," Julia warned Alexander.
"The President has got to pony up pretty handsomely for that sort of
generosity." In desperation for ready cash, Tyler began dunning his
own debtors for sums as small as $3.56 still owed him for legal work
performed years earlier. "These are small matters/' he admitted to his
nephew, "but the world is made up of atoms; and for myself I have
incurred pretty heavy expenses in fixing up this place, and dollars
whether few or many are important to me." In spite of his shaky fiscal
situation, Tyler stinted on none of the expenses connected with Julia's
desire to entertain her new friends and neighbors in the grand manner.14
In early May Julia gave a large dinner party, her first at Sherwood
Forest. She was ostensibly pleased with the results. " 'The full extent or
nothing' is almost my motto now," she told her mother in triumph.
Only when the crusty Juliana expressed surprise that her daughter had
really enjoyed the affair "as well as your grand ball at the White
House," did Julia confess that the gaiety of social life along the river
was a decided cut below that of Washington. "I ... have been almost
spoiled by excitement and livelier scenes. . , . What dinner parties of the
usual kind in country or city would not appear dull to me after all those
brilliant ones we gave at tie White House! " she admitted.15
More serious for Julia than this passing social disappointment
was the badly infected throat (Tyler called it a "cold in the face")
that sent her to bed for two weeks in mid-May 1845. Painful as this
was to her, it gave her solicitous mother a splendid opportunity to
indulge in her favorite hobby — medical diagnosis by mail. In fact,
296
Juliana spent most of her adult life practicing medicine without a
license. No malady, large or small, escaped the attention of the family
outpatient clinic she ran with the aid of the Post Office. In this typical in-
stance, quantities of patent medicines were rushed southward to Sher-
wood Forest. She had discussed the symptoms of Julia's condition
with Dr. Quin, the Gardiner family physician in New York, and she
had decided upon the treatment to be employed. Having no con-
fidence in any but New York doctors (who were medically as ignorant
as she), Juliana confidently told her daughter exactly how throat in-
fections should be treated. Alexander thought that Dr. Quin and his
whole profession were engaged in "humbug/' and Juliana agreed that
"their knowledge is not perfect." But she was certain that a diet
omitting wine and coffee would cure all infections if these dangerous
liquids were replaced by tea and muffins and supplemented by massive
doses ©f calomel. Eventually, Tyler's brother-in-law Dr. Henry Curtis,
"an eminent physician," was called in from Richmond for consulta-
tion, and while he consulted and tinkered and speculated, Julia got
well. She attributed her recovery to black tea. "I find that black tea is
better for me than coffee which I thought I never could live without,"
she informed her mother. "I have acquired a fondness for black tea
and scarcely regret the coffee." 16
As Julia's health returned, her emotional attachment to Sherwood
Forest and to Virginia deepened and matured. Soon after her arrival in
Charles City she had complained about the "peculiarity of Virginia
manners." The soft deference that characterized personal relations
within the planter aristocracy seemed strange to her at first. She agreed
with her mother's view that New York was still "the first city in our
Country ... a bright and smiling city," even though she appreciated
the fact that its elite social circles could not easily be breached unless
one "grew up with it from earliest childhood." But after a few months
at Sherwood Forest Julia came to love the studied chivalry of Old
Dominion society. For the edification of her family she began to draw
comparisons between Virginia and New York which became progres-
sively more critical of the latter:
Yesterday I had a call from Mr. and Mrs. William Harrison of Lower
Brandon across the river. They are of the first aristocracy of Virginia and
amply did they meet my views of it. Her manner is very cultivated — great
repose and finish. Her effect is that of one born a lady I was pleased with
our interview and her soft manners I do not know any in New York
society that would appear so elegant. I know she would feel herself far
before the fashionable society there. I think there is every prospect of my
being surrounded by an agreeable society and carry out your idea of ex-
clusiveness in every particular . . . but I think from what you write the first
society in the State of New York is sadly declining. ... I meet with more
accomplishment among the ladies of Virginia than is usually met with in
297
those of New York State. They have generally more talent and finer man-
ners, more self-possession, which is owing I think to their priding themselves
so much on their native state, "The Old Dominion" — the home or birthplace
of so many Presidents I should think, Margaret, you were really tired
of meeting face to face that same old set, those same old coons. — 17
In contrast with New York City, life at Sherwood Forest was
pleasant, easy, and gracious. Tyler spent three or four hours a day on
horseback among the slaves in the wheatfields "encouraging them by
his presence." To protect himself from the sun while he was in the hot
fields he purchased a huge Panama hat, which, in Julia's words, had a
"brim so broad that his face was quite lost. I thought I should have
killed myself with laughing. Since which he has been turning it up
in every direction to lessen the size and made me also admire it."
In the late afternoon Julia would join her husband, he on horseback,
she on her pony, and they would ride across the flat acres. And in
the early evening hours they would sit together on the piazza, and
"listen to the corn song of the work people as they come winding home
from the distant fields." 18
Tyler had managed to get "a few hundred acres" of wheat planted
in the fall of 1844. From this modest effort he harvested two thousand
bushels in June 1845. With wheat at one dollar a bushel that year,
and only a fraction of the available land at Sherwood Forest yet under
cultivation, the plantation gave great economic promise. Fifty acres
of his best bottom land were capable of yielding from twenty-five
to thirty bushels per acre. The remainder would produce considerably
less, averaging little more than eight bushels to the acre. While this
scarcely compared with the forty bushels an acre Nathaniel Gardiner
harvested on Long Island, it would produce enough, Julia calculated,
to "sustain all upon the estate in an abundance." Dollar wheat, she
explained to Margaret, was "cash in hand" on a Virginia wheat planta-
tion. She was quite certain, as was her husband, that "these James
River lands are very highly esteemed and are susceptible of anything
almost by improvement." In this she was correct. Under Tyler's expert
management the productivity of the plantation rose steadily through
the years.
John Tyler was a cautious farmer, devoted to careful and patient
scientific experimentation. In August 1845 he ordered a copy of Liebig's
Chemistry in Its Application to Agriculture and Physiology through
Alexander in New York. Published first in 1841, this pioneer study in
soil chemistry was the best in its field. He also read Edmund Ruffin's
seminal Essay on Calcareous Manures (1831), and he followed Ruffin's
later articles on the subject in the Farmer's Reporter. Tyler's study
of Liebig and Ruffin convinced Mm that he must use marl (clay
mixed with calcium carbonate) to correct the lime deficiency in Ms
298
soil. He also experimented with South African wheat seed in 1847
and in 1850 with wheat seed from California in an attempt to develop
a rust-resistant strain that would also better withstand frost. The seed
experiments failed, but the marl applications worked so well in in-
creasing his wheat and corn yields that he was slow to shift to the
use of the much-superior guano as fertilizer. "The President's crop of
wheat is the talk of Virginia," Julia boasted in June 1849:
A notice of it even appeared in a Richmond paper as the most flourishing
crop on James River. Some of his friends . . . say "Ah ha ! he's only been
on his farm five years and is before his neighbors already." We cannot form
the slightest idea how much he will make, but it is before by a great ways
any of his former crops. The P rides down everyday to look at and
admire it.
Following the failure of his 1850 crop, Tyler reluctantly aban-
doned marl for the more expensive guano. He selected thirty of his
least promising acres for the experiment in 1851 and was astonished
to see the wheat yield soar from three bushels to fifteen on this sub-
standard land. From that point on he used guano almost exclusively.
Until the drought of 1858-1860 struck all the James River plantations,
Tyler generally had excellent crops. Nevertheless, he could never
estimate the price Ms grains would bring in the Richmond and Baltimore
markets. Wheat ranged from $i to $2.50 a bushel during the decade
1845 to 1855. Corn fell as low as 50 cents and went as high as $1.50.
Like all farmers of the period, Tyler produced blindly into an unstable
market, one over which he had no control. The Mexican War of 1846—
1848 shot prices upward for a time, and the Crimean War pushed wheat
to a fantastic $2.50 a bushel in 1855. In 1850, however, com stood
at a mere 50 cents and Tyler was caught with 2500 bushels at a price
"so low as scarcely to remunerate." Farming was like roulette. Still,
guano fertilizer made an immense difference. As Juliana wrote from
Sherwood during her annual visit there in September 1855:
You see very few careworn faces here and I begin to think these planters
lead comfortable, independent lives with less to annoy them than our city
business men. Guano is making them rich quite rapidly. In driving around I
am made sensible of this from the sight of their crops — wheat and splendid
fields of corn.
Converted to the employment of guano in the early 18505, Tyler
was not eager to endanger his rising profit ratios with a heavy invest-
ment in farm machinery. Thus when he was invited to the Douthat
plantation, Weyanoke, in June 1852 to witness the operation of "two
soil machines, McCormick's and Hussey's," he was unmoved by the
demonstration. While the mechanical reapers invented by Cyrus H.
McCormick and Obed Hussey were destined to revolutionize American
agriculture, the newfangled equipment caused little excitement and
299
less interest when it was first exhibited on the James River wheat and
corn plantations. Instead, Tyler and his neighbors piled on the guano
and left the harvest to the labor of the Negro slaves in whom they
already had such large financial investments.19
To harvest his first crop in 1845, however, the ex-President found
it necessary to lease slave labor for the season. At the same time, he
began adding to the permanent slave population of Sherwood Forest
by outright purchase, financing these new acquisitions with long-term
notes at Richmond banks. Since the Negroes, hired or purchased, usually
came to the estate accompanied by their women and children, there
was a built-in bonus for the owner. "The children and their work
afford the interest upon the slaves," Julia explained to Margaret. "A
pretty handsome interest is yielded for the amount invested."20
At Sherwood Forest plantation Julia found the good life. As she
described it to her city-bound sister in June 1845 ft seemed almost
idyllic:
The President [is] in a large armchair near me on the piazza with feet
raised upon the railing The reapers liave come to their labors in the
field about five hundred yards from us and their loud, merry songs almost
drown the President's voice as he talks with me. Once in a while a scream
from all hands, dogs and servants, causes us to raise our eyes to see a full
chase after a poor little hare. This moment we have looked upon one, and
I see they have caught it — there is a regular scuffle between dogs and men.
With these hares and squirrels our place abounds. We are removed about a
mile, in a direct line, from the river, that is to say the mansion — the
estate runs down to it — and the trees on the bank that intercept the view have
already been nearly cut away. Since I have been seated here I have noticed
some five or six vessels pass up and down. Louisa and Fanny Johnston
[house slaves] are sewing the carpet in the dining room — and now if you
nave any fancy you can picture us all.21
Nothing in the slave system disturbed Julia or shocked her sen-
sibilities. As conducted by Tyler at Sherwood Forest it functioned
easily and humanely. No whips or lashes, no brutal overseers were
found on the President's property. The seventy-odd "servants" (as
they were always politely called) were adequately clothed and housed,
and if there was discontent among them it was not manifested by
runaways or by recorded instances of "sassiness." Instead, slavery at
Sherwood Forest was an example of Southern white paternalism at its
best. No slave was ever "sold South,'7 and Tyler saw to it that none
of his slave "families" was broken and scattered. On the surface
of things, the "servants" had a strong attachment and loyalty to the
Tylers. In turn, the family saw to it that the slaves were instructed
in the basic tenets of Christianity. And while neither Tyler nor his
wife ever defended slavery as a positive moral good, Julia spent too
300
many evenings sitting up with sick slaves (she treated their chills and
fevers with strong doses of quinine laced with a jigger of whiskey),
worried too many hours over their physical and material well-being, and
witnessed too many evidences of her husband's kindness to them to be
convinced that the Institution was totally evil. Just how the slaves felt
about It Is not known. No one asked them. It Is a fact, however, that
from 1845 until the arrival of the Army of the Potomac at Sherwood
In 1862 only one Negro deserted the property. He was drunk at the
time, and he fled, of all places, to nearby Richmond, a city with no high
reputation as an express stop on the Underground Railroad. He was
scarcely a runaway In the Uncle Tom's Cabin sense.
Still, it Is doubtful that the Tylers encouraged monogamy among
their slaves. Negro children were shifted casually from one hut to another.
Thus after Alexander visited the model plantation in November 1845
and complained that he had seen a Negro child there improperly clothed
against the cold, Julia assured him that the boy had since been made
comfortable. "Now he is like all the rest entirely fitted out in new
warm clothes — coat, pantaloons, and shirt." She explained, "The truth
of the matter is he was left to the care of one of the women who
had other children — and she of course soon stripped him for them —
but now he is transferred to a childless woman and finds himself very
kindly treated." Nor is there any satisfactory evidence that the
slaves were taught to read or write. And if they sang in the fields
and played their banjos and bones in their quarters at night, the fact
also remains that they speedily abandoned the plantation in 1862-1864
when opportunities to leave were presented them. Only four of the
male Negroes remained on the estate after their liberation by the Union
Army in May 1864 — and these few joined in sacking the house and
stealing the furniture.22
In spite of Julia's constant assurances that the slaves at Sher-
wood were content and happy, Juliana was concerned that her daughter
was surrounded by so many Negroes. "Do inform me if you have any
white people about you, or are all your servants colored?" she asked
nervously. She pleaded with her daughter to employ a "respectable
efficient white woman" as a housekeeper, someone Julia could turn
to for sympathy and assistance in case of illness. To find such a person
for Sherwood Forest Juliana undertook a thorough search in New York
City. She soon located Catherine Wing. In November 1845 Catherine
arrived by boat at Sherwood Forest to fill the station. She, like all the
Gardiner servants in New York, was an Irish immigrant, and she ac-
cepted the situation in Julia's household for her room, board, and five
dollars per month. "You must insist upon neatness and care and good
order," Juliana lectured her daughter on the eve of Catherine's arrival.
"You must learn to put your own things in order or I fear you will find
301
no one to do it for you. I never did, that's a fact." Julia was pleased
with the efficient Irish girl, whose many duties came to include general
supervision of the house slaves.23
In February 1847 another white woman, twenty-five-year-old
Harriet Nelson of Norfolk, joined the household staff as seamstress
and nurse for Julia's baby. Harriet was of "good family with relations
well to do," and she was "much brighter in mind than my Catherine
and an experienced nurse" as well. "And what do you thmk her wages
are?" Julia asked. "£3 per month! Did you ever hear anything so
absurd — but that is all she has been in the habit of receiving. The
reason that white labor is so low is this: Slaves are so general that a
white person will only be hired as a favor almost — and a Virginia
girl never thinks of leaving her state." Without quite sensing it, Julia
had put her finger on one reason why so many urban workingmen in
the North feared the economic implications of abolition.24
As Tyler's fanning operations became increasingly extensive and
his harvests larger, he continued the practice of leasing Negro labor
from the slave brokers in Richmond for seasonal stints. He also hired
free Negroes for field work at regular daily wages. A small settlement
of freedmen at nearby Ruthville provided this particular labor source.
Thus in the wheat- and cornfields of the plantation, resident slaves and
leased slaves worked side by side with the Ruthville freedmen. In the
main house slave women like Louisa and Fanny and Sarry worked
alongside Catherine Wing and Harriet Nelson. This unusual mixture of
race and status, indoors and out, was accomplished without incident.25
Contented slaves notwithstanding, not all was sweetness and light
at Sherwood Forest during Julia's first year as mistress there. There
were sharp tensions within the family circle that required patient
handling. Neither Elizabeth Tyler Waller nor Letitia Tyler Semple
was yet willing to accept Julia as a stepmother. And Julia became sick
and tired of their studied insults and backbiting. As the collective
blood pressure of the ladies mounted, an embarrassed Tyler worked
diligently to soothe and placate all parties. He also had to deal firmly
with eighteen-year-old Alice Tyler. The problem with Alice centered on
the respect and deference she owed Julia. She was a headstrong and
romantic girl who fell in and out of love so often and so completely
that Julia questioned her indiscriminating romantic judgments. The
bucolic life at Sherwood Forest bored young Alice, much as East
Hampton had bored her stepmother at the same age. Her own success
in Washington as a member of Julia's Court had given her a lively
sense of independence and she did not accept Julia's effort to discipline
her with good grace. "She is the most 'spoilt child' that ever existed,"
Julia concluded. Fortunately, Alice spent much of her time in Williams-
burg visiting in the Waller home, a vantage point from which she
302
could observe and be observed by the William and Mary collegians.
This arrangement minimized her friction with Julia. But when their
clashes did occur, Tyler strongly and plainly supported bis young wife.
He made it crystal-clear to Alice that she was to be guided entirely
by Julia's "advice and opinions." The ideal solution to the problem,
thought Julia, was to get Alice married off as quickly and as ad-
vantageously as possible. "I hope she will catch a beau who will love
her dearly." But the contrary Alice refused to be rushed into matri-
mony. "You always tell me I'll marry a cMr. Nobody7 (to use your
expression) because I am so easy to please," she countered her step-
mother. "But I have found out that I am not so easy to please as
I thought myself. [I] have almost come to the conclusion it would be
better to marry 'Nobody/ so you'll have to be contented with me as
long as you live." From Julia's standpoint that was a grim prospect.26
With John Tyler, Jr., the family problem was quite different and
much more serious. After his father left the White House he had
nothing to occupy his time or his interest. His marriage was on-again,
off-again — mostly off. For a time in 1844 he considered running for the
Virginia House of Delegates from the Charles City district. This came
to nothing. Then he came down with a severe case of mumps. Follow-
ing this, he loafed around Washington looking vainly for a patronage
job from the Polk administration. In late April 1845 he and his friend
Louis F. Tasistro "got rather extensively corned" and were involved
in a Washington street brawl in which they badly beat up a passing
citizen. Much to the mortification of Tylers and Gardiners alikef~tSe
New York Herald ran an account of the disgraceful incident. Ordered
to Sherwood Forest in May to explain his conduct, he was evasive and
without contrition. Tyler finally decided that his foot-loose son was
drinking too much, and he demanded that John adopt more temperate
habits. The upshot of the President's stern counsel was John's decision
to return to his wife and two children in Jerusalem, Virginia, stop
drinking, and resume his study of law. By July 1845, Julia could report
that he was temporarily sober and was determined to "keep out of
debt if he has to dress in Virginia cloth and eat nothing else than
cornbread." This reform was short-lived, one of many that marked a
bacchanalian existence. No year passed that John, Jr., did not manage
in some way to embarrass his long-suffering father. Julia finally gave
up on him entirely. Not until the middle 18505 did he at last settle
down in Philadelphia to practice law with Robert. By that date he
had wasted nearly fifteen years of his life.21
Julia liked young John. She thought him good-natured and per-
sonable. When he visited at Sherwood Forest he always kept the table
well supplied with fresh game and cheerful chatter. In her presence he
was always a gentleman. Juliana's suspicious view that he was destined
for perdition and that his affection for his stepmother improperly
303
transcended the platonic and dutiful was unfair to John, as Julia fre-
quently pointed out to her mother. Yet Juliana so strongly and narrowly
detested the use of spirits in any form that she could not be objective
about anyone who indulged a taste for liquor. Just how this God-
fearing daughter of a wealthy brewer derived her prohibitionism from
her Episcopalianism remains a theological mystery. Nevertheless she
did, and it was for this reason that Juliana always disliked the ir-
responsible John. She was ever prepared to see or expect the worst in
all his acts. He, in turn, thought her a cross between a prude and a
battle-axe, and on one occasion he noted caustically that he had never
"seen a Gardiner yet who could take a jest." By way of contrast,
Tyler's approach to his son's use of liquor was more temperate. As
Julia explained it to her mother: "The President has adopted a proper
plan. To all those whom he thinks care for wine or for any sort of
liquor he does not offer it." Thus when John, Jr., visited the estate
after 1845 he found the sideboard and wine closet securely locked. When
other visitors came the mellow liquids flowed.28
Visitors came often to Sherwood Forest. The most prominent in
1845 was the distinguished Caleb Gushing, who visited the James River
country in May and June. Julia was certain that Cushing's motives
in making the leisurely trip through Virginia were no more complex
than the desire to find a wealthy wife from a politically prominent
family. "I suppose if he married one of the Miss Ritchies he would be
sent Minister to England right off," she observed. "He is getting to
be notorious as a fortune hunter." Indeed, Cushing's effort to charm
Ann Eli2a Ritchie (who was visiting at Brandon) was less than subtle,
as were similar romantic crusades designed to overpower suitable young
ladies in Baltimore and Richmond. "He does not get disheartened by a
few disappointments," said Julia. Yet when Gushing arrived at Sher-
wood Forest, Julia's graciousness could not have been faulted. She had
eighteen to dinner to entertain and honor him, and he in turn toasted
Tyler and his administration as the most "important and eventful ad-
ministration . . . since the days of Washington." Julia thought it a "bold
speech in these days" and "liked him for it more than I ever have
done. Ann Eliza Ritchie will write it to her father I've no doubt."
Julia's broad reminder that Gushing had promised to bring her a fan
from China resulted a few months later in a far more impressive gift —
two large blue-and-white Chinese vases. Gushing was not, said Julia,
"particular to any one of the young ladies" while visiting at Sherwood
Forest, although "he was frequently exposed and joked about the fair
ones that report and newspaper paragraphs have attached him to which
often made him quite nervous — much to my amusement." ^
When Julia was not entertaining at home she found diversion in
trips to various Virginia vacation spots. In late June 1845 she and the
President visited Old Point Comfort to celebrate their first anniversary.
304
Julia hoped that her family had not forgotten the date — June 26 — and
that they had all toasted the absent couple with a bumper of ale. "We
did not forget it you may imagine/' she wrote her mother. Army
officers and prominent Virginians were present in quantity at the spa,
among them the Ritchies, and Julia had an opportunity to catch up on
the gossip of Richmond and Washington. She found Old Point Comfort
particularly "agreeable for married ladies because the married society
is of the best selection so far as it goes." But she informed Margaret
that unmarried women would find it dull "excepting those that are con-
tent to become Officers' wives — which in my view is the last thing to
be desired." In her contacts with editor Tom Ritchie she quickly dis-
covered that "the sunset avenue" to his heart was "through kindness
to his family." In traveling that avenue no possible kindness escaped
her commission even though she discovered that Ritchie was a man
of "very moderate circumstances." From the Washington gossip mill
she was titillated to learn that George Bancroft, Folk's dignified new
Secretary of the Navy, had been badly routed in a broadside gunnery
exchange with Mrs. J. D. Stevenson of New York. According to the
story that made the rounds at Old Point Comfort, the extroverted lady
had playfully decided to observe his reactions were she to "jump up and
kiss him." Dared to do so by her friends, she sprang toward Bancroft
in her parlor one day and "sure enough kissed him." Bancroft im-
mediately struck his colors, running "behind the door in fright and
confusion and she cried out if he did not come out she would kiss
Mm again!"30
Bancroft abandoned ship easily. Julia did not. It took a great
deal more than an impetuous kiss to frighten her. When in late June
Old Point Comfort was struck by a hurricane that ripped the roof and
shingles off the hotel where Julia and the President were staying, the
mistress of Sherwood Forest maintained her composure. While other
ladies were fainting about her in droves, Julia calmly saw to the rescue
of "Johnny Ty," the female canary she had brought back with her from
Europe in 1841. "The first thing I did as I ran from the room was
to seize the cage and place it in the hands of Sarry with the strict
injunction she must save the bird's life with hers if possible." As the
whole building trembled and shook, Julia and her body servant carried
"Johnny Ty" to safety.31
The act was characteristic. Julia and John Tyler both loved ani-
mals. Throughout their married life they were surrounded by various
horses, dogs, and birds, to all of which they became very attached.
When one of Tyler's pet mockingbirds was mangled by a nondescript
barn cat in June 1845 Julia was outraged. "The vile cat!" she ex-
claimed, as she undertook to nurse the unlucky bird through a broken
leg, a torn breast, and a heavily depleted tail-feather collection. Julia
was a better veterinarian than matchmaker. When, for example, Tyler
305
purchased a mate for "Johnny Ty" in Norfolk, Julia was disturbed to
observe that the male "treats her with the utmost contempt and . . .
does not deign to sit upon the same perch with her I fear it is not
one of the marriages made in Heaven." The sudden death of the sexless
"Johnny Ty" in November 1845 kft Jun"a disconsolate for days. Dr.
Wat Henry Tyler attributed the canary's death to a heart attack,
but his knowledge did not erase the grief Julia sustained. "Such a
delicate hold they have on life," she mourned. Similarly, the death of
one of the President's favorite horses moved Tyler to erect over its
grave in the grove of Sherwood Forest a wooden slab on which was
inscribed the epitaph:
Here lie the bones of my old horse, "General,"
Who served Ms master faithfully for twenty-one years,
And never made a blunder.
Would that his master could say the same 1 32
Her intense love of animals caused Julia to look forward in great
anticipation to the arrival of the Italian greyhound Tyler had ordered
from Naples for her the preceding winter. The dog finally appeared
at Sherwood Forest in November 1845 after spending several weeks
with Juliana in New York. Julia was warned by her mother that "Le
Beau/' as he was called, was very rough on furniture and rugs and
that he required constant attention and discipline. "I think a great
deal of him, but I would not take such a pet for a gift/' she decided.
Le Beau arrived in Virginia accompanied by instructions from Lafayette
Place that would do credit to a modern veterinarian. In fact, Juliana
enjoyed practicing veterinary medicine when all the humans of her im-
mediate acquaintance fell suddenly well. In the feeding and care of the
handsome animal she left nothing to her daughter's imagination, and
Julia responded by assuring her that "Little Le Beau is perfectly well
and hearty and has the most unfailing attention. In the loss of my
bird I have had a warning to keep my eye constantly on him." 3S
Compassion for animals at Sherwood Forest extended on one oc-
casion to a hapless field mouse who fell accidentally into the foot tub
in Julia's bedroom. She was awakened in the night by the creature's
wild thrashing in the water, and she promptly woke the President and
instructed him to investigate the strange noise. Candle in hand, he
finally discovered the cause of the commotion and decided to let the
little mouse drown. At breakfast the following morning the President
was penitent. "I wonder," he said sadly, "if I had taken that mouse
and put it in the woods whether it would have come back to the house
again." Julia belatedly realized the enormity of the crime. "I felt like
reproaching myself after that for the fate of Lady Mouse/' she con-
fessed to her mother.34
Following a suitable period of mourning for Lady Mouse, Julia
306
prepared to assault White Sulphur Springs, the summertime citadel of
fashionable Virginia society. Fashion alone did not dictate her decision
to travel into the mountains. July and August was the malaria season
along the James, and Julia was strongly encouraged by her family to
depart for the Springs as soon as possible. There was also a political
consideration. In choosing between the Virginia Springs and Newport
for a vacation, Tyler felt he could "reap more political good77 at White
Sulphur than in Rhode Island. Preparations for what Julia called her
"campaign in the Springs" required several strenuous shopping days
In Richmond during which she "contrived to spend . . . nearly two
hundred dollars and yet got nothing very unusual or more than seemed
absolutely necessary for a proper appearance for Alice and myself
at the Springs. " Actually, she was not too interested in making the long
trip west to White Sulphur. To her the easy quiet of Sherwood Forest
would be much more pleasant even though it was hot, humid, and
fever-ridden. But she agreed that it was "improper and [a] neglect of
a duty owed to society for anyone at my time of life to live in constant
retirement." 35
White Sulphur in 1845 was dull. A thoroughly bored Julia at-
tended only one dance while she was there. "I went . . . dressed in
black," she wrote, "and have not attended again as I do not think
the reasons that compelled me to enter in such scenes last winter exist
now." During her stay she felt she had to "be dignified as an Ex-
Queen, and sit with the Old Ladies, when I was dying to join in the
mirth of the younger ones." Alice flirted with the skimpy manpower
supply without success, and Tyler's planned political exposure was
badly overshadowed by the unexpected arrival of Henry Clay. With
Calhoun at nearby Sweet Springs, Tyler was sure that the two politi-
cians were in the same area at the same time for only one reason —
to strike an alliance that would put Clay in the White House in 1848.
Yet, as Alice reported, Clay's arrival at White Sulphur had generated
little political excitement among the guests. "He was not received as
enthusiastically as one would have thought, and I fear greatly that he
will never be President — So git-long, Clay." The continuing decline of
Clay was the only hopeful note that the White Sulphur interlude pro-
duced. While Julia was "very flatteringly mentioned" in the "Letters
from Sulphur Springs" column which appeared in newspapers all over
the state, the reports "made me somewhat older than I really am,
which was horrible to be sure." Thus after two disappointing weeks of
inactivity the Tylers moved on to Sweet Springs for a week. From
there they traveled northward to visit the Gardiners in New York.36
Meanwhile, Margaret and her mother had found Saratoga and
Newport much gayer and more beaux-populated than the Virginia
spas, in spite of Julia's pessimistic warning that there was "a painful
scarcity of good beaux to be found anywhere." Those in Washington,
307
she concluded, were a "contemptible, mean set." In New York, "few
seek to marry at all." Margaret would have no luck at Newport or
Saratoga either, Julia gloomily assured her. Nevertheless, Margaret had
a wonderful time at Newport that summer, especially at the annual
fancy-dress ball At this function she was a sensation. She wore an
elaborate white-and-silver dress topped by a "little opera hat with
beautiful long drooping feather — the hat with silver gimp band and
otherwise ornamented with silver — diamond on the forehead with pearls
wound in the back of her head." Her costume was, said Juliana pride-
fully, "remarkably chaste and elegant":
. . . satin sMrt trimmed with two rows of silver gimp, short tarletan dress
trimmed with scalloped edging of silver, the silver flowers put on in chaplets
in front of her dress, the silver Japonica on her bosom, all the silver
bracelets on her arms, silver fringe upon her gloves and boots, a small train
to her dress, pearl earrings, three balls and tassels of silver on her sleeves,
[while] the butterflies confined her dress behind. The waist of her dress
ornamented with silver gimp
With Julia married and out of the husband market, Margaret was
finally beginning to come into her own, although in this particular dress
the wonder was that the weight of the silver ornamentation did not
immobilize her. But the other young ladies were dressed in equally
constraining costumes, so the beaux race was an even one (New York
Senator Daniel S. Dickinson appeared at the ball in a sailor suit and
"acted his part to perfection"). Margaret was quite a hit, and she had
no dearth of admirers at Newport.37
Moving on to Saratoga, she was delighted to become the object
of a ludicrous romantic struggle between a Mr. Gay of New York and
a Mr. Watson of Baltimore. Gay, said Margaret, was "the oddest
character you ever saw," a hopeless "piece of awkwardness." Neverthe-
less, he was "worth at least 150,000 dollars and was the most des-
perately in love man in the world." Watson was less wealthy and more
awkward than Ms New York rival — and more captivated by the at-
tractive Margaret. "How completely convulsed you would have been,"
she wrote Julia, "to have seen them as I did, at the Ball, one on each
side of the same column casting despairing looks at me — both com-
pletely innocent of what the other was about." While Margaret sorely
wanted a husband, she was not yet reduced to utter desperation. She
gave neither of these wistful-eyed suitors any encouragement. "Yes,
Julia, I killed two unhappy mortals — if not outright they are dead
now to a certainty," she chortled. There were better beaux than these
at Saratoga, and Margaret casually flirted with them. She did not hurl
herself at the summertime Romeos. As Juliana explained it, "We are
quiet people and stand a little upon dignity . . . [and] did not become
308
so generally known to the multitude." Still, the United States Hotel at
Saratoga was a matchmaker's paradise. "There never was such a scam-
pering after young ladles that were thought rich/' noted Margaret. "It
was truly amusing to all lookers on." 3S
Her sense of feminine Irresistibility restored by her modest suc-
cess at Newport and Saratoga, Margaret was in excellent spirits when
Julia, the President, and Alice arrived in New York from Sweet Springs
In September. It marked the first reunion of the family since the
evacuation from Washington. Julia had planned her homecoming with
great care; she had looked forward to It eagerly for several months.
It would give her an opportunity to purchase "the wardrobe I want
from head downwards/' as well as dozens of household articles for
Sherwood Forest. The President, Julia informed her mother, would have
to return to Sherwood Forest by October i to superintend the fall
planting ("He Is too good a planter to rely entirely on the judgment
of an overseer") ; but she hoped she might be able to stay on to shop
and visit for a while longer, "though it would never do to breathe to
him that I have any rebellious intentions." Her main concern on arrival
in New York was that her mother secure a proper carriage for them
while she and her husband were in town. "I don't like the idea of the
President's riding in a hack on his first visit to Mama," she worried.
Appearances should be maintained at all times, and to assure this
Juliana was instructed to engage "a neat coachman with a velvet band
round his hat."
Tyler, on the other hand, looked forward to the trip to the North
as an opportunity to meet again with his political followers in Phila-
delphia and New York. Alexander and Robert arranged a series of
conferences to this end. While Julia ran riot in the stores, Tyler quietly
talked politics with his friends. A brief visit to East Hampton (Tyler's
first appearance there) properly impressed the townspeople. Old friend-
ships were renewed and gossip was exchanged by the ladles. Julia dis-
covered, however, that an ex-First Lady did not attract anywhere near
the attention and deference a reigning First Lady had. Her homecom-
ing did not make nearly the social splash of her September 1844 visit.39
Julia returned to Sherwood Forest in mid-October. She found the
plantation cool and healthy. The fever season had passed. The New
York and East Hampton visits had given her a fresh opportunity to
compare her former life as the "Rose of Long Island" and "Mrs. Presi-
dent Tyler" with her new role as mistress of Sherwood Forest. The
longer she pondered the comparison, the more convinced she became
that her former New York and Washington friends could not "affect
our social position in any way although we may advance theirs." She
was tired of their "obsequiousness" in her husband's presence, and
she decided that in the future she would "play the Queen of the White
309
House among them." Seeing New York again had made Julia even
more of a Virginian. Her contempt for New York society was sharply
increased:
Do you know I have a sort of disgust for New York [she confided to
Margaret] . I do believe it is a place tmequaled in selfishness I do not
like nowadays to be anywhere where I am no mover or to have people move
without me — nous verrons Half of N.Y. cares for the other half only
so far as it is likely to advance their own interests . . . and those who can
serve one another in life are those only who seem to be "Society," of which
I think one must be or be unpleasantly situated in a City notwithstanding
aU the talk about philosophy and independence. A place ought to be shunned
by one who finds his presence a matter of no moment and yet who has a right
to influence somewhere . . . don't you say amen to all this?
Julia's judgment was as harsh as her question was rhetorical, and her
emotional expatriation from New York was actually to be of short
duration. She would visit often and pleasantly with her family in New
York and East Hampton in the years ahead, usually in the early fall,
and no winter passed at Sherwood Forest without protracted visits by
her mother, sister, or one of her brothers. Indeed, when the Civil War
enveloped the defenseless plantation she fled home with her children to
Juliana.40
Her complaint to Margaret about New York society in late Octo-
ber 1845 was the offhand remark of a troubled woman. Julia had come
to a feeling of remorse in having added heavily to her husband's finan-
cial burdens. She and Tyler had spent so much money since their
departure from the White House on clothes, on travel, and on furnish-
ing the plantation that for the first time in her life she was forced
to undertake a minor economy program. As a start Alexander was in-
structed to cancel some of the more expensive New York purchases.
She toyed with the idea of effecting a $250 economy by buying a
"State Coach" carriage rather than the more costly "Modern Barouche."
Only after an uneven match with her fiscal conscience did she decide
that the barouche was really one of life's necessities, and she asked
Alexander to lend the President the $250 difference in the price. "Do
you venture his credit?" she asked him. "I think you had better,
and I will stand security for him . . . you will be repaid and soon." At
the same time, she told Alexander that insofar as income from the
Gardiner estate was concerned, it was his duty to see that their mother
was made entirely comfortable before any receipts were distributed
among the children. She wanted no funds from her New York property
until that condition had been met, although she did warn Alexander that
she might "want possibly now and then a little pin money." 41
Julia's petulant attitude toward Gotham society was also partly
the product of her first pregnancy. By the end of October she knew
310
that she had become pregnant on the New York trip. She was nauseated
and irritable much of the time in November, and by year's end she was
complaining to her mother that a new silk dress she had bought in
New York was "the most beastly fitting thing you ever saw . . . too
large by a great deal about the bust and too small by a great deal
about the waist and somewhat too short I am really discouraged
as to what shall be done with it." ^
There was little Julia could do about her new silk dress. Until
David Gardiner Tyler was born in July 1846 her fitting problem would
grow progressively more hopeless. Her general mood, however, im-
proved rapidly as her nausea decreased. By the time Margaret and
Alexander visited Sherwood Forest in late November she was beginning
to snap out of her depression. Save for the tragedy of her increasingly
obsolete wardrobe, by Christmas she was more concerned with the
health and welfare of her pets than she was with her own condition.
Compared with Tyler's growing political disappointments, Margaret's
inability to catch a husband, and the poverty and sickness which stalked
the Robert Tyler home in Philadelphia, Julia had no serious problems.
The death of "Johnny Ty" was her saddest personal experience in 1845.
The difficult transition from the White House to life at Sherwood
Forest had been effected with considerable ease if not with the strictest
economy.
TYLER AND POLK:
A QUESTION OF REPUTATION
/ know that after the struggles of the present day
shall have passed away and those who have taken
part in them shall have sunk into their gravest the
greater part not even to be remembered, impartial
history will not fail to write a faithful account of all
my actions. . . . The impartial future will see the mo-
tive in the act; and the just historian will look to
the good and evil only which will have been devel-
oped, and find in the one or the other cause of cen-
sure or of praise. To this ordeal I submit myself
without fear.
JOHN TYLER, JUNE 1847
Politics is an unsure business, but of one bit of political business John
Tyler was sure. He was certain he had reached a firm understand-
ing with James K. Polk on patronage. His friends would not be purged
from their public offices. His withdrawal from the 1844 canvass fol-
lowing his conversation with Robert J. Walker, and his receipt of
definite assurances on the patronage matter from Major William H.
Polk and Andrew Jackson could sustain in his mind no other interpreta-
tion. His subsequent dispensation of patronage to strengthen the
Conservative or "Hunker77 Democracy in New York at the expense of
the liberal Van Buren "Barnburner" Democrats there had been, as he
viewed it, the maintenance of his part of a bargain with Polk. His
willingness to appoint William H. Polk to a consular post, at Young
Hickory's request, was further evidence to Tyler of a "gentlemen's
agreement" with the new President on the whole patronage question.
312
And if Tyler had used Ms power of appointment from November 1844
to March 1845 to keep alive a Tylerlte cadre within the Conservative
Democracy in New York, that action was not aimed at the Polkites.
On the contrary, it sought to strengthen the Polk faction vis-a-vis
Van Buren; it was designed to advance the great issue on which both
Tyler and Polk had staked a large measure of their political reputa-
tion— the annexation of Texas. True, Tyler's withdrawal from the
1844 canvass may not have proved a statistically decisive factor in
Polk's victory, and for this reason Young Hickory may not have felt any
special obligation to reward the Tylerites with additional offices. But
he had no cause to purge those of Tyler's faction who already held
sinecures.
The drift of Tyler's relations with Polk in 1845-1846 was not
unrelated to Tyler's continuing political ambitions for 1848. He had
decided to maintain his political contacts should talk of a Democratic
nomination develop. It was therefore vital that his friends retain their
offices in New York and elsewhere in the interests of his availability.
Shortly after his return to Sherwood Forest he began corresponding
with John R. Thompson of Princeton in an effort to strengthen the
Tylerite faction in New Jersey. When this contact became known he
was soon in receipt of "letters from several political friends about the
country suggesting the propriety and advantage of taking a tour of the
principal States to extend his political and social acquaintance and
acquaint himself with localities, etc. in a private manner." Meanwhile,
Tyler's brother-in-law, Dr. N. M. Miller, and his old friend, Judge
Edward Douglass White, busied themselves in a covert attempt to raise
the §6000 necessary to buy up the influential Washington Madisonian
as a permanent Tyler organ. From Philadelphia Robert reported that
the President's friends in Pennsylvania had quietly gained control of
the Spirit of the Times. Tyler very much wanted "a press in Richmond"
through which his political views might be broadcast in Virginia, and
it was largely in this desire that he sought a rapprochement with
editor Thomas Ritchie in the summer and fall of I845-1
John Tyler was certainly not willing to campaign openly in 1845—
1846, but he did make an effort to remain in the political spotlight
by keeping his name and his views of current affairs before the public.
Robert and Alexander organized this effort and assisted him with it.
Their function was to make certain that the ex-President's opinions
and observations, and those of other commentators who were pro-
Tyler, appeared in such influential papers as the New York Journal of
Commerce and the Watt Street Reporter. Reprints of these articles
were then distributed to key Tyler allies all over the nation as a sort
of political newsletter from Sherwood Forest. At the same time, at-
tempts were made to sustain and encourage those few newspapers which
lauded Tyler's administration and fairly presented his views.2
3*3
In May 1845, shortly after he left the White House, It was decided
within the family circle that the former President's most effective tactic
would be to remain quietly available. He should maintain his New
York City political position through Alexander and John Lorimer
Graham, and he should effect a political and personal reconciliation
with the powerful Thomas Ritchie, former editor of the Richmond
Enquirer. Ritchie was now editor of the official Polk organ, the Wash-
ington Union. Suggestions from Virginia friends that Tyler run again
for the United States Senate to secure a public platform from which to
address the nation were never seriously considered at Sherwood Forest.
Instead, it was felt that this object could be accomplished more con-
servatively and with more dignity through the columns of friendly
newspapers.
All things considered, Tyler was hopeful, in Julia's words, that
his friends might "unite to give him [an] abundance of support and in-
crease thereby his influence." Many of them did. By September 1846
Robert Tyler could assure his father there was a Tylerite group in
Philadelphia upwards of three thousand in size awaiting their march-
ing orders from Sherwood Forest. Of course, they did not march, nor
were they ever called to march again under the old banner of "Tyler
and Texas!" When Tyler finally made the announcement in June 1848
that he had "no expectation of again entering public Hfe," it was
based on his firm conviction at that time that there was no moderate
and conservative middle within the Democracy to which he might ap-
peal. On the contrary, the Mexican War and the Wilmot Proviso had
triggered the beginning of the sectional polarization of the Democratic
Party that would lead in 1860 to its final disruption, the election of
Lincoln, and the Civil War. By 1848, then, Tyler's aspirations were dor-
mant. The Virginia Democrats, he complained, "have acted a more
condemnable part towards me than any others, as I am to the manner
born . . . [but] I learn that they at last talk of a move in the way
of invitation to dinner." A dinner invitation was a far cry from a Presi-
dential nomination by the Old Dominion Democracy.3
In spite of his lingering political ambitions, it was not Tyler's
intention in 1845-1846 to make war upon the Pollutes in the Demo-
cratic Party. While he wanted to keep a Tylerite faction in existence
for personal reasons, his larger desire was to employ it to sustain the
new President and hold the party together at the national level. He
wanted neither the Locofoco nor the nullifier extremists in any posi-
tions of power in the party. He hoped instead that a working alliance
between Hunker Democrats and states' rights Democrats and Whigs
might be forged under the spreading ideological tent that was the
Democracy. This trans-sectional grouping of moderates, as Tyler visual-
ized it, would center its program upon continental imperialism prop-
erly viewed as a national desideratum. It would, of course, be anti-
314
abolitionist. That the leadership of the Van Buren Democracy and the
Northern Whigs opposed territorial expansion on abolitionist grounds
struck Tyler as a perverse sectionalization of the foreign-policy ques-
tion. Slavery and expansion, he naively maintained, were issues which
men of good will could keep separate and distinct. Linking them for
political advantage he considered despicable.
Convinced, therefore, in 1845 that a bridge from the Tylerites to
the new administration had been firmly anchored on the twin pillars
of a patronage understanding and a joint commitment to Manifest
Destiny, the tenth President was shocked to observe Folk's ruthless
purge of Tylerite officeholders during the spring and summer of 1845.
That the Van Burenites and Calhounites in the Democracy appeared
initially to fare no better at Folk's patronage trough than the Tyler-
ites was not the point. The point was that Folk used his power of
appointment to surround himself with territorial expansionists who were
not Tylerite expansionists. He favored many New York Conservative
Democrats with appointments without recognizing the Tylerites among
them. Of Tyler's Cabinet and top officialdom only John Y. Mason of
Virginia and Charles A. Wickliffe of Kentucky were retained by Polk.
Mason became Young Hickory's Attorney General and Wickliffe was
sent as a special agent to Texas to counteract lingering Anglo-French
antiannexationist influence there. Thus, while the new administration
took on the character of a Dixie-Hunker Democratic operation, the
Tylerites were scrupulously excluded from its patronage benefits. More
disturbingly, they were actively removed to make way for Polkites who
were no more anti-Barnburner or pro-annexationist than the Tyler
partisans they replaced.
Tyler's disillusionment with Polk grew as reports of the first re-
movals reached Sherwood Forest. As early as March 27, 1845, Julia's
dressmaker in Washington inaccurately informed her that Army officers
who had been close to the social life of the White House during Julia's
reign were being transferred to remote stations. Four days later N. M.
Miller told Alexander Gardiner that Folk's "work of decapitation" was
under way in the capital. This action he attributed to the influence
of the Democracy's Locofoco clique at the White House, particularly
Francis P. Blair and the Washington Globe, who were "rabid and
clamorous for the removal of every Tyler man." He felt that Tyler
"would do well to profit by the moral of the fable of little Red Riding
Hood and the wolf." The fact that Polk withdrew Tom Cooper's
nomination for Surveyor of the Port of Philadelphia from the Senate
produced great alarm within the family. "I am utterly at a loss to ac-
count for this," said Alexander, "for there was certainly a right to
expect a very different course of action." 4
Indeed there was. So upset was Alexander over these shocking
developments that he composed a stiff letter to Polk recalling Tyler's
315
aid in the 1844 campaign and arguing the right of every Democrat to
be "retained in office until the expiration of his term." The Tylerites
were Folk's friends, Alexander reminded the new President. "Turn
them out they become your enemies. Do those by whom you supplant
them become your friends? No. They are the friends of the partisans
through whose influence they have become appointed — of Mr. Dallas,
of Mr. Buchanan, of Mr. Walker, of Mr. Ben ton, of Mr. Wright, promi-
nent gentlemen around the throne and candidates for the successor." 5
Polk needed no gratuitous lecture on the patronage realities of
factional politics. He had been in the business a long time. And nothing
from Alexander Gardiner's pen could stay his decision to place into
office and retain in office men loyal only to himself — not to John Tyler
or anyone else. He did, however, relent in the case of Tom Cooper and
appoint the sixty-nine-year-old actor to an inspectorship in the New
York Customs House. But by April the other Tylerites in Gotham were
reported by Alexander "resting quietly" and insecurely amid growing
rumors of planned proscriptions. Only the Plebeian among the New York
papers gave them "even a negative support." This dangerous situation led
Alexander to the rueful conclusion that the support of the press was of
more political consequence in the long run "than the most extensive
patronage without it — its value cannot be magnified." With the
Aurora defunct and no Tylerite newspaper outlet in the city, the future
for the ex-President's friends there looked grim. Not quite as grim as in
Philadelphia, where the coming of May found all the Tylerites "de-
capitated," but black enough. The Philadelphia story, thought Margaret,
was clear evidence of the "coldest ingratitude that one could be capable
of." 6
By May 1845 the New York City purge was also on in earnest
and a worried Juliana informed Sherwood Forest that "the Tyler men
meet but little quarter under the present administration." Among the
first to go was William Gibbs McNeilL Pressure was also building up
on Polk for the removal of John Lorimer Graham and Cornelius P. Van
Ness. "The Van Buren and Anti-Texas men seem to be strong at
headquarters," Alexander noted sadly. Whatever its ideological cutting
edge, the anti-Tylerite axe struck Postmaster Graham on May 6 and
he left the lush office amid a clamor of charges that his conduct of the
New York City Post Office had not been without personal gain. The
family was certain that his removal — and that of McNeill — demon-
strated the Van Burenist leanings of Polk. Actually, Polk had no such
clear-cut orientation; he was no Locofoco, but his abrupt removal of
Collector Van Ness in June did nothing to disabuse the Gardiners and
Tylers of that notion. "The conduct of Mr. Polk," opined Alexander,
"appears to me to have been cold and ungrateful in the extreme and
may lead to the defeat of the Democratic party in '48." 7
A feeling of betrayal by Polk stalked the family circle as Nathaniel
316
P. Tallmadge fell in Wisconsin and Silas Reed in Missouri. Close per-
sona! and political associates of Tyler were also purged in Ohio and
in Illinois. Tyler accurately termed it "an unrelenting war against the
few sincere friends I left in office/' noting to Alexander that "the blood
of the martyr is said to be the seed of the church — nous perrons — I
watch in silence the course of events." 8
The longer Tyler watched, the more angry he became. Particularly
humiliating to him was the way Polk toyed with his brother-in-law,
N. M. Miller, first demoting Mm from Second Assistant Postmaster
General to Third Assistant, then purging him altogether. At the same
time, attempts by William Tyler, the ex-President's brother, and Robert
Tyler to secure modest patronage positions from Polk met with cool
indifference in the White House. Tyler had accommodated Polk's
brother, it was recalled in the family, but the return favor seemed
beyond Young Hickory's sense of moral obligation.9
Tyler's frustration increased daily. A rumor that Secretary Ban-
croft had unceremoniously removed the former President's portrait
from a wall in the Navy Department disturbed the Sherwood Foresters
a great deal, as did their growing realization that Polk was neither
a man of his word nor a sagacious politician. Only Polk's Mexican
policy reconciled Tyler at all to the new regime:
I left some two hundred personal friends in office [Tyler noted in Septem-
ber] who were also the warm, active and determined friends of Mr. Polk
in the late contest — a small number in comparison to the 40,000 officeholders.
They have been for the most part removed or superseded. Some half dozen
remain I cannot but sympathize with them — but I go no further. I
shall neither seek to augment their discomfort or desire to encourage it —
but I cannot but express the belief that Mr. Polk wars upon himself in
permitting war on them. They were his true friends — men who would have
battled for him at every step of his administration . . . they may still do so,
and my hope is that they will. ... I consider him entitled to the support of
the whole country for his course on the Texas question as far as develop-
ments have gone. . . .
The whole administration, General John P. Van Ness agreed, was po-
litically "very contemptible." 10
Not surprisingly, the prestige of the Polk administration sank
rapidly and steadily within the Tyler- Gar diner family as Young Hickory
snuffed out the precarious life of the Tyler faction. Tyler himself be-
came persuaded that Polk's proscription of the Tylerites could only
result in a Whig victory in 1848. "If Polk had played his game wisely,"
he confided to Robert in the summer of 1848, "he would have recon-
solidated the old Republican party. . . . Such was my policy; but he
destroyed, I fear, all that I built up, by the proscriptions of my friends."
In this analysis Alexander concurred.11
As the sands of the arena soaked up the blood of Tylerite mar-
317
tyrs, Juliana and Margaret urged Alexander to disengage himself en-
tirely from the sordid world of politics. He was simply wasting his
time and his money because Polk was in "no way friendly to the Tyler
party." "Oh! these politics/7 lamented Juliana, "I pity anyone who
depends upon popular favor for preferment or happiness ... it is in-
deed a broken reed." Alexander would not accept their well-meaning
advice. He enjoyed politics whatever the cost, and he continued playing
the game within Tammany Hall well into 1846. Letters from his busy
quill praising the Tyler administration's patriotic sagacity in the annexa-
tion of Texas continued to appear in New York newspapers. Against
increasing odds he struggled to maintain a hard core Tylerite cadre
within Tammany Hall in the vain hope that the political roulette wheel
would again come up with John Tyler in 1848. For this reason he held
onto his Circuit Court clerkship with the tenacity of a boa constrictor.12
At least Alexander had a clerkship. Robert Tyler could point to no
such lasting benefit from his own involvement with his father's political
fortunes. He had given up his post in the Land Office in 1844 and had
sought and secured no other office prior to Tyler's departure from the
White House in 1845. He now had no prospect that Polk would bestow
one upon him. In subordinating his Philadelphia law practice to Tylerite
politics, he had reaped financial hardship and a distraught wife. Over-
whelmed by poverty, family illnesses, and the tragic deaths of her
babies (Mary Fairlee in 1845 and John in 1846), Priscilla, like Margaret
and Juliana, viewed the alleged advantages of political life with reserva-
tion. In fact, the distressed woman suffered a complete nervous break-
down in 1846 under the impact of economic privation and personal
sorrow. She was just beginning to recover her health and cheerfulness
when her father died in April 1849. This blow was followed three months
later by the death of her infant son, Thomas Cooper Tyler, at age one
year. Again she was cast into gloom. Throughout these desperate years
she pleaded with her husband to abandon politics and concentrate on his
lagging law practice.
But Robert Tyler, like Alexander Gardiner, could not and would
not disengage from the political process. Whatever its sacrifices, and for
his family they were considerable, he gambled with politics until he died.
And he died poor. In 1847 James Buchanan was instrumental in secur-
ing for him an appointment as Solicitor in the Philadelphia Sheriff's
Office, a minor post which assured him a small annual income. After a
discouraging start, his law practice gradually grew, although it never
really prospered. In 1850 he was appointed Prothonotary of the Supreme
Court of Pennsylvania, an office he held until the outbreak of the Civil
War when he fled to Virginia to cast his lot with the Confederacy. This
post finally brought Robert a modest measure of financial security and
enabled him to move his family from the tiny cottage in Bristol into a
new home on Rowlandson's Row in Philadelphia. By 1852 he was largely
out of debt and Prlscilla was occasionally able to entertain "the best
people" In town. The Robert Tylers were never really well off, but
during the 18503 they were comfortable and they managed to stay a
short hop ahead of their creditors. Priscilla had three more children dur-
ing the decade, all of whom lived.
Robert, of course, continued playing the political game. From
1848 until 1860 he was one of Buchanan's trusted political lieutenants
in Philadelphia, specializing in mustering the Irish-American vote there
for the greater glory of "Old Buck" and his Pennsylvania machine.
Indeed, he played a major role in Buchanan's nomination in Cincinnati
in 1856, and two years later he was named Chairman of the Democratic
Executive Committee of Pennsylvania, a post which paid in the coin of
prestige only. His political career, however, was solidly Buchanan-based
after 1848. Polk did nothing for him and Robert returned the favor.13
Julia's attitude toward the Polk administration was no more en-
thusiastic than that of the other members of the family. It gave her a
wry pleasure, of course, to learn that Sarah Polk's White House reign
was considered in Washington social circles to be downright dull. It was,
Alexander assured her, viewed with "general indifference." Sarah's nar-
row Methodism would not permit any drinking, card playing, or dancing
in the White House. For this reason her four-year tenure in the Presi-
dent's Mansion was generally dubbed a social failure from beginning
to end, though it was cheered by the prohibitionists and certain lunatic-
fringe ecclesiastical groups as a great triumph of Christian virtue. When
Alexander went to the capital in February 1846 to head of! a Tammany
raid on Ms clerkship, he found the President "excessively plain and
equally devoid of manner and tact in conversation." From a strictly
social standpoint, he told Julia, Washington was "not by any means
what it was last winter." The only party he enjoyed was a jam-packed
affair at the home of the John Y. Masons, where "the floor drank as
much champagne as the guests, and it was an even chance whether the
viands once lifted would reach the mouth or take some other direction."
Nor was Julia convinced that the new President, whatever his short-
comings as a host, was a man of sound judgment. When she learned,
for example, that Polk had offered the London mission to her old flame,
Francis W. Pickens, she wondered at the common sense of Young
Hickory. "What an incompetent Minister he would make at this crisis,"
she exclaimed. "His talents are quite too superficial for an emergency."
She was relieved to hear a few days later that Pickens had turned down
the post on Calhoun's urging, the South Carolinian wanting no such
close connection with the new administration.14
Julia's disenchantment with Polk stemmed from her unquestioning
acceptance of the family thesis that the new President was a Jacksonian
mouthpiece, a Locofoco radical, who was purging the Tylerites because
of their sane and patriotic political conservatism. Jackson had never
319
been a favorite in the Gardiner family, and from Julia's standpoint
Young Hickory was no improvement over Old Hickory. Both were
dangerous levelers. Thus when the Old Warrior of the Hermitage finally
died in June 1845 no tears were shed at Sherwood Forest or at 43 La-
fayette Place. Indeed, when citizens in Norfolk and Portsmouth invited
•Tyler to deliver a eulogy to Jackson, Julia reported her husband "in a
complete dilemma for he does not see how he can decline it without
giving offense." Tyler, of course, did not decline. He was too much of
a gentleman. He went through with it. Alexander also managed a
gracious gesture to Jackson's memory at the Shelter Island Fourth of
July celebration. Nevertheless, the family was not overcome by sorrow
when Andrew Jackson was gathered unto his fathers. They had a strong
suspicion, not unfounded, that the Polk purge of the Tylerites had been
encouraged by the palsied hand of the aged General. Jackson had, in
fact, written Polk soon after the 1844 election that "the offices are
filling up by Tyler, so that all his partisans must remain in office or
you be compelled to remove them give yourself elbow room when-
ever it becomes necessary." That Tyler had appointed Jackson's nephew,
Andrew J. Donelson, United States charge in Mexico in September
1844 did not temper the vindictiveness of the Hero of New Orleans. To
the victors belonged the spoils.15
Nothing disturbed Julia quite so much as partisan attacks (she
considered them Polk-inspired) on her husband's reputation, on his
personal integrity, and on his political beliefs. His enemies were her
enemies; and his struggle for Clio's accolade became her struggle. It
was a time-consuming occupation during her first years at Sherwood
Forest. Indeed, the entire family devoted considerable time and effort
to the project of monitoring newspapers for references to the Tyler
administration and its works. Pro-Tyler notices were happily circulated
throughout the family circle and attempts were made to have them
reprinted in other journals. Criticisms of the ex-President were vigor-
ously contested in letters by Robert, Alexander and John Tyler himself
to the editors involved. Hiram Cumming's expose The Secret History of
the Tyler Dynasty was branded the tissue of lies it was, and exception
was taken to various statements and judgments in the generally accurate
Mordecai Noah series on the Tyler administration which appeared in
the New York Sunday Dispatch in early 1846. "He represents as facts
things and affairs very new to the President," said Julia in some be-
wilderment. Many of the personal attacks on himself Tyler felt were
"too gross to regard, still there are so many who are kept ignorant of
facts it is hard to resist opening their eyes." Defenses of Tyler's ad-
ministration penned by Robert and Alexander were sent first to Sher-
wood Forest, where they were edited and amended by Tyler before
reaching print. Conversely, Tyler's own remarks in defense of his
policies were placed in New York newspapers whenever possible by
320
Alexander. Reprints were obtained and then distributed to former Tyler-
ite chieftains throughout the nation.16
The ex-President was particularly sensitive to the charge that his
advocacy of Texas annexation had been a manifestation of slavocracy
rampant. He was also easily upset by the slur that he had been a "Presi-
dent by accident." When, for example. Lord Brougham used the ob-
noxious phrase ("The miserable slang of Clay and his satellites/3 Tyler
called it) in an 1845 House of Lords speech attacking Tyler on the
Texas issue, the remark was challenged by the Philadelphia Ledger with
the observation that Victoria herself was "Queen by accident." Tyler
was delighted with the Ledgers comment and sought to have it re-
printed in other papers. After all, said the former President, Victoria had
come to "the crown by the death of her predecessors as I to the Presi-
dency by the death of the President."
Alexander was instructed to compose defenses of Tyler's Texas
policy, emphasizing the point that Tyler had no interest in the slavery-
expansion feature of annexation. These appeared, sometimes anony-
mously, under such titles as "The Voice of the Impartial as to the Ad-
ministration of John Tyler." JuHa made it clear to her brother precisely
what Tyler wanted from him in these matters relating to his historical
reputation:
I will tell you also what the President / know privately wishes; that you
would not overlook the misrepresentations, when they appear in the papers,
of him, to pass unnoticed. It cannot be best for no one to come forward in
New York to notice them and let untruths as regards the acts, etc. of the
President's administration be disseminated far and wide. When they appear
in Philadelphia papers Robert T., I perceive, invariably corrects them over
Ms signature, and why should not you do the same Whenever such
misrepresentations as the one I enclose appear and another which the Presi-
dent himself noticed to you a few mails since, it is proper they should meet
your attention . . . with your own full signature at the bottom.17
Julia had no intention of being remembered as the First Lady of an
administration history would count a failure. She was therefore un-
remitting in her efforts to set Clio straight before the histories were
written. While the Tyler administration had not been as pure morally as
driven snow, it had been uncommonly free of the petty corruption that
had characterized previous administrations. Its foreign policy had been
a series of dramatic successes and the failures of its domestic policies,
however evaluated by future historians, had at least been founded on an
honest effort to find areas of accommodation among moderate Whigs
and Democrats. Its patronage record had been neither more nor less
venal than those of the Jackson and Van Buren administrations. Com-
pared with Polk's patronage ethics, Tyler's seemed almost pristine.
Tyler's word was his bond in such matters. There was also the larger
321
question of the constitutional status of the Vice-Presidency, the reso-
lution of which could be counted a solid plus for Tyler. "If the tide of
defamation and abuse shall turn/3 he told Robert in 1848, "and my
administration come to be praised, future Vice Presidents who may
succeed to the Presidency may feel some slight encouragement to pur-
sue an independent course." The alternative to this would be Vice-
Presidents so frightened by their accession to the Presidency that "the
executive power will be completely in abeyance and Congress will unite
the legislative and executive functions.37 1S
Julia thought the nation should understand and appreciate these
things, and she urged the active cooperation of the entire family in un-
tangling the record before it was twisted further. She was not as con-
cerned as were Robert and Alexander that her husband stay available
for the 1848 Democratic nomination. She demanded only that he re-
ceive historical justice for what he had accomplished in the White
House. Even her family complained sometimes that she was "too sensi-
tive" to criticisms of the ex-President. She was pleased to note, there-
fore, that several newspapers long hostile to Tyler began in April 1846
to treat her husband more gently. "After exhausting their abuse, they
have come to see that John Tyler's administration left the country in
the most prosperous and happy condition . . . this is the language of
the U.S. Gazette and other Whig papers of Philadelphia. Pray keep us
au fait of any change of opinion in N.Y.," she instructed Alexander.19
The family was particularly pleased — grateful for small favors —
when the good ladies of Brazoria County, Texas, saw fit to present Tyler
a lovely silver pitcher in gratitude for his leading role in the annexation
of the Lone Star Republic. The unexpected gift arrived at Sherwood
Forest on New Year's Day 1846, and Tyler, deeply touched by the
gesture, responded with a gracious letter of thanks which received as
much national publicity as had the fact of the gift itself. Margaret
impishly suggested that "a grant of a thousand or two acres of the best
Texas land" would have made a somewhat more impressive gift, but the
family was really much affected by the present.2<>
The Brazoria pitcher symbolized the fact that some of the old anti-
Tyler passions were slowly dying out, Tyler did much to bank the
partisan fires himself. In May 1846 he went to Washington (his first
return visit there since March 1845) to appear as a witness before the
House Foreign Affairs Committee. A month earlier, Democratic Repre-
sentative Charles J. Ingersoll of Pennsylvania had charged Daniel
Webster with a misuse of money from the Secret Service Fund in 1842.
Secretary of State Webster, it was alleged, had employed the money to
bribe newspaper editors and the Boundary Commissioners of Maine and
Massachusetts. This, said Ingersoll, had been done to insure public
acceptance of the Maine Boundary Treaty which Webster and Tyler
had negotiated with Lord Ashburton in the full knowledge that Ameri-
322
can claims to the disputed territory were better cartographically and
stronger legally than the final territorial settlement had reflected. In
sum, the smell of treason permeated the Ingersoll charge, to say nothing
of the Pennsylvania's further Imputation that Webster had also dipped
money out of the Fund for his personal use.
As keeper of the Secret Service Fund In 1842 Tyler was by direct
implication a party to the Ingersoll attack on Webster, and he hastened
to the capital to support Ms former Secretary. Representative Thomas
H. Bayley of Virginia, representing the Charles City district in Wash-
ington, defended Tyler on the floor of the House against any suggestion
of wrongdoing, although his defense was not as vigorous as Alexander
thought the situation demanded. Similarly, an attack on Tyler's honesty
and integrity in the Fund matter by the alcoholic and unstable Virginia
Representative George C. Dromgoole rankled the family circle a great
deal. Webster in Ms own defense stated publicly that throughout the
Maine Boundary negotiations he had acted under the constant counsel
and direction of Tyler. Nonetheless, he said he was quite prepared to
answer IngersolPs charges without reference to that fact. He did, how-
ever, solicit Tyler's testimony on the question. The whole thing, said
Julia, was merely additional evidence of calculated "injustice to John
Tyler." She dismissed Dromgoole as an embittered antiannexationist
and Van Burenite. "You may depend upon it the President will stand
by Daniel Webster," Julia assured Margaret. "He alone directed [the
treaty] and he alone deserves any credit or abuse attached to it."21
Tyler's heralded appearance before the Ingersoll committee was
anticlimactic. With a sure grasp of the facts and figures of the Secret
Service Fund, he demonstrated the mathematical impossibility of Inger-
solFs charges. There just was not enough money in the Fund to finance
all the alleged sins. It was an impressive, convincing, and dignified
exposition, and the committee's deference to Mm increased proportion-
ally as the charges against Webster slowly collapsed. Still, the partisan
maneuverings of the politicians on the Fund issue disgusted htm. "I
turn my back upon the miserable set ... with indescribable pleasure,"
he told Robert as he prepared to return home to Sherwood Forest. With
philosopMc resignation he concluded that he would probably have to
expect continued indirect attacks of the Ingersoll-Dromgoole sort until
the campaign of 1848 when "the courtsMp for my friends will begin." 22
The May 1846 trip to Washington did afford Tyler an opportunity
to visit his friends in the capital. Dinner with Polk at the White House
was uneventful. The table conversation centered on the Mexican War
(which had begun two weeks earlier) rather than on domestic political
developments. The purge of the Tylerites was not broached by the
former President. Following this standoff with Young Hickory, the
John Y. Masons, Daniel Websters, and Robert J. Walkers came forward
to entertain him. The former President was wined and dined and called
323
upon until he was fatigued. "One unbroken stream has flowed in upon
me during the whole time that I have been here/' he wrote Robert. "This
has been gratifying . . . [but] my harvest is about beginning, and home
is my place." So popular had John Tyler apparently become in Wash-
ington that N. M. Miller was moved to remark that "a stranger would
have inferred that he was still the dispenser of patronage.77 Indeed,
concluded John Lorimer Graham, "there is [now] a disposition to
render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's. A comparison is now
drawn between the past and present administration of public affairs in
almost every circle, greatly to the advantage of the former. We have
always said that History would do justice to our friend. . . ." 2B
If Clio had manufactured for Tyler the beginning of a Mona Lisa
smile, the glad tidings were not conveyed to John C. Calhoun. The iron-
jawed and iron-willed Carolinian, whose ego was exceeded only by his
intellectual arrogance, decided in February 1847 ^at ne and ne alone
had unilaterally annexed the Republic of Texas to the United States. "I
may now rightfully and indisputably claim," said Calhoun without
noticeable modesty, "to be the author of that great measure — & measure
which has so much extended the domains of the Union; which added
so largely to its productive powers ; which promises so greatly to extend
its commerce; which has stimulated its industry, and given security to
our much exposed frontier.73 More alarming to Tyler, Calhoun's claim
minimized the national economic advantages of annexation and identi-
fied the action with the South's interest in slavery expansion.24
Senator Calhoun's wild grab for the historical accolade of Texas
annexation, an accolade properly Tyler's and one on which Honest John
had painstakingly constructed his personal appeal to history, produced
nothing less than outrage in the Tyler-Gardiner family. Alexander found
very little "South Carolina chivalry" in Calhoun's speech, and he ad-
vised the former President to prepare a memoir of his administration
which would put the Texas matter in its proper light. For a few weeks
Tyler seriously considered his brother-in-law's suggestion. Even if an
autobiographical exposition of his foreign policy would be "of no value
to the great crowd/' it might, he thought, be "acceptable to those who
may come after me." He was extremely upset by Calhoun's impertinence.
"Was there ever anything to surpass in selfishness the assumption of
Mr. Calhoun?" he asked heatedly. "He assumes everything to himself,
overlooks his associates in the Cabinet, and takes the reins of the gov-
ernment into his own hands He is the great fl am/ and myself and
Cabinet have no voice in the matter." Instead of an extensive personal
memoir (the "building up and reclaiming an estate which had been
permitted well nigh to run to waste" left him with no time to write an
autobiography), Tyler dispatched two dignified letters to the Richmond
Enquirer patiently explaining again the national character of annexation
and the commercial and economic motives that had influenced his ac-
324
tions and thinking in the matter. At the same time, he assured Alexan-
der that Calhoun's narrowing of the Texas question "to the compara-
tively contemptible ground of Southern and local interest" had dis-
stressed Mm more than the South Carolinian's arrogant claim of sole
authorship, "for it substantially converted the executive into a mere
Southern agency in place of being what it truly was — the representative
of American interests . . . and if ever there was an American question,
then Texas was that very question." Alexander and Robert were both
urged to see to it that the Richmond Enquirer letters were reprinted in
Northern papers, and that Tyler's interpretation of the national char-
acter of Texas annexation be brought once more to the attention of the
Northern public.25
Julia thought Calhoun's February 24 Texas speech "the height of
impudence." She too was distressed that the South Carolinian had un-
necessarily stirred up the slavery issue, and she advised Alexander that
her husband could not let that phase of the matter pass unnoticed.
Robert Tyler immediately challenged Calhoun's statement in a series of
private letters to the senator. These produced no an^w^rs and no
satisfaction. Juliana again threw up her hands in despair over the
morality of politics and politicians. "It is rather late in the day for Mr.
C. to be claiming the honor of it," she snorted. Where was Calhoun
hiding in January 1844, she wondered, when the Texas measure was still
unsettled and when "such heavy denunciations were pronounced against
John Tyler for daring to effect it?" Calhoun had remained silent then.
"As for President Tyler," she told Julia in disgust, "his laurels are
destined I fear to be few if left to be awarded by his Cabinet. Webster
in relation to the Ashburton treaty was much more courteous in ad-
mitting he acted under the instructions of the President. Indeed after
this from Mr. Calhoun I think Mr. Wfebster) acted a much higher
part." Toward Calhoun personally, the family decided finally to observe
a "marked silence," There was little else they could do.26
The attempt to strip Tyler of his Texas laurels gathered momentum
in 1847. Sam Houston began claiming that it was Andrew Jackson who
had really engineered annexation. Tyler, in turn, attacked Houston for
having slowed up the annexation process by his pro-British flirtations
in 1844-1845. Meanwhile, Tyler was skewered by the Whig National
Intelligencer for having been influenced in his Texas policy by "the
speculators in Texas stocks and lands by whom he was surrounded,
counseled and impelled to that unwise measure," Categorically denying
the latter charge and the accompanying innuendo that he had personally
profited by the annexation, Tyler insisted again that he "saw nothing
but the country and the whole country, not this or that section, this or
that local interest, but the WHOLE . . . the glory of the whole country
in the measure,"27
These were the opening salvos in a war for reputation that would
325
rage for years as Tylers and Gardlners fought to assure John Tyler full
historical credit for the one great accomplishment of his public life. In
1848 a nervous Tyler finally circularized the former members of his
Cabinet, soliciting from them their recollections on the annexation ques-
tion as these might pertain to the claims of Calhoun and Houston and
to the charges kveled against him by the National Intelligencer. As he
received their various written testimonials he was satisfied that his own
mind had not played tricks on him, and that his point of view would be
fully sustained in the eyes and judgment of history. Nevertheless, as late
as 1856-1858 Tyler was still parrying threats to deprive him of the
historical glory of his Texas accomplishment. Again he argued that
Calhoun had played no important role in annexation ("Mr. Calhoun
had no more to do with it than a man in Nova Zembla"). Upshur's role,
under the President's daily direction, had been the vital one in prepar-
ing the treaty, Tyler maintained. Further, Texas annexation, by gravi-
tational pull, had also brought California into the Union. The inclusion
of California went well beyond what Tyler could reasonably claim for
his Texas Annexation Treaty, even though he supported the Mexican
War which Polk brought on to insure the additional acquisition of
California. But there can be no doubt that Tyler's role in Texas annexa-
tion was the decisive one. And in boldly seeing it through he earned
his place in American history, shaky as that niche seemed in the
i85os.28
Although at times Tyler felt he might truly detach himself from
the sting of adverse public opinion, the fact was that every slight, every
misrepresentation of his motives, cut his psyche deeply. Nor did it help
much to tell himself that the opinions of the masses were worthless. "By
far the greater part of them do not think at all/7 he argued. "The ma-
jority of those who do assert the reasoning facility conceal their opinion
even from themselves from fear of inflicting self -injury." Even when he
was criticized in what Alexander assured him were the "trash weeklies,"
newspapers with absolutely no circulation "among respectable classes/'
Tyler was upset. When Tyler was hurt, Julia was hurt. She therefore
urged Robert and her brothers to continue their strict monitoring of
the press and to report all evidences of anti-Tylerism to Sherwood
Forest. Pro-Tyler references, of course, were still to be reprinted and
circulated as widely as possible. So insistent and thin-skinned was Julia
in this regard that her mother finally admonished her:
You must not think us so indifferent to the publications respecting the P.
We were very sensitive at first and felt all the slanders cast upon him, but
now we have become wiser and let all pass as something not worth regarding.
When a good thing is said Alex and D [avid] are the first to see it, and speak
of it at home and turn a deaf ear and blind eye to all that is bad. I should
think by this time you had arrived at the same philosophical state.
326
Neither Julia nor her husband was ever able to reach that "philosophi-
cal state."29
Tyler's position on the Mexican War produced new criticisms to
which the family could close neither its ears nor eyes. The war split the
opinion of the nation and brought James K, Polk under heavy attack
from abolitionist Northern Whigs and Democrats who maintained that
the President's war of conquest in the Southwest was designed for no
purpose other than to conquer more land for slavery expansion — to se-
cure bigger pens to put more slaves in. Ironically, Tyler suddenly found
himself publicly defending an administration he personally disliked and
a military venture in Mexico about which he had deep-seated reserva-
tions. In addition, this defense of Polk brought him under a brisk fire
which once again linked him with the aggressive Southern slavocracy
and with Texas land and stock speculations. It was a cruel dilemma.
Tyler tried to solve it intellectually by refusing to admit the obvious
fact that there was a causal connection between Texas annexation and
the war itself. This too was Alexander's position, and about the best that
can be said for it is that it had the advantage of separating the two men
from the most blatant of the warmongers. "What does it matter whether
it was caused by the annexation of Texas, or the marching of the
American troops into the territory between the Nueces and the Rio
Grande?" Gardiner asked in a speech written for a war rally in Tam-
many Hall. "The Historical or Antiquarian Society can settle this point
on some long winter evening." Actually, it mattered a great deal. The
Mexican government had long argued that the annexation of its province
of Texas would be an overt act of war. True, no serious warlike
preparations were launched in Mexico City after the annexation was
formally completed by an exchange of treaty ratifications in July 1845.
Nor were there any Mexican military preparations of significance until
Polk provoked them early in 1846 in his eagerness for a war that would
dismember the remnants of the Mexican Empire and secure California,
New Mexico, and Arizona to the United States.
In this aggressive activity John Tyler played no part. He felt
privately, however, that Polk's policy on the Rio Grande was unneces-
sarily provocative; and he insisted publicly that had the Senate passed
his annexation treaty when he first submitted it to them in April 1844
there would have been no war at all. At that crucial moment in 1844,
he explained, Anglo-American relations had been excellent, thanks in
large measure to the 1842 Webster- Ashburton Treaty settlement of out-
standing frictions between the two nations. A subsequent deterioration
in these relations had occurred in late 1845, principally on the Oregon
question. This decline Tyler traced to irresponsible Democratic demands
for "Fifty-four Forty or Fight!" and to Polk's Annual Message of De-
327
cember 1845 which implied that the frosty latitude was the only settle-
ment line in Oregon to which the United States could agree. This rising
tension in Anglo-American affairs, Tyler further explained, had em-
boldened the Mexicans to cross the Rio Grande at Matamoros on April
24, 1846, and contest General Zachary Taylor's right to be encamped
in the disputed territory between the Rio Grande and Nueces. The
Mexicans, Tyler's analysis continued, had earlier had no "hope of suc-
cor, or aid from any quarter." In April 1846, however, they could look
to London with some hope that British assistance would be forthcoming
in their war with the Americans. More importantly, thought the former
President, the war could only stimulate the rapid revival of the domestic
slavery controversy and all the political and sectional dangers inherent
in that smoldering subject. It was also clear to Tyler that in the contest
between David and Goliath the American giant would annex vast
reaches of new territory and the question of whether those areas would
be organized slave or free could not long be avoided. He was therefore
completely sincere when he said, on the eve of the conflict, "I should
deprecate a war as next to the greatest of evils." 30
Once Folk's crusade into Mexico and California had been set in
motion in April 1846 Tyler joined Alexander in publicly proclaiming it
the most "just war" ever fought by the American people. This was for
the patriotic record. Privately, Tyler confessed to Alexander his concern
over the morality of the unequal struggle. But he felt he could do noth-
ing about it. Thus he noted with resignation that "even if the war be
improper in its inception, there is no other mode by which we can get
out of it with honor. ... I go for whipping Mexico until she cries
enough." Tyler, it will be recalled, had been perfectly willing to dis-
member the Mexican Empire in 1842, but he had hoped to accomplish
Ms aim without bloodshed. There was too much blood and thunder in
Polk's approach to suit him.31
As Floyd Waggaman, James A. Semple, and other Tyler-Gardiner
kin marched off to fight the Mexicans, war fever swept through the en-
tire family. John, Jr., willingly gave up his languishing law studies in a
burst of patriotic fervor. Girding himself for combat, he implored his
father to help him get a commission in the Army. Tyler agreed to try,
but only on the condition that his son promise to forswear the use of
liquor forever. John, Jr., accepted this condition, and Tyler reluctantly
asked Polk for the favor. The President gladly obliged his predecessor
and John, Jr., was soon Captain Tyler. He saw no action and quickly
forgot his pledge, but he enjoyed army life immensely. "Excitement of
some sort he must have," sighed Julia.
Not to be outdone by his younger brother, Robert Tyler raised a
company of Philadelphia volunteers, mostly Irish-Americans, and
pleaded with Pennsylvania authorities for an opportunity to march his
unit off to kill Mexicans. The fact that there was a new baby in his
328
household and that Priscilla strenuously opposed the idea did nothing
to dull his ardor for service on the Rio Grande. When the honor of
fighting was denied him by the governor, Robert was disconsolate. Tyler
comforted him with the thought that the Rio Grande region was an
unhealthy place and that "few laurels" could be won In such a war any-
way. He was better off tending his struggling law business and advanc-
ing his political fortunes at home.
Julia, meanwhile, followed the war news avidly. She cheered each
predictable victory and wrung her hands over the fate of the Mexican
noncombatants. "What thrilling accounts every mail brings us from
the seat of war/' she wrote to Margaret. "The taking of Vera Cruz
though glorious for our arms was terrible for the poor women and
children." At the same time she devoutly hoped that neither of her
brothers would "ever feel any martial fire glow In [their] veins/7 and
that neither would join the glorious crusade to Mexico City. Neither did.
Colonel David Lyon had no desire to leave the comforts of Lafayette
Place, and Alexander felt he could do more for the war effort on the
home front. Julia felt, however, that her brothers might at least show
some patriotic enthusiasm for the unequal slaughter:
Are you not interested in, and do you never think of the war? It is full
of thrilling Interest in my opinion, but you do not seem even to think of it.
What a glorious country is America! Who can recount such deeds of courage
and valor as our countrymen? My opinion of them has never been half
justice, I tHnk that almost all are manly spirits. All nearly are capable
of being heroes, and a coward constitutes the exception.32
Alexander actually thought a great deal about the war. In addition
to delivering stirring pro-war orations inside and outside of Tammany
Hall, he realistically evaluated some of the political and economic con-
sequences of the conflict. He was hopeful that the "immense military
patronage" the President held would ultimately be employed to break
the backs of all the antiwar Whigs and Democrats. He saw also that the
war-stimulated rise in wheat and com prices was benefiting his kin at
Sherwood Forest. When the conflict was over, he stood with his new
brother-in-law, John H. Beeckman (Margaret's husband), and lustily
cheered the returning New York Volunteers, "yielding to the enthusiasm
of the moment somewhat to the damage of my hat." Within the family
then, only Juliana could see no sense, profit, or glory in the war; nor
could she generate any excitement for it. To her the whole thing "ap-
peared quite improbable to my mind from the beginning." 33
Alexander was much more critical of Polk's cautious diplomacy
with Britain on the eve of the Mexican War than was John Tyler.
Gardiner was particularly distressed to learn that the President was
willing to settle the Oregon boundary dispute with England at the forty-
ninth parallel. By February 1846 he had become fearful lest Polk's
329
effort to compromise the boundary on that reasonable basis (thus
wisely avoiding complications with Britain while he was preparing to
despoil Mexico) "lose us a considerable portion of the territory — that
portion of it north of forty-nine degrees." Alexander Gardiner was a
thoroughgoing fire-eater. Unlike Tyler and Polk, he was quite willing
to see the United States fight Mexico and Britain simultaneously. He
seems to have believed the jingoistic nonsense about 54° 40' even though,
the American claim to territory north of the forty-ninth parallel was so
dim legally as to be virtually nonexistent. His sister Margaret agreed
with him, however, and promised him she would boycott all things
English. "Until England accedes to *54°-4oY " she told Julia, "I must
eschew everything English." Robert Tyler likewise surrendered to
Anglophobia in a violent form during the renewal of the Oregon con-
troversy in 1846, although as head of Philadelphia's Irish Repeal
Association and an active functionary in Irish-American politics there,
his capitulation was perhaps predictable. In any event, he was a frequent
and dedicated twister of the Lion's Tail on the Oregon boundary ques-
tion, and he was all for raising a brigade to help drive the Redcoats
from the Northwest.34
Tyler considered the views of his son and his brother-in-law on the
Oregon problem shortsighted and dangerous. In a series of letters to
Robert he explained his fear of an Anglo-American war over Oregon
and the disadvantages of such a conflict for the United States:
I fear a war for the whole [of Oregon] will lose us the whole I go for
peace if it can be preserved on fair terms. The United States require still a
peace of twenty years, and then they hold in their hands the destiny of the
human race. But if war does come, we shall fight on the side of right. Our
claim to Oregon to the forty-ninth is clear; what lies beyond is attended
with colorable title [But] should we be found at war, then every man
should do his duty, and God forbid that a son of mine should be recusant.
The brigade by all means! It gives you position and control. My thoughts,
however, I must confess, are turned to peace For myself, I would much
prefer success where you are. . . . Make but one speech in court equal to those
you made at the [Irish Repeal Association] meetings, and all will be well. . . .
Your Oregon meeting was certainly immense The resolutions which were
adopted are sufficiently ultra But war! war! is the cry in which Demo-
crats, Whigs, Abolitionists unite. Strange union, indeed. The objects of the
last are easily understood. They seek not Oregon, but the Canadas, as means
of overbalancing Texas. War, I also say, before one jot or tittle of the public
honor be surrendered; but that is the very point to be decided.35
Happily for Anglo-American relations, a timely Cabinet crisis in
London brought the muzzling of the imperialist Lord Palmerston by
the peace-oriented Peel ministry. In addition, the successful repeal of
the controversial Corn Laws in England, coupled with Polk's unwilling-
ness to fight a war for 54°4o' while he was engaged on the Rio Grande,
330
ultimately brought hotheads on both sides of the Atlantic under control.
The responsible leaders of neither nation really wanted a war on the
Oregon issue and the crisis passed safely into history. In June 1846 a
treaty was concluded which divided the territory along the forty-ninth
parallel.
For this Tyler was thankful. Peace was more sensible and much
more profitable than war and he knew that the American claim for
territory north of the compromise demarcation was "attended with
colorable title." The repeal of the English Corn Laws, which abolished
import duties on foreign grains, was "a measure of the greatest moment"
for all American grain exporters, Tyler noted. With the assurance of
peace, "The tide of prosperity will flow in upon us; the value of every-
thing will be increased." Even war hawk Alexander had sober second
thoughts about the Oregon matter toward the end of March 1846. "I
have no doubt/' he informed Sherwood Forest, that "the conclusion of a
war [with Britain] would find the Whigs in power. I wonder whether
England would not forego all her claims upon Oregon, in consideration
of an amount equal to that which Polk calls for, for the increase of the
Navy — Fifty millions! Whew!" The political and economic cost of an
Anglo-American war was, he began to feel, too large a price to pay for
martial glory in the frozen Northwest. A sharp drop in stock prices on
the New York exchange contributed further to his loss of belligerency
as it became increasingly apparent that his own market speculations
were suffering as a direct result of the Anglo-American war scare. Julia
had no direct economic motive in her desire for peace with England.
She simply thanked God once again that the amorous Francis Pickens
had not been sent to London as the American minister in the midst of
such a complex and emotion-filled crisis.36
In the final analysis, the war with Mexico and the agitation for the
whole of Oregon did produce, as Tyler feared it would, the revival of
the slavery question. To see the abolitionists embracing 54°4o/ "as a
means of overbalancing Texas" disturbed Tyler as much as had Cal-
houn's narrowing of Texas annexation "to the comparatively contempti-
ble ground of Southern and local interest." Tyler did not want to see
the sectional issue drawn into either problem for political purposes. Yet
when Congressman David Wilmot of Pennsylvania, a free-soil Demo-
crat, introduced in the House in August 1846 his famous amendment to
an emergency war appropriation bill, the sectional lines were firmly
drawn. Tyler was forced to take a stand on a question he would have
much preferred to see remain dormant. The so-called Wilmot Proviso
asked for nothing more subtle than the exclusion of human slavery from
any of the territories conquered from Mexico during the war. Adminis-
tration forces sought to soften the Proviso by restricting its application
to any territory acquired north of 36°3o/. In brief, they would extend
the old Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific. This maneuver was
331
blocked, however, and the Wilmot Proviso was adopted by the House
on August 8, 1846. Defeated in the Senate, the controversial Proviso
never found its way into the law of the land. But its very existence as
an idea tore the nation apart.
Once the issue was broached, Tyler swung to the Southern view-
point on it. He was convinced, as he always had been, that the impact
of climate would ultimately solve the question of slavery extension, and
that the institution was destined to disappear in Delaware, Maryland,
and Virginia as it already had in the North. Thus the former President's
main criticism of the Wilmot Proviso was that it raised "a contest be-
tween the sections for the balance of power [that] is to render us in a
foreign war the weakest nation of the world." Further, it seemed to say
to the South, and to American soldiers from the South fighting in Mex-
ico, that "You may toil and bleed and pay, and yet your toil and blood
and money shall only be expended to increase our [the North's] power;
you and your property being forever excluded from the enjoyment of
the territory you may conquer." The Proviso was, as he put it in an
anonymous letter to the Portsmouth (Va.) Pilot, "nothing less than
a gratuitous insult on the slave-States." It would soon bring about the
political subordination of the slave states to the free states within the
Union. It would, in fine, raise new problems in America more dangerous
than the one it sought to remedy. In these views both Alexander and
Robert concurred, Alexander going one step further in his interpretation
of the Proviso as part of a British abolitionist plot unfoldino- in the
United States.37
As the sectional crisis deepened, the developing tension fortified the
Tyler-Gardiner family in their opinion that the Polk administration was
an unmitigated disaster in all its works. The fact that Polk had accom-
modated John, Jr., with a captaincy and Tom Cooper with an inspector-
ship of customs did little to soften this view. They disliked Polk's poli-
cies, foreign and domestic. Nothing he sought to do really suited them.
His administration was, they unanimously agreed, undistinguished in
every way. His financial policies disrupted the -money market ("Money
now commands two per cent a month in Wall Street, a rate of interest
ruinous to regular business," Alexander complained). His foreign policies
agitated the slavery question. That some of the old and true friends of
the Tyler administration,, notably former New York Congressman
Roosevelt, had made their political peace with the Polk crowd seemed
to the family evidence of the basest hypocrisy.38
Julia and Margaret could find but one redeeming feature in the
whole Polk administration. Sarah Polk had at least shown the good sense
not to disturb Julia's arrangement of the furniture in the White House
bedrooms. But even in the peripheral area of home economics, the Polks,
man and wife, did not measure up. When the United States Journal re-
ported that in the interests of the "strictest economy" the new President
332
and First Lady would spend only half of the 1845 appropriation de-
signed for White House renovation and entertaining, Margaret was
beside herself. ""What monstrously small people they must be!" she ex-
claimed. She knew how desperately the President's Mansion needed a
face-lifting and how expensive White House social functions, properly
done, could be. The Gardiners had certainly paid for enough of them
to know.39
From Julia's standpoint, Sahara Sarah was more than monstrously
small. She was dull and uninteresting as a First Lady. Her nonalcoholic
White House functions did save the taxpayers a few dollars, and the
floors of the President's Mansion were undoubtedly protected from the
wear and tear of waltzing feet. But her parties remained impossibly
dreary. "I don't see or hear that Mrs. Polk Is making any sensation In
Washington," Julia remarked with Ill-concealed cattiness in February
1846. Sarah Childress Polk was never a social sensation, and Tyler
rarely missed an opportunity to encourage Julia's self-satisfied com-
parisons of the glories of her reign with the manifest failures of Sarah's.
"The Idea of her being able to follow after you/' he assured her, was
an impossible one. He was right. Whatever "Impartial history" would
say of John Tyler as President of the United States, it could only say
of Julia that as First Lady she would have no real rival for one hundred
and sixteen years.40
333
SHERWOOD FOREST: THE GOOD YEARS
We are raising up quite a large family, 5 boys and
one girl and all fine children in intellect and mech-
anism. Thus it is that my old age is enlivened by
the scenes of my youth — and these precious buds
and blossoms almost persuade me that the spring-
time of life is still surrounding me.
JOHN TYLER, 185!
Within a year of her arrival at Sherwood Forest Julia began longing
again for the bustle and activity of Washington. Especially during the
winter months of 1846, when snow covered the plantation and confined
the population indoors, she visualized a return to the scene of her
triumph. Often she would while away an evening before the fire plan-
ning a reconquest of the capital that Sarah Polk had surrendered with-
out firing a social shot. This was a harmless diversion Tyler encouraged.
"I shall expect to meet with a good deal of attention and have no doubt
every distinction which my 'position before the country' has a right to
command will be accorded me and therefore all of us," Julia said of one
planned but never-realized return visit to Washington. As she well knew,
however, these dreams would be many a year materializing. First she
would have her seven babies. Indeed, she would not return to the capital
until January 1861, when John Tyler emerged from retirement to serve
as president of the Peace Convention called in a final abortive effort to
save the nation from the stupidity of civil war.1
In the winter of 1846 Julia was anticipating the arrival of her first
child — and her mother was bombarding her with obstetrical advice from
New York. "Keep your mind in as easy and agreeable a state as possible
and avoid all unpleasant sights," she counseled. Gentle exercise and
334
clothes "comfortably loose" were also recommended. It had been willed
for several months that Julia's first baby would simply have to be a
boy and that his name would be "David Gardiner Tyler." Thus as she
and John Tyler awaited the arrival of the son and heir, thoughts of
social Washington and its superficial frivolity melted away. When her
time of confinement finally approached in July, Tyler took her north
to the fever-free climate of East Hampton where her mother and Mar-
garet could be with her.2
Before the baby was born Julia encountered news from New York
that made it difficult for her to 'preserve that "easy and agreeable"
mental state recommended by her solicitous mother. On February 21,
1846, the New York Morning News carried an item to the effect that
"A rumor is in circulation that Ex-President Tyler's wife has separated
from him and returned to her home on Long Island, N.Y." Other papers,
notably the New York Ledger, picked up the report, adding to it the
innuendo that the May-and-December marriage had been a rocky one
from the start. Alexander first heard the gossip in Washington in
January, but he had not reported it to Sherwood Forest for fear of
upsetting Ms sister. Actually, as former Attorney General John Nelson
and Secretary of the Navy Mason had explained to Alexander, the rumor
stemmed from the much-whispered-about marital difficulties of John
Tyler, Jr., and his estranged wife Mattie. In its confused transmission
from barber shop to Capitol Hill the rumor had settled somehow on the
innocent shoulders of the ex-President and Julia. Since the family had
no desire to see John, Jr.'s hymeneal problems further paraded through
the newspapers, they could not publicly explain the origin of the story
or the mistaken identities involved.
David Lyon experienced "great wrath" when he first saw the item
in print; he was all set to "go direct to the office to give the man a
regular blowing up for printing such a scandal." But a family conference
decided on a more politic approach. Under the strategy adopted, David
Lyon was assigned the delicate task of calling quietly on various editors
to request that they run dignified retractions. Several papers did. Still,
retractions are seldom so interesting or well remembered as the slanders
they attempt to correct, and the subject remained common gossip in
New York and Washington for several months. The incident did not,
as David Lyon hoped it might, afford Tyler and Julia a "hearty laugh."
On the contrary, as Juliana clearly understood, "such reports [are] very
disagreeable because people are apt to think there must be some founda-
tion for them." Julia agreed with her mother. She thought the entire
thing
. . . more provoking than anything in the world and I should think you would
have felt exactly like choking the perpetrator of the scandal. The way you
managed its contradiction, however, was most proper, only the President
335
. . . [that] the Editor in his contradiction should have been made to
add also . , . that no union ,could be more harmonious and happy for he is
afraid that the world will think there must have appeared some foundation
for the tale. Pray be on the alert for everything improper that may appear
and let it not be unnoticed.
She was still upset about the divorce rumor when her baby was born.3
David Gardiner Tyler was born in East Hampton on July 12, 1846.
At eighteen he would fight under Lee in the Army of Northern Virginia.
During Reconstruction he would become a key figure in Charles City's
successful struggle against the baneful influence of Carpetbagger gov-
ernment in Virginia. A fine lawyer and judge, he would also serve with
distinction in the Congress of the United States in the 18903. More
important to Tyler and Julia than contemplation of his future was the
fact that "Gardie" was from the beginning of his active life a healthy,
happy baby. East Hampton friends crowded in to congratulate the par-
ents on the birth of the "Little President" ("the only cognomen he is
known by/' explained Margaret), and Tyler was filled with pride and
happiness. Barely a week after Gardie's arrival Tyler was forced to
return to Virginia, having heard "unfavorable accounts of his harvest"
at Sherwood Forest. But he soon hastened back to East Hampton to be
with his family.4
With the aid of a nurse, a housekeeper, and at various times her
sister, mother, brothers, and husband, Julia steadily regained her
strength and health. By mid-August she was recovered enough to wish
she could join Margaret in Newport "to see the maneuvers of the
cliques." With Julia, this desire was as much a sign of her complete
recovery as was her mournful discovery that she could no longer strug-
gle into her old corsets. And while her postobstetrical ailments remained
minor, they provided Juliana a fresh opportunity to practice medicine
by mail. "You ought not to eat hot bread," she counseled on one oc-
casion when Julia complained vaguely of a weak stomach. When her
daughter experienced backaches (from carrying her new baby about so
much), Juliana sent her a plaster to apply. This torturous device "oc-
casioned such an intolerable itching, irritation it would be more elegant
to say," that Julia could not bear it. As usual, much of Juliana's medical
advice centered upon strictures against alcohol in any form. She rarely
missed an opportunity to tell her daughter that wine was a debauching
beverage — bad for her complexion, her back, her stomach, and all other
parts of her anatomy. Julia did not discourage this well-intentioned
medical intervention. She was so distressed by the amount of weight
she retained after Gardie's birth she was ready "to try any diet or any
prescription." 5
Julia had her first baby with minimum difficulty and complication
and with maximum assistance and advice from the family. When she
and Tyler returned to Sherwood Forest in September, after the fever
season on the James had passed, she discovered in her husband an ex-
cellent nurse and baby-sitter. The fact that Gardie was the first of a new
set of children for the former President in no way dulled his enthusiasm
for babies. "You would be amused to see what an excellent nurse the
President has become/7 Julia told her mother.
I devolve the whole charge in the morning upon him. The babe wakes at
early dawn and he rises and sits with it before the fire until the horn
arouses the plantation and its own proper nurse enters to relieve Mm. All this
time I very calmly and cruelly go to sleep. This is really very right ... to
be broken of sleep agrees better with the President than with me. . . .
Tyler only lost sleep. For Alexander Gardiner the arrival of Gardie
meant a new assignment to the servitude of baby shopping for Julia in
New York, keeping her complex accounts straight, and generally pro-
viding her with the numerous things infants and young children con-
stantly need. In the course of his life Alexander Gardiner probably did
more shopping than any other man in the state of New York.6
Julia was wonderfully happy as a young mother. Indeed, little
Gardie could emit no sound, cut no tooth, toddle no step, and take no
bite that was not reported by Julia to Lafayette Place in the greatest
and most breathless detail. Her baby was the most intelligent, pre-
cocious, and beautiful in the whole world. In appearance he was more
Gardiner than Tyler, she thought, but in firmness of character and in-
dependence of spirit he was all Tyler. From the time he learned to
walk and talk he had a mind and will of his own. "Wherever I go he
puts all other children who are much older completely in the shade,"
Julia boasted. She loved bouncing him on her kp and playing with
him on the bed. For hours on end she would sing him Mother Goose
and other nonsense rhymes to the accompaniment of her guitar and
his mellifluous gurgles:
Rock-a-by baby, your cradle is green;
Father's a nobleman, Mother's a queen.
Betty's a lady and wears a gold ring,
And Gardiner's a drummer and drums for the king.
Ride away, ride aways Gardy shall ride;
And he shall have pussy cat tied to his side.
And he shall have pussy cat tied to the other ;
And Gardy shall ride and see his Grandmother.
To John Tyler, his new son was no less than "the noblest fellow in
creation." Neither the war in Mexico nor the purges of the Tylerites in
New York were as important to him as the baby. The former President
delighted in predicting a "high destiny" for his son. Thus when whoop-
ing cough struck the plantation in November 1847, Gardie contracting
it along with the other children, black and white, the entire family was
alarmed.7
337
Whenever she was in doubt on some point relating to the care and
feeding of Infants Julia wrote to her mother, receiving back reams ol
detailed advice fresh from the New York pedlatric front. "You must
not allow the nurse to put anything she may be eating in Ms mouth,"
cautioned Juliana. "It is an old- fashioned practice entirely exploded.
. . . What food he takes let it be pure and properly prepared for the
baby." Her mother also advised her to breast feed Gardie as long as
she could. This, she assured Julia, would prevent her conceiving another
child right away, a myth that was widespread in those days. In fact,
Juliana thought one child quite enough for her daughter, and at one
point she considered giving Tyler "the most severe lecture telling him
he had children enough." s
This advice attracted absolutely no support at Sherwood Forest.
On the contrary, Julia wanted another child as soon as possible. She was
ecstatically happy in her new role as a mother, and she looked forward
to having a large and handsome family. The only consideration that
gave her any pause at all was the effect of childbearing on her petite
figure. "It is the remark of everyone how fat I have become," she
lamented a year after Gardie's birth. "I shall be a fat old lady I sup-
pose. I cannot push my arm through any sleeve I used to wear." Like
many attractive women who gaze self-consciously into their mirrors
before breakfast each morning half expecting to see the final fall of
Rome revealed, Julia's concern for her figure was more imagined than
real. Juliana thought it mainly a question of posture and urged her
daughter not to "allow your increase in size to make you look lazy —
keep your figure erect, shoulders braced back." Actually, Julia remained
a beautiful woman, a fact remarked upon by all her contemporaries.
But when friends assured her that "they never saw me looking so well,"
Julia was not convinced. "I guess they have forgotten," she sighed
wistfully.0
The birth of her second son, John Alexander Tyler, on April 7,
1848, at Sherwood Forest, brought Julia new joy and delight. "Alex"
was destined to an unhappy life. On his seventeenth birthday he would
find himself in the rain at Appomattox, cold, wet, and hungry, ankle-
deep in red Virginia mud beside the gun he serviced. Two days later
General Lee surrendered the remnants of his gallant and ragged army,
Alex Tyler included, to the United States. It was a bitter moment for
the boy. Trained as he later was in German universities Alex would
become an engineer of considerable competence, but his entire life was
scarred by the tragic events of April 9, 1865. His happiest days were
those of his boyhood at Sherwood Forest — days of fishing in the James,
hunting in the nearby woods, and playing with Ms older brother and
with the Negro children of the plantation.
Again Julia had no difficulty in childbirth, although Alex weighed
in at twelve pounds. Before his arrival, however, she heard that no less
338
a personage than Queen Victoria was contemplating the use of chloro-
form when her sixth baby (Princess Louise) was delivered In March
1848. Thus she asked Margaret to find out In New York if the gas
could "be safety used in confinements," pointing out that Norfolk
doctors were already employing it in surgery7 with great success. What-
ever her research into the value of chloroform revealed, there is no evi-
dence that Julia ever used it herself in childbirth.10
As Alex grew straight and strong and devilish, Julia found him
"the loveliest child that ever was seen." When he was a year old sh'e
decided that "Gardie has the thinking head and Alexander the im-
aginative one." Given this discovery, she could only pray that Alex's
"imagination will be governed by discretion." Tyler was less worried
about Alex's future discretion than he was pleased that Ms newest son
had been born "a Virginian." In his satisfaction with this geographic
circumstance he hastened to provide the nurse and the additional house-
hold help that would make Julia's recovery safe and rapid. Happily,
her recovery was both, marked only by headaches and chills which were
treated by "burning up my temples with hartshorn and deluging my
head with bay water." Soon she was up and about again, busily dis-
patching eulogistic accounts of her two boys to Lafayette Place. In
this motherly activity she was undeterred and unintimidated by Alex-
ander's chiding that her children were, after all, like most other chil-
dren. They were definitely not like other children, Julia stoutly insisted,
reminding Alexander that she had magnanimously chosen his name for
little Alex. Teasing aside, both of her brothers were terribly pleased
that Julia had selected their names for her sons. "I think both babies
of mine have been rightly named/3 she decided. Gardie, she felt, was
very much like Ms Uncle David Lyon in temperament, while little Alex
was more like his Uncle Alexander.11
Blessed as she was by two "goodly babies" and an exceptionally
happy marriage, Julia was easily persuaded that Margaret, her brothers,
and Alice Tyler should all experience the joys of the marital institution
without further delay. To this end she appointed herself the family's
official matchmaker and marriage-prospects consultant. Forming a loose
partnership with her mother to deal with the problem systematically,
she launched a campaign to marry David Lyon, Margaret, Alexander,
and Alice to "suitable" mates at once. The mother-and-daughter mar-
riage-brokerage firm did business entirely by mail, main office in La-
fayette Square, branch office at Sherwood Forest. Tyler watched the
firm's devious machinations with great amusement.
It was soon apparent to Julia that David Lyon would not be
rushed to the altar. In fact, Alexander had long since given up on his
bashful brother, his own efforts in matchmaking having produced no
339
results. Juliana?s most recent attempts had likewise been in vain. Dur-
ing Julia's reign the family had discouraged all of his flirtations with
such caustic finality that he now approached women with a caution
bordering OB timidity. Nevertheless, every report from New York that
mentioned his dancing with or even conversing with a young lady was
hopefully construed by Julia as the beginning of a serious romance.
She utilized Ms visits to Sherwood Forest to introduce him to various
local belleSj and she flattered Ms masculine ego by invariably inter-
preting these casual meetings as "really brilliant conquests" for him.
In the interests of his romantic aspirations she suggested that he
become adept at the polka and understand clearly that "almost every-
thing in the Polka depends upon the fascinating expression of counte-
nance." It had to be danced, said Julia, "with a most bewitching smile
and grace." She did not think David had nearly enough savoir faire, and
she was sure that a firm mastery of the waltz and the polka would in-
crease Ms opportunities. Her advice on dancing was sound, and David
Lyon heeded it. He took dancing lessons at Madame Ferraso's studio
in New York and gradually he acquired a ballroom conversational polish
that brought Mm into an easier and more natural contact with a larger
Dumber of eligible women. At the same time, however, JuHa worried
lest David lose sight of the eternal verities of marriage as he spun
around the dance floor. On one occasion she urged him to marry one
homely young lady on no more than the practical grounds that it was
Ms golden "chance for $100,000 planked down." Indeed, some of the
names she came up with as possible mates for her oldest brother seemed
so outlandish to Margaret that she finally scolded Julia with the ob-
servation that "You are continually insulting D. with your match-
making and a few more such like proposals as the last will completely
change his nose, with turning up." Julia was neither intimidated nor
silenced by Margaret's criticism. Nonetheless, by 1851 she had become
much discouraged. David's dancing lessons had accomplished little
save teaching Mm to dance. By 1855 Juliana also began to fear that un-
less David soon married the Gardiner line was threatened with ex-
tinction. "I do not like the idea of the family name in our line becom-
ing extinct either," Julia agreed. "If David remains a bachelor too
long he will become an inveterate one." Discouraging as it seemed, she
could still hope that someday her brother would "seem a blessing to
the fasMonable and rich young ladies when they become more aware
of Ms steady and well regulated habits." That day would not arrive
until i860.12
Alexander had few of his brother's steady habits and none of his
social shyness or humorless stolidity. Getting him safely into holy wed-
lock appeared to JuHa an easy task. But in spite of Ms sister's elaborate
plans for his happiness, Alexander had no interest in marriage. He was
fascinated by the ladies and missed few opportunities to avail himself
of their charms. Yet he never confused Ms desire for distaff companion-
340
sMp with the notion that lie should marry. Instead, Alexander toyed
with women as he played the stock market, acquiring and disencumber-
ing himself of them as the situation demanded. He was an active young
man about town with no desire to settle down. His legal duties, political
interests, and business affairs were combined with the management of
his mother's properties and, after 1845, ^th the direction of John
Tyler's financial affairs. He was very busy. He enjoyed his cigars, his
liquor, and Ms books, and he tolerated with good humor Julia's in-
sistence that he make a "rich love match," settle down, and become a
solid citizen. Attractive to women, his occasional "indiscreet and im-
prudent" involvements with them were handled with a skill and urbanity
that avoided exposing the family to scandal. He had a fierce loyalty to
Ms sisters and Ms mother, but his sense of family unity did not in-
clude their right to mess and muddle in Ms private affairs. Julia soon
gave up on Mm. It was one of her few total defeats.13
All around Julia wedding bells were ringing for her friends and
classmates, but they tolled not for David Lyon, Alexander, Margaret
or Alice. In August 1847, however, a good omen appeared in the mar-
riage of Mary Gardiner to Eben N. Horsford. Mary had waited three
years for him, and her patience seemed to demonstrate that Gar diners
were not by some strange hex inherently unmarriageable. The Horsford-
Gardiner union was a love match, although Professor Horsford's
friendly connection with industriaiist-pMlanthropist Abbott Lawrence
was not overlooked by the Gardiner family. Lawrence, indeed, was in-
strumental in obtaining for Horsford Ms post at Harvard College in
1847. For the vivacious but still untutored Phoebe her sister Mary's
courtsMp was a revelation of another sort. "TMs love-making is so
new to me/' she wrote Julia a few days before the wedding. "I have
been vastly amused, never having seen lovers together before — there
is something going on for me to wonder at all the time!" Some ex-
citement at last had come to remote Shelter Island.14
Mary Gardiner's good fortune caused Julia and her mother to
worry more and more about Margaret's marital prospects, and they
redoubled their efforts to provide her with a suitable husband. As early
as November 1845 Juliana complained that it was foolish for Margaret
to "waste her time" visiting Julia at Sherwood Forest when potential
husbands were calling at 43 Lafayette Place every day inquiring after
her. "She should keep her position here and not abandon her post,"
said Juliana. "Indeed I have been very careful not to mention her
absence except for a very short time for fear it will go forth that she
has gone South for the winter there is notMng like being at one's
post. The city is busy and gay in appearance this fall, a great deal
of calling and walking is done." Margaret got the message. With Julia's
urging she hastened home from a brief visit on the James to man her
pillbox on the Lafayette Place social firing line.15
Margaret was an attractive girl, physically and financially. Her
341
main drawback remained her intelligence and her absolute candor with
men; and she had the additional bad habit of seeing the complex mating
process of the 18403 as the superficial comedy of manners it was.
She especially objected to having a wealthy husband captured, tied,
branded , and delivered to her by her family like a side of Grade- A beef.
Finding Just any "suitable" husband for Margaret would have been no
difficult task. She was a good catch. But she would not cooperate. She
would not play the game as the rules of polite society demanded. She
wanted a love match, not a corporate merger.
This made her an especially difficult problem for her mother and
sister, who found "decent beaux" to be "lamentably scarce" in New
York City anyway. There was, for example, Thompson S. Brown of
New York, who would have been an adequate husband for Margaret.
He clearly quaEfied as a "decent beau" by Gardiner standards. He was
comfortably fixed and of good family. He called at 43 Lafayette Place
often during 1845-1847, and he rushed Margaret at Newport and
Saratoga during her summer visits there. But Margaret did not love
him. She considered him physically unattractive and socially awkward
in spite of her mother's exasperated view that he was "very genteel in
his manners" and quite a good prospect.16
Margaret would probably have married George Samson in mid-
1845 tad family support for the match been unanimous. Although he
was a widower with a small daughter, he owned some modest properties
in the city and he was devoted to Margaret; she in time returned his
affectionate interest. Julia thought him a good prospect and saw no
reason why her sister should not marry him. "Were I Margaret," she
explained to her mother, "and no chance of being Mrs. President Tyler
(ahem!) I would most certainly devote my attention to Mr. Samson
[whose] . . . kind heart and good character and house in Broadway and
Bond are not to be trifled with according to my thoughts," This, un-
fortunately, was not the majority view. Vetoes came from all sides.
David Lyon's blunt "Not for the world!" and Juliana's conviction
that Samson was not sufficiently possessed of the world's goods to make
Margaret truly happy combined to defeat the project. Rumors within the
family that a wedding was pending were quashed, and Margaret hid
her evident disappointment in a frenzied round of Sunday School and
Bible Association activities.17
When James Bruen walked suddenly into Margaret's life in De-
cember 1845 there was a new rustle of excitement within the family. "Is
he rich?" Julia asked her sister. It was Alexander's Job to discover the
answer to this inevitable family question. A casual but pointed con-
versation with Bruen produced the information that he had "about
$100,000 of his own and very much more in prospective." Another
discreet investigation of the Bruen family by Judge Ogden Edwards
corroborated Alexander's findings. Though Bruen had passed his Dun &
342
Bradstreet with flying colors the fact remained that Margaret was not
in love with him. Only his considerable wealth tempted her at all.
"I am rather flurried'9 she confessed to Julia, "and I don't know what
to do. I shall have to come to a decision one way or the other — that's
sure — and I would not for the world have an [engagement] take place
that was to end in nothing To be or not to be, that is the ques-
tion! Pray decide " Not surprisingly, Julia had already decided. She
wrote Margaret, strongly urging the match. And Alice Tyler humorously
suggested that if Margaret did not want the wealthy Bruen she might at
least have the good sportsmanship to pass him along to her. When
Braen actually proposed marriage in March 1846 Margaret put Mm
off. She still could not make up her mind. As Juliana reported the
breathless indecision of the Gardiner household to Sherwood Forest:
We are in a peck of trouble, etc. about Mr. B[ruen] and M[argaret]. I dare
not encourage or discourage — it is so serious. When we conclude upon what to
do we shall write. Until then keep a closed mouth and talk about it to no one.
Your letter almost decided M. it was so much in favor of it. She has begun
to relapse a little now however and thinks it will not be agreeable to make a
change just now. She wishes a little more time for reflection.18
Margaret's cautious reflectiveness on the Bruen proposal was
typical of her basic honesty. She simply could not marry a man she
did not love even if he did have "$100,000 of his own." At the same
time it was becoming increasingly apparent to her that she was falling
in love with the handsome though impecunious John BL Beeckman. She
had known Beeckman for several years. She had first met him at East
Hampton in 1842. She saw more of him during her romances with
Samson and Bruen. By January 1846 he had become a regular caller at
43 Lafayette Place and Margaret's frequent escort to divine services
at the Church of the Ascension and St. Thomas' Episcopal Church.
John Beeckman was an unusually tall and handsome young man of
good family. His "glossy luxuriant" dark hair, sharply wrought features,
and "genteel figure" commanded instant attention. Even the critical
Juliana at first thought Mm an "excellent beau" for Margaret because
he was "refined and gentlemanly in deportment ... of good family, in-
telligent, well educated and well read.7' His mother had been Catherine
Livingston, and that prominent New York name and connection placed
the Beeckmans within the Gardiner social circle. The Beeckmans lacked
none of life's necessities and few of its luxuries. The summer season
usually found them at East Hampton, Saratoga, or Newport. But
these displays did not conceal the fact that the Beeckmans were not
truly wealthy. They all had to work for a living. At the time of John
Beeckman's courtship with Margaret, his younger brother was clerking
at Graham and Varnum's store (the Beeckmans and the Varnums were
related by marriage), while John and his older brother Gilbert labored
343
in a downtown mercantile house in which business was often so slow
that one or the oilier would be laid off for several weeks at a time.
These economic realities were partly atoned for by the fact that
Catherine Livingston Beeckman maintained a gracious home filled
with mementos and curios attesting her ancestry and good breeding.
Site was extremely proud of her Revolutionary War heritage and de-
lighted In displaying the war relics given her husband years earlier
by Governor George Clinton. If the Gardiners were less than fascinated
by Catherine Beeckman's tiresome excursions into her "Spirit of '76"
genealogy (she only did it, said Margaret, to impress the Gardiners
"with aii idea of her importance" ), their reaction could be traced to
the fact that the Gardiners of the 17 yes had not displayed an over-
powering dedication to the great struggle for life, liberty and the pursuit
of happiness. (They had been neutralists, selling their goods and serv-
ices to both sides.) Future family genealogists, notably Curtiss C.
Gardiner in his Lion Gardiner and His Descendants, would be hard
pressed to find more than one or two members of the clan whose
patriotic contributions during the Revolution far transcended profitable
collaboration with the British occupation forces on Long Island. Cath-
erine Beeckman , on the other hand, was an early prototype of a
Daughter of the American Revolution, and her constant harping on the
glorious events of 1776 did little more than confirm in the Gardiners a
suspicion that the Beeckmans were stronger in blood line than in credit
line. Margaret was threatening to accept half a loaf or no loaf at all
in a marriage contract.19
Only when it was clear, by March 1847, that Margaret was gen-
uinely in love with John Beeckiian was Alexander detailed to discover
how much of a loaf was actually there. A probing conversation with
young Beeckman enabled him to report Beeckman 3s personal view that
no man should marry unless he could support Ms wife "in the same
style she has been accustomed to live" and the corollary observation
that no lady should accept marriage "unless she was certain her posi-
tion and enjoyments would be the same." On the basis of this meager
information Margaret assured Julia that "the exposition of affairs was
very satisfactory." Just how satisfactory, in cold round numbers, Alex-
ander would not reveal. He favored the match and did not want to
see Margaret denied the man she loved because of the money ques-
tion. Nor did Beeckman himself offer any financial specifics. "If he had
an income of some five or six thousand," Juliana complained to Sher-
wood Forest in March 1847, "we should know at once. That's the
point of difficulty. Now what think you? Is it time to think of something
and somebody else or keep the status quo?" 20
Julia pondered the question and decided Margaret should marry
Beeckman whether there was great wealth in the bargain or not. Both
she and John Tyler had met the Beeckman family at East Hampton
344
In 1845, and the ex-President had been particularly impressed with
the young man. Still, she agreed with her mother that the economic ele-
ment could not be entirely overlooked. "If I could only be sure of Ms
independence I should not have any fears were the match concluded
on," she said. "Margaret should refer Mm to you and then it would
be Ms business to give sufficient assurance that he was able properly to
support her." 21
The sufficient assurance was never forthcoming and Margaret never
insisted upon it. She was in love, not in high finance. When a panicky
Juliana threatened to quash the whole tMng in August 1847, Alexander
finally stepped in and told her firmly that the marriage would take
place. His sister's happiness must not be sacrificed to a misplaced
decimal point. "I suppose it is perfectly understood that nothing
[further] is to be said about it," he told Ms mother sharply. "You
are yet to be satisfied as to manner, mode and extent, and that defi-
nitely. What one person may esteem abundant, another may not." It
was the only time in her life that the strong-willed Juliana was
thwarted by one of her cMldren. Julia accepted her sister's judgment in
the matter with better grace, noting only that Margaret would find
Beeckman's "manner of wooing" more desirable were he wealthier and
able to spend more money on her.22
The courtsMp was decidedly an economical one. It involved for
Beeckman nothing more expensive or ostentatious than escorting
Margaret to church and Sunday School and calling upon her in her
heavily chaperoned parlor. An occasional stroll on Broadway completed
the pattern. An engagement was agreed upon in August 1847 and the
wedding planned for January 1848 in the Church of the Ascension. Not
until the engagement was announced, daguerreotypes exchanged, and
all the arrangements made, did Margaret inform her friends and her
Shelter Island cousins of her plans. Nor did the usually talkative Julia
let the secret out during her New York visit in September. To Phoebe
Gardiner's chagrin, she was one of the last in the family to learn of her
cousin's intentions. When she finally heard the news she eagerly de-
manded the "whole history" of the romance and asked Margaret es-
pecially to "devote a separate sheet to the confidential." Margaret's
courtsMp had been a quiet one, devoid of all gossip and speculation, and
she wanted to keep it that way. She did not oblige Phoebe with any of
the details, confidential or other.23
That John Beeckman had no money ceased being a major con-
versation piece in the Gardiner family as Margaret began busily to
make her wedding plans. WMle the financial suitability of the match
was no longer talked about openly, it remained a concern in the minds
of both Beeckman and Ms fiancee. Indeed, it was Ms fear of Ms in-
ability to support Margaret in the manner to wMch she was accustomed
as a Gardiner that drove John Beeckman to the California gold fields
345
in April 1849 — and to Ms death a year later near Sacramento. And It
was apprehensiveness on Margaret's part that her husband would
never fee! comfortable In the Gardiner presence until he had made him-
self independently wealthy that persuaded her to acquiesce in his get-
rich-quick scheme in the new E! Dorado. The latent tragedy in the
whole affair could not, of course, be appreciated as Margaret's wedding
day approached.
It was Juliana's Intention to give the twenty-five-year-old Margaret
as nice a wedding and as expensive a trousseau as her sister Julia
had had three and a half years earlier. She was determined also that the
ceremony would be an exclusive affair involving the immediate families
only. Xone of Alexander's seedy Tammany friends would be invited to
this wedding. Julia endorsed her mother's decisions in these matters.
"You need not regulate [Margaret's] wardrobe by mine," she volun-
teered. "/ hope it will be very nice — but then I also hope there will be
enough left to buy me a gold watch and Gardie a silver cup." A trip to
New York in midwinter always posed grave transportation problems
for Tidewater Virginians. Nonetheless, Julia assured her family that
she and the President would "make the grand effort" even though
Julia was six months pregnant with Alex at the time. Nothing, she
vowed, could keep her from "The Ceremony" And while the President
had just returned to Sherwood Forest in December from a fatiguing
six-week trip with Alexander to view his coal and timber lands near
Caseyville, Kentucky , he too was eager for the New York jaunt. "He
is so happy in being with me again that he has rallied immediately
and all the fatigued look . . . has vanished," Julia explained.24
Margaret married John H. Beeckman at the Church of the Ascen-
sion on January 8, 1848. The Reverend Gregory T. Bedell performed
the ceremony, as he had earlier for Julia and the former President.
John Tyler gave the bride away. The service and reception went
smoothly and with dignity, although Tyler was piqued that "there was
no more particular mention made in the papers of [the] wedding."
He expected, said Margaret, that "his giving me away would be par-
ticularly announced" Priscilla wrote to congratulate Margaret on the
event, observing that "if your husband is only one half as good as
mine . . . you cannot help being happy." With his usual organizational
efficiency Alexander took upon himself the task of distributing the
wedding cake to friends of the Tylers and Gar diners. With each piece
of cake went the observation that Tyler could secure the Democratic
nomination in 1848 if his many friends were properly rallied.25
Margaret and her husband returned to Sherwood Forest with the
President and Julia for a month-long honeymoon visit. They were ac-
companied by Gilbert Beeckman, the bridegroom's brother. Alice Tyler
immediately began a "desperate flirtation" with Gilbert. Julia arranged
"two blow outs" to honor the newlyweds. For a few weeks Sherwood
346
Forest reeled under the impact of visiting, dancing, and merrymaking
as friends and neighbors of the Tylers trooped in to pay their respects
to the Beeckmans. During the clear crisp days of January 1848 Margaret
rode horseback over the plantation while her city-bred husband tramped
the woods and fields in a crash program to make himself into an
outdoorsman and hunter. To educate and instruct him in the fine
Virginia art of shooting and riding to hounds, Tyler organized several
large fox hunts which filled the woods and meadows of the planta-
tion with the sounds of horns and dogs. Beeckman tried, but he failed
the test. His absolute inability to hit anything with a rifle was soon
a broad family joke.26
It was a happy month for Margaret, and it was with real re-
luctance that she and John left Sherwood Forest on February 5 for
Washington, the next stop on their honeymoon itinerary. Armed with
letters of introduction from Tyler to various senators and Cabinet
officers, the young couple looked forward to a pleasant visit in the
capital. Julia envied her sisters return there. Much to Alice's dismay,
Gilbert Beeckman preceded the honeymooners to Washington to make
arrangements for their stay. Alice had "seriously encouraged" his at-
tentions and Ms departure drove her to her room for a day of tears
and fasting. "No girl ever courted so hard in this world I really
think she was smitten," said Margaret. Also supplied with letters of
introduction from the former President to prominent political figures
in Washington, Gilbert hastened ahead to the capital to investigate
the possibilities of a patronage appointment as well as to engage rooms
for the oncoming travelers. The best he could manage for John and
Margaret was cramped quarters in the Willard Hotel attic. This was
better than he managed for himself. His Tyler connection was too
tenuous to command patronage attention from the Polk administration,
and by the time the newlyweds arrived on February 7 to claim their
attic room, a crestfallen Gilbert had already departed for New York.
Margaret reached town badly shaken with seasickness by a rough
voyage up Chesapeake Bay and the Potomac. Nevertheless, she lost
no time distributing her cards at the Polks7, Calhouns7, Walkers',
Masons', Buchanans7, John A. Dixes', and at Dolley Madison's. Her
upset stomach was settled by drinking what she vaguely described to
her teetotaling mother as "a wine of some description" Tyler had
recommended that she take in such circumstances. Her health restored,
she spent a few days pleasantly visiting, dining, and gossiping with old
friends. She attended the third Assembly ball of the season. Her arrival
at the ball, she reported,
. . . caused a general commotion among the dancers. Such a distingue couple
couldn't be beat there, that's a fact. Nobody thought of dancing — but every-
body was ogling and running after the bride. "There she is I" was echoed
everywhere in my ears I wore my veil and therefore would not dance
347
except with Robert Tyler who has been here since yesterday and Is staying at
this house . . . this morning I find myself not the least the worse for my
frolic.21
No sooner had Margaret returned to New York In mid-February
than she knew she was pregnant. Within a few weeks she was so un-
comfortably ill she was forced to bed. By May 1848 she could no
longer tolerate the noise and closeness of the city, and with her mother
she moved out to East Hampton for the fresh sea air. While Julia
experienced nothing more serious than "a sleepless humour" when Alex
was on the way, Margaret's venture into motherhood was difficult
throughout. At one point no fewer than three doctors were in attend-
ance. During these troublesome months Beeckman remained at his
office in Xew York and took his meals and lodging at a boardinghouse.
He visited Margaret in East Hampton on week ends. His letters to her
between these visits were filled with a passion and compassion that
helped pull her through a critical period. His gift of a mockingbird
also raised her spirits considerably. Still, she remained generally de-
pressed and out of sorts until the birth of Henry Gardiner Beeckman
on October 20, 1848. This glad release ended Margaret's travail for
only a short time. The baby was weak and sickly and required con-
stant attention during Ms first year. By the time "Harry" had fully
caught hold of life, Margaret worrying and working herself half-sick
over Mm all the wMle, John Beeckman had accidentally shot himself
to death in California, WitMn two years, then, Margaret Gardiner was
bride, mother, and widow. But at least her marriage, brief and tragic
though it was, had been sometMng more than a stock merger.28
Margaret's marriage encouraged Julia to hope that Alice Tyler's
day of joy was also imminent. For a moment in February 1848 it ap-
peared that Gilbert Beeckman would make Julia's fond wish ("I wish
she was married to somebody") come true. It was Mgh time, she
thought, for Alice "to go seriously in search of a husband." Tyler
agreed with his impatient wife. It was embarrassing, he felt, to have
Alice running back and forth to Williamsburg and Richmond pursuing
harmless flirtations when she should be thinking of settling down —
especially when a perfectly good prospect appeared on the scene in
1848 in the person of Edward O'Hara of Williamsburg. He was twenty-
six and eager to marry Alice. Juliana met Mm during her 1848 visit
to Sherwood and found -him "intelligent, well-educated, and pious. In
all respects a most worthy and unexceptional character with an income
between ten and twenty thousand a year and no mistake thoroughly
conversant with the Bible." O'Hara even appeared at Sherwood Forest
on one occasion armed with a diamond ring and a firm proposal of
marriage. Tyler discovered that the young man was "confounded
shrewd" in business affairs and, supported by Julia, urged Alice to
348
marry Mm. But Alice would have none of Mr. O'Hara. Her Independent
attitude left Julia frustrated. "He is ... entirely too good for Alice," she
finally snorted. "Any light laughing fellow suits her, but I perceive Mr.
O*H. is altogether too serious and rational for one of her taste I
fear it will be all to no purpose." ^
The O'Hara interlude,, as Julia feared, came to nought. Alice was
only twenty-one and felt she had "not been a young lady long enough
yet." She certainly did not want to be forced into marriage for the
sake of marriage. She had overcome the adolescent awkwardness of
her White House days, lost weight, and become a tall and attractive
young woman. Rather than follow her father and Julia's advice in such
matters as the O7Hara affair, she preferred to carry on the hopeless
and unrequited flirtation with Gilbert Beecknian. She was still maneu-
vering for Beeckman's attention in 1849 when she met Henry Mande-
ville Denison.30
Denison was a tall, rugged, "very masculine looking" man of
twenty-eight. A native of Wyoming, Pennsylvania, he was in 1849 £^e
popular new Episcopal rector at Bruton Parish in Williamsburg. All
the impressionable young ladies of the parish were soon hopelessly in
love with him and Alice Tyler was no exception. As Julia quickly sized
up the handsome clergyman, Denison was "very social in company and
is ready to enter into the frolics of the wildest of the girls — for he is
altogether a ladies' man." Alice, of course, was wholly "captivated" by
Mm. Soon he was a regular visitor at Sherwood Forest and Alice flirted
with him "pretty freely." Julia thought her chances of landing Denison
fairly slim, but Alice decided she wanted him and with the usual Tyler
fortitude and singleness of purpose she set out to get him. The wedding
took place at Sherwood Forest on July n, i85o.31
Alice's married life, like Margaret's, was to be a series of trag-
edies. The wedding itself took place in an atmosphere of gloom.
Scheduled for June 1850, it had been postponed a month when Tyler's
second daughter, Elizabeth Tyler Waller, died suddenly of the after-
effects of childbirth. Not yet twenty-seven, she left four young children
behind her. When Alice's wedding party finally gathered at Sherwood
Forest in July it comprised but a handful of the immediate family and
the ceremony failed to dissipate the funereal depression that prevailed.
Julia was not at all sure in her own mind that Alice was in love
with Denison. With less than $6000 in savings and a new charge as
Assistant Rector of Christ Church, Brooklyn, at $2000 a year, Denison
was scarcely weighed down with material goods. Julia thought that
a "wealthier match" with Gilbert Beeckman would have been of more
advantage to the bride. Still, she was glad Alice had finally found a
husband and would be leaving Sherwood, for "in whatever humor Alice
was she did not possess real amiability." 32
Whether she was really amiable or not, Alice's departure from
349
home saddened John Tyler. A deeper shadow fell over Sherwood Forest
when it was learned In April 1851 that Alice's first baby, born pre-
maturely In Philadelphia while the Denisons were visiting Robert and
Prlscila, had died after one fitful week of life. Her second baby,
Elizabeth Russel Denison — "Bessy" — born in Louisville in March 1852,
was more fortunate, although Julia thought the child "without any
beauty, looking entirely unlike Alice." But long before little Bessy was
able to do anything about her appearance, Alice herself died in June
1854 from the effects of "bilious colic." Her sudden passing nearly
prostrated Tyler. Indeed , the sudden and unexpected deaths of three
of Ms grown daughters within seven years (Mary in 1847, Elizabeth in
1850, and Alice in 1854) produced a fatalistic observation: "The ills
of life are numerous enough without our dwelling on them too much.
What best becomes us is to rest in the conviction that 'whatever is is
right.' Altho my loss of three dear children has fallen in each instance
heavily upon me, yet I am thankful to an over-ruling Providence for
leaving me a larger share than falls to the general lot."33
Death came so quickly and with such frequency in the 18403
and 18503 that Americans of all classes had no choice but to learn to
live with it philosophically. Yet with all the sorrow he bore, John
Tyler's share of happiness was indeed much larger than that of the
general lot of mankind. Although three of his daughters had died by
1854, a happy and healthy new family was growing around him.
Sherwood Forest was a carefree, prosperous plantation. The house
rang with the laughter of children and the sound of music, dancing, and
entertaining. Interesting visitors and old friends stopped by whenever
they were in Charles City, and these callers provided Julia numerous
excuses for entertaining her neighbors with the elaborate balls and
dinner parties for which she gained such well-deserved local fame.34
These, then, were good years for John Tyler. He was happy and
his wife was happy. After she had borne him six of their seven chil-
dren, he still referred to Julia as his "bride," and on one public oc-
casion in 1858 he asked his embarrassed and delighted spouse "to bear
testimony that the honeymoon has not passed with us." During his
leisure moments nothing pleased Tyler more than to be asked to&play
his violin for his guests, for the dances of the young people, and for
the children of the plantation. He was particularly proficient in playing
"Washington's March," "Believe Me, If AH Those Endearing Young
Charms," and "Home Sweet Home." In 1848 Alexander presented him
a new violin and he practiced regularly upon it, "night after night."
His repertoire grew steadily. Often Julia sang to his accompaniment or
joined him with her guitar in a string duet. The violin was a boyhood
interest Tyler took up again with enthusiasm during his years at
Sherwood Forest. "He plays with the same taste that he does every-
350
tiling else?" said Julia. "It is better than Ms dancing of the Polka/'
Occasionally a family orchestra (Julia called it an "Ethiopian band")
was formed to provide music for the dances at Sherwood Forest — Tyler
on violin, son-in-law William Waller on banjo, Jula on guitar, and
young Tazewell Tyler on bones. Alice, Belle Waller (William Waller's
sister). Julia, and Margaret (if she happened to be visiting) often con-
stituted themselves an all-girl choir and entertained their guests and them-
selves with Xegro melodies, the Ethiopian band plunking happily away
behind them. "The President is in good health, and cheerful} which is es-
sential to good health," Juliana wrote of him in 1855. "He fiddles away
every evening for the little children black and white to dance on the
Piazza and seems to enjoy it as much as the children. I never saw a hap-
pier temperament than he possesses." 35
The nearby woods were thick with deer, and Tyler shot venison
for the table all winter. Ducks from the river added variety to the
family diet and gave the former President countless opportunities to
demonstrate himself an excellent marksman. Fox-hunting also provided
good sport for the planters in the neighborhood and produced an oc-
casional fur for Julia. Tyler enjoyed the chase immensely, and when
any of the Gardiners, Tylers, or Beeckmans were visiting he arranged
a hunt. The fox-hunting business, however, could be as gastronomic as
it was athletic. As Julia explained its krger implications in 1846:
Yesterday the President joined the huntsmen around us In their sports and
then made the party and their hounds come home and dine them for the
wMch we were previously prepared and Catherine [Wing] dished us an ele-
gant dinner I am sure of Maccaroni [sic~] soup, Roast Turkey, Stew Venison,
bacon and cold roast beef, celery, parsnips, Sweet and Irish potatoes — for
dessert Transparent pudding, mince pie, apple tart, Damson tart, soft custard
and preserves. Some of the company I presume never saw so fine a looking
table in their lives before and it will be in consequence quite an era in their
lives. A Fox was the result of their hunt.36
Julia always set a fine table. One never knew who would be drop-
ping in for lunch or dinner. Tyler's birthday on March 29 called for
something special, and Julia usually humored Ms sweet tooth with
his favorite dessert — "pancakes, sweetmeats and ice cream." Good
French wines also graced the table at Sherwood Forest. Of course,
Julia had her disappointments — a December 1847 dinner party was in
this category:
My own dinner was a failure in consequence of a pouring rain all day. My
plum pound cake with its bunch of white roses and evergreens went for
naught. Catherine sat up all night preparing the lemon puddings and pastries
and I tired myself to death over pigs feet jelly until I got it as clear as crystal.
. . . My intended guests did not give up the hope of its clearing away until the
351
eleventh tour when I received apologies. I however carried off the dinner and
Mr. Jones, Mr. Tyler, Alice and myself sat down with formality and in
costume while the lamp was lit in the drawing rooms and coffee handed
around when we retired.37
Except on special occasions, life at Sherwood Forest was not par-
ticularly formal. Tyler Insisted, however, that Ms wife be "always
dressed proper for company." In April 1851, for example, Julia learned
that the distinguished British diplomat Sir Henry Lytton Bulwer and
Lady Bulwer were traveling through the county en route from Wash-
ington to Charleston. The Mistress of Sherwood immediately "dressed
for company and [put] the rooms In order with a large bouquet of
splendid tulips setting off the parlor. I presume they will not make their
appearance but it is more agreeable not to be taken by surprise."
Julia needed little urging about her dress. It was her intention "to keep
nicely , very nicely dressed all the while," and she missed few opportuni-
ties to journey to Richmond to add to her considerable wardrobe. Like
most women, Julia loved clothes, the more expensive the better.
But whether an occasion was formal or informal, she insisted on
good manners in her home at all times. She became extremely annoyed
when the basic civilities were not observed. Letitia Tyler Semple de-
lighted in needling Julia in this respect. Returning from church one
Sunday morning, Julia found Semple and Ms wife awaiting her in the
parlor. "She was seated at one extremity of the room as we entered and
did not rise to meet me, or rather us, until I walked quite up to her
chair!" Julia expostulated. "Her ways until she went away this morning
were what you would determine hateful [although] to her father she
she was exceedingly coaxing." 3S
These moods passed quickly. There was so much genuine happiness
and mutual respect within the family that the continuing Julia-Letitia
feud never dominated the situation. And if there was tension with Letitia
and with Alice (before her marriage to Denison), there was never any
between Julia and young Tazewell. On the contrary, Julia loved Taz as
though he were her own child. As he grew into young manhood (he was
twenty in 1850), Julia delighted in teasing Mm about Ms various young
lady friends, particularly the "pretty girl with a snug fortune of thirty
thousand" who lived over near Williamsburg. The frequent balls at
Sherwood Forest and at the other plantations along the river enabled
Taz to pursue Ms interest in girls with considerable ease, and Julia
followed the ups and downs of his romantic career with much encourage-
ment and good advice.
When the snow lay deep upon the ground, clogging the dirt roads to
Williamsburg and Richmond, the Sherwood Foresters were confined to
more localized social activities. Nearby families joined the Tylers for
winter sports, the neighbors visiting back and forth in their canoe
sleighs:
352
Who should drive up in a canoe sure enough but the Douthats and Seldens
[Julia wrote Margaret] It was quite too funny for description. They
were drawn by their carriage horses and they sat upon a thick carpet in
Indian file in a long narrow canoe presenting as comfortable as curious an
effect. It was a merry visit and they described to us the variety of their
Journey which consisted in floating in the most charming manner through all
the runs that came by necessity in their way. . . . They took cake and wine
and left full of spirits.39
Julia lacked nothing. The natural isolation of the plantation was
easily overcome. The family experienced no difficulty entertaining them-
selves when special events were not scheduled. Thus a winter's evening
Eke that of February u, 1853, found Margaret visiting the plantation
and the family engaged in experiments in levitation, magnetic power,
and the conjuring up of spirits from the great beyond. On this particular
instance, as Margaret reported tlie phenomenon to her spiritualist-
inclined mother, Julia
assembled some four of the negroes and seated them around a table in the
sitting room. They sat for an hour without effect and finally a sewing woman
[Mrs. Adams] of Julia's placed her hand also upon it. In about ten minutes
the table began to move — and [then] made the circumference of the room —
with the combined influence of them ali What was singular, it would not move
for [Mrs. Adams] alone nor for all the rest without her. Instead of being
terrified, I was very glad I witnessed what is without doubt the magnetic
influence of the body — and not supernatural agency. As for the spirits
having anything to do with the matter, we called upon them in vain. The
more we called the more they would not come.40
It was much easier to raise a band of serenaders and revelers at
Sherwood than the spirits of the departed. When Governor John B. Floyd
and his wife visited the plantation in May 1851 the household was
awakened at 2 A.M. by a wagonload of amateur musicians who came to
serenade the governor and the Tylers. Musical instruments of all sorts
blasted away with "Hail Columbia" and "Love Not," Tyler got up,
called for light, and invited the noisy group indoors. "You know public
men like manifestations of every sort," Julia explained to her mother.
"The serenade was chiefly for us, but we ascribed it to the Governor . . .
and he was greatly pleased. There was a violin and a guitar in the
party and they sang after they entered the dining room, and after they
had rested a little and conversed with the President and taken a good
drink all around, they departed sending up three loud huzzas accom-
panied by a bugle blast as they drove off." There were few dull moments
at Sherwood Forest. In fact, so many visitors came that it was a rare and
welcome occasion when the family actually bad the house to themselves.
"I am luxuriating in a state of repose/' Julia confessed to her mother
in May 1852. "No visitor is here and I am breathing freely." 41
In addition, Margaret and her mother kept Julia well supplied with
353
New York gossip so detailed in nature that it was the next best thing
to being in the city. Such juicy tidbits as the Van Ness scandal (it was
widely rumored that the old General had secretly had a young wife) ;
the latest gaucheries of the Astor clan; the romantic death of Robert
Mott, who "committed suicide by choking himself with a rope on his
wife's bier"; and the social machinations of their Lafayette Place neigh-
bors ("We stand upon our dignity and think it bad policy to be intimate
with, anyone," said Margaret. "It is the only way for us!") kept Julia
in touch with the fashionable world. Frequently, however , she demanded
more details of the various sins of omission and commission of the elite
set in the city, and Margaret on more than one occasion had to apologize
that she could not make her letters more "entertaining" in this regard
because she was forced to be so prudent. "I can never take a pen in hand
that my ears are not assailed from every quarter with 'Take care,
Margaret, what do you intend publishing now!' " ^
Detailed descriptions of the cultural events New York provided
were also dispatched to Sherwood Forest, supplementing for Julia the
newspaper reports of these activities and alerting her to what might be
worth seeing and hearing when the attraction finally reached Richmond.
The Gardiners especially urged Julia and John Tyler to see Tom Thumb
when he appeared in Richmond in 1847. "He is the greatest curiosity in
the world and no mistake/' Juliana wrote. There was even some talk
within the family of buying Tom Thumb's coach as a souvenir, but
Juliana thought that would be going too far. The coach was simply not
fashionable enough. Opinion in these matters was not always unanimous.
Phoebe, for instance, found Barnum's money-making freak a revolting
little man, a disgust engendered when the arrogant midget attempted on
one occasion to seize and kiss her. Weighing the reported merits and
demerits of the Tom Thumb exhibit, Julia said flatly that she would not
go to Richmond or anywhere else to see such a nauseating creature.
When Tyler was in Richmond in April 1847 buying summer supplies
and had an opportunity one evening to see Tom Thumb, he too passed
it up. Both Tyler and Julia thought it much more a curiosity that Mrs.
John Selden of Westover had just given birth to her seventeenth child
and was "still a very handsome woman." It was certainly a feat none of
P. T. Barnum's freaks could match.43
When Jenny Lind came to Richmond to sing in December 1850
Julia and the President joined their James River neighbors in a trip to
town to hear the celebrated Swedish Nightingale perform. Half the fun
of going to Richmond for such events was the delight in seeing friends
and neighbors aboard the riverboat and exchanging with them the news
and gossip of the day. It was an opportunity for the planter families
along the James, the "upper ten" as Tyler called them (the Harrisons,
Tylers, Carters, Seldens, Douthats, et aL), to mingle casually and in-
formally. The Jenny Lind excursion and others Eke it filled an im-
354
portant social purpose. Julia was disappointed with the concert, al-
though she agreed with Margaret that the "angelic" soprano was "an
Interesting looking creation75 even though her singing was "not exactly
so melodious as we would expect from an angel." 44
More enjoyable for Julia and the President was a trip to Richmond
In February 1850 with Margaret and Juliana (then visiting at Sher-
wood) to be present at the ceremonies attending the laying of the
cornerstone of the Washington Memorial and the great ball given by
Governor Floyd to honor visiting President Zachary Taylor. Julia was
happy to note that she still attracted much attention In such distin-
guished political company, and that there was a "great deal more Interest
shown to see 'Mrs. Tyler* than Gen. Taylor" at the ball. Indeed, the
Gardiners found Old Zach wholly unimpressive. He was, said Margaret,
an
indifferent specimen of the Lord of Creation. He is a short, thick-set man
looking neither like the President of a great nation nor a military hero tho*
he bears both honors and the last not undeservedly. If he had rested at that
climax, history would have accorded him an unmodified distinction. Now the
man-past Is forgotten in the man-present, and If the party which elected Mm
confessed themselves mortified and disappointed at Ms want of political tact
. . . the opposite one will have little conscience I fear in yielding Mm to the
sacrifice. He has not die happy faculty of extemporaneous speech making. . . .
The Gardiners and Tylers would take Increasing comfort in the years
ahead in the knowledge that in comparison with the likes of Taylor,
Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan, the accomplishments of President Tyler
looked impressive indeed.45
JuMa never felt plantation-bound. She frequently accompanied
Tyler on his speaking engagements around Virginia and to Baltimore
and Philadelphia. No summer passed that she and her husband did not
visit New York, East Hampton, Pittsfield, Saratoga, Newport, or the
Virginia springs for at least a month at a time. She enjoyed the con-
tinuing deference paid her during these frequent public exposures. Her
impact at Saratoga in 1847 was fairly typical. As David Lyon reported
it:
I do not believe there has been any party here this season so much noticed as
ours. Julia in particular on whom all eyes are centered and expressions of
admiration are heard from every quarter. Everyone on our trip wanted to see
Mrs. Tyler — she appeared to elicit universal admiration — and respect — Old
John they said they were not so anxious to see.
Similarly, at a Richmond dinner party in 1849 Julia was toasted as "The
Wife of Ex-President Tyler: the handsomest woman in the world"
("Was that not a stretcher?" she laughed) ; and at Charlottesvllle in
June 1850 she was pleased that she and the former President "were the
lions and treated accordingly." Her appearance was certainly a great
355
deal more noticed than Ms pedestrian speech to the combined literary
societies of the University of Virginia.46
Preparations for her summer jaunts always involved heavy outlays
for the proper clothes in Richmond and New York. Not infrequently
these expenditures would exceed $500. In order to pay her clothing bills,
Tyler,, invariably cash poor between crops, would have to borrow the
money from Alexander, or ask Alexander to go security for him on a note
at a New York bank. "We have been out shopping" he wrote Alexander
in 1849 from Richmond in semi-despair, "and I need not add the
results." Julia could spend one hundred acres of wheat on a single
costume and never bat an eye. To hold the summer-vacation cost line
to something halfway reasonable, Tyler insisted that they avoid the
posh hotels at the various spas and take rooms at the less expensive
private boardinghouses in the area. At Mrs. Sylvia S. Rogers' house in
Saratoga, for instance, the rents were relatively modest — four dolkrs a
week for each adult, two dollars for each child and body servant, and
three dollars for the coachman. The Tylers and the Gardiners occupied
such accommodations at Saratoga and Pittsfield in 1849-1 85 i.47
The only thing that could keep Julia at all confined to the planta-
tion and temporarily out of the social swim was advanced pregnancy and
cMldbearing, and even this transitory inconvenience had the advantage
of bringing Juliana and Margaret to Sherwood Forest for long and
pleasant visits. None of her seven accouchements was accomplished
without the aid of her sister or her mother. These creative experiences
rarely slowed her down for more than a few months at a time, however,
or interrupted planned excursions to New York or various fashionable
spas.
Gardie and Alex were only the beginning of a krge family. They
were healthy, normal boys who cut teeth painfully, had flu, measles,
chickenpox, and whooping cough, fell out of trees, and fought over their
toys. Of the two, Alex was the more aggressive in spite of the fact that
he had been baptized in genuine River Jordan water supplied Tyler by
Navy Lieutenant Dominick Lynch. "You never saw such fights as he
has with Gardie who takes away all his playthings and won't permit
Mm to have a single thing/7 said Julia. "He kicks and squeals while I
make Gardie give Mm up one or two." By December 1850 she had de-
cided to employ a young French maid to ride herd on them and intro-
duce them to the civilizing tendencies of the French language.48
Julia loved her rowdy little boys, but she desperately wanted a
daughter. Thus, when Julia Gardiner Tyler (she was usually called
"Julie") was born at Sherwood Forest on December 25, 1849, Julia was
overjoyed at the gift from St. Nicholas. Margaret and Juliana were on
hand as usual to help out. After some hesitation Margaret pronounced
Julie a beautiful baby with the possible exception of her "decided Tyler
356
nose. I hope that organ will rest a while in its maturity, for Its promi-
nence Is quite amusing." Fortunately 3 nature arrested the growth of
the offending proboscis, and within a few months Julia was predicting
that her daughter would become "the greatest belle of her day I am
making very great calculations upon her." The birth of Julie was some-
what more difficult for Julia than those of her sons, and It was more than
six weeks before she was again up and around. In the meantime, Gardie
and Alex adjusted quickly to their little sister's presence and, said
Margaret? "having fallen from their high estate upon Mama's knee by
the recent innovation are making all haste to manhood." 49
By the time Lachlan Tyler was born on December g, 1851, Julia
was beginning to weary of her biennial contribution to America's popula-
tion explosion. Lachlan (Julia omitted the "Me") was her most difficult
pregnancy. This fact did not, however, prevent a grueling shopping trip
to Richmond in July 1851, from which "she returned perfectly foundered
in all her limbs so that she has fairly taken to her bed," or a jaunt to
Saratoga in August. But a planned visit to Niagara Falls with Tyler,
Margaret, and David Lyon In September proved quite beyond her
strength, and she remained in New York with her mother and her
children. The annual Northern trip had the advantage of removing the
children from the mosquito, flea, tick, and fever season on the James
and for this reason it was invariably undertaken, whatever the incon-
venience. "The fleas are troublesome to Julie and the ticks to Gardie
who will wander everywhere Ms Father goes," Julia explained. "If one
flea finds its way to Julie before you know it she is spotted in many
places and suffering greatly." While the children returned to Sherwood
Forest in 1851 unmarked by insects, Julia reached the plantation badly
fatigued and unusually apprehensive about her coming ordeal. She
briefly considered the use of drugs or whiskey to ease her through the
experience. This Idea was sharply overruled by her friends and relatives.
The puerperal advice she received from Mary Conger on the point was
typical:
I do really feel sorry for you for you seem to be so ill beforehand which is
certainly ungrateful work, as it does no good to anybody. I fear you do not
take exercise enough in your Southern mode of life. I advise you to resume
your old horseback [riding] habits. You were so healthy as a girl that you
ought to be able to have children with little or no suffering besides the actual
labor which is not to be got rid of anyhow. I have little faith in clouding
one's perceptions by the use of any drug . . , for myself I should have strong
objections to entering eternity drunk, and in the character of a coward fleeing
from the battle he was appointed to fight. I would sooner try all lawful means
of strengthening mind and body to endure and conquer.50
Julia endured and she conquered. Within a few days of Lachlan's
appearance at a husky nine and a half pounds, the delighted father could
357
assure Henry Curtis that Julia was out of danger. Although she was
"fatigued and overdone by nursing our little boy," all was well with her.
"You perceive/' Tyler added,
that we are raising up quite a large family, 3 boys and one girl and all fine
children in intellect and mechanism. The girl ... is as bright as her mother
and is already the idolized of the Household. The boys by a sort of instinct,
look upon her as one claiming their especial regard and in their conduct to-
wards her manifest the deepest affection. Thus it is that my old age is en-
livened by the scenes of my youth — and these precious buds and blossoms
almost persuade me that the springtime of life is still surrounding me.51
John Tyler was sixty-one when Lachlan was born — still in the
"springtime of life." His love for Julia and for his new "buds and blos-
soms" grew and deepened through the years and kept him young in heart
and spirit. Thus Edmund Ruffin, Virginia's "celebrated agriculturist,"
could say of Tyler's second family during his March 1854 visit to Sher-
wood that "as a lot they would bear off the premium of any agricultural
show." To which a gentleman present added: "With their mother at
their head there would be no question about it!" Julia and John Tyler,
in spite of the great age difference between them, were a happy and de-
voted couple. Ruffin remarked on this shortly after leaving the planta-
tion:
The mother of five living children, she [Julia] still looks as blooming and
fresh as a girl of 20, and indeed I should not have guessed her to be older, if
meeting her without knowing who she was. There was nothing in their man-
ner to each other to indicate the relation of husband and wife. A stranger
might have as soon supposed them to be father and daughter. But without
any of the usual feeling (whether of real or pretended love) in such cases of
disproportionate age, she really seemed to be her husband's devoted admirer,
and a contented and happy wife.52
Only a few outsiders saw the John Tyler who rode his plantation,
played his fiddle, struggled with his bank balance, smoked his cigars,
sipped his wines, bounced his babies, teased his wife, and treated the
family to poetry of his own composition. Julia finally made him give up
the smelly black cigars for a pipe^ but she could not still his iambic pen.
Phoebe often received his poetic outpourings to cheer her dreary exist-
ence on Shelter Island, and after the Gardiners moved from Lafayette
Place to Staten Island in 1852 Margaret was the subject and recipient
of a piece titled "Margaret of the Isle" which began:
The springtime has its violets,
The summer has its rose;
The autumn has its varied tints,
But winter has its snows —
But springtime's violet, summer's rose
Are not so sweet to see,
358
Or autumn's tints or winter's snows
So bright — so pure is she;
As Margaret of the lovely Isle
That is girt in by the sea 53
Difficult as Lachlan's arrival had been, Julia was content to bear
Tyler's children. He derived so much pleasure from them and when he
was happy she was too. Yet by the time her fifth child, Lyon Gardiner
Tyler, was born on August 24, 1853, Juliana Gardiner was beginning to
belabor her daughter with the notion that there was something rather
indecent about families so large. She, of course, had had four children
of her own in a space of six years. So Julia's five in nine years was
scarcely a family frequency record. Still, when Julia informed Margaret
in May 1853 of her new "predicament," she did so with the suggestion
that Margaret break the glad tidings to her mother gently. "Her nerves
might be too much shaken if taken by surprise," said Julia. Lyon
Gardiner Tyler was destined to become the family biographer, a pro-
ductive historian, and the distinguished president for many years of
William and Mary College. But his arrival on the scene in August 1853
was for Julia an inconvenience. Mainly, it deprived her of her usual and
much anticipated summer escape to Saratoga and East Hampton. For a
moment she indulged in the luxury of feeling sorry for herself, some-
thing she rarely did. "I have it all to bear/7 she announced stoically,
"[but] you may depend upon it I shall encourage no other state of
mind than cheerfulness." She would, she said, "make the best of it."
The arrival of another baby did have one peripheral advantage: it per-
mitted Julia to break the routine of home and child management and
take to her bed and rest. "I don't expect to get any rest or repose myself
in mind or body until I am flat on my back," she had told her mother a
month before "Lome's" birth. Happily, she came through the ordeal
well. "She has been a patient sufferer," Juliana reported. With five
children now at Sherwood Forest, Tyler could proudly boast that he
was "not likely to let the [family] name become extinct." 54
Nevertheless, a family of five small children (later seven) made the
annual pilgrimage to the North increasingly difficult for John Tyler and
Julia to arrange. The sheer logistics of transporting so large a brood to
East Hampton, Saratoga, or even to White Sulphur Springs was too much
of a task despite the aid of several nurses and body servants. It was
clear by 1853 that other summer plans would have to be made if the
insect-and-fever season at Sherwood Forest was to be escaped.
So it was that Tyler began negotiating for the rental of a summer
place at Old Point Comfort, Virginia. In October 1853 the arrangements
were well advanced. Several years later, in 1858, Julia used $10,000 of
her own money to buy a property at Hampton, Virginia, near Old Point
Comfort, known in the family as "Villa Margaret." Here the family
summered during the last years before the Civil War. The children loved
359
the spot; its long wide beaches and ocean breezes were ideal. Julia and
the President enjoyed the full social life that centered on nearby Fortress
Monroe. Old Point Comfort thus became the delightful answer to the
summer-vacation problem. It was near enough Sherwood Forest to per-
mit Tyler to keep an eye on his fields, and close enough to the officers
stationed at the Fortress to permit Julia to dance, flirt, and gossip.
Juliana and Margaret approved the new summer-vacation arrangement
wholeheartedly although they were not quite so impressed with the gal-
lant West Pointers at the Fortress as was Julia. "Poor matches but the
most fascinating of men," said Juliana of them. Nevertheless, she and
Margaret visited the Tylers at Old Point Comfort during the summers
of 1853-1856. As Juliana described the gala society there in July 1855:
There was no dearth of gentlemen at Old Point but I don't know who they
all were. ... I had not the means of ascertaining anything about their social
position except those belonging to this state The ladies however found
plenty to dance with which is more than they could do last season at Sara-
toga. I think for social enjoyment Old Point for the best, but for display
Saratoga, as there is less dress. J[ulia] received with the P [resident] every
attention at Old Point. A salute was fired and all the officers called together
to pay their respects and were in turn presented to Julia. She was a decided
belle . . . and all pronounced her unchanged in appearance.
For Julia it was almost the recapture of her honeymoon.55
360
AND THE PURSUIT OF PROPERTY
Maybe our Argonauts, returned laden with the golden
fleece, will be disposed to invest some of their riches
on the banks of the Ohio. At any rate the land must
become more valuable if gold becomes more abun-
dant.
— ALEXANDER GARDINER, JUNE 1849
Sherwood Forest was an expensive plantation to maintain and scarcely
a harvest season passed that John Tyler did not wish that he were a
wealthy man. He wanted his young wife and growing family to have
every luxury money could buy. For James River wheat planters, ready
cash was always a scarce commodity, and Tyler spent most of his
retirement years borrowing from one bank to pay notes due at another,
He never missed a payment due, nor was he ever denied a loan. Never-
theless, he had many close calls. Had it not been for the Gardiners,
particularly Alexander, financial embarrassment might well have over-
taken him on several occasions. As he explained his predicament to
Alexander on one occasion in 1849, "In a community so small as this,
where every man's business is known to every other, I do not like it to
appear that I substitute one note for another." This was, however, the
way he was forced to operate, and although the Gardiners7 role in his
fiscal affairs was usually discreet to the point of secrecy, their function
was the vital one. They served as co-signers and guarantors of his
numerous notes and as his outright creditors. John Tyler, in sum, lived
in a swirling sea of notes paid, notes negotiated, and notes due, and it
was always a struggle for him to keep his chin above water. It was this
unhappy way of fiscal life that caused him to get involved in a coal-and-
timber speculation with Alexander Gardiner in Union County, Ken-
tucky, a scheme which on the surface and at the outset had all the ear-
marks of get-rich-quick.1
Tyler had purchased the Kentucky land in the late 18305. It
amounted to three patents of 400 to 450 acres each, first issued to
Lieutenant Colonel Holt Richardson of Virginia for his Revolutionary
War services. From Richardson it had passed first into the hands of
Patrick Hendren, and then from Hendren to the trustees of his estate,
who offered it for sale to meet Hendren's debts. For a depression-level
price he never disclosed, Tyler bought the property as a speculation,
fought off several suits by disappointed Hendren creditors to attach the
land, and subsequently rented it to two local farmers for a nominal
annual fee of $100 pending a decision on what to do with it. Located
about three miles due west of the small settlement of Caseyville, the plot
fronted a mile and a quarter on the Ohio River. In July 1839 Tyler
went to Caseyville to view his purchase and found it remote, heavily
timbered, unsurveyed and unfenced. Save for two rude dwellings which
stood in a small clearing and some fifty acres his tenants had cleared for
farming, the property was an isolated jungle. Disappointed with the
rugged appearance of the land, he put it up for sale at three dollars an
acre and appointed Samuel Casey, a local realtor and jack-of-all-trades,
his agent in the matter. There were no takers at this or any price. The
panic and depression of 1837 had dried up all venture capital.2
Faced with a great need for cash during the months immediately
following his departure from the White House, Tyler renewed his efforts
to sell the Caseyville land. To effect this he appointed Captain John W.
Russell his new agent. Russell was a well-known Ohio River snagboat
operator and had served as the President's Superintendent of River Im-
provements in the West. His appointment as Tyler's realtor followed
hard on the heels of his report to Sherwood Forest in June 1845 that
coal of high quality had been discovered near the Tyler property line
and was being mined commercially in the area. Ordered by Tyler to
investigate this promising development further, Russell soon reported
the likelihood of coal on the former President's land as well. Thus en-
couraged, Tyler promptly raised his asking price from three to five
dollars an acre and urged Russell to find a buyer. At about the same
time, in October 1845, in desperate need of cash he borrowed $2000
from Corcoran and Riggs, the Washington bankers. He secured this
loan with a contract that gave the bank the option of calling the note
when due or taking instead a deed to a quarter-interest in the coal lands.
Meanwhile, he instructed his old friend John Lorimer Graham to look
into the possibility of surveying the land and forming a joint stock com-
pany to exploit it. When Graham announced that the prospects at Casey-
ville would be well worth further analysis, Tyler decided to risk $200
in a detailed mineral survey. In this decision he was influenced by
Alexander's optimistic prediction that "great profit" was to be made in
the enterprise.3
362
While Tyler was making preliminary arrangements to have the real
worth of the property assessed, Russell resigned as his agent to run for
the Kentucky state senate. In so doing he turned Tyler's affairs over to
two "young and poor, but strictly honest" Frankfort lawyers, Henry
Tilford and R. G. Samuels. Tyler informed his new agents in April 1846
that while he still wanted to sell the land aat a fair price," he had
"friends in New York" who would share in any reasonable plan to ex-
ploit the coal deposits. He made it clear to his new agents that it was
their main responsibility to keep him "beyond the reach of fraudulent
speculation." With this expression of the ex-President's intentions, Til-
ford and Samuels journeyed from Frankfort to Casey ville to look at
the property. Their subsequent report pegged the value of the land at
not more than five to eight dollars an acre and concluded that while
there was indeed high-quality coal present, it was probably not in
enough quantity to make mining it feasible. They did, however, recom-
mend proceeding with a thorough exploration of the deposit on the off-
chance that it might add "several thousand dollars" to the value of the
land. This, of course, Tyler had already decided to do.4
The report of the coal survey undertaken by Thomas Wilson, a
former English coalminer, led John Tyler to believe that his treasure
ship had finally come in. Indeed, Corcoran and Riggs were so enthusias-
tic that they promptly exercised the option on their Tyler note and be-
came one-quarter owners of the property. This optimism was occasioned
by Wilson's survey analysis of October 1846 which announced the dis-
covery of a three- foot seam of top-quality cannel coal, "all free from
Sulpher [sic] . . . superior to any coal we have in this part of the country
. . . superior to any coal for Grates I have ever seen tried." With these
glad tidings, Tilford and Samuels informed Tyler they were unwilling
to sell his land "even at $10 per acre." His coal deposit, they said, was
"inexhaustible." They recommended an immediate investment of five or
six thousand dollars to open a shaft and to build a spur railroad to the
river which lay two miles distant. "Our idea would be to keep an ex-
tensive coal yard for Steamboats and woodyard also and let it be known
as cCapt. Russell's7, then a Steamboat would scarcely ever pass, he
being so very popular on the river " Russell himself verified Wilson's
encouraging report and guessed that Tyler's superior cannel coal would
be worth eight to ten cents a bushel at the riverbank. He promised that
he would use it himself and would also "persuade all of my acquaint-
ances" on the river to buy exclusively at Tyler's coalyard. He noted
further that Tilford and Samuels themselves had expressed an eagerness
to work the mine on shares and he strongly urged such an arrangement.5
Confronted with the prospect of a great and lucrative coal opera-
tion that would solve his financial problems for life, Tyler sounded out
Alexander in New York to ascertain his view of an initial six-thousand-
dollar investment in opening a mine shaft. He also suggested a Tyler-
Gardiner partnership to develop the coal land and urged Alexander to
363
go to Union County and see for himself the great riches that awaited
them both there. Although Julia assured her brother, the shrewdest
businessman in the family, that "the President thinks this is a fine
chance for you" Alexander backed politely away from the deal. He
thought that if a substantial amount of stock in a development com-
pany could be sold to knowledgeable people on the scene, particularly
optimistic souls like Russell, Samuels, and Tilford, it might be worth a
gamble. Otherwise, he counseled extreme caution. The pressure of his
clerkship and other affairs did not permit him, he said, an exploratory
trip to Caseyville.
Instead, Tyler's brother-in-law, Dr. N. M. Miller of Columbus,
Ohio, was asked to visit the property in December 1846 for a firsthand
evaluation of its potential. Miller soon informed Sherwood Forest that a
Memphis group headed by a Colonel David Morrison was interested in
buying the land, although at a price well below the value Tilford,
Samuels, and Russell had all placed upon it. This deflationary news
aroused Tyler's suspicions, especially since Miller also noted in his
letter that the new Farnuni Iron Works had been established on the
Cumberland River, and that "Caseyville is the best point to get their
coal." The President's enthusiasm for the coal business dipped appreci-
ably a few days later when Captain Russell turned down Tyler's offer
of stock in a projected mining company on the grounds that he had just
tied up all his available cash in a Frankfort tavern venture. Russell had
belatedly discovered, he explained, that of Tyler's fourteen hundred
acres, only fifty evidenced the presence of coal. When Alexander advised
the sale of the land without deeper involvement and at the best price
offered, Tyler accepted the suggestion without dissent. So discouraged
had he suddenly become that he turned down a proposition offering him
a seemingly low $2000 for every acre of coal dug on his land. This, as it
turned out, he should have accepted.6
In February of 1847 Tilford and Samuels informed Tyler that they
were, as instructed, drawing a contract to sell the land for $12,000.
The potential buyer was reputed to be a company comprised of Messrs.
Samuel Page, David Morrison, and Robert Winston. Tyler was delighted
to have the matter so profitably disposed of, and he immediately agreed
to the bargain. Actually, the contract, signed on August 16, 1847,
showed Robert P. Winston, a Caseyville merchant, as sole purchaser.
Before Tyler learned of this change, he was notified privately that the
"company" to which he was selling his land did not in fact exist; that
Winston alone was the buyer; and that Winston had never seen $12,000
in his life and never would. "Now my dear fellow I would advise this,"
wrote his friend Joseph L. Watkins from his Tylerite patronage job at
the Memphis Navy Yard, "kick the bargain already made to hell, for I
begin to suspect the buyers are men of straw I think there is now
some disposition to swindle you." With justifiable alarm, Tyler confessed
364
to Alexander: "I know the property to be valuable and I am almost
persuaded that a fraudulent contract has been entered into to cheat me
out of It."
Watkins' suspicions notwithstanding, the contract was not actually
fraudulent. Robert Winston was simply financially incompetent to exe-
cute it. While discovering this sad fact for himself, Winston poured at
least $3000 into a dauntless attempt to get a mine into operation. In
this successful activity he discovered several new coal veins, which
raised from fifty to three hundred the estimated coal acreage on the
Tyler property. Meanwhile, he undertook to sell shares locally in Ms
project in an attempt to meet the first of the three annual payments
of $4000 due to Tyler on February 10, 1848. This little stockbroking
effort failed completely. In September 1847 he therefore persuaded
Samuel L. Casey to assume the burden of tie Tyler contract. When,
two months later, it became apparent that Casey could not make the
first payment to Tyler either, Winston evidenced a willingness to cancel
the contract altogether on repayment of the unwisely ventured $3000
capital investment he had put into the mine and property.7
Rather than begin tedious litigation at such distance, Tyler reluc-
tantly decided to pay Robert Winston the $3000 morally due him, cancel
the contract, and start over from the beginning. While he felt that he
had been put upon by sharp Kentucky speculators, he became con-
vinced once again that he could still make a fortune at Caseyville.
Winston's discovery of additional veins brought a new flush of en-
thusiasm, a dream of great riches, which Tyler undertook to transmit
to Alexander Gardiner. Privately, Alexander remained dubious about
the entire speculation. But to accommodate his eager brother-in-law
he became Tyler's active partner in the venture in November 1847. He
purchased half interest in the President's share (Corcoran and Riggs
still held their quarter) for $6000. He also agreed to put up half of
the reimbursement to be paid Winston for his capital improvements.
He did this, as Tyler described it, in the "belief that the property might
be rendered available in some form at once and that at the earliest
period the mines should be put into operation." With Alexander as his
partner, Tyler explained to Corcoran and Riggs that the future would
bring them all great profits. "So far as my own interests are in-
volved . . . you will see in all I have done security and not specula-
tion." Alexander was never convinced. As he later confessed to Tyler,
"My own chief inducement in becoming interested in the property was
to preserve your interest from sacrifice." Nevertheless, he agreed to ac-
company Tyler to Caseyville in November 1847 to survey the situation
at first hand and see what might be made of the operation,8
As a businessman Alexander Gardiner was no fool. He entered
into the Caseyville speculation with his eyes open. He combined a flair
for speculation with hard-headed business sense. In supervising the col-
365
lection of Gardiner rentals in New York, for example, he allowed no
feeling of sympathy to interfere with his duty. Judgments for back rent
were quickly and regularly filed in the courts, and for the tenant it was
either pay up in full and on time or get out on the street. Repairs and
maintenance on the properties were held to a bare minimum, and then
undertaken only under pressure from the Health Warden. Tenants
were expected to effect their own repairs and improvements. That the
downtown Gardiner properties were already well on their way toward
slumhood was of no concern to him. If his mother complained that
her "head requires everything of a business nature to be made plain,"
Alexander had no such problem. For him success in business boiled
down to a simple philosophy — buy cheap and sell dear. And if he
could bleed oratorically for the poor and the downtrodden of New York
City at a Tammany rally, he never permitted that sentiment to inter-
fere with his business acumen. By nature a plunger and speculator,
he played the stock market with dash, investing thousands of dollars
with cool, disdainful detachment. At various times he bought and
sold stock of the United States Mining Company, the Hudson and
Delaware Canal Company, the Long Island Railroad, and the British
and Canadian Mining Company. He also gambled on New York City
lots and on vacation properties in Newport. In all his financial specula-
tions his methodology emphasized an icy calmness. "Do not be too
anxious," he once counseled his brother. "Let results take care of them-
selves and if you lose make up your losses as well as you can without
allowing yourself to be harassed. We have too much nervous suscepti-
bility in our family . . . the weakness of a child in face of the smallest
reverse." In spite of his coolness, Alexander never made very much
money in the stock market. Nor did he lose money. When he died he
was at about the break-even point. Certainly he never managed to
elevate himself fully into New York's aristocracy of great wealth, the
Astor-dominated clique he criticized but to which he subconsciously
aspired:
The ball at the Astor's last week [he wrote in February 1843] was a verY
brilliant affair, more brilliant than any that has taken place this season. There
•was a great display of the precious metals. The Astors seem now at the head
of fashionable society, and though they are laughed at privately, those that
appear in such rich trappings must needs be treated with much deference.
Money and impudence are the only essentials to such circles, but they are
indispensable Of all aristocracies, that of wealth is the worst since it is
the only kind that affords no incentive to virtue.9
How much incentive to virtue Alexander had as he set off for
Caseyville with Tyler on November 15, 1847, is difficult to determine.
Very likely he had motives no more complex than to convert their
land into a profitable operation without delay. The trip itself was
366
arduous and demanded a strong incentive of some sort. To reach Casey-
ville, Kentucky, one proceeded from Baltimore to Cumberland, Mary-
land, by rail, changing trains at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. There the
President and Alexander met and chatted with Captain Robert Stock-
ton, home from the war in California ("He looked like a Russian hussar
hardened and bronzed by exposure — more military than naval"). Since
Tyler was traveling "quite incognito . . . not more than two or three
persons recognized him" at Harpers Ferry. At Cumberland the travelers
boarded a four-horse mail stage for Wheeling, Virginia, via the same
National Road which Tyler, ironically, had fought against so vigorously
as a young congressman. Forced to walk up each hill behind the stage,
the two men were stunned by the magnificent views from the mountain-
tops. Or as Alexander reported it: "On the summit [Laurel Hill, Pa.]
. . . our eyes stretched far below and away over the Great West. It
seemed as if a new world was bursting upon the vision." From Wheeling
they proceeded down the Ohio by steamboat to Cincinnati. At the
"Queen City of the West," they chanced upon and conversed with
Mississippi Senators Henry S. Foote and Jefferson Davis, who were on
their way to Washington. Davis was still on crutches, the result of his
wounds at the Battle of Buena Vista. From Cincinnati a thirty-six-
hour boat ride carried them down to Louisville, where Tyler was met
and formally entertained by Governor Metcalf. Then came a punish-
ing ten-hour carriage trip over to Frankfort to consult with Tilford and
Samuels. Returning to Louisville, they boarded the boat for Casey-
ville where finally they "landed under the auspices of Hail Columbia,
Yankee Doodle and the Star Spangled Banner. The passengers on board
gathered at the side of the vessel, hats were raised by all, and the
whole population of Casey ville was called out by the occasion." The
trip took twelve days.10
Since Tyler 's land was heavily timbered, Alexander saw at once
that considerable money was to be made in the wood business. A week
in Caseyville strengthened this view and convinced him that the coal
deposits were also well worth exploiting. When he returned to New
York in December he decided to form a joint stock company to capi-
talize and launch the coal venture. At the same time he began pre-
liminary arrangements for the cutting of timber. With wood selling to
steamboats on the river at $2 to $2.50 per cord, and with much of
Tyler's property capable of yielding 150 cords an acre, he proposed to
put six lumbermen to work cutting fuel. He was certain he could hire
woodsmen for $75 to $100 per year and asked Samuel L. Casey to
superintend the proposed lumbering operation for a 25 per cent com-
mission. Casey, however, wisely refused the job, suggesting instead the
employment of his deaf brother. Alexander admitted to Tyler that the
handicapped sibling was "perhaps too deaf to be a safe conniver in
mischief," but he decided to employ someone more experienced in busi-
367
ness matters. Meanwhile, he assured Tyler that handsome profits would
soon roll in from the forests. Under no conditions should the President
divest himself of his interest in the enterprise. With upwards of
$300,000 worth of timber on the property, Tyler agreed that the wood
business might well be the answer to his financial problems.11
This point settled, Alexander pushed ahead with plans to form a
joint stock company to mine the coal at Caseyville. Working with three
retired veterans of the Tyler political wars — T. William Letson of Balti-
more, General William G. McNeill of New York, and Major L. A. Sykes
of New York — he undertook to sell 3000 shares at $20 each. Of the
$60,000 thus raised, $45,000 would purchase the Tyler-Gardiner land.
The remaining $15,000 would be used to build a spur line to the river,
erect necessary utility buildings, purchase coal cars, mules, carts, river
scows, and tools, and build a sawmill to process the timber. Employing
somewhat optimistic arithmetic on production costs and probable sales,
Alexander calculated a $27,000 net profit the first year, increasing to
$45,000 the third. Letson estimated it even higher — $150,000 in the
first three years, or $50 clear profit per share. By December 24, 1847,
Alexander and Letson announced 2100 shares sold (to whom they did
not reveal — probably to Tyler and themselves) and were urging Mc-
Neill and Sykes to pick up the remaining 900. McNeill assured Sykes
that "this is a good thing," but Sykes did some rapid arithmetic of his
own and concluded that "the reality does not exactly tally with the
estimate." He figured that the known veins would yield 650,000 tons
rather than Alexander's estimate of 30,000,000 tons. While he still
thought the speculation a "good one," he decided he would have to
"know more about it before engaging in it." The longer he looked at
it the more harebrained it became, and he finally decided he would
have no part of it. By mid-January 1848 the dubious project was vir-
tually dead, Alexander explaining to Tyler that "the money market is
so much oppressed that speculations find no favor." 12
Whatever the reasons for the collapse of the joint stock venture,
Corcoran and Riggs decided that they had had enough of speculative
dreams along the beautiful Ohio. In March 1848 they offered to sell
to either Tyler or Gardiner their one-quarter interest at Caseyville
for $2100, or roughly what they had invested in the project. At first,
Alexander was willing to buy the bankers' holding, but Tyler decided
to retain it himself. A few months later, however, hard-pressed for cash
as usual and determined to liquidate his Kentucky holdings entirely,
he offered the Corcoran and Riggs share to Alexander. "My day for
speculation and adventure is over; yours has just come," he told his
brother-in-law. But at that moment Alexander was overextended in the
stock market and in no position to purchase the additional interest.
After much polite backing and filling, which occupied over a year, he
finally informed Tyler bluntly in June 1849 that "matters are changed,
368
expectations of the immediate return from the property have been
scattered to the winds, all my cash means have been invested in other
adventures, and the past has admonished me of the wisdom of having
a little money on hand, keeping out of debt, and not expecting to make
all the bargains in this world." Although he refused the proffered Cor-
coran and Riggs share, Alexander loyally retained his three-eighths in-
terest in the uncertain venture.13
As his vision of a joint stock mining company gradually clouded,
Alexander moved ahead with the lumber-cutting project. In May 1848
he signed a contract with Andrew J. Fenton of Gowanus wherein
Fenton agreed to go to Caseyville for one year and supervise the
cutting of timber. For this he would receive one-fourth of the net
profits, the free use of such land as he and his wife might want to
cultivate, and the use of either of the crude dwellings then standing
on the property. To get matters off on a proper footing Alexander
made a second trip to Caseyville in June 1848 to see that Fenton had
arrived and to brief him on accepted business procedures. En route to
Union County he stopped and visited pleasantly at Homewood, the
estate of Tyler's former War Secretary William Wilkins, near Pitts-
burgh. When he finally reached Caseyville Fenton was still nowhere
in evidence. It was symbolic of what the Gardiner-Fenton relationship
would be during the next year. In a word, Andrew J. Fenton was one of
history's tragic figures. Well-meaning and honest, he was also accident-
prone, incompetent, and generally ill-starred. He could seemingly do
nothing right, try as he might.14
When Fenton at last showed up, the two men surveyed the situa-
tion and discovered a tight local labor market. It was then decided that
Fenton should return to Maryland and lease a dozen Negro slaves at
$40 to $50 each per year, accompany them back to Caseyville, and
set them briskly to chopping. With high hopes Fenton departed for
the East. Within a few weeks he reported to Alexander that he had
scoured eastern Maryland and the Eastern Shore without success. There
were no slaves for hire at $50 — or at any price. Alexander then ordered
him back to Caseyville with instructions to hire whatever local white
laborers were available and get started. "I know that you have too much
courage and determination of purpose to be disheartened by trifles," he
assured his manager.15
The "trifles" mounted alarmingly. Fenton's regularly submitted
expense accounts soon demonstrated that more money was being poured
into the forests than lumber was dribbling out. White labor was scarce,
shiftless, and expensive, choppers demanding fifty cents per cord cut
rather than the forty cents Alexander thought the work worth. Few of
the men hired by Fenton stayed on the job for more than a few days.
They would earn a few dollars, stock up on White Lightning, and dis-
appear drunkenly and happily downriver. "If I could get all black men
369
I would prefer it," Fenton reported, "as the white men in this coun-
try are very lazy and have no desire to work. The man that I had last
week cut 3% cords and quit; he would not cut anymore for that price."
While Fenton labored unsuccessfully to keep a token labor force in
the woods, Alexander Gardiner's expenses mounted. The costs of build-
ing Fenton a habitable dwelling (the structures on the property were
scarcely more than sheds), combined with the cost of tools, carts, and
scows, were much higher than Alexander had anticipated or thought
necessary. In addition, Fenton and his wife both fell ill with the malaria
that raced through the community in August 1848. "All of our men
are sick with fever and have been so this last ten days . . . everybody
is sick, rny wife included," he wrote. "I have had a bad beginning."
Healthy labor, much less sober labor, became virtually impossible
to procure. "If I can get Negroes by the month I shall get them," said
Fenton, "for I can make them work, but the white men work one day
and play the next and I think it will be more profitable to get Negroes."
By September 1848 it was costing Alexander exactly $6.18 to get a cord
of wood cut that sold from $1.75 to $2. This was not the royal road
to the Seven Cities of Cibola that Alexander and John Tyler expected
to travel.16
As Fenton fought his uneven battle against fever and trees on
the banks of the distant Ohio, Alexander Gardiner lounged at Saratoga
dancing, flirting, and boating with the ladies. Angered by what seemed
to him sheer malingering on Fenton's part, he commenced sending off
detailed instructions on just how a lumber business should be efficiently
and profitably conducted. Alexander Gardiner had never chopped a stick
of wood in his life, but he was certain that Fenton's force (such as
it was) should be stockpiling 100 cords a week in preparation for
winter demands from the steamboats. On the other hand, Fenton's
patient explanations that he could obtain only a handful of choppers
at any given time, Negro or white, and that fever felled them faster
than they felled trees, elicited from Alexander little more than a de-
mand for "proper perseverance" — and an unsolicited cure for malaria:
The disease is now very easily managed in Virginia by active treatment [he
told Fenton]. When first seized with it you should have taken ten grains of
Calomel on going to bed at night, and a strong dose of castor oil upon
getting up in the morning. As soon as this medium has operated, three doses
of quinine of five grains each should be taken at intervals of four or five
hours . . . the use of quinine should be continued . . . the dose being gradually
reduced. . . . They give quinine in small doses in Kentucky and it is not so
effectual.
If this advice proved any consolation or provided any cure, Fenton
gave no evidence of it. As soon as he was up and around again he
pleaded with Alexander to "send me more money, as much as you can
spare, for I want teams and carts and boats and ropes and feed." 1T
370
As Alexander's expenses increased steadily, his belief that tlie
cost of producing the fuel might be brought below its potential sale
price waned. While Gardiner was complaining to Tyler that "the slow-
ness of the proceedings in Kentucky passes all understanding/' Fenton
was complaining to Gardiner that he could not hold labor, and that
he could not manage "without Negroes as the white men are not worth
shooting." Nor was Alexander's growing frustration diminished when
he learned that Fenton had named a small peninsula on the property
"Gardiner's Point." This shrewd appeal to the Gardiner ego did not
dull the darkening economic facts of the whole operation. Indeed,
Alexander's desire to reduce operating expenses at Caseyville reached
the ultimate extreme of instructing Fenton that "when your letters
are heavy direct them (as it will save postage) to Ex-President Tyler,
care of Alexander Gardiner, Esq., New York City." To this sugges-
tion Fenton responded only with a plea for $500 to purchase additional
equipment and as a personal advance on commissions to enable him
to buy needed household provisions and pay his doctor's bills. "This
is the last money that I shall want of you," he assured his employer.
And for a week or so it was the last money he requested. Alexander,
in turn, fired back a high-level lecture in Classical Economics, urging
Fenton "cut on, and keep cutting constantly, and without flagging.
There is no other way in which money can be made either to myself
or to you." As Fenton cut on, Gardiner and Tyler continued throwing
money into the deep woods. By mid-December 1848 the operation at
last began to show dim signs of reaching the break-even point. At that
hopeful juncture, however, came the rain, the flood, and the mud that
bogged down Fenton's wagons, drove his meager and erratic labor
supply to shelter, and swept away some 100 of the 600 cords of wood
he had stacked on and near the riverbank.18
Tyler watched the trials and tribulations of poor Andrew J. Fenton
with mounting dismay. With wood at $1.75 a cord, the venture had
shown no profit whatsoever in its first six months. Indeed, Fenton
had sold little of what he had cut, and over $1000 had already been
invested in the project. Increasingly, Tyler began to think of the place
as a future plantation site rather than a business location. Fenton was
therefore instructed not to cut the pecan and other "highly ornamental^'
broad nut trees standing on the property. By February 1849 the Presi-
dent too had finally lost patience with Fenton. Flood and mud, cholera
and malaria were bad enough, but when steamboats passed Gardiner's
Point without stopping, Tyler was prepared to concede that the game
was up. Not Alexander— at least not yet. "Keep the axe going," he
ordered Fenton in late February, "the boats will all be in motion soon
and you will have a brisk demand for wood." Nevertheless, he agreed
with Tyler that Fenton's pessimistic reports were "discouraging, and
to me ... as unsatisfactory as they are indefinite." 19
The April floods on the Ohio drowned forever the Gardiner-Tyler
dream of a lumber empire. Inundating several hundred acres of the
property, sweeping away much of the unsold stockpile of wood, the
annual spring disaster convinced Tyler that Fenton should be fired for
general inefficiency. He simply had not taken "those wise precautions
which the knowledge of the constant liability to overflow . . . would
properly have dictated." The only way the operation could be con-
tinued profitably, Tyler argued, was with a vigorous new overseer at
the head of no less than four Negro slave workers. While the slaves
would cost up to $2250 each, they would "do more and be less ex-
pensive than the casual white labour to be picked up by accident."
This, of course, would mean pouring a great deal more capital into an
already flooded rathole, and Tyler frankly preferred to fire Fenton,
sell the jinxed property, and be done with it. With this evaluation
Alexander reluctantly agreed. Fenton must go. But whatever modest
satisfaction Tyler and Gardiner might have derived from discharging
their hapless manager was denied them. In April 1849 Fenton and his
wife simply pulled up stakes and disappeared from Caseyville, leaving
their furniture behind them.
Following their hasty departure the ex-President and his partner
decided to offer the land for sale again. This time they placed a price
tag of $20,000 on the property. "I no more doubt the ultimate great
value of the property than I do my own existence," Alexander assured
Sherwood Forest. "The establishment of the Navy Yard at New Orleans
dispels all doubt." As for the dream of great wealth which both partners
had momentarily shared, Tyler philosophically told his brother-in-law
to "set it down as a thing of the past, and let it no longer disturb."
There was actually little else Alexander could do. Fenton, he con-
cluded, was not a bad sort. "He is very stupid, but really seems to be
honest." This opinion was strengthened when Fenton wrote him in
May enclosing a final accounting of the disposition of the equipment at
Caseyville. From a financial standpoint the operation had been a dis-
aster, and Alexander agreed with his brother-in-law that the venture
should be terminated and the property sold.2Q
Selling it was not an easy matter. On the contrary, it was still
unsold when Alexander died in January 1851 and left his share to
Julia. And it was not until September 1853, after such friends and
agents as George Waggaman, General William G. McNeill, and Duff
Green had worked on the problem, that Tyler and Julia finally disposed
of the land to a group of Norfolk speculators for $20,000, Julia using
her share of the proceeds in 1858 to purchase Villa Margaret, the
summer house at Hampton. It was probably just as well that the prop-
erty was not sold in 1849. "There could not be a worse time to sell
than the present," said Alexander, "when the whole West is depressed
by the floods and the cholera." There was also the possibility that
David Lyon Gardiner and Henry Beeckman would return from the
372
California gold fields so laden with wealth that they would rush to
invest it at Caseyville. As Alexander explained this final hope to Tyler:
Maybe our Argonauts, returned laden with the golden fleece, will be disposed
to invest some portion of their riches on the banks of the Ohio; at any rate
the land must become more valuable if gold becomes more abundant, and
next year will be an important one in regard to the ultimate value of the
land.
Alexander's reverie that his brother and his young brother-in-law would
return from California weighted with gold was destined to be dashed,
as were the bright initial prospects of his own financial speculations in
the Bear Flag Republic. But he turned eagerly from the Kentucky
coal fields to the California gold fields, confident that great riches lay
somewhere near his outstretched fingers.21
The discovery of gold on the American River near Coloma, Cali-
fornia, in January 1848 produced as great an upheaval in the Tyler-
Gardiner clan as it did in any family in the United States. Confirmed
as a fact by Polk in his Annual Message of December 1848, news of
the great strike raced from New York to Sherwood Forest and back
with all the speed of a juicy scandal. Within a few months John H.
Beeckman, David Lyon Gardiner, and Beeckman's cousin Henry B.
Livingston of New York, had all departed for the gold fields, among the
first in that vast tidal wave of humanity that began the frenzied trek to
wealth and adventure in early 1849.
John Tyler's initial reaction to Folk's electrifying announcement
was not an excited one. He had no desire to go to California or to
speculate there. Burned by the collapsing Caseyville operation, he was
in no humor to pour additional capital into the mountain streams of
El Dorado County. "The President," Julia wrote on December 15,
1848, "has not expressed himself much about this California fever,
but he says if gold is so plentiful it will be valueless. He thinks a good
farm on James River with plenty of slaves is gold mine enough."
This mood quickly changed. By February 1849 the former Presi-
dent, along with millions of other Americans, had a severe case of Cali-
fornia fever. More and more he came to regard California as "the only
country worth living in," and he was persuaded that both John
Beeckman and David Lyon Gardiner would make vast fortunes there.
He agreed, however, with Samuel Gardiner that "it will not be the
diggers of gold who will make the fortunes but the merchants." And he
pointed out, as any good planter might, that the real wealth of Cali-
fornia lay in the rich soil of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys.
Nevertheless, he was sure that John and David Lyon would quickly
"line their pockets with the yellow dust" even though they had no in-
terest in agriculture. Since both men were "mature and knowledge-
373
able" in business matters, Tyler was confident that they would "not
be led away from the true road to fortune by any will-of-the-wisp."
Instead, they would sensibly mine the miners. As merchants and real
estate operators, and even as moneychangers ("I hope that David
carried with him a plentiful supply of 5 and ten cent pieces — each will
be worth a pinch of gold and the Colonel's fingers are not the smallest")?
they would make their fortunes in the new empire on the Pacific.
"Will you believe it," he confided to Alexander, "that I ofttimes wish
myself located on some choice spot of land on the Sacramento — and
that in my imaginings I have fancied that country an Eden There
is nothing like the elbow room of a new country." 22
Tyler's growing enthusiasm for the California country was a direct
product of the gold fever infection that swept Tidewater Virginia in
1849. The highly contagious virus did not spare Sherwood Forest.
Even little Gardie began clamoring for adult members of the family
to go to "Gattyformy to dig gold to buy Gardie tandy." Julia was far
less interested in gold and candy for Gardie than she was in the great
profits she was sure were to be made in California real estate and
merchandising. She was "all for paying a person's passage and dividing
the profits." Indeed, as shiploads of adventurers left Richmond and
Norfolk, Julia pondered Alexander's suggestion that young Tazewell
Tyler, not yet eighteen years old, be allowed to join the local Jasons
bound for the gold fields, there to get a lucrative start in life. Taz was
certainly eager to go, but Tyler put an end to his agitation with the
firm decision that he would be better employed commencing the study
of medicine with his uncle, Dr. Henry Curtis, in Hanover County.
Equally eager for adventure in the West was the foot-loose John
Tyler, Jr., who enlisted his father's aid in his desire to join the migra-
tion to California. Working through Daniel Webster, Tyler attempted
to secure for his second son a San Francisco patronage appointment.
It was better, he reasoned, to have John, Jr., living his gay life in
distant California than in nearby Richmond and Norfolk. Unfortunately
the new Taylor administration refused to cooperate in effecting John,
Jr.'s polite banishment to the Golden Gate. Tyler therefore considered
Alexander's offer to grubstake any member of the immediate family who
wished to seek his fortune, metallic, mercantile, political, or otherwise,
in the new territory. But a moment's reflection convinced the President
that it was well past the time when John should be made to "paddle
his own canoe," and he turned down his brother-in-law's overture. Julia
considered his decision a mistake. John, Jr., she argued, was "such
an unsettled visionary fellow that for my part I shall jump for joy
when he is 17,000 miles away ... the P [resident] will feel equally re-
lieved. From first to last he has given him no end of annoyance. . . .
The P. says he really believes him part a mad man. ..." Madman or
not, John Tyler, Jr., never got to California. But then neither did
374
Julia's perfectly sane, gold-seeking cousin, Egbert Dayton of East
Hampton, who died en route to the mines a few days out of Panama
and was buried in a lonely Acapulco grave.23
First of the family Argonauts to depart for California was the
handsome John Beeckman. His financial position had never been strong,
and his marriage to Margaret in January 1848 had not improved
matters. By December 1848 he was in serious economic difficulty. With
a wife and a new baby to support, he found himself suspended hope-
lessly between underemployment and unemployment. Forced to move
his small family into his mother-in-law's house on Lafayette Place, the
humiliated young man had no prospect of ever maintaining Margaret
in the accepted Gardiner manner. To Beeckman, therefore, the trumpet
call of the gold fields was a summons to financial independence. Julia
approved his judgment on the grounds that he had "a wife and child
to be thinking of which gave a stimulus to the adventure." Juliana
agreed. She had never really approved of Beeckman's marriage to
her daughter, but she was willing to give her son-in-law his chance
to become rich. She consented to lend him $2500 at 7 per cent that he
might buy a stock of general merchandise for sale to miners in the
Sacramento area. She made it clear to him, however, that the cost of
supporting Margaret and the baby during his absence would obligate
him to her for an additional $500 to $1000 annually. She would have
her pound of flesh. With this unpleasant detail arranged, Margaret
"screwed her courage to the breaking point" and finally assented to her
husband's departure. In her reluctant decision she was assured by her
sister that Beeckman would make a fortune, and that she would soon
be "drawing on the 'Bank of California' for a few thousands." When
this optimism was also echoed by John Tyler, Margaret's opposition
collapsed. Beeckman shipped a cargo of merchandise ahead of him,
worth perhaps $5000 retail in the mining camps, and left New York
in early January 1849 for the arduous seven-month trip to San Fran-
cisco around the Horn.24
As a lonely and heartsick Margaret fought an unending battle
with infant Harry's swollen gums, colic, and skin rash, reporting these
hearthside difficulties in detailed and lengthy letters to her husband,
Beeckman made his way slowly to California via Rio, Valparaiso,
and Callao. Sporadic reports of his boredom at sea, his near-shipwreck
off Cape Horn, and his hopes for the future in California drifted back
to Sherwood Forest and Lafayette Place. In August 1849 he finally
reached Sacramento. There he met David Lyon Gardiner, who had left
New York several weeks behind him but had chosen the quicker trans-
Panama route. There too was his cousin, Henry B. Livingston, who
had reached El Dorado in early June. 25
Beeckman's first report to Margaret from Sacramento in Septem-
ber 1849 described a lusty society dominated by diggers, some of
375
whom had already "succeeded beyond all calculations" while others
were nearly starving to death. "It all depends upon whether you are
fortunate or not in the selection of your spot. One person may dig
with all the assiduity in the world and find little or nothing for his
pains; another, not three feet off may by a lucky stroke of his pick
or turn of his shovel expose to view three or four hundred dollars' worth
of the precious metal." This backbreaking pick-axe roulette was not for
Beeckman. Instead, he sat
in front of a small India rubber tent, my portfolio on my knee in the shade
of a large oak surrounded by goods of every variety, looking keenly at every
teamster as he passes on his way to the mines and anxiously inquiring his
wants and scanning my ability to supply him on moment seen if a pair of
shoes or boots will fit a very dirty pair of feet, the next instant called off to
sell y2 barrel of pork or case of brandy and anon engaged in the more
delicate and agreeable business of weighing a few dollars of gold dust received
in payment in a small and nicely adjusted pair of scales.
He assured his worried wife that while Sacramento was little more
than "a city principally of tents springing up in the wilderness amid
the shade of large and spreading trees," bathed alternately in dust and
mud, jammed full of Americans, Chinese, Europeans, Africans, and
Polynesians ("every language is spoken that tongue can utter"), it was
nonetheless an orderly community:
No attention is paid to appearance . . . this is a community of men — no ladies
— and very few women. Still everything is conducted in the most gentlemanly
manner. No quarreling. Nor have I seen half a dozen drunken men since I
have been in California. Indeed I am very much surprised at the extreme
order which everywhere prevails. Goods left exposed in the streets are as
safe as beneath your roof — this may perhaps be owing to Judge Lynch who
deals out justice with most remarkable alacrity in this part of the world and
the would be guilty stand greatly in fear of his summary mode of proceed-
ing. . . . By the time I shall write you again ... I hope to be able to send you
some of the California dust as a token that I have not been idle or un-
employed.26
So far as can be determined, Beeckman shipped none of the "Cali-
fornia dust" to his waiting wife. Once his initial stock of merchandise
was exhausted, he discovered that shipping schedules on the Coast were
so unpredictable that regular replenishment of stock from New York
was virtually impossible. In November 1849 he gave up retail mer-
chandising and invested much of his capital, some $4000, in a real
estate speculation in Sacramento in partnership with one Major
Benjamin W. Bean. The Major (who supplied two thirds of the capi-
tal) and Beeckman bought a lot on J Street and spent $12,000 build-
ing a combination wooden frame store and residence on the property.
They immediately rented the structure to two New York merchants
376
for $2500 per month, a sum not considered excessive in the wild infla-
tion of Sacramento in 1849. For a brief time it appeared that John
Beeckman had struck it rich, that he would soon recoup his investment
and enough in addition to repay Juliana and begin banking a sizable
monthly income.
At this hopeful juncture in his affairs, floods swept down the
Sacramento River in January 1850. Much of the tent city was inundated
and the Bean-Beeckman property was damaged to the tune of $5000.
By the time necessary repairs had been made and the tenants restored,
a business slump struck the area, driving the rent down to $800 per
month. As Beeckman explained the discouraging situation in February
1850, "most of those who have been engaged altogether in mercantile
pursuits have failed or lost all they made last summer and fall. The
high rates paid for store rents — most of them $1000 a month — and
clerk hire make way with profits to a large amount so that at the end
of the year one is little better off than at the commencement." In addi-
tion to this, a rowdy element was beginning to drift into the gold
towns. "Numbers indeed of the most abandoned character have settled
at San Francisco and Sacramento City and lead a life of the most
shameful profanity.77 27
To escape the noxious immoral influences of Sacramento, and to
exploit the now-obvious desirability of high ground along the river,
Beeckman turned to land speculation at Butteville. In partnership with
four other men, among them Benjamin Bean, the group hired a whale-
boat and systematically explored a 6oo-mile stretch of the Sacramento
River in search of high ground. They found what they were looking
for and in March 1850 they purchased from Johann Augustus Sutter,
for $3600, two square miles of high land on the Sacramento River about
175 miles above Sacramento City, near what is now called Butte City.
Beeckman himself made the preliminary arrangements with the famous
Sutter. Under the contract that was drawn Sutter retained half of the
planned town site for his own use. He agreed, however, to bear half
the cost of surveying the whole parcel. The idea was to divide the re-
maining square mile into 100 blocks of 36 lots each, six lots per partner,
each block to be sold for $1000. Actually very little investment capital
was involved. Sutter consented to take his $3600 from the initial sale of
lots. The main cost would be that of a survey and the expense of a
road linking Butteville with the immigrant wagon trail that passed
nearby. The speculators were thus gambling on their belief that the
town they would create at Butteville would become the supply and
distribution point for diggers heading upriver into the Trinity Mine
country north of Redding. As it turned out, the miners generally went
up the west side of the river to Redding. This perverse habit caused
them to bypass Butteville and property there was shortly reduced to
virtual worthlessness.28
377
But Beeckman could not know this when he journeyed up the
Sacramento in early April 1850 to examine the town site and arrange
for a survey. On the contrary, he told Margaret that it would surely
"prove a good operation and put money in our pockets." With the
covered wagons of the overland immigrants beginning to reach Califor-
nia in great numbers, and with flood-prone Sacramento "once this
winter all under water and . . . momentarily in expectation of a similar
catastrophe," Butteville could only prove a "profitable speculation."
All the venture required was hard work. "Enterprise and activity alone
are the watchwords to success in this stirring country . . . and if in-
dustry and success are synonymous I shall have my reward." 29
John H. Beeckman had his reward less than three weeks later.
Following a ten-day evaluation of the Butteville site, John was return-
ing downriver to Sacramento in a whaleboat when the accident oc-
curred. At 7:30 A.M. on April 26, 1850, while passing Knights Landing
ten miles above Verona, John attempted to shift his position in the
boat. Somehow he joggled his loaded shotgun which was "resting [on
the thwart] with the barrels turned towards his chest." One barrel
discharged, the iron balls striking him solidly in the right lung. "My
God I am shot!" he cried as he fell into the arms of one of the boat-
men. He continued breathing for nearly half an hour; but he was
dead, suffocated in his own blood, when the boat reached Verona. There
the mayor of the settlement, a Doctor Weeks who had formerly prac-
ticed in New York City, took charge of the lifeless body and prepared
it for burial. An item on the tragedy appeared in a Sacramento paper
the next morning. Within an hour Henry B. Livingston was en route
upriver to Verona. He arrived there that same afternoon.
Livingston arranged the final details, procuring a rude coffin, a
Presbyterian clergyman, and a quiet lot in a cemetery a half-mile back
from the unpredictable river. On Sunday morning, April 28, in a
"beautifully retired grove," Margaret's unlucky young husband was
buried. Hymns were sung by a small group of rough-looking men, an
Indian, and a few women of the village. "On closing the lid of the
coffin," Livingston reported, "John's countenance had not altered in
the least and all remarked how placid and unchanged!" It was a
"singularly solemn situation" for Livingston, who suddenly found him-
self "in a strange land 6000 miles from home performing the last rites
of respect to the only relative in whose veins flowed my own blood, and
I the solitary mourner." The lone Indian standing passively at the grave
side caught something of Livingston's sorrow. As John's coffin was
lowered into the ground, the Indian's eyes followed it slowly downward.
"Adits, hombre;* he said softly, "adids."
John Beeckman's dream of wealth, his ambition to achieve eco-
nomic equality with the Gardiners, ended in a lonely grave on the
Sacramento River. His estate, such as it was, added up to a $4000
378
interest In the J Street store, an option to purchase a one-twelfth in-
terest in a large lot on J Street (value uncertain), a sixth interest in some
undeveloped near-wilderness at Butteville (worth nothing), and a few
personal effects. These included "his pocket book with 2 letters from
Mr. Tyler, $25 or 30, his large ring with Margaret's initials and his
own, his hunting watch, gun, pencil and a beautiful old silver cup
which the men in the boat said he seemed to prize very much." His per-
sonal effects were worth, by Livingston's calculation, no more than
$275. To be sure, the Bean-Beeckman store had a tenant for eight
more months at a rent of $800, but aside from this immediate prospect
of income the estate of John H. Beeckman was modest indeed. After
ordering a headstone for the grave and sending a snip of his deceased
cousin's hair to Margaret, Livingston undertook the thankless task of
settling Beeckman Js worldly affairs.30
News of her husband's death reached Margaret on June 8. Her
reaction was very little less than traumatic. "Nothing could have
been more distressing," Alexander noted. "The lamentations of Mar-
garet were but overcome at last by exhaustion." To Alexander the
tragedy was an object lesson in the careless use of firearms. But this
irrelevant observation brought as little comfort to the widow as Julia's
view that since Beeckman had died with little suffering Margaret would
soon see the tragedy "in the right light" and "cease to mourn for her-
self" Juliana's initial reaction had the usual Gardiner decimal point
in it. Revealing little of the "severe shock" that rocked Sherwood
Forest, she immediately instructed Alexander to inform Henry Living-
ston in Sacramento that she had a solid $3000 claim on Beeckman's
estate and that she wanted the matter settled without delay. With that
practical demand made clear, she took her grief-stricken daughter to
Saratoga for a month so that she might speedily regain her "cheerful-
ness." Margaret's cheerfulness was very slow to return. Years later she
was still writing mournful lines that ran
Would I were with him! To embrace
The loved one lost long years before,
What joy to gaze upon the face
That never shall be absent more!
There friends unite, who parted here
At Death's cold river, oh! How sadly
Forgotten are the sigh and tear
Their hearts are leaping, oh! How gladly.
The disadvantages of marrying for love had at last become painfully
apparent to Margaret Gardiner.31
Pain of another sort struck Lafayette Place when it became evi-
dent that Beeckman's estate was not destined to manufacture great
riches. Increasing taxes, property assessments, repair and maintenance
379
costs, combined with steadily decreasing rental income, effectively dis-
sipated the Gar diners5 optimistic expectation that the one- third in-
terest in the jerry-built wooden store on J Street would prove a gold
mine for Beeckman's distraught widow. By 1852 Sacramento was being
transformed from a city of wood and canvas to one of brick and stone,
and the less than desirable Beeckman-Bean property, when it had a
tenant at all, brought Margaret only $100 a month. In 1853 the net
rental income from the store amounted to only $538.19. Juliana's legal
daim against the estate for $3000 was never upheld, filed as it was
too late to meet the requirements of California law. There was not
much to claim anyway. The Butteville land soon disappeared down the
back-tax rathole, and the undeveloped lot on J Street, the purchase
option which Margaret exercised in January 1853 for $2200, found
no buyer. In spite of heroic legal efforts by John Tyler, acting as
Margaret's agent and lawyer, John Beeckman's estate yielded precious
little.
Indeed, family frustration in the matter produced caustic intima-
tions and suspicions, wholly groundless, that Henry B. Livingston,
Benjamin W. Bean, and other Gardiner agents on the scene were milk-
ing the estate. "He has either the hide of a Rhinoceros or a pocket with
a very large hole in it," said Tyler ungenerously of Livingston. In-
sinuations of this sort, to say nothing of a threatened Gardiner law-
suit, finally persuaded a disgusted Henry Livingston to wash his hands
of the whole mess and withdraw from further dealings with Lafayette
Place. "For myself I have received nothing but the commissions allowed
by law/' he wrote them angrily, "charging nothing for my traveling
expenses, etc., as I have wished to close up all transactions connected
with my painful office as economically as possible." Actually, he had
become involved in April 1851 in a creek-bed gold speculation at Oregon
Bar which involved diverting the waters of the North Fork of the
American River, and he was too busy with that extensive project to be
troubled with insistent and ill-humored demands from New York and
Sherwood Forest that he render instant and accurate accountings of
every penny paid into and out of the John Beeckman estate.
The Gardiners also alienated Major Bean by bringing suit against
him, forcing him to sell the J Street store and distribute the proceeds.
This successful litigation eventually brought $2000 into the Beeck-
man estate, or roughly half of what John had put into the venture in
the first place. Not surprisingly these short-tempered verbal and legal
harassments from New York and Virginia ultimately caused the manage-
ment of the Beeckman interests in Sacramento to be abandoned by
acquaintances and kin of the deceased resident there. Instead, these
matters fell into the hands of various local lawyers and rent collectors,
strangers whose high charges and commissions further depleted Mar-
garet's dwindling income from California.32
380
David Lyon Gardiner fared somewhat better in California than
his brother-in-law. At least he got out alive, although his financial suc-
cess was not nearly what his family had optimistically predicted for
him. Unlike Beeckman, however, David Lyon did not have to go west
for economic reasons. He went for adventure and out of a curiosity to
see the new country. Practicing law bored him, and collecting Gardiner
rents he found a demeaning and distasteful occupation. When it was
agreed that Alexander would hire a law clerk to assist him with his
clerkship and his growing private practice and also help manage the
Gardiner rental properties (Richard E. Stilwell was engaged in April
1849), David Lyon felt free to leave New York. In February 1849
he shook off his usual lethargy long enough to board the Eugenia,
bound for San Francisco via Veracruz and the Panama route. It would
be, Tyler predicted, "an agreeable adventure" which would "improve
him in every respect besides making him his fortune." He was supplied
with letters of introduction to American military government officials
in California by Tyler and Senator Robert J. Walker. Provided also
with a $3000 stake by his mother and brother, David departed New
York over Julia's objection and warning that he would find California
rough and lonely. His absence, she warned him, would seriously distress
their mother "however pleasured she might be to see you master of a
large fortune." 33
As in Beeckman's case, the "large fortune" was elusive. Arriving
in San Francisco in April 1849, David went directly into merchandising.
He quickly discovered that store rents were high and that dry goods
shipped in from Australia, Canada, Hawaii, and South America were
already glutting a very uncertain and unpredictable market, one which
responded sharply upward and downward to the delay or arrival of a
single shipload of a given commodity. When his profits failed to climb
above a bare 10 per cent, Colonel David concluded that the Golden
Fleece lay not in retailing. In August 1849 ne headed into the gold
fields near Sacramento to try his luck with pick and shovel. This un-
accustomed labor blistered his hands and feet and hurt his back. So
great was his pain that Julia wondered solicitously whether it would
not be a good idea to send him a brace of "whalebones for him to
wear around the hips and small of his back . . . when working in the
mines." Although she hoped that her brother would "not give over his
gold seeking for slight causes," David soon decided that he was no
miner. Brushes with timber wolves frightened him. Sleeping in cramped
cabins or in the open air with rough, dirty, and uncultured men de-
graded him. The loneliness and the monotony of heavy physical labor
In the mining camps soon conspired to drive him swiftly back to San
Francisco in September "to recruit his health," which, as Beeckman
reported it, "had been severely tasked ... at the mines."
As news of his various trials and tribulations filtered back to
Lafayette Place and Sherwood Forest, the ladies of the family decided
that California was much too barbarous and sinful a place for "poor
David/' He should come home immediately. "Sleeping in a ravine pro-
duced his sickness no doubt," said his mother, "and being like the rest
of us of a bilious constitution he will find it difficult to get rid of."
With prostitutes, murderers, and thieves outnumbering the resident
ladies, clergymen, and doctors, California was obviously no place for a
well-bred and bilious young gentleman. Her thirty-three-year-old son,
Juliana thought, was simply not suited for combat with such a hostile
environment. "His exposure to wolves and fevers and bad climate is
really quite too much to dwell upon," she concluded. "It is a fact men
do not know how to take proper care of themselves. They require the
attention of a mother all the days of their lives." To provide her little
Argonaut with a touch of home she sent him preserves and jams and
constant reminders that "there are many ways of making money here
where you can be surrounded by family and friends and the comforts
of civilization." 34
In spite of these maternal urgings David Lyon decided to stick
it out for a while longer in California, a decision Tyler approved and
recommended because "no doubt a short period will make him rich if
he will make up his mind to continue." Convinced that real estate
speculation held the key to his counting room, David joined in partner-
ship with the ineludible Major Bean and bought several pieces of
Sacramento property in August 1849. A Year later he sold the parcels
at a $3000 profit. Having launched these Sacramento speculations, he
returned to San Francisco in time to witness the first of the seven
major fires that ravaged the city between December 1849 and June
1851. While his mother was hopeful that this disaster "would advance
for the present the value of money very much," and suggested that
Gardiner capital be rushed to the stricken community for near-usurious
reconstruction loans, David felt that San Francisco would never tran-
scend its incendiary nature. In February 1850, therefore, he decided to»
migrate to the nonflammable and more salubrious climate of San Diego,
there to engage in merchandising, real estate speculation, and the ware-
housing and forwarding business.35
Tyler encouraged this shift, and David himself was confident that
San Diego, riding the crest of a modest boom in 1850, would prove
a more comfortable and profitable place to reside. Whoever bought
San Diego real estate, thought Tyler, "will leave the estate of a mil-
lionaire." Alexander, on the other hand, considered the move foolish.
Not only was San Diego (with its 650 inhabitants) a mere village com-
pared to San Francisco, but it lay near no known gold fields and its
population potential was, at best, dubious. "I take it that you left San
Francisco just as the business season had commenced and that you ar-
rived in San Diego just as the business season terminated," Alexander
382
scolded him. Similarly, Juliana had no great confidence in the real estate
future of San Diego, and in spite of encouragement from David Lyon
she refused to put any of her own money into such an uncertain venture.
"It would be absurd/' she said flatly. "It is not safe on account of un-
certain titles. A bird in hand is worth two in the bush and there is no
mistake about property in and about New York." 36
Alexander had more than a casual interest in his brother's new
arrangement in San Diego. To be precise, he eventually had a $5000
stake in what David did in California, and the longer he watched his
brother in action as a businessman and land speculator the more
pessimistic he became that either of them would ever make a dollar.
David Lyon Gardiner, in truth, was no businessman. He panicked
easily, and he had little real feeling for business opportunities. He
could not distinguish between a crazy speculation and a reasonable one.
Nevertheless, his arrangement with Alexander made him his brother's
partner and agent. Their agreement was that he would retail the gen-
eral cargoes sent out from New York in both Alexander's name and in
his own. The profits from this traffic would then be invested in Califor-
nia real estate and mining opportunities. From time to time Alexander
shipped cured meats, blankets, kitchen utensils, wagons, hardware,
wheelbarrows, furniture, doors, and even disassembled houses to Cali-
fornia. "The freight of the house cost me as much as the house itself,"
he complained on one occasion. Plagued by bills of lading which often
failed to reach their consignee, a thoroughly unpredictable consumer
market, and the difficulty of doing business by mail at a distance of
6000 miles, Alexander concluded by January 1851 that merchandising
in distant California was as speculative and profitless an operation as
coal mining and lumbering had proved in Kentucky. David's removal
to isolated San Diego and his general business inefficiency, together
with Beeckman's tragic death at Sacramento, strengthened this con-
viction. And while he eventually recovered some of his investment in the
form of gold dust (worth $17.50 per ounce in New York) and interest-
bearing promissory notes remitted by David, Alexander Gardiner went to
his grave in January 1851 knowing that his California operations had
failed.37
It took David Lyon somewhat longer to realize his own inade-
quacies in the complex mercantile and real estate world of California.
While San Diego in 1850 gave some signs of potential growth and
prosperity, it soon began the rapid decline that resulted in the loss of
its city charter in 1852 and left it with a population of scarcely a
dozen souls in 1867. Ships did not often stop in a harbor that lacked
a customs house. Mail and merchandise consigned to San Diego usually
had to be transshipped by sloops back down the coast from San
Francisco. For this reason, David spent much time and energy agitat-
ing for the establishment of a local customs house. Meanwhile he
383
traveled up and down the coast between San Francisco and San Diego
arranging for the purchase and shipment of dry goods to his store.
In this peripatetic enterprise he was assisted by his partner, John
R. Bleeker, a transplanted New Yorker who was postmaster of San
Diego. The firm of Gardiner and Bleeker, dedicated principally to the
sale, storage, and forwarding of merchandise, also dabbled in San Diego
real estate. Operating from a small combination store and warehouse
located on the shore of San Diego Bay, the partners conducted what
was at best a marginal enterprise. Later generations of San Diego
Jaycees might acclaim them pioneer city fathers, but the 1850 truth
of the matter was that Gardiner and Bleeker were situated in a town
that had no economic raison d'etre. By mid- 1851 it was already mov-
ing back toward the sleepy settlement it had been under the Spanish
and Mexican flags. The Cupefios Indian uprising in November 1851
(known locally as the Garra Rebellion, after Antonio Garra, chief of
the Cupefios) created a confusion that was neither conducive to busi-
ness enterprise nor productive of great confidence in the future stability
and safety of the village. Only the vain hope that a major gold strike
might be made in the nearby Laguna Mountains kept San Diego alive
at all in 1851-1852. By 1853 some residents of the dying hamlet were
so bored and foot-loose that they joined the first of William Walker's
abortive filibustering expeditions into Mexico.
Others, like Bleeker himself, prayed "that the Rail Road route
must come Southward and if so the Port on the Pacific must be San
Diego." Indeed, the prospect that the projected transcontinental rail-
road would terminate at San Diego persuaded Gardiner and Bleeker
in June 1850 to purchase a lot on San Diego Bay (at the foot of Spring
Avenue, now Broadway) in the hope that they would achieve a great
financial coup if and when the railroad bought it up as a right of way
or elected to build a terminal on it. Their purchase was thus based on
the gamble that the transcontinental railroad, when it was authorized
by Congress, would follow a southern route. The question of routing
became one of the great sectional political issues of the mid- 18505 and
enlisted on the Southern side of the argument such outstanding spokes-
men as Robert Tyler. The onset of the Civil War suspended this ran-
corous debate. Not until 1869 was the transcontinental railroad com-
pleted— along the central route.
Gardiner and Bleeker did eventually make a killing on their Spring
Street lot. They sold it in 1887 for $35,000, after the Sante Fe Rail-
road system reached San Diego and the town began its renaissance.
But by this late date the aging David Lyon Gardiner had long since
lost all interest in the speculations of his youth, and was devoting his
time to an enjoyment of his own and his wife's money while he dabbled
in family genealogy.38
Unfortunately, no railroad was to rescue San Diego in the early
384
18503. Gardiner and Sleeker collapsed with the town while David
pleaded fruitlessly with Alexander and his mother to send more family
capital from New York for his real estate operations. Tyler consistently
encour^^^C :ili of David's projects in California (including a wild
scheme to build and operate a flour mill in San Diego), but Julia did
not. 3he feared that her brother was going "native" in California, and
she t rged him to stop throwing good money after bad in San Diego and
come home to a civilized way of life. "So you have taken to cooking
for yourself!" she exclaimed. "Well, many stranger things have oc-
curred, but I should like to know who washes the china? — I hope
you keep up your civilized habits, shave and dress in neat apparel
every day." 39
Faced with the gradual realization that the Midas touch was not
to be learned in a warehouse-store on San Diego Bay or by buying up
local property sinking rapidly in value, David Lyon did what came
naturally to the Gardiners after their Tyler connection had been made
fast. He wrote to John Tyler in October 1850 and asked the former
President to use his influence in Washington to secure him the collector-
ship of customs in San Diego when the new Fillmore administration got
around to establishing a customs house in the town. He had voted for
Taylor and Fillmore in the 1848 campaign (the only member of the
family who had voted Whig), and to his way of thinking this demon-
strated dedication enough to Old Zach to secure the post. Tyler im-
mediately wrote to William McKendree Gwin, California's first senator.
He identified "Colonel Gardiner" as his wife's brother, a man of "high
honor and business talents," whose appointment to the San Diego post
would be considered by Tyler a "personal favor." Alexander, meanwhile,
contacted James Brooks, owner of the New York Express, and Senator
Daniel S. Dickinson of New York and interested them in his brother's
newfound political aspirations. Unfortunately for David, Gwin reported
that Fillmore and Congress had simultaneously established and filled
the $3000 post. This sad news was communicated to David by Julia. "I
cannot tell you by words how great was our regret the Collectorship of
San Diego had not earlier been thought of," she apologized. Alexander,
political realist that he was, thought it "exceedingly doubtful" that
David Lyon could expect any appointment from the Fillmore adminis-
tration "sufficiently valuable to be worthy of your acceptance." He was
right. Nothing "sufficiently valuable" was forthcoming, and when David
was offered the unpaid post of mayor of San Diego in November 1850
by the local citizenry he declined it.40
Disappointed in politics and business, David Lyon Gardiner was
contemplating his next predictably unsuccessful move when news reached
him in San Diego on March 4, 1851, that his brother Alexander had
died suddenly in New York in late January. The sad tidings stunned
him, as it had the rest of the family. Although he briefly considered re-
385
maining in San Diego for a few more months on the strength of rumored
gold strikes in the Sierra Madre, anguished pleas from home and from
Sherwood Forest that he return to New York jjgjnediately became so
insistent and were couched in such piteous terms that he c^uiti *;^t resist
them. Turning his business affairs over to John Bleeker, he departed San
Diego on April 4 and arrived back in New York on June 7. Again he
used the shorter trans-Panama route. When he reached New York he
was so sun-tanned, ragged, and bearded that Juliana and Margaret
scarcely recognized him. It was clear to theni that his personal habits
had indeed deteriorated. But they welcomed him with enthusiasm, happy
that he had returned at last from the degrading influences of distant
California.41
It was probably well that he left California when he did. Within a
few months he was receiving from Bleeker news of San Diego's demise.
"Sales are remarkably dull and money exceedingly scarce, and our In-
dian excitement has not bettered matters Our New Town lots will
probably not sell for their cost," his partner reported. By March 1852
Bleeker had nearly given up all hope that San Diego would ever amount
to anything. Employing his vague connection with John Tyler, he at-
tempted to secure the vacant collectorship of customs in San Diego. The
emoluments of the sinecure would enable him, he argued, to remain on
the scene until the transcontinental-railroad-route question was settled
one way or the other. "Good bye to the prospects of old San Diego until
it is made the terminus of the Rail R.," he told David Lyon flatly in
June 1852. The population of the town, he reported, had decreased 50
per cent in the past year, and local real estate values had plunged to
near-worthlessness. Tyler did all he could for Bleeker 's pursuit of office,
writing Senator Gwin in his behalf, but nothing came of the collectorship
idea. Nor did a modest coal discovery on the shores of San Diego Bay
in 1856 arrest the decline of the town. Water filled the shaft at 100
feet and the Mormons involved in the venture gave it up. In 1857 the
discouraged Bleeker sold the store and the remaining merchandise for a
pittance and returned to New York. Without a railroad, San Diego had
become a ghost town. With neither coal nor gold to sustain it, it could
not continue.
So ended the Gardiner quest for wealth in California. While the
liquidation of the Gardiner-Bleeker enterprise eventually brought David
Lyon a $5000 rebate on his San Diego investments, the short-term eco-
nomics of the family speculation in El Dorado added up to little more
than death, frustration, and litigation. One grave on the banks of the
Sacramento and some worthless lots in Butteville, San Francisco, and
San Diego were about all the family could show in 1854 for a cash in-
vestment of nearly $12,000. It was a gloomy chapter in the history of the
Gardiner-Tyler connection.42
386
BLACK MEN AND BLACK REPUBLICANS
It is quite sensibly felt by all that the success of the
Black Republicans would be the knell of the Union.
JOHN TYLER, JULY 1856
The unexpected death of Alexander Gardiner momentarily unhinged the
entire Gardiner-Tyler family alliance. Serving as its lawyer, broker,
banker, rent collector, speculator, and political analyst, and as Tyler's
appointed biographer, his sudden departure from the scene produced
lamentations, confusion, and, finally, the necessity of reorganizing the
administration of all family affairs. John Tyler was particularly upset by
his young brother-in-law's passing. "The President feels as if he had lost
his chief prop," Julia wrote of the shock experienced at Sherwood Forest.
"Alexander and he alone understood his thoughts and feelings entirely.
Upon him he depended for his posthumous fame. He was literally the
chosen friend of his bosom, and he felt for him a deeper affection than
he had ever felt for an own brother." 1
Alexander fell ill on Friday, January 17, 1851, following a strenuous
round of midwinter social activities which had kept him out late and
brought him home inebriated for three successive evenings. He com-
plained initially of sharp abdominal pains, later diagnosed as "severe
bilious colic which terminated in inflammation of the bowels." He had
had several such attacks before, the most recent during his second trip
to Caseyville in June 1848. Three prominent doctors were called into the
boardinghouse room at Houston and Crosby streets in which he was liv-
ing at the time. With David Lyon and John Beeckman absent in Cali-
fornia, Juliana and Margaret had given up the Lafayette Place house
in April 1850, auctioned some of the furniture, and moved back to East
Hampton. At the time of Alexander's final illness, however, the ladies
387
were at Sherwood Forest for their annual midwinter visit. News of his
serious condition was telegraphed to Charles City on January 21. Thor-
oughly alarmed by this report, Juliana and Margaret departed Sher-
wood Forest the same afternoon to hurry to Alexander's bedside. They
had barely reached Baltimore the following day when they read a news-
paper account that their son and brother had died on the evening of
January 21.
During his last hours Alexander was quiet and rational, although he
suffered severe pain. He seemed to know that he was dying and he spoke
calmly of his imminent fate to his uncle Nathaniel Gardiner, his cousin
Dr. William Henry Gardiner of Brooklyn, the Reverend Henry M.
Denison, Richard M. Stilwell, his law clerk, and others who visited his
sickbed near the end. Having no disposition to draw up a formal will, he
told Stilwell exactly how he wanted his estate distributed. Julia was to
receive his three-eighths interest in the Caseyville lands "on account of
her associations and position in society she will naturally be more ex-
pensive in her mode of living." David Lyon was released from all finan-
cial obligations to him from their joint California speculations. His
mother was to receive everything else, his share of his father's estate, and
some $15,000 worth of stocks, bonds, and real estate parcels in New
York City. Margaret, he told Stilwell, would be looked out for by her
mother. With these details attended to, he assured his anxious friends
that he was not afraid to die. Indeed, his last words were: "I don't know
if I care whether I live or die. I am not particularly fond of the world.
I believe in the Christian religion. I would not take one word from it."
At 7 P.M. on Tuesday, January 21, 1851, Alexander Gardiner, aged
thirty-two, died of a ruptured appendix as three of New York's "most
skillful physicians" stood helplessly by his bedside. "He died as peace-
fully as an infant would lie down to sleep," said Margaret.
The funeral was held in the Church of the Ascension by the Rev-
erend Gregory Thurston Bedell on January 28 with members of the
United States Circuit Court, the New York bar, and the old Tyler party
in New York City present in numbers. On the following day Alexander
was buried at East Hampton. Obituaries were carried in important news-
papers from New York to Richmond, Since one of his last official acts as
a Clerk of the Circuit Court had been the handling of the controversial
James Hamlet fugitive slave case in such a way as to "create a feeling
of great respect for him at the South," his passing was noted with more
than casual interest in that section.2
Alexander's sudden departure emotionally overwhelmed the women
of the family. Juliana felt that had she been with him at the end her
longstanding knowledge of his physical condition might have helped
him. While Margaret and Julia assured her that this was an unreason-
able and masochistic attitude, that nothing known to medical science
could have saved Alexander, they did agree with her that David Lyon
388
should be urged to return speedily from California to take charge of
family affairs. Awaiting Ms return, Juliana and Margaret rented rooms
in a private home on Clinton Avenue in the Bedford section of Brook-
lyn. "It looks like a delightful country village/' said Juliana; "I like it
much better than living in the City." They also procured a French
nurse, "who cannot speak a word of English/7 to help with little Harry,
turned over the complete management of the Gardiner properties in
New York to Richard Stilwell, and fired the first salvos in the long
battle to settle John H. Beeckman's estate in California as quickly and
profitably as possible.
At the same time, Sherwood Forest was assured that the President's
various personal notes would be underwritten and secured as they had
been in the past when Alexander handled Tyler's financial affairs in New
York. Indeed, Tyler discovered within a month of Alexander's death
that his seasonal cash shortage and the necessity of juggling his notes
and bills of credit from one New York bank to another would become
insoluble problems without continuing Gardiner aid. For this reason he
spent some anxious moments until Juliana's assurances on the subject
reached him. Julia diplomatically arranged this touchy situation with
her mother, explaining that
The President will require someone to take Alexander's place in giving him
the free use of their name for his accommodation in Ms worldly matters . . .
I hope therefore you will at once offer your name to Mm to continue matters
as they stood between Mm and A. Yotir name only is required and he meets
everytMng else . . . when I hear from you I shall tell the President that I
had written you to propose you should take Alexander's place in assisting Mm
in Ms affairs and you unhesitatingly consented. I shall look for your reply to
ease the perplexity the President I see is feeling — and, of course, myself also.
Less diplomatically, Julia made clear to her mother her doubts that
Alexander meant to exclude her from that part of his estate above and
beyond the Caseyville property. She was certain he had not regarded the
Kentucky bequest a full settlement of the 25 per cent portion of the
income of his clerkship due her under their 1845 agreement. "I know
that no one in the family as yet requires so much as myself, with my
three children," she reminded Juliana. "It seems to me that if anything
remains after the payments of debts and bequests it should be divided
between yourself, D., M., and myself and ... if you would throw in
your part for our benefit it would add much to our comfort while it
would be of small value to you. As far as I am concerned, it would leave
a smaller amount of the President's notes to be paid." 3
WMle these fiscal matters were being settled to Julia's satisfaction,
though not without strained feelings all around, David Lyon returned to
New York from San Diego. He took charge of meeting the small claims
against Ms brother's estate, and he confirmed the arrangement under
389
which Stilwell would manage the family rental properties in town. Mean-
while, Juliana, Margaret, and Harry left Brooklyn and returned to East
Hampton to live. They soon decided, however, that the place was far too
lonely and isolated. Since Juliana was determined to take a more active
personal interest in the administration of her New York properties, she
decided to move closer to the city.
In 1852 the house and several lots in East Hampton were sold, some
of the furniture there was disposed of at auction, and the bulk of the
funds realized was invested in a large house and eleven-acre property on
Staten Island (what is now West New Brighton) known as Castleton
Hill. Juliana, Margaret, and her three-year-old son moved there in May
1852. When David Lyon had recovered several thousand dollars of his
California investment from Bleeker's liquidation of their San Diego
partnership, he too located on Staten Island, purchasing a seventy-
three-acre farm at Northfield, about two and a half miles from his
mother's property. He made this decision only after John Tyler and
Julia, working through State Supreme Court Judge James I. Roosevelt,
had failed in their attempt to procure for him the patronage job of
Marshal of the Circuit Court of the Eastern District of New York.
Beginning in March 1853 David Lyon Gardiner reluctantly became
a gentleman farmer on Staten Island, a casual pursuit varied by oc-
casional attention to the legal problems of the Gardiner properties in the
city. The actual labor on his farm was done by a series of tenants. None
of these hired hands suited David any more than a steady stream of
various Irish domestics suited his meticulous mother. Consequently,
throughout the remainder of the decade Gardiner servants and tenants
on Staten Island came and went by the platoon. In the city, Stilwell
undertook the day-to-day work that the family's real estate holdings
required. The livability of the Gardiner houses in New York gradually
deteriorated, but their value mounted steadily as the city grew and pros-
pered. The Gardiner philosophy of landlordism had long been that the
tenant was always wrong, and Juliana did nothing to disturb this hoary
tradition. "All embellishments must be at the cost of the tenant," she de-
creed. And at no time did she consider young Stilwell quite firm enough
in dealing with the destructive, complaining malingerers who invariably
inhabited her premises.4
During none of these trials, disappointments, and crises in the
family circle did John Tyler or his in-laws lose interest in or surrender
an active connection with American politics. Tyler was not convinced
that his own political career was over. He even derived some wry satis-
faction when the Charles City Whigs selected him overseer of roads for
the county in 1847. Designed to humiliate him, his election was con-
sidered a great joke by the local Whigs. But so hard and long did Tyler
keep the slaves requisitioned for this work at road duty (this at the
390
height of the harvest season) that the jokes ters were soon pleading for
his resignation and an end to road-building. "Offices are hard to obtain
in these times," he teased them in reply, "and having no assurance that
I will ever get another, I could not think tinder the circumstances of
resigning." Work on the roads continued. Less humorous to Tyler was
the realization that his political influence in Washington had waned so
much by 1848 that he could do nothing effective to help Robert Tyler's
vain quest for appointment to a proposed diplomatic mission to Rome.
Similarly, a trip to New York in December 1847 conclusively demon-
strated to him that there was no remaining interest in that quarter for
another Tyler attempt at Presidential politics. Instead of rallying the
old Tylerite hosts in Gotham, his visit did little more than stimulate
newspaper speculation that Tyler had come to the city to marshal his
friends behind the Whig candidacy of General Zachary Taylor — a charge
Tyler hotly denied. "I am wholly unconnected with the political in-
trigues of the day and cloak myself under no secret movements what-
ever," he wrote the editor of the New York Journal of Commerce. His
statement was accurate, although the former President might have
wished it otherwise. Tyler was detached from the national political
scene. The time had come, said the New York Herald patronizingly, to
forget about John Tyler as a force in American politics, "for that once
distinguished man, whom the steamboat left on the wharf — lady, trunk,
and all — has long since ceased to possess any influence for either good
or evil." 5
The time would again come when Tyler would have influence, but
in early 1848 his political role was reduced to remaining "entirely pas-
sive until election day." He watched the Presidential boom for the
Virginia-born, slaveowning Zachary Taylor with neutrality and disinter-
est. In March 1848 he learned from Juliana and Margaret that Clay
demonstrations in New York and Philadelphia had fizzled as the Ken-
tuckian's last bid for the White House ran head-on into the hard fact
that most Whigs preferred an inept old general who could win an elec-
tion to a brilliant and controversial two-time loser who could only lose
again. This news of Clay's embarrassment pleased Tyler, as did a report
from Alexander in February 1848 that all the old Tylerites in New York
were for Lewis Cass of Michigan because of his sturdy opposition to the
Wilmot Proviso. The pro-Proviso Van Buren Democrats, opposed as
they were to the further extension of slavery in the territories, continued
to command as little support at Lafayette Place and Sherwood Forest as
did Clay and the Whigs.
From the standpoint of the Tyler-Gardiner family, the nomination
of Taylor and Cass to head the two tickets was perhaps the best the
country could hope for, since both men were basically "safe" on the
slavery issue. Robert Tyler embraced Cass reluctantly — only when it
became apparent that his friend and mentor James Buchanan was beaten
391
for the nomination in the Baltimore convention in May 1848; then he
endorsed Lewis Cass. "If Genl. Cass be defeated, as entre nous he will
certainly be/' Robert wrote Buchanan pessimistically in July, "the very-
foundations of the party will be swept up as with a deluge." When the
Whigs in June passed over the controversial Clay and nominated Zach
Taylor and Millard Fillmore to oppose Cass and General William O.
Butler of Kentucky, the entire family (except David Lyon) unenthusi-
astically supported the Democratic nominee while freely predicting the
inevitability of Old Zach's election. These predictions involved no
psychic insights. The Democracy was badly split on the Wilmot Proviso,
and a divided Democracy could not win. With Van Buren running on a
third-party Free Soil ticket in the North, it was certain that the Cass
vote there would be badly fractured, as indeed it was.
On the whole, the 1848 campaign was an exercise in political tip-
toeing. Both major party candidates submerged the slavery question as
best they could and both took moderate positions on all other issues that
threatened further to divide their respective followers into the internal
sectional contradictions inherent in each group. The result was never in
doubt. Cass could not win, and Taylor had only to remain studiously
vague on all issues to keep from losing. This he managed to do without
trying. Tyler voted quietly for the lackluster Cass, and privately blamed
the Democracy's expected defeat on Polk. Young Hickory, said Tyler,
had commenced his
administration by a war on all my friends. I have sustained them as well as I
was able in a quiet way, and I have voted for Cass, but Mr. Polk inflicted the
immedicable vulnus on the Democratic party in the onset, by rejecting the
aid which had brought him to power. Van Buren and the men of no principle
were courted and the true men thrown off Now all things have to become
new. The end we shall probably live long enough to see.
If the election statistics failed to support the Tyler analysis that Polk
was the evil genius of the piece (the Van Buren candidacy, not Polk's
treatment of the Tylerites, had cost Cass New York state and the 36
electoral votes there that would have spelled a Democratic victory), the
ex-President could take comfort in the fact that the Democratic press
began treating him more gently after the Cass debacle. While this new
orientation in no way helped him secure midnight patronage positions
from the outgoing Polk for son Robert or for nephew M. B. Seawell, it
did encourage him to believe that he was no longer living entirely out-
side the Democratic pale. Nor did Taylor's success at the polls really
disturb him. "I shall not shed many tears at the result/' Tyler con-
cluded. "Poor Van! He is literally a used-up man; and Clay, let him
shed tears over the fact that anybody can be elected but himself." 6
The Taylor administration was not a brilliant one. The old General
had never voted prior to 1848, his personal political views ranged from
392
the confused to the obscure, and the Whig Party had again, as in 1840,
carefully refrained from adopting or running on a platform. The new
President had no program. When in his Inaugural Address the fuzzy-
minded hero seriously suggested that California was too distant to be-
come a state and might well become an independent nation instead,
some Americans wondered about his sanity. Jarred from this quaint view
by William H. Seward and other antislavery Northern Whigs and Demo-
crats who wanted California in the Union as a free state, Taylor quickly
reversed himself and announced that he would welcome California into
the Union, with the slavery question there to be decided on the basis of
"squatter sovereignty." This controversial idea, advanced by Lewis Cass
in the 1848 campaign, sought to remove the question of slavery exten-
sion into new territories from congressional control and politics. Instead,
the inhabitants of a territory would decide the slavery question for them-
selves locally and democratically, and then apply for admission to the
Union either as a free state or a slave state. Under this concept Cali-
fornia applied for entrance as a free state in March 1850, and in so
doing threatened to upset the numerical balance of free and slave states.
But well before this crisis over the future status of slavery in the vast
territories wrested from Mexico split the nation and threatened civil
war, the Tyler-Gardiner family had passed harsh judgment on the
fumbling Taylor administration.
Indeed, Tyler took one look at the Cabinet Taylor assembled
around him after the election and told Alexander that he was "ready to
admit the complete ascendancy of old-fashioned Federalism in the U.S."
Taylor's appointment of "that scoundrel Ewing" to the new Department
of the Interior particularly upset him. He interpreted it as nothing less
than a Clay maneuver to "reward" Thomas Ewing "for his perfidies to
me." This was a thin-skinned and inaccurate view of the appointment
of Tyler's former Secretary of the Treasury to Taylor's Cabinet. Never-
theless, Tyler was never able to forgive or forget those men who had
participated in the Cabinet resignation "plot" of September 1841, and
on this point his conspiracy theory of history never changed. "I rejoice
most heartily now in my vote for Cass," he finally decided.
In spite of his hostility to Taylor, Tyler was not averse to support-
ing the patronage importunities of his friends and relatives. In fact, both
the ex-President and Alexander Gardiner thought their chances of get-
ting something from Taylor "somewhat more promising" than from
Polk. Thus John Tyler, Jr., John Lorimer Graham, David Lyon Gar-
diner, William Bray Gardiner (Julia's first cousin), and other Tylerites
were strongly recommended to the new administration for patronage
jobs. Needless to say, none of these stalwarts received appointments.7
Patronage matters faded quickly into the background for John
Tyler when California's application for admission into the Union as a
free state triggered sharp sectional animosities and led to the introduc-
393
tion of Henry Clay's third and last great compromise measure. Amid
much talk of secession and civil war during the spring and summer of
1850, Congress hammered Clay's resolutions into a series of legislative
acts collectively known as the Compromise of 1850. Under these, Cali-
fornia was to be admitted as a free state; the New Mexico and Utah
territories were to be organized on the basis of "squatter sovereignty"
("popular sovereignty," as Stephen A. Douglas more elegantly dubbed
it) with the understanding that all questions regarding slavery in these
territories would be reviewed by the Supreme Court; a new Fugitive
Slave Act placed the pursuit and recovery of runaway slaves under
federal legal jurisdiction; and the slave trade in the District of Columbia
was to be abolished,
As these controversial suggestions emerged from committee and
into law, Tyler concluded that the main hope for avoiding civil war lay
in the ability of the Democratic Party to maintain its unity across sec-
tional lines and avoid support of any and all extreme solutions to the
nation's problems. He was no more impressed, therefore, with William
H. Seward's denunciation of the Compromise as "radically wrong and
essentially vicious" than he was with Jefferson Davis' demand that Con-
gress not interfere with slavery anywhere or under any conditions. He
objected to Ohio Senator Salmon P. Chase's view that it was the moral
duty of Congress to prohibit slavery in the territories, and he regarded
as dangerous extremism the dying Calhoun's demand on March 4 that
the South be given virtually an autonomous status within the Union.
Instead, he warmly supported Cass, Douglas, and Mississippi Senator
Henry S. Foote in their endorsement of the Clay compromise proposals.
These moderate Democrats Tyler saw as the true saviors of the party
and of the nation, a vision which caused him to argue that the expulsion
of lunatic-fringe free-soil and abolitionist elements from the Democracy
would have to be accomplished if the party was to endure:
The Democratic party [he wrote Robert] can only hope for success by dis-
carding from among them the Free-Soilers, Abolitionists, and all such cattle.
Let the Whigs, if they please, court them, and take them to their embraces;
but let the true lovers of the Union repudiate them as unworthy of their
association. They do, indeed, deserve the deepest curses of the patriot for hav-
ing put in jeopardy the noblest and fairest fabric of government the world
ever saw. When I think of it, all the milk of my nature is turned to gall. . . .
Calhoun's speech does him no credit. It is too ultra, and his ultimata im-
practicable I regard his speech as calculated to do injury to the Southern
cause 8
Given these attitudes, it is not difficult to understand why Tyler
welcomed Daniel Webster's famous Seventh of March speech, which
fervently appealed for the preservation of the Union and a spirit of
compromise. Denounced by Northern fire-eaters as a "traitor" to his
section for criticizing the excesses of the abolitionist societies, Webster
394
argued persuasively in his great address that there was really no need
for congressional action on slavery in the New Mexico and Utah terri-
tories. The twin impact of hostile soil and climate made the institution
wholly impracticable there, he pointed out. These views squared with
those Tyler had long held, and Webster was soon in receipt of a letter
from Sherwood Forest praising his patriotism and sagacity and thanking
him for his exposure of the "machinations" of the organized abolitionists.
At the same time., however, Tyler felt it necessary to counter Webster's
Seventh of March suggestion that the Texas annexation movement of
1843-1845 might indeed have been launched by Southerners interested
only in slavery expansion. Tyler hastened to assure his former Secretary
of State that this charge was partly in error. Whatever the motives of
Upshur, Calhoun, and other Southern fire-eaters had been in supporting
annexation, Tyler's own decisive role in the matter had turned entirely
upon an honest desire to achieve a cotton monopoly for the whole United
States.9
By late May 1850 Tyler was prepared to accept the Compromise of
1850 as the only reasonable alternative to splitting the Democratic
Party and risking a civil war. In endorsing the compromise he knew
full well that slavery could never successfully be carried into the arid
wastelands of New Mexico and Utah. He also appreciated the fact that
the admission of California as a free state, together with the whole
principle of "popular sovereignty/7 would soon doom the South to an
inevitable and lasting inferiority in its political-power balance with the
North. Clearly, popular sovereignty would result in more free states
being carved from the remaining territories than slave states. Yet he
was prepared to accept the containment of slavery and the political in-
feriority of the South as preferable to civil war. These views he freely
incorporated into a letter solicited from him by Senator Henry S. Foote
of Mississippi. The letter was widely circulated by Foote on Capitol
Hill in his successful effort to bring moderate Southern elements to the
support of Clay's compromise proposals. Later it was published. As
Tyler told Alexander Gardiner on May 21, "I go for the compromise." ia
The unexpected death of General Taylor in July 1850 and the
elevation of Vice-President Millard Fillmore to the White House mo-
mentarily threatened the progress of the compromise bills through the
Congress. Suspicions swept moderate circles, North and South, that Fill-
more's long antislavery background in New York might upset the deli-
cate arrangements being made. Happily, the new President announced
his willingness to support the legislation and preserve the Union, and in
September the compromise package became law over his signature. In
both sections moderate Union parties, and Union committees within
the Democracy, sprang into existence dedicated to the preservation of
the Compromise of 1850 as the "final solution" to the trying sectional-
slavery issue. In New York City both Alexander Gardiner and John
395
Lorimer Graham took active roles in the Union Committee there, and
the group enlisted in its ranks many of the old Conservative Democrats
and Tylerites of 1843-1845.
In spite of his patriotic stand on the compromise, Millard Fillmore
did not command the support of the Tyler-Gardiner family. To begin
with, the failure of David Lyon's patronage safari into the San Diego
Customs House was not accepted by the clan with exceptionally good
grace. Not only did Tyler have no patronage influence with the new
administration ("of the administration I can ask nothing/7 he lamented),
but he also became increasingly worried lest Fillmore not throw the full
power and prestige of the federal government behind the Fugitive Slave
Act. This particular portion of the 1850 legislation had done much to
marshal Southern support behind the compromise package. At the
same time, it was this very section of the compromise that most in-
furiated the Northern abolitionists. They regarded it as bestial and
inhumane and in violation of a higher moral law that completely tran-
scended the Constitution. While Tyler himself had no problem with
runaway Negroes at Sherwood Forest, he had assumed, in publicly sup-
porting the compromise, that the Act would be administered with
"impartial justice" and that the recovery of Southern slave property
from the North would be accomplished with speed and decision by
federal authorities. As he phrased his view of this point in his letter to
Senator Foote, "what I should chiefly desire to see would be the . . .
effectual delivery of the fugitive by some means to prevent recapture.
There is so solemn an obligation resting on the government to carry
faithfully into execution the provision of the Constitution on this point,
that I cannot believe that an objection will be made to the most strin-
gent provision." u
By December 1850 there was so much agitation by abolitionist ex-
tremists for the overthrow of the Fugitive Slave Act, much of it from
the pen of George Thompson, the celebrated British abolitionist, that
Tyler was prepared to blame the entire anti-Fugitive Slave movement
on self-serving English interference in American internal affairs. He even
toyed momentarily with the irresponsible idea that provoking a war with
Britain on the Thompson intervention issue might serve to heal the sec-
tional split in an excited burst of American patriotism. As seen through
Tyler's Anglophobic window on the world, the rascally Redcoats had
fastened slavery on America in the first place. Now they might perform
a really useful service to the United States by obliging the nation with
a therapeutic war. "An earthquake of some sort would seem to be neces-
sary," he told Alexander, "[for] unless a new direction is given to the
public mind, I cannot augur results." The censure of Senator Foote by
the Mississippi legislature for his moderate stance on the Compromise
of 1850 strengthened Tyler's belief that the very fabric of the compro-
mise was being torn to shreds by extremists on both sides. Only in the
396
flames of a foreign war "might the disturbers of our harmony be con-
sumed." At no time did he agree with John Tyler, Jr.'s view that instant
Southern secession was the answer to the problem. Tyler did not want a
civil war. An Anglo-American war would do. This bellicose mood even-
tually passed, however, and the former President vented his ire instead
in an anonymous letter to John S. Cunningham, editor of the Ports-
mouth Pilot. It was an indignant and ill-considered communication
dashed off in less than an hour on December 10, 1850. In it he demanded
that Fillmore support the Fugitive Slave Act firmly and vigorously:
It is the law of the land. . . . Let him discharge it faithfully, boldly and un-
flinchingly. No half-willing marshalls, no doubting commissioners. . . . No
prying about for a subterfuge under which to escape, no honeyed words. . . .
Let the President . . . pledge the army and navy to sustain them if needs be.
The time for fair words, easily spoken, has passed. The time for decision and
action is at hand. Let him begin the work of seriousness with "the Hon."
George Thompson, member of Parliament ... by remonstrance to the British
govt . . . and then he is ready for the Garrisons and their allies.12
For an old enemy of the 1833 Force Bill these were ironical words.
But Tyler felt that the Fugitive Slave Act alone had reconciled Southern
moderates and unionists to the total compromise deal. Destroy the ef-
fectiveness of that mollifying sweetener, he argued, and the secessionist
extremists in Dixie would ultimately force the slavery question to civil
war. Tyler fully appreciated the difficulties a Vice-President had in
coming suddenly to power, but he feared that the Buffalo politician
would prove too weak to parry abolitionist pressure to repeal the legis-
lation. "There are but few men in the world who have the moral bold-
ness to face all odds and encounter all hazards in the honest discharge
of duty, and we must express the fear that Millard Fillmore is not one
of them," he told the readers of the Pilot.1*
The slavery controversy was brought home even more forcefully
and personally to the Gardiner-Tyler family when Alexander, in the last
months before his death, found himself in the heated middle of the
controversial James Hamlet case. Serving as a federal commissioner in
New York under the Fugitive Slave Act, Alexander was involved in a
much-criticized action which saw James Hamlet, a porter in the store of
Tilton and Maloney on Water Street, and allegedly a runaway slave
from Baltimore, arrested and given over to Mary Brown of Baltimore,
his master. Unfortunately for Alexander, the case was not so clear-cut
as it might have been, nor were the legal procedures he employed beyond
criticism.
In the first place, instead of taking the depositions himself, Alexan-
der permitted his deputy, Charles M. Hall, to collect the initial data
on Hamlet's legal status. Hall was a competent young upstate lawyer,
397
but not a qualified commissioner under the meaning and wording of the
Fugitive Slave Act and thus not empowered to take depositions. In the
formal hearings over which Alexander did preside personally, in Sep-
tember 1850, there was also much to fault. As the American and Foreign
Anti-Slavery Society charged in its subsequent pamphlet on the matter,
Hamlet "was taken into a retired room in the second storey of the old
City Hall, and the Commissioner, without any notice to any acquaint-
ance of the prisoner, without assigning him any counsel, or giving him a
moment's opportunity to send for assistance, proceeded with hot haste,
ex-par te, to take the testimony of [Thomas J.] Clare, the son-in-law
of the alleged claimant, and young Gustavus Brown, her son, in proof
that the prisoner was her slave." A bystander happened to overhear
what was going on and sent immediately for a lawyer to appear for
Hamlet. The lawyer arrived in time to elicit by cross-examination the
fact that Mary Brown was not Hamlet's owner of record as defined by
the Fugitive Slave Act. She had leased Hamlet to the Baltimore Shot
Company, which Clare served as clerk, prior to the Negro's "escape"
from Maryland in 1848. Hamlet insisted during the hearing he was a
free man and that his mother was a free woman. "But the law pro-
hibited his testimony from being taken, and Commissioner Gardiner,
upon the testimony of two family witnesses . . . decided that the prisoner
was a slave of the claimant, and doomed him to perpetual bondage . . .
not by verdict of a jury but by the fiat of a mere clerk whom the law
has constituted slave-catcher for Southern masters."
Within a few days Commissioner Gardiner's office became the swirl-
ing storm center of a concerted abolitionist effort to hamstring the opera-
tion of the hated Fugitive Slave law. "The affair," said Alexander, "kept
my office in confusion more than a week and gave me more trouble than
any one nigger was worth." The fact that the law permitted no Negro
who claimed to be a freedman (as Hamlet vigorously did) the right to a
trial by jury, or even the right to give testimony in his own behalf,
outraged the abolitionists. So too did the fact that a simple affidavit by
a claimant was regarded as sufficient proof of his ownership of an alleged
fugitive. The Fugitive Slave Act, whatever its purely political merits as
part of the Compromise of 1850, flew foolishly in the face of everything
the American judicial system represented in the area of responsible trial
procedures. Common fairness was found nowhere in it. Instead, it es-
tablished star-chamber techniques which mocked, on racial grounds
alone, the basic rights of the individual under traditional Anglo-Saxon
law.
The abolitionists were handed a strong moral argument, and they
lost no time making the most of it. The crusade for James Hamlet was
led by William Jay, son of the former Supreme Court Chief Justice and
one of New York City's most active and dedicated abolitionists. Jay
centered his criticism of Alexander's handling of the Hamlet case on the
398
technical question of Charles M. Hall's competence in taking the
depositions. He argued that Alexander's deputy was not a bona fide
commissioner under the law and had no business being involved in the
case at all. The whole procedure before Gardiner's bench had therefore
been an improper one from start to finish. Alexander's surrender of
Hamlet to his alleged owner, concluded Jay, was both immoral and
illegal.14
Alexander Gardiner was strongly antiabolitionist and had been so
since his undergraduate days at Princeton. To him, a slave was private
property, and a master had as much right to recover a fugitive as he
did a strayed horse. Not surprisingly, he considered Jay's arguments
irrelevant and he went through with the Hamlet transfer to Baltimore.
He was stung, however, by abolitionist letters vehemently condemning
his role in the case, some of them addressed to him from as far away
as Rockton, Illinois. Under the impact of these attacks his patience gave
way, and he struck back at the intervention of the New York abolition-
ists in the Hamlet case. In an unsigned New York Herald article titled
"The Question of the Day," he pointed out that the letter of the law
had been faithfully complied with and that the whole issue had been
artificially manufactured and blown up by William Jay, "pretty well
known in this community for some years past in connection with the
negro race. He is an abolitionist of the darkest shade, and one of the
most fanatical and persevering agitators." Defending every provision of
what he preferred calling the "Fugitive From Service Act," Alexander
concluded with the biting observation that
We do not entertain the idle expectation that truth or reason can make any
impression on the commingled freesoil, abolition, Fourierite, infidel and
woman's rights party. From Martin Van Buren and William H. Seward, the
arch demagogues, who are looking to a Northern Presidency, to Frederick
Douglass and Samuel Ward (black men) through the host of such inferior
lights as Abby Kelley, Horace Greeley, Sojourner Truth, Ward Beecher,
Rosa Lee, William Jay, Lucretia Mott . . . and others . . . these people and
their followers constitute a formidable party, espousing one side of the only
substantial question now dividing the country- These are the abolition party,
engaged in an effort to abolish — first the union of these States, and then the
distinctions of color, and those social institutions which are a result of the
wisdom of the ages. Against them is arrayed a party most properly designated
as republican, composed of men of established moral views, who keep in
sight the imperfections of our nature, and whose habits of thought and action
are founded on the old continental school. The sooner the empty party
distinctions of Whig and Democrat are abandoned . . . the sooner we will
have a clear field and a fair fight on the only substantial topic of the day —
the better for ourselves, even though it be too late to save the Union.15
Alexander Gardiner did not live to discover how the slavery ques-
tion was finally resolved. Hamlet himself achieved his freedom when a
399
public subscription was collected in New York to buy him out of
slavery. But the emotionalism engendered by the explosive Hamlet af-
fair was still reverberating throughout the nation when Alexander died.
As mentioned earlier, his sudden passing was prominently noted in
Southern newspapers, and his obituaries in the South were tributes to
his patriotic steadfastness in the face of the abolitionist provocations
of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. There was even talk
for a time that the Union Committee of New York would erect a monu-
ment over his grave in East Hampton. "The South," said Julia, "would
be more convinced by that act than by anything they could do to show
their patriotism and real desire to see the laws of their country upheld —
and it would create here one universal sentiment of approval and satis-
faction." No Union Committee monument ever materialized, but Sher-
wood Forest was later pleased to learn that Governor John B. Floyd of
Virginia had been in private correspondence with Alexander during the
Hamlet case. Floyd regarded the young New York lawyer's passing a
great loss to the South. "His conduct as United States Commissioner,"
agreed Cunningham of the Portsmouth Pilot, "showed him to be a very
proper man." 16
The Fugitive Slave question would continue to trouble the political
waters of the nation until the onset of the Civil War. Tyler's stand on so
incendiary an issue (as expressed in his public letter to Senator Foote)
brought him again into the national political limelight. En route to join
Julia at Saratoga in September 1850, he was hissed at an address he
gave a group of law students in New York City, an incident gleefully
reported in the local abolitionist and free-soil press. On the other hand,
his Fugitive Slave attitudes earned him a favorable hearing among those
elephant-memoried Virginia Democrats who had roundly condemned
him when he identified himself with the Whigs in 1836-1840.
Indeed, Tyler felt that the sectional crisis of 1850 had actually
benefited and "purified" the Democratic Party by shaking out both the
Northern abolitionists and Southern secessionists in a single snap. For
this reason Tyler gave ear to Robert's suggestion that he support James
Buchanan's renewed quest for the Democracy's nomination in 1852.
Actually, the master of Sherwood had little love for Buchanan ("he had
none for me in my severe trials"), but he sensibly realized that as long
as Virginia and Pennsylvania moderates remained united on their Presi-
dential candidates, the Democratic Party as a whole could probably be
held together.17
A severe case of flu which developed into pneumonia prevented
Tyler from participating in the usual preconvention maneuverings that
occupied the politicians during the early months of 1852. During this ill-
ness Julia spent many nights "holding his head and giving him warm
drinks," while her mother argued for massive doses of "German pills"
400
and "alum water." By April the former President was recovered enough
to take an active interest in politics again, and he was much restored
and buoyed when the Virginia State Democratic Convention retroac-
tively endorsed the acts of his administration and welcomed him once
again into full political brotherhood. There was even some talk in Rich-
mond, Julia reported, that his "friends stand ready to throw in his
name" as a compromise candidate if the coming Democratic convention
should fail to reach a decision among its half-dozen hopefuls.
This endorsement of his administration by the Virginia Democracy
ended at last John Tyler's long battle for the recovery of his political
reputation. "I began to fear," he confessed to Henry A. Wise, "that I
was to descend to my grave without any shadow of justice being done to
me in public places." The rest of the family was equally cheered by this
happy turn in Tyler's psychological fortunes. "The endorsement of
Father and his Administration," said John, Jr., "is certainly gratifying.
The time is surely rapidly coming when the whole country will acknowl-
edge his just and meritorious claims upon its opinions. I think he will
live long enough to die happy in the consciousness of the fact re-
alized. . . ." 18
At the Democracy's Baltimore convention in June 1852 delegate
Robert Tyler labored diligently (down to "the very last ballot") for the
nomination of James Buchanan. Tyler encouraged his son's activity, and
he was willing to accept Old Buck as the party standard-bearer himself.
He was not unhappy, however, when dark horse Franklin Pierce of New
Hampshire was nominated on the forty-ninth ballot. In fact, several
days before Pierce's selection Tyler informally polled his "own family
circle" and announced that Pierce was the solid family choice. He was
certain that Pierce, a Northern man with Southern principles, would
defeat General Winfield Scott, latest and last of the Whig soldier-hero
candidates. And he was encouraged by the prospect that Pierce would
attempt to knit the Democratic Party firmly together across sectional
lines and preserve the Union. Robert, of course, was disappointed that
Buchanan had not received the prize at Baltimore, but once the con-
vention's decision was made he gave himself wholly over to the Pierce
campaign. As in the past, he concentrated on his political specialty,
mustering the Roman Catholic vote for the Democracy in Philadelphia.19
The campaign of 1852, a dull and listless affair, was highlighted by
the embarrassing pomposity of hero Scott and the gutter tactics of both
Whigs and Democrats. Both party platforms stood solidly for the Com-
promise of 1850, but to many voters in the South Pierce seemed "safer"
on slavery and on the Fugitive Slave Act than did Scott. Southern
Whigs by the thousands thus renounced their own candidate, streamed
into the Democracy, or went fishing on election day. The result, as Tyler
predicted, was never in doubt. Supported by a unified if not honey-
mooning Democratic Party, Pierce won in a landslide. Scott carried only
401
four states, tlie disaster marking the end of the Whig Party as a major
force in American politics. The Whigs, it would seem, had finally run
out of available generals. With their Northern wing split on the Com-
promise of 1850 and their Southern wing defecting into the Southern
Democracy, no single personality, certainly not the egocentric Scott,
could hold the eclectic Whig coalition together any longer. The timely
death of the Whig Party produced no tears at Sherwood Forest.20
As the Pierce administration took office in March 1853 J°nn Tyler
was confident that all was right in the world again. Pierce's appointment
of former Corporal's Guardsman Caleb Gushing as Attorney General
gave the ex-President a personal pipeline to the new administration
which he immediately filled with patronage suggestions. "The ultras of
the Democratic party are already restless," he warned Cushing soon
after the election. The Attorney General should therefore work to
"conciliate as large a body of true friends as you can . . . the person,
whoever he may be, who hands you a letter from me is your true friend,
and no mistake." Tyler promised Cushing he would recommend for
federal office men who were "old tried friends who have stood by us in
past times and have never wavered since." Among these old, tried
friends was his nephew, William Waggaman, whom Tyler hoped Pierce
would "provide for comfortably." When Pierce offered Henry A. Wise
any Cabinet job the Virginian wanted, Tyler was further persuaded
that the new President was indeed a discriminating judge of political
talent. This view was strengthened in May 1853 when Robert Tyler was
signally honored by Pierce with a White House dinner invitation fol-
lowed by an ostentatious two-hour "arm-in-arm" stroll down Pennsyl-
vania Avenue. And when John Tyler met the President at White Sul-
phur Springs in August of that year the mutual exchanges of greeting
and respect could not have been more cordial. Buchanan's appointment
to the Court of St. James's, Jefferson Davis' selection as Secretary of
War, and rumors that Robert Tyler would sooner or later secure the
London consulate all contributed to Tyler's belief that Franklin Pierce
would bring new strength and unity to the Democratic Party. With
Pierce in the White House and the Compromise of 1850 on the books,
the whole question of slavery in the territories, thought Tyler, had be-
come an academic abstraction. "I do not see to what Free-soilism can
[now] attach itself, or upon what food it can longer live. It is at this
moment but a mere abstraction." 21
In the midst of this emerging euphoria over the Pierce administra-
tion the slavery controversy struck Sherwood Forest with full force. As
might have been expected, the storm center of the excitement was Julia.
In the February 1853 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger, a Rich-
mond monthly of broad circulation, appeared Julia's letter defending
slavery. First printed in the New York Herald and the Richmond En-
402
quirer In January, the article was a spirited rebuttal to an open letter
from the Duchess of Sutherland, the Countess of Derby, the Vicountess
Palmerston, the Countess of Carlisle, and Lady John Russell urging
Southern ladies of quality and moral sensitivity to take the lead in de-
manding an end to the immoral slave institution. Although Tyler's
thoughts on the subject ran prominently through the piece, Julia ac-
tually wrote it. Indeed, she labored over it for a full week until she was
exhausted by the close concentration and attention it demanded. "Au-
thorship does not agree with her," Margaret reported, "and what with
intense thinking and excitement on the subject it has quite upset her
usual current of health. She has been obliged to take some blue pills in
consequence." 22
The slave system Julia knew intimately at Sherwood Forest and
saw functioning among the James River wheat plantations bore little
resemblance to the view of slavery the English ladies had evidently
derived from reading Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin when
it first appeared in March 1852. Julia's response to the Duchess was
thus an attack on the Stowe image of the Southern plantation slave as
well as a restatement of the positive paternalistic features of the system.
She knew perfectly well that the Sherwood Forest slaves were well
treated and that they had a deep emotional attachment to their master.
She had witnessed too many evidences of this to permit the Sutherland
charges to go unanswered.23
As recently as June 1852, for example, she had seen Henry, a body
slave who had "run away" from Sherwood Forest in 1844, return volun-
tarily to the plantation to explain to Tyler that he had not really been
a runaway. Henry's story was that his desertion had been no more than
an attempt to rejoin Tyler at the White House after being left behind at
Sherwood Forest when the President and Julia had returned to Washing-
ton from their honeymoon. Whatever the truth of his account, Henry
had been arrested, classified as a runaway, and had been sold by Tyler
to a new master in Georgia. There in the intervening years he had
learned the barber's trade, saved his money, and in 1852 he had pur-
chased his freedom and journeyed to Washington to secure manumis-
sion papers which were legally unobtainable in Georgia. On his way
back to Georgia, papers in hand, he stopped at Sherwood to see his old
master. On greeting Tyler again, reported Julia, "he could not restrain
his tears — and said ... he never could be a contented man or die happy
unless the time should come when he might see and talk with his master
once again." After cutting Gardie and Tazewell's hair, he left for
Georgia. This was not the stuff of Uncle Tom's Cabin.24
The only other runaway incident recorded at Sherwood Forest (it
could scarcely be classed as a serious attempt at escape) occurred in
December 1855 when the slave Roscusis got drunk, became impertinent
with John Tyler, Jr., and was knocked to the ground for his attitude.
403
In fear and panic the bewildered Negro picked himself up and "ran out
of the front gate" and away — to nearby Richmond. Immediately appre-
hended, roughed up, and slapped in a Richmond jail, he would, said
Julia, "have had punishment enough before he sees home again to dis-
gust him with traveling." 25
In her lecture to "The Duchess of Sutherland and the Ladies of
England" Julia did not attempt to defend slavery as a positive moral
good. She admitted too that it had grave political disadvantages and was
the "one subject on which there is a possibility of wrecking the bark of
this Union." But she denied that the slave system was by definition a
form of bestiality run amuck and she questioned the right of British
critics, male or female, to intervene in what was essentially an Ameri-
can domestic problem. Warming to her task, Julia pointed out that —
compared to the depressed white laborers of London — the Southern
Negro "lives sumptuously," enjoying warm clothing, plenty of bread,
and meat twice daily. The separation of slave families was "of rare
occurrence and then attended by peculiar circumstances." In addition,
she praised the work in Liberia of the American Colonization Society,
called attention to the steady statistical increase in the numbers of free
Negroes in Virginia, and noted that in helping Negro freedmen return
to Africa "we seek to retribute the wrongs done by England to Africa,
by returning civilization for barbarism, Christianity for idolatry." Negro
slaves attended church in great numbers, Julia maintained. They had
their own pastors, and they were encouraged to undertake religious in-
struction. To charge that their masters cruelly denied them this spiritual
boon (as the Duchess of Sutherland had) was to parrot "some dealer in,
and retailer of, fiction." 26
By 1853 these arguments were standard, mechanical defenses of
the slave institution. The main force of Julia's article rested in her well-
mounted attack on British abolitionist interference in American internal
affairs. Charging that the Duchess and her co-signers were merely
mouthing the abolitionist opinions of their powerful husbands, Julia
reminded the English ladies that slavery was first fastened on America
by British colonial administrators. It came with singular bad grace for
the English now to shed great "crocodile" tears for the poor slaves. If
the ladies of England demanded an object for their tears, their mercy,
and their frustrated sense of humanitarianism, Julia suggested that they
concentrate on the destitute and impoverished people of their own coun-
try, particularly on the miserable conditions of their merchant and naval
seamen and the plight of their starving Irish:
Spare from the well-fed negroes of these States one drop of your super-
abounding sympathy to pour into that bitter cup [Ireland] which is over-
running with sorrow and with tears Go, my good Duchess of Sutherland,
on an embassy of mercy to the poor, the stricken, the hungry and the naked
of your own land — cast in their laps the superflux of your enormous wealth;
a single jewel from your hair, a single gem from your dress would relieve
4-04
many a poor female of England, who is now cold, and sniveling and destitute.
. . . Go, and arrest the proceedings of your admiralty ! Throw your charities
between poor Jack and the press gang 1 ... I reason not with you on the
subject of our domestic institutions. Such as they are, they are ours We
prefer to work out our own destiny The African, under [English] policy
and by her laws, became property. That property has descended from father
to son, and constitutes a large part of Southern wealth We meddle not
with your laws of primogeniture and entail although they are obnoxious to
all our notions of justice, and are in violation of the laws of nature. . . . We
preach no crusades against aristocratic establishments We are content to
leave England in the enjoyment of her peculiar institutions; and we must
insist upon the right to regulate ours without her aid. I pray you to bear in
mind that the golden rule of life is for each to attend to his own business, and
let his neighbor's alone I 27
Within a fortnight of Julia's appearance in print Sherwood Forest
was showered with congratulations and letters of support from all over
the country. For a brief moment Julia Gardiner Tyler became a national
figure and a Southern heroine. Sarah Polk sent congratulations. Resolu-
tions of thanks were received from various women's organizations all
over the South. More than fifty newspapers, North and South, were re-
ceived at Sherwood Forest containing favorable notice of the article.
The Boston Times pronounced it "powerful," as did the New York
Journal of Commerce. The Philadelphia Pennsylvanian praised it, and
such Whig papers as the Petersburg (Va.) Gazette crowed that Julia's
effort had "knocked the Duchess's document into the middle of next
week." Robert Tyler and John Tyler, Jr., wrote that it had "created an
immense sensation in Philadelphia circles and added greatly to her
fame." Washington was "loud in commendation," reported Colonel John
S. Cunningham from the capital. Some argued that Julia had squashed
Harriet Beecher Stowe in one blow, but Margaret demanded better and
more tangible evidence for this broad claim. "I think the good people
of our Union had better unite in subscribing a sum at least equal to the
amount of Mrs. Stowe's publication. This would be a substantial evi-
dence of the favor with which it has been received." Still, Tyler opined
that "there was never a public document in the annals of our history
which has received such universal approval and admiration." As Julia
happily dispatched reprints of her effort to old Washington friends and
acquaintances — Mesdames Polk, Webster, Calhoun, Wickliffe, and Wil-
kins — the music halls in Richmond began enjoying the fun and excite-
ment. When Tyler took Gardie to town in September to hear the
Kimble Band he learned that the organization was preparing a new
song titled "The Duchess," the refrain for each verse ending with the
sassy lines:
Oh, Lady Sutherland,
To comfort you I'll try.
Mrs. Tyler gave you what was right,
But Duchess don't you cry.28
405
Tyler's Anglophobic appetite was not entirely sated by Julia's re-
buke to the good Duchess and her circle. The onset of the Crimean War
in 1854 raised briefly the hope at Sherwood Forest that Britain would
be crushed by Tsarist Russia in the contest and that such a defeat would
obviate for many years any English plans for a military intervention in
America's domestic slavery problem. "The allied armies find they have
caught a Tartar/' Julia exulted. Tyler had no love for Tsarist Russia.
He recognized it for the senseless despotism it was. Indeed, when Tsar
Nicholas intervened in the Hungarian Revolution in June 1849 Tyler
had been loud in his praise of the courage and democratic idealism of
Louis Kossuth and his heroic Hungarian patriots. But the advantage
of the Crimean War to Americans, as he saw it, lay in the possibility of
the mutual military exhaustion both of the autocratic Tsar and the
meddlesome John Bull.
As the ill-managed slaughter progressed, however, Tyler expressed
his willingness as a humanitarian (and as a politician not averse to a
comeback attempt) to head an American peace mission to negotiate an
end to the conflict. "These views are for your own eye," he informed
Robert in January 1855 after his son sounded him out on the idea with
a view to reporting Tyler's reaction to Ambassador Buchanan in Lon-
don. "If such a thing as a tender of such mission should be made me,
accompanied with such outfit as the occasion would demand, I might
take its acceptance under serious advisement." Tyler was not summoned
from his bucolic retirement to head a peace mission. Instead, he re-
mained on his farm and enjoyed the rise in grain prices occasioned by
the Crimean War. With wheat up to $2.50 per bushel and applications
of guano steadily increasing the yield of his corn- and wheatfields, Tyler
could regard the continuing combat with a certain equanimity.29
-«am> <S> i^mi-
He could not regard the sharp renewal of the slavery controversy in
the same detached manner. On the contrary, the introduction of the
Kansas-Nebraska Bill in January 1854 threatened again to break
asunder the Democratic Party and lead the nation down the shortening
road to war. Proposed by Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, the
controversial bill provided for the organization of territorial governments
for Kansas and Nebraska, both of which lay north of the 36°30/ line
set by Congress in the Missouri Compromise of 1820 as the dividing line
between slave and free territory. Whatever Douglas' personal motives
in submitting the legislation (they included his interest in a central route
for the projected transcontinental railroad, his private ambition for the
White House, and his attempt to remove the slavery controversy foot-
ball once and for all from the fumbling hands of Congress), the feature
of the proposal that produced the greatest national turmoil was the
provision that the slavery question in each territory was to be solved
democratically by popular sovereignty. In sum, the Missouri Compro-
406
mise would be repealed and slavery in the territories, now no longer
contained by congressional fiat, could legally expand north of the old
36°3o' boundary. Southern supporters of the legislation, denying that
these proposals necessarily meant "squatter sovereignty," pointed de-
fensively to the provision in the legislation that permitted all legal dis-
putes over slavery in the two territories to be carried to the Supreme
Court. This, however, did not still the uproar. Although it was not likely
that more slaveowners than free-soil advocates could be moved into
Kansas in time to win the territory for slavery, the fact that the institu-
tion might now legally metastasize brought fierce attacks in Northern
free-soil and abolitionist circles on the "aggressive slavocracy" of the
South and the Pierce administration. Aggressive or not, the fact was, of
course, that the slavery forces could not long compete in Kansas with
the antislavery advocates who ultimately rushed into the territory in far
greater numbers. In Nebraska the slavocracy had no chance at all.
When this became apparent, the initially agreeable doctrine of popular
sovereignty soured suddenly in the South and the suspicion grew that the
wily Douglas had advocated the principle in the full knowledge that
slavery, unable to compete in any of the still unorganized territories,
would be confined forever within its 1854 boundaries.
Tyler had opposed the Missouri Compromise limitation on slavery.
As a young congressman he had argued in 1820 that Congress had no
constitutional prerogative to interfere with slavery in the territories one
way or another. While he had never been particularly interested in
slavery expansion as such (indeed, he had regarded this as the least
relevant argument for Texas annexation in 1844-1845), he still believed
slavery should be legally permitted to expand into regions where the
climate and soil conditions were particularly favorable to the institution.
He had never been militant on the subject; he had accepted the hydro-
logical limitations on expansion implicit in the Compromise of 1850.
He knew that the slave institution could not flourish in arid New Mexico
or Utah. He correctly saw that the alleged victory for the South in those
desert sections was far outweighed by the political advantages the North
achieved through the admission of California as a free state. Nor did he
think that more than a few Missouri planters would want to carry their
"domestics" into neighboring Kansas. Nevertheless, he thought they
should have the right to do so until such time as the settlers of Kansas
Territory declared against the institution in a democratic and orderly
manner. He therefore publicly favored the passage of the Kansas-
Nebraska Bill as recognition of the legal "equality" of Southern and
Northern institutions in the unorganized territories. It would mark an
end to three and a half decades of "busy intermeddling of Congress" in
the slavery question in those areas. Popular sovereignty, as conceived
by Douglas, publicly received his support in 1854 as a reasonable solu-
tion to the question of slavery expansion in the territories. Nevertheless,
407
he remained fearful in Ms own mind that the revival of the whole issue
would lead only to the ultimate "despoilment of the South." He was
certain that "these agitations cannot end in good." For these reasons he
devoutly wished that the whole question had never come up. Privately,
he defended the judgment of his own congressman, John Singleton Mill-
son, in voting against the measure.30
With confusion enough abroad in the land, it particularly galled
Tyler to observe that some segments of the Northern clergy were willing
to interject theological and ecclesiastical considerations into the Kansas-
Nebraska debate. As he wrote Margaret:
I am especially vexed with the Northern Clergy who have left their ap-
propriate sphere of peace on Earth and good will to men to enter upon the
battlefield of politics — an arena from which they cannot depart without bear-
ing all the marks of a wretched and unhallowed conflict about them. Mr.
Bedell even is of the number. Alas, alas! I thought him so absorbed in the
saving of souls, as to have no time to devote to us poor devils of the South
as their learned and very pious men of the pulpit would have us. Don't ask me
to accompany you to any church in which any one of these busybodies may
have to preach. I should have to deny your request altho' to do so would
give me pain.31
The Kansas-Nebraska Bill passed Congress in May 1854 and was
duly signed by South-leaning Pierce. Hailed initially in the South as a
triumph for the future health and welfare of Southern institutions, the
measure immediately set into motion a series of dangerous reactions,
which, as Tyler had feared, brought civil war a step closer. Within two
years a coalition of Northern Whigs, abolitionists, Free Soilers, and anti-
slavery Democrats had organized the new radical Republican Party;
Kansas had become a bloody battleground fought over by pro-slavery
and abolitionist guerrilla forces; the Democratic Party began disinte-
grating in a great centripetal motion; and in the midst of the growing
social and political disorder the short-lived Know-Nothing Party made
its wild bid for government by hate.
John Tyler watched these tragic developments with consternation.
It distressed him to see the Roman Catholic issue hurled into the politi-
cal arena. He had condemned the intolerant Nativist movement in the
18405, and with equal vigor and consistency he attacked its anti-
Catholic and anti-immigrant Know-Nothing offspring in 1854. To Tyler,
the Roman Catholic Church, above all others, was to be commended for
its noninvolvement in the slavery controversy. Catholicism, said Tyler
in July 1854, "seems to me to have been particularly faithful to the
Constitution of the country, while their priests have set an example of
non-interference in politics which furnishes an example most worthy of
imitation on the part of the clergy of the other sects at the North, who
have not hesitated to rush into the arena and soil their garments with
the dust of bitter strife." In defending the Roman Church against
408
Know-Nothing charges of treason, un-Americanism, and worse, Tyler
saw that the hate crusade fed principally on the broader sectional con-
fusion engendered by the Kansas-Nebraska controversy and the threat-
ening breakup of the two party structure. Thus he felt that the new
party's real danger turned on its bid to "unite the malcontents of all
parties" and compromise the prospects of a victory for moderate Demo-
crats in 1856. For these views he was heavily indebted to Robert Tyler
whose war against the Know-No things in Philadelphia on behalf of
James Buchanan's continuing candidacy for the Democratic nomination
was reported to Sherwood Forest in great detail. As for the future of
the Know-Nothing movement, Tyler could only hope that
The Intolerant spirit manifested against the Catholics, as exhibited in the
burning of their churches, etc., will, so soon as the thing becomes fairly
considered, arouse a strong feeling of dissatisfaction on the part of a large
majority of the American people; for if there is one principle of higher im-
port with them than any other, It is the principle of religious freedom.
Tyler predicted that the madness would eventually run its course. The
Know-Nothings would soon split helplessly into their own pro- and
antislavery sectional components and with that division the church-
burners and immigrant-beaters would play but a small role in the 1856
canvass.32
In the meantime, Tyler supported the gubernatorial aspirations in
Virginia of his old friend Henry A. Wise. Not only did former Guards-
man Wise "denounce and satirize by turn the Know Nothings" in the
Old Dominion, but his campaign included as well a vigorous ex post
facto defense of the accomplishments of the Tyler administration. "The
Democratic press, in order to sustain him," observed Tyler, "has to
eulogize me; and thus Mr. Wise's nomination has been better for me
than any other incident which has occurred." Wise's impressive victory
in May 1855 over an ideologically rudderless Whig-Know-No thing coa-
lition smashed the anti-Catholic movement in Virginia and elated the
Sherwood Foresters. "The opponents to that miserable know-nothingism
are so anxious to bring in Wise," Julia wrote on the eve of the election.
Even little Alex, barely seven, was reported to have declared he did "not
wish to live a day longer in the world if Henry A. Wise is defeated."
Not only was Wise victorious ; the size of his sweep was enough to bring
his name prominently before the South as a possible candidate for the
Democratic nomination in 1856. John Tyler, his personal struggle for
reputation over, hastened into Governor Wise's corner. With Republican,
Democratic, Whig, and Know-Nothing parties now in the national po-
litical picture, all save the Republicans badly divided on the slavery
issue, the election of 1856 loomed as one of the most unpredictable in
American political history. Nor would the task facing the victorious
candidate, Wise or otherwise, be enviable. As Tyler saw the immediate
political future in November 1855:
409
Rely upon it, that the next four years will prove to be the turning point of
our destiny, and that it requires no ordinary man at the head of affairs to
weather the storm. I even doubt whether the presidency would be desirable.
He would be but a wreck in history, whose administration should witness a
destruction of the government. But I must here end my gloomy reflec-
tions 33
Never had the former President been so clairvoyant. President
James Buchanan turned out to be a very "ordinary man," and his ad-
ministration, a "wreck in history," did little more than preside paralyti-
cally over the steady erosion of the Union. Tyler, of course, was not an
enthusiastic partisan of Buchanan in 1856, even though his son Robert
continued to labor loyally in the Buchaneer cause. Tyler favored the
Democracy's nomination of Wise, Pierce, and then Buchanan — in that
order. When it was apparent that Governor Wise could hope to com-
mand little or no Northern support, Tyler "inclined strongly" toward
Franklin Pierce, who had "on the absorbing question of the times been
true as steeL" This attitude toward Pierce, whose administration had
proved something less than a glorious success, was in part determined
by Tyler's unwillingness to trust Buchanan fully. As the Democratic
convention in Cincinnati in June 1856 came to its end, he worried that
Old Buck was still "wedded to the men who most figured as partisans
during General Jackson's administration." About the only thing that
reconciled him to Buchanan at all was the thought that a Pennsylvania-
Virginia alliance within the Democracy might serve to preserve the
transsectional integrity of the party and with it "the integrity of the
Union and the Constitution." 34
The various nominations, counternominations, walkouts, endorse-
ments, divisions, and deals of the politicians turned the preconvention
and convention activities of the several parties into near-chaos. The
Know-Nothings, meeting in Philadelphia in February 1856, had no
difficulty condemning immigrants and Catholics to hell, but they
promptly split on the slavery issue. In the confusion the Northern anti-
slavery delegates walked out, leaving the remainder to nominate Mil-
lard Fillmore and launch the so-called American Party. The ex-President
was available. Since Fillmore's moderate role in the Compromise of 1850
assured him some following among Southern Whigs, the fanatics who
ran the Know-Nothing rump decided that he was the man of the hour.
His only other support came from a scattering of conservative Whigs in
upstate New York who were not militant on the slavery question. This
attempt by the Know-Nothings to attach Southern and New York
Whigs to the hard core of anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant lunatics
who dominated the Americans stimulated talk in Virginia that the
Democracy might well bring Tyler forward again to lure the Southern
Whigs away from the Fillmore standard. But Tyler scotched this talk
with the statement in mid-May 1856 that he had "neither longings or
410
ardent desires" for the White House. At this point he was still for Pierce
and he was now sure the Know-No things would disintegrate in the
sectional heat of the campaign.35
The antislavery Know-Nothing secession group nominated Speaker
of the House N. P. Banks with the understanding that he would with-
draw in favor of John C. Fremont if the new Republican Party nomi-
nated the Pathfinder. Since Fremont's nomination on a strong anti-
slavery platform was a possibility if not a probability, the threat of that
prospect hung over the Democratic convention in Cincinnati. By the
time the Democracy's delegates reached the Queen City on June i, the
influential Virginia delegation was strongly — though not unanimously —
for Buchanan. Thanks in part to tireless liaison work of Robert Tyler
between the Virginia and Pennsylvania delegations, Wise's own ambi-
tions for the nomination had been blunted and his sensibilities in the
matter salved. Indeed, both Wise and John Tyler had swung over to a
reluctant acceptance of Old Buck. Tyler's shift was dictated largely by
the realization that much of Pierce's support within the Northern
Democracy had seeped away to Stephen A. Douglas during the months
before the convention, a point employed by Robert with telling effect
at Sherwood Forest in his successful effort to bring his father around
to Buchanan. Old Buck, absent in London for two years, had the ad-
ditional advantage of not having taken a public stand on the popular-
sovereignty feature of the Kansas-Nebraska question. Thus when the
convention met in Cincinnati, Buchanan, Pierce, and Douglas (in that
order) were the front runners.36
As one of Buchanan's floor managers at Smith and Nixon's Hall in
Cincinnati, Robert Tyler was in the thick of Old Buck's fight for the
nomination. Speaking, cajoling, banqueting, and buttonholing, the Tyler
touch was so prominent among the delegates that there were rumors
of Robert's nomination for the Vice-Presidency should Buchanan fail
to receive the top spot. "Think of that/' he informed his father. "But
I laughed it off, when mentioned to me, as a good joke. If I were a
rich man, and the Union does not 'slide,' I might be something yet.
But as it is I float helplessly in the waves of doubt and debt." As it
turned out, the efforts of Wise and Robert Tyler were decisive for
Buchanan. Leading all the way, he was nominated on the seventeenth
ballot after Pierce had withdrawn and thrown his support to Douglas.
Virginia held firm for Buchanan during this maneuver. As a result, the
Pierce vote (largely Southern) that went over to Douglas at the crucial
juncture did not trigger a general stampede to the Little Giant. When
the expected rush failed to materialize, Douglas also withdrew rather
than see the convention hopelessly deadlocked.
The platform on which Buchanan and Vice-Presidential nominee
John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky were pledged to stand upheld the
Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the concept of popular
411
sovereignty, the Fugitive Slave Act, and states7 rights generally. For
Virginia's constancy hi his cause Buchanan was extremely grateful.
As he had said to Robert a week before the convention, "Should the
Old Dominion stand firm, it is my opinion that my friends will suc-
ceed at Cincinnati." Succeed they had, and Robert was soon in receipt
of the "warmest sort of letter" of thanks from Buchanan who had
assured him earlier that his many services to the Buchanan candidacy
over the years were eternally "recorded in my heart." Elated by the
vital role he had played in the Buchanan nomination, Robert was
momentarily overwhelmed by the patronage implications of the nomi-
nee's debt to him. "After all, I do not know what he can do for me,"
he remarked in some bewilderment. Margaret experienced no such
hesitation. She knew exactly what Buchanan could do for Robert. He
could bestow the "good fat office" which Robert had obviously earned
and "ought to have." 37
When Tyler received the news of Buchanan's nomination he pro-
nounced the selection "fortunate," although the feeling still nagged
him that if "anyone ever deserved a renomination it was General Pierce,
especially at the hands of the South." Nonetheless, he realized correctly
that "the great game is the Union, and with Pennsylvania sound the
Union is safe." He was hopeful that Buchanan would win in November,
and that the Know-Nothings would "entirely melt away" during the
campaign. That latter prospect being likely, the "Black Republicans,"
he said, "will either have to rush into the embraces of the Abolitionists,
and recognize the lead of Garrison and Phillips, or go into so violent and
rabid a course as to abandon and disgust all reflecting men." 38
When on June 17 the "Black Republicans" predictably nominated
John C. Fremont at Philadelphia on a frankly sectional platform that
opposed the extension of slavery in the territories and called boldly
for the admission of Kansas as a free state, the distress felt throughout
the Tyler-Gardiner family was profound. Similarly, when what remained
of the broken Whig Party endorsed the Know-Nothing nomination of
Fillrnore at Baltimore in September, on a platform appealing vaguely
for national unity, the concern at Sherwood Forest increased to ill-
disguised alarm. With three major candidates now in the field, the anti-
Republican vote could conceivably split so badly between Buchanan
and Fillmore that Fremont might slip into the White House by the
side door. That result, thought the Tylers, would lead straight to the
disruption of the Union. As Tyler pointed out to David Lyon, "it
is quite sensibly felt by all that the success of the Black Republicans
would be the knell of the Union." 39
As a momentary panic developed within the family, Robert Tyler
argued that in the event of a Republican victory the South should im-
mediately secede lest the "infidels, atheists and rascals" who ran the
Fremont crusade undertake to reduce the section to a "tributary peo-
412
pie." His father's views were more moderate, but Tyler's sense of im-
minent doom reached a new peak of intensity. Sanguine that Buchanan
would somehow squeeze through to victory, Tyler was still forced to
admit that some Southern Whigs, among them many Virginians, were
so hostile to the Democracy that they were willing to take "Fremont or
the Devil in preference to Buchanan." The Know-Nothings, he pre-
dicted, unimportant in themselves, would bend every effort to "divide
and distract us here at the South." Their unholy alliance with the
Whigs behind Millard Fillmore and his American Party might well cast
the election into the House of Representatives.
Were this to occur, reasoned the former President, the South
could be certain "of the union of the malcontents upon Fremont over
Buchanan." If Fremont were elevated to the White House in this
manner, the South would find itself in serious trouble. Tyler rejected
Robert's radical concept of immediate secession, just as he turned his
back on similar recommendations from Henry A. Wise and other South-
ern fire-eaters. But he admitted to his eldest son that Fremont's elec-
tion would force the South into some sort of collective regional action.
The alternative was to stand by helplessly and watch the Republican
abolitionists legislate the South's slave property out of existence:
I know not what to say about the course . . . Virginia will pursue in the event
of Fremont's election [he wrote in September 1856]. The Democracy looks
the danger in the face, and is prepared to meet it; and there is a large
minority who are entirely indisposed to any action. They wish to see the
inaugural, and to await some hostile movement. For myself, I scarcely know
what to counsel. To await the inauguration is to find ourselves under the
guns of every fortification and our trade at the mercy of our enemies. It is,
therefore, the dictate of prudence that the Southern States should understand
each other at once. A concentrated movement would control the fate of the
country and preserve the Constitution. I believe that such measures are
looked to by those in high places in the South. A call of all of the legislatures
of this section to make a distinct avowal of their sentiments and to place
their States in a condition to maintain their resolves would not fail to roll
back the tide — or at least to restrain all arbitrary legislation.40
This, in broad outline, would be Tyler's reaction to Lincoln's elec-
tion four years later. In 1856, however, he need not have been so
nervous or concerned. Buchanan ran well throughout the campaign, and
he looked the probable winner when the first returns began coming in
in late October. This happy outcome was in no small measure a result
of the labors of Robert Tyler who became the work horse of the Penn-
sylvania-Virginia alliance within the Democracy and served as a roving
ambassador of good will between Buchanan and the Wise faction during
the campaign. Patiently he undertook to explain the politics of each
man to the other. He calmed the mercurial Wise's suspicions that Old
Buck was not sound on the popular-sovereignty concept the Southern
413
extremists now so clearly feared. In addition, Robert stumped Phila-
delphia and mustered the Irish- American vote there for Buchanan. In
fact, Robert was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, so complete
was his physical exhaustion as the campaign drew to a close. But his
effort was rewarded when the first returns reached Sherwood Forest.
Buchanan outpolled the combined Fremont and Fillmore vote in both
Pennsylvania and Indiana. To an elated John Tyler this news from the
North and West filled the "Democratic people with unspeakable joy."
To his daughter, Letitia Tyler Semple, then touring in Europe, he
expressed the belief that Buchanan's now-certain election would "for-
ever strangle the monster which has threatened to devour the Con-
federacy." Returning again to a long-standing and deep-seated Anglo-
phobia, Tyler informed Letitia that
I can enjoy the confusion and mortification of our foreign enemies if the B.
ticket shall prevail by a large majority. The Westminster Review had
chuckled in anticipation of Fremont's election, and had pronounced it the
knell of the Union. Old Mother Britain may yet put on sackcloth and ashes
before the epitaph of this Republic is written.41
Whether Buchanan's narrow election in 1856 preserved the Union
or merely postponed its dissolution and whether the subsequent paralysis
of the Buchanan administration actually contributed to the catastrophe
of 1 86 1 remain moot points. Certainly Tyler's view of the Republican
Party as a "treasonable sectional movement" contributed more heat
than light to a political situation already burdened with excessive
emotion. Tyler did not ponder the fact that Buchanan's success was
by plurality rather than majority vote. The combined Fremont-Fillmore
vote exceeded Old Buck's by some 400,000. Nor did the former Presi-
dent seem to appreciate the fact that the Democracy, now moving
toward the status of a minority party, had been forced, like the Whigs
before them, to purchase sectional unity at the price of nominating a
faceless man who posed as all things to all Democrats.
These fundamental problems apparently disturbed Sherwood For-
est not at all. In the general elation over Buchanan's victory the
Tyler-Gardiner family speculated mainly on the bread-and-butter issue
of just what "good fat office" the struggling Robert had earned with
his heroic effort for Old Buck. Much to their evident and bitter dismay
they quickly discovered that Buchanan would set no speed records in
rewarding Robert with a patronage appointment commensurate with
the value of his years of labor for the President-elect. Although Bu-
chanan told him he could have "anything he wanted," the specific
tender of the ministry to Switzerland in November 1856 had to be
rejected. Desirable as this post was from a prestige standpoint, it paid
little and Robert therefore had no choice but to turn it down. This
decision was a "dreadful blow" to Priscilla, who considered it a "very
414
nice, quiet and dignified" job that would "take Mr. Tyler away from all
the din and fury of party politics, from personal hostilities, and from
this vulgar, hurried turmoil of city life." She agreed, however, that
her husband's economic situation would not permit him the luxury of
the Swiss post. As Robert explained his postelection financial status to
Wise, "I have never yet for fifteen years known one day free from
pecuniary embarrassments and the most painful." And, although he
thought he saw a "dawning political future" ahead of him, this dawn
could scarcely be pursued in the mountains of distant Switzerland. Just
what Robert had in mind for himself, just how glorious a political sun-
rise he anticipated, cannot be determined. When, for example, his
brother John undertook after the election to enlist Henry Wise's in-
fluence with Buchanan to secure Robert a Cabinet post, Robert dis-
missed the attempt with the observation that "I would not think of ac-
cepting a place in Mr. Buchanan's Cabinet. I am wanting in the specific
information and talents for the only two Cabinet positions of any
value, and I regard the others as mere clerkships."
There is no evidence, of course, that Buchanan considered offer-
ing Robert a Cabinet appointment. Nevertheless, a full year and a
half passed before he again offered Robert anything, and when the offer
finally came it evidenced a rather pronounced deflation in the Chief
Executive's estimation of his obligation to the Philadelphia lawyer.
Thus in May 1858 Robert disdainfully declined a clerkship in the
United States Circuit Court for Eastern Pennsylvania, informing Bu-
chanan testily that he was "distinctly my own master and no office
seeker." He was still burdened with "debt and poverty," but he let the
President know that he expected political favors from no man, at least
not at the clerkship level. "While I am by no means insensible to po-
litical honors and advancement, I do not want them unless they come
to me unsolicited and unquestioned," he told Buchanan. Nor during
these lean months of waiting could his father aid him financially. "I
am as hard put up, to use a vulgar phrase, as any one," Tyler confessed
in 1859. In November of that year Robert turned down the offer of a
paymastership in the Navy Department on the advice of Sherwood
Forest. The job itself, like the Circuit Court clerkship, was almost an
insult. "Give up politics," Tyler finally urged him, "by which no man
profits other than a knave; retrench, as far as retrenchment be prac-
ticable, and wait for political preferment to reach you at its own gait."
Tyler firmly believed that Robert's long devotion to the President's
career should be handsomely rewarded, but he certainly wanted no Tyler
to have to beg a minor sinecure from the likes of James Buchanan.
The independent and haughty attitude of the Tylers, father and son,
ended the patronage matter and Robert had to be content with the
chairmanship of the Democratic Executive Committee in Pennsylvania,
to which Buchanan appointed him in 1858. While this post had con-
415
siderable prestige it had no salary, and Robert's modest income con-
tinued to be derived from his job as Prothonotary of the Pennsylvania
Supreme Court and from his marginal law practice in Philadelphia.
Similarly, John, Jr.'s attempt to land a patronage job from Bu-
chanan came to grief. With little else to occupy his time, John, Jr., had
worked as hard for Buchanan's election as Robert had. He vigorously
supported the administration after it took office, frequently placing
articles in Virginia newspapers designed to explain and rationalize the
decisions and policies of the President. Yet by June 1858 Tyler saw
there would be no reward for his second son either. "The people in
Washington seem to be resolved to give him nothing," the former Presi-
dent complained. "That a man of his fine talents and accomplishments
should not be able to earn his daily bread, or should fail to set about
the task of doing so, is to me incomprehensible. I had rather see him
following the plough than doing nothing."
By July 1860 John Tyler was quite upset by the treatment his sons
had received at Buchanan's hands. As he told Robert:
He has been uniformly polite to you . . . but he is altogether your debtor. No
one has been so true to him or rendered him greater service . . . but now his
political days are numbered, and his sand nearly run. He might now recipro-
cate by rendering you service. Will he volunteer to do it, or, having squeezed
the orange, will he throw the rind away? I may do Mm injustice in regarding
him as a mere politician without heart. I hope I am mistaken.
Tyler was not mistaken. Robert was squeezed dry and cast aside. The
Confederate States of America would do much better by him politically
than had the United States under James Buchanan.42
416
RUMORS OF WAR:
AN END TO NORMALCY, 1855-1860
We have fallen on evil times. The day of doom for
the great model Republic is at hand. Madness rules
the hour. . . . / sigh over the degeneracy of the times.
JOHN TYLER, NOVEMBER i860
On the surface of things life at Sherwood Forest reflected little of the
confusion and turmoil that gripped the nation during the last years
before the Civil War. As the country proceeded steadily down the road
to sectional conflict, the Tylers and Gardiners continued their normal
habits. They enjoyed their extensive social life at various fashionable
spas during the summers and they advised one another on the complex
problems of health and longevity throughout the winters. Julia con-
tinued having babies, and John Tyler continued to tend his wheat- and
cornfields, confident that whatever the nation's agony on the slavery
question it would surely be solved short of the idiocy of civil strife.
Visits back and forth between New York and Charles City also marked
these final innocent years in the history of the family. Julia still
thrilled to hear that her reign as First Lady had not been forgotten.
She applauded the sagacity of the Ohio riverboat captain who, with
more persistence than imagination, named all of his boats The Gentle
Julia. Indeed, when Henry M. Denison reported seeing The Gentle
Julia No. 17 near Louisville, the mistress of Sherwood Forest was con-
fident that an immortality of sorts was hers. Only under the impact of
the John Brown raid at Harpers Ferry in October 1859 did normalcy
flee Sherwood Forest.1
Until then, Julia and her husband enjoyed the pleasant existence
afforded by the plantation and their frequent exposures at Saratoga,
417
Old Point Comfort, or the Virginia springs. "It is but reasonable," Tyler
held, "that Julia should like to look out on the great world once a
year." Whether they journeyed to the Virginia mountains (Tyler's
preference) or to the North (which his wife preferred), Julia was in-
variably "all agog to go." True, Tyler's increasingly precarious health
in the late 18503 limited the duration of these excursions, on occasion
threatening to cancel them entirely, but he was generally able to sum-
mon the necessary strength and energy for Julia's forays into the outside
world.2
Visits with Robert and Priscilla in Philadelphia and with Juliana,
Margaret, and David Lyon on Staten Island and at the New England
watering holes were combined with joint family gatherings at Old
Point and the Virginia springs, Margaret and her mother enjoyed these
escapes to Virginia's beaches and mountains from the heat of New
York. For Tyler, the occasional journey to New York or New England
had the additional advantage of allowing him to test the political
opinions of the area, to say nothing of the medicinal advantages he
thought he derived from "taking the waters" at Saratoga or Sharon
Springs. Still, the "numerous retinue of servants and children" involved
in such northerly operations increasingly dictated the logic of vacation-
ing in Virginia. In 1855 and 1856, for example, the summer vacation
was confined to a month at Old Point Comfort and a month touring
White Sulphur Springs, Rockbridge Alum Springs, and Warm Springs.
Margaret, Harry Beeckman, and Juliana came down to Sherwood Forest
in June and the ladies then took turns tending the children while
the adults proceeded to Old Point Comfort or to the Virginia springs.
On one occasion, in August 1855, Julia sent Gar die, Alex, and Julie to
Staten Island to visit their grandmother while she, Tyler, and Margaret
casually toured the Virginia spas. This arrangement was a failure.
Julia spent much of her vacation time nervously bombarding her
harassed mother with detailed instructions on child care.3
Whether they had any therapeutic value or not, the Virginia
mineral springs were the nerve center of the Old Dominion's ante-bellum
society. Like the Tylers and the Gardiners, those wealthy and socially
prominent Americans who could afford the luxury of taking the waters
believed that their health was improved by the experience. "The com-
pany is now so good and the waters agree so well with me I have very
little disposition to move," Margaret wrote from Alum Springs in
August 1856. Indeed, Margaret reported the Rockbridge County resort
so crowded that summer that guests of the hotel were packed five to
a room and were reduced to sleeping on mattresses in the drawing and
reception rooms. But the salutary effect of drinking and bathing in
the waters was thought to be well worth the inconvenience. "I am now
fairly under the influence of the waters," Margaret informed her city-
bound brother. "They have taken hold of me pretty severely." Tyler also
felt rejuvenated by the sulphuric ingestions.
418
In addition, the family found the company good and the social
activities pleasant at the western Virginia spas they frequented. Old
friends were invariably present, and old recollections and new gossip
could be exchanged. When, for example, the families of Commodore
Beverly Kennon and Thomas W. Gilmer arrived at Rockbridge Alum
Springs in August 1856, Margaret thought it singular that three of the
five prominent families connected with the Princeton disaster should
again have been brought accidentally together. The somber remem-
brance and recounting of that tragedy did not dull the merrymaking
of the survivors. On the contrary, dances and picnics were the order of
the day. The appearance of Governor Wise added the inevitable po-
litical touch. Tyler, however, preferred not to mix his politics with his
sulphur, and all efforts to persuade him to speak to the guests on the
issues of the day proved unavailing.4
In her frequent travels to Virginia, winter and summer, Margaret
was searching for health and recreation, not for another husband. She
had developed a nagging cough in 1854, and she was more interested
in treating that condition than she was in finding a new father for young
Harry. Julia could only dimly perceive this fact. With all the match-
making power and instinct at her command she persistently endeavored
to involve Margaret in a serious romance. Thus when the young widow
visited Sherwood Forest during the winters of 1854-1856, Julia and her
neighbors sponsored numerous dances and dinner parties for her enter-
tainment. These gave Julia an opportunity to nudge a bewildering
array of unattached Tidewater men toward the comely Margaret in
her campaign to find the husband she was sure her sister sorely needed.
Not surprisingly, Margaret responded no more positively to Julia's
new effort than she had to her sister's matchmaking in 1845-1847. She
did, of course, enjoy the attentions of the men and the excitement of
the various neighborhood "blowouts" immensely. "The F.F.V.s of
Charles City are not so bad," she had confided to her mother in 1854.
"You must try to appreciate them better. They improve upon acquaint-
ance — but I find many of them have as extensive ideas as their lands
are. . . . Here's this young Wilcox, heir apparent to his uncle's estate
and half heir to his father's. Both are rich . . . [and] his father who is
a widower took quite a fancy in this direction and wishes very much
to pay a visit. Don't laugh!" 5
Margaret had "no little fun" at Sherwood Forest among her
"many admirers." She danced, teased, and flirted with all of them al-
though most of the eligible men were quite a bit older than she. Her
most loyal suitor, Dr. Henry Wilcox, was "upwards of sixty" by Julia's
frank reckoning. Margaret also made it clear that a classic May-and-
December match, however well it had worked for Tyler and her sister,
was not her idea of torrid romance. Julia was quick to admit that many
of the aging land-rich local beaux left much to be desired as "eligible
matches for fashionable ladies unless the lady can produce a good part
419
of the cash." But she was certain that this condition was not a Charles
City phenomenon. In her opinion it was a universal malady. Margaret
was foolish, therefore, not to grab whatever she could get — rich, poor,
old, or young. After all, Julia reasoned, Margaret was fortunate to be
able to meet a variety of "Colonels, Doctors, Lawyers, planters, Honor-
ables and ex-Presidents" in Virginia. "Won't that do? To dress up for?
... if one is going to be always looking for a suitable offer and nothing
but that they will waste a good deal of time." Nevertheless, during
the winter of 1855-1856 Margaret managed to work her merry way
through "no less than eight balls, eleven dinner parties, a countless
number of tea drinkings," and a flock of fox hunts without rewarding
Julia's romantic interests in her behalf. Tyler better understood Mar-
garet's feelings in the matter, and he flatly informed one of her suitors
that "the lady in question is not to be won even by a Prince Alton
or a Duke of Brunswick." 6
Margaret never did remarry. She still mourned for John Beeck-
man. It is not certain, however, that she would have remained con-
tent with widowhood for the rest of her life. She died before the question
could be tested, before Beeckman7s memory had dimmed. On June i, 1857,
while visiting at Sherwood Forest preparatory to a visit to the Virginia
springs with Julia and the ex-President, the thirty-five-year-old widow
suddenly passed away. Death came as quickly to her as it had to Alex-
ander in 1851, and as it had to her young Shelter Island cousin Mary
Gardiner Horsford in November 1855. It would come with equal celerity
to Henry Mandeville Denison, Alice Tyler's widower, in October 1858.
But to the lovely Margaret it came inexplicably. Mary died at the
age of thirty-one, "without a struggle or a groan," in the grim gamble
that was childbirth in 1855. That was normal. The thirty-six-year-old
Denison was predictably, almost suicidally, carried away by yellow fever
in Charleston after he refused to leave his stricken parishioners at
the height of an epidemic there. Margaret, on the other hand, was alive
and healthy one day and dead within the week. Her last letter, dated
May 28, 1857, indicated the mystery of her ailment as well as the un-
witting contribution of the medical profession to her sudden demise:
Dr. Giddeon Christian . . . appeared to understand my ailing better than any-
one I have seen yet. Said at once I had sneaking chills with torpor of liver
and deranged digestion — all of which I believe to be true. He gave me right
off a dose I shan't soon forget. It made me so sick. I think it must have been
antimony mingled with a good quantity of quinine and a nervine. However I
believe it was a good dosing. He does not go for small doses of quinine. It must
be taken until the ears ring, and to this end I have taken some thirty grains
since yesterday — and with fine effect.
The initial "fine effect" was compromised by continued ear-ringing
quantities of dangerous drugs, and a few days later the gay Margaret
was gone, probably from a heavy overdose of morphine. The funeral was
420
held at Sherwood Forest on June 3. Harry Beeckman and Juliana
came down to Virginia for the melancholy amenities. When these were
completed Tyler and Julia returned with them to New York that they
might all attend graveside ceremonies for Margaret at East Hampton.
It was "our most sad and bitter mission/7 said Julia. It was decided
during this crisis that Margaret's orphaned nine-year-old son would be
reared by his grandmother in her Staten Island home.7
The death of her beloved sister removed from the earth Julia's
closest and dearest confidante. "We were always in such close com-
munion. She was included in all my arrangements past, present and
future." Julia went into deep mourning for a year. She tormented her-
self with the thought that perhaps "the skill of Margaret's physician
was at fault." She derived only a bit of consolation from the fact
that her sister had passed away "under the influence of a dose of
morphine." At least "Death stole upon her without producing a dread
or a pang." In mid- July the sorrowing Tylers and their children went
to Staten Island to be with Juliana for the remainder of that desolate
summer.8
For Julia it marked the end of an era. After 1857 she did not
visit the Virginia springs or travel north for casual vacations on Staten
Island and at the New England watering places. For the mourning
Julia these once-happy excursions were meaningless without Margaret's
cheerful presence. Not until November 1862 did she appear again at
Castleton Hill — this time to deposit four of her children in the safety
of her mother's home for the duration of the Civil War. Until the
outbreak of that conflict the reunions of the family brought Juliana
and Harry to Sherwood Forest or to Old Point Comfort. A summer
place at Hampton was purchased in 1858, and named Villa Margaret
in Margaret's memory. It provided a stationary vacation spot for the
clan. Here Harry could swim and fish and play with his first cousins
while Julia visited with her mother.
David Lyon did not visit in Virginia during the last five years
before the war. Julia had always felt less close to him than she had
to either Margaret or Alexander, and the tragic upheaval that would
mark their relations during the Civil War had seeds that germinated in
their long separation on the eve of the conflict. Settled, self-satisfied,
and lazy, the Colonel had all he could do to muster the strength to
override his mother's opposition and get married in 1860. Traveling
to Virginia was apparently well beyond his energy, and Julia was too
husy with too many children and an aging husband to dash off to
New York. And so brother and sister drifted gradually apart. They
seldom corresponded. Only a new baby at Sherwood Forest seemed im-
portant enough to produce an exchange of letters.
The birth of Robert Fitzwalter Tyler, Julia's sixth child and fifth
son, on March 12, 1856, was accomplished without incident save that
421
the sturdy expectant mother had, in her husband's words, "a violent
pneumonia" accompanied by a cough "so severe and violent and of
such long continuance as much to have enfeebled her, a circumstance
particularly unfortunate at this time as the period is near at hand for
her regular confinement." (Tyler reconsidered the sentence for a mo-
ment and then primly struck through the word regular.) But Julia
coughed her way through the ordeal and was soon out of danger.
Juliana was on hand for the blessed event, as usual, and nothing con-
nected with the arrival of little Fitz was allowed to disturb the normal
flow of visitors and dinner parties at Sherwood Forest. Childbirth had
indeed become a regular thing for Julia.9
Fortunately, her children were as healthy as she. They passed
through their various adolescent diseases without serious difficulty.
The most severe of their illnesses was Gardie's "bilious attack" in
October 1856. Julia was on Staten Island at the time. For a time Tyler
feared he would lose the boy, but the ten-year-old responded to opiates
and extensive cupping and somehow pulled through. He was pronounced
out of danger the same day Tyler learned that Buchanan had carried
Indiana and Pennsylvania. The former President was thus "in the
happiest condition to enjoy the good political news." By the time a
panicky Julia had rushed home to Virginia, Gardie had entirely re-
covered. Nevertheless, she was so frightened by the incident that she
determined never again to leave her children. To be sure, they con-
tinued to have their bouts with boils, mumps, measles, and chicken
pox, but they survived these childhood shocks just as they managed
to survive the beginnings of their formal educations. Chicken pox was
no worse than arithmetic and composition, and it was over and done
with a lot faster. The Tyler children were not bad scholars. Like
most children, however, they were less than entranced by the beauties
of irregular French verbs and Latin conjugations — especially when the
fish were biting and the rabbits were jumping.10
They were happy, active children who lacked nothing. Christmas
at Sherwood Forest was their day, and Tyler had all he could do to
prevent them from finding the presents and opening them before the
appointed hour. As he described the scene on December 25, 1855:
The children last night hurried to bed at an early hour in order to sleep
away the tedious hours which were to elapse before the dawning of day, but
I went to Gardie and Alex's room at near eleven o'clock, and sleep had not
visited their eyes. They were watching for Santa Claus, and complained of his
tardiness. Being told that Santa Claus objected to being seen, and did not
like boys to watch for him, they finally went to sleep; but the day had not
fairly dawned when their exclamations filled the whole house. Having
dispatched the sweet things, they then opened their toy boxes: Gardiner is
still (eleven o'clock) carrying on the siege of Sebastopol; Alex is busily en-
gaged with "Wttittington and his Cat"; Julia arranges her furniture; Lachlan
422
spurs Ms hobby horse; and Lionel . . . calls for his drummer. A happier con-
cern you rarely ever saw.
Nor was the Christmas season at the plantation entirely a children's
festival. It was an opportunity for Julia to entertain her neighbors
and their holiday houseguests. "Before midnight," said Tyler of one of
these gatherings, "the fun grew fast and furious." u
As the years sped by Tyler had more and more difficulty keep-
ing up with his spirited children and with the "fast and furious" parties
sponsored by his socially zealous wife. Unlike the other members of
his hearty family, the aging Tyler complained increasingly of his health
after 1854. His late sixties found him with numerous aches and pains
located in a variety of inaccessible organs. His medical problem centered
chiefly in his digestive tract, as it had since his early thirties. After
his sixty-fifth birthday he was also prone to heavy colds and influenza,
arthritic attacks, and kidney disturbances. When in 1854 he threatened
to try homeopathy for his "dyspepsia" (as all gastric problems were
then termed), Julia urged him to go instead to Baltimore and place
himself under the care of competent physicians there. Tyler rejected
this advice, preferring to rely on local medical talent. He also rejected
his wife's various home medical remedies (for example, her standard
cure for flu — small doses of morphine combined with the copious drink-
ing of "chicken water"). He always objected to extensive and experi-
mental self -medication, and he spent much of his life with Julia caution-
ing her against the persistent tinkering with her body she (and her
mother) so thoroughly enjoyed. While he was not slow to summon a doc-
tor, he had little confidence in the medical profession. He was, however,
no faith healer. On the contrary, he spent some $700 a year for four
long years procuring his talented son Tazewell an expensive medical
education at the Philadelphia Medical College. It was just that the
diagnoses and nostrums of the medical fraternity seemed to vary so
widely on the same set of symptoms. "I wish that I could entirely cure
myself," he wrote in February 1856, "for I am never perfectly clear
of pain. There is a great difference between 32 and 65 — especially in
cold weather. . . . What a delight it would have been to have fled [to
Florida] from this oversevere winter." He was sure his illnesses were
God's will. "I am the oldest and most infirm and cannot move about
much," he complained in 1856. "I have many aches and pains. They
will attend upon a sexagenarian, however, and so be it, for I am con-
vinced that all is wisely ordered by Providence." Taking the waters
at the Virginia springs seemed to ease these multiple aches and pains
for a time, and, as has been noted, Tyler became a devotee of sulphuric
hydrotherapy. Frequent and massive doses of calomel also became
standard with him. Nevertheless, he was often rendered "quite feeble"
by digestive upheavals, and his continuing war against this "old enemy"
423
was one of attrition. In November-December 1856 he became so ill
he "despaired at times of recovery." 12
During this two-month crisis in late 1856 he began planning for
a "fair history" of his administration. Too ill and weak to complete
a biographical account of his public service he had commenced in
the late 18405, he ordered his public and private papers turned over to
his old friend Caleb Gushing. He had heard that the distinguished
lawyer was contemplating a scholarly reminiscence of the Tyler ad-
ministration after his stint as Pierce's Attorney General had ended.
Alexander Gardiner had originally been selected for this task, but his
death in 1851 had caused the project to be abandoned. Now Tyler was
anxious to see the book launched before death overtook him. "That a
fair history of my administration should be written by a competent
person is a matter very near to my heart," he told John, Jr., in January
1857. "Whatever time might be assigned for the publication of such
a work, whether during my life or after my death, I feel it to be im-
portant that it should be written while I live. My own explanations
might be wanting to render the narrative clear and perfect." Unfor-
tunately, Gushing turned to other pursuits in 1857, and Tyler's un-
finished manuscript, with most of his private papers, was burned in
1865 when the retiring Confederate defenders set fire to Richmond. Nor
was the former President's health ever again robust enough prior to
his death in 1862 to permit him to finish the work himself.13
By 1858 Tyler was loath to leave Sherwood Forest for very long
for fear he would take ill and die in strange surroundings. In January-
February of that year he again very nearly joined his fathers. Weakened
by severe gastric upset and crippled by arthritis, he was confined to bed
for two months. But on March 29, 1858, his sixty-eighth birthday, he
was able to report to David Lyon that
I now walk about the house and take my seat at the table with the rest of the
family, but I cannot adventure out of doors except in a closed carriage — then
I ride over the estate and see how matters are going on. I have had a terrible
winter, and when I look back upon it I am at a loss to know how I have
survived. Nothing but the kind providence of our heavenly Father could have
saved me. For an entire month I remained suspended between life and death
without perceptible change. I am at this time laboring under one of my old
attacks which has I hope nearly run its course. Today I am better. It is my
birthday and I now number 68 years — my three score and ten nearly attained
and I can well appreciate what the Psalmist says of living to three score and
ten — aches and pains, etc. etc. But I do not mean to sermonize.
Shaken by Ms close brushes with death in 1856 and again in 1858,
Tyler drew up his will in 1859, leaving everything he owned to Julia
and her children. His private papers were left to his sons Robert, John,
Tazewell, and Gardie, and to his sons-in-law James A. Semple and
William N. Waller, all of whom were to serve as his literary executors.14
424
As he contemplated the provisions of his will and the approach-
ing end of his allotted days, Tyler became more attached to the scenes
of his youth. William and Mary College received a good deal of his
time and interest in the late 18505. As Rector of its Board of Visitors
and Governors he concerned himself with the details of faculty appoint-
ments, the renovation of the physical plant, and institutional finances.
Awarded an LL.D. by the college in 1854, he was named its Chancellor
in 1860, a post held before only by George Washington. Both of
these honors pleased him immensely, and he frankly confessed his
"egotism" in being so conspicuously signalized. William and Mary, with
its solid academic emphasis on the Greco-Roman classics and states'
rights, was, he felt, the "nursery of the great principles" which had
contributed to the "glorious" elevation of his lifelong friend, Henry A.
Wise, to the Governor's Mansion in Richmond in January 1856. The
William and Mary LL.D. he therefore considered a real "feather in his
cap." The chancellorship was an honor of which he was "quite as
proud as any other ever conferred upon me by my fellow men." As
often as his health permitted and his presence on campus was needed,
he journeyed to WilHamsburg to attend to his official duties or to address
commencement exercises and other college gatherings. At these he was
always enthusiastically received. "The cheering was immense," he
wrote of one of his better performances in October 1859. "I never spoke
better. Every sentence was followed by loud applause. I was twice after
toasted with rapturous applause." 15
His few public speeches during these years of increasing infirmity
also demonstrated a growing tolerance of conflicting political and sec-
tional viewpoints. Gone was the sharp and sarcastic invective of his
great free-trade orations in the Senate. Gone was the absolute certainty
of his ringing Presidential messages on states' rights, the Bank of the
United States, and Manifest Destiny. Departed too was the self-
conscious sense of moral righteousness that had often characterized
his political outlook and tiresomely manifested itself in his public pro-
nouncements. Instead, John Tyler, his own political wars apparently
concluded, sought to pour soothing oil on the troubled waters of the
Buchanan administration. To him states' rights as a concept seemed
not nearly so important now as the reality of continued national unity.
His almost-compulsive need to defend the total record of his administra-
tion before the altar of Clio and in the memories of his fellow men also
became less evident. While he still felt obliged to counter and correct
the more obvious distortions of his Presidential motives and acts, par-
ticularly those casting shadow on his personal honesty in office and
on his motives in the Texas matter, he no longer lashed out at his
tormentors with the wounded pride and savagery of 1845-1852. "I
am almost indifferent to what others think," he told Robert in i859.16
His speech at the Maryland Mechanics Institute in Baltimore
425
on March 20, 1855, to an overflow audience of five thousand, reflected
something of his newfound political peace of mind and his interest in
pacifying sectional passions. Titled "The Prominent Characters and
Incidents of Our History from 1812 to 1836," the address sought to
bury the factional and sectional rancors of the immediate past in an
appeal to the glories of the Union. It was, said Margaret, who heard
it, "considered magnanimous in its bearing towards those who had not
spared the P politically." A gratuitous tribute to the departed
Henry Clay particularly impressed Henry M. Denison as the beginning
of a whole new orientation in Tyler's political life — one in which "you
have attained the cool eventide of life where the meridian heats of
party spirit and indiscriminating passions have passed away." To
Tyler's delight, the Maryland Institute address was well received by
all who heard it, and the Baltimore trip was marred only by the cir-
culation of a story that the former President had suddenly died in
Barnum's Hotel the following night. Some eight hundred persons called
at the hostelry during the evening hours to make "anxious inquiries"
about the report which, Julia hastily assured her mother, "had not the
slightest foundation ... he is remarkably well at present." Neverthe-
less, the rumor blighted an otherwise gay round of shopping, parties,
and receptions that the journey to Baltimore had provided Julia.17
Similarly, Tyler's "The Dead of the Cabinet" speech delivered
in Petersburg on April 24, 1856, was designed to calm troubled sectional
waters roiled by the bitterness of the 1856 Presidential campaign. On
the advice of Thomas Ritchie, and by his own inclination, he scrupu-
lously avoided any mention of the growing menace of "Black Republi-
canism." Instead, he was resolved to maintain a "dignified silence and
graceful non-interference in the political questions of the day." Widely
published in newspapers North and South, the Petersburg address was
the plea of an elder statesman to the nation to bury the animosities
of the past. Eulogizing the deeds, patriotism, and memory of men as
different in their attitudes and politics as Hugh Swinton Legare, Abel
P. Upshur (who "failed not to see in virtual monopoly of the cotton
plant what the annexation of Texas would accomplish"), Daniel Web-
ster, John C. Calhoun, John C. Spencer, and Henry Clay, Tyler asked
his audience to view these dead patriots as he did — as Americans
undisturbed by the ravings of faction or the roar of the political tempest,
intent only on the public good, and earnest to record their names on the pages
of history as public benefactors We were comrades — sat at the same table
— brake bread and ate salt together, bared our bosoms to the same storms,
and when the angry clouds so far parted as to admit a ray of sunshine, we
basked in it together. . . . Let no man fear that I shall . . . introduce into my
address anything that can excite party feeling. I shall do no such injustice to
the memory of those of whom I design to speak 18
426
Having made his peace with the American political spectrum from
Webster to Calhoun, Tyler lovingly tackled the history of his native
state in a major speech in Jamestown on May 14, 1857. Eight thousand
Virginians were present to celebrate two and a half centuries of the
white man's presence in the Old Dominion. Tyler was the featured
orator. Of the hundreds of speaking invitations he received annually,
the Jamestown address was one of the very few he felt obliged to ac-
cept. The remainder were declined, usually because his health was
"too precarious." To the Jamestown speech he devoted weeks of prep-
aration, attempting to cram a two-hundred-fifty-year survey of Virginia
history into a two-and-a-half-hour eulogy to the glories of the Old
Dominion. "They have not given me time enough/' he complained. In
spite of the careful preparation, the final result was not satisfactory.
It was a tedious, rambling, superficial effort which taxed his health
and the attention span of his audience with equal severity. Neverthe-
less, the ancestor worship in it strongly appealed to those Virginia
Shintoists near enough the platform to hear it over the din of crying
babies, lost children, and mint-julep merrymaking that characterized
the carnival atmosphere of the celebration.19
In spite of his various physical infirmities, John Tyler had much
to live for as the 18505 came to a close. His growing children brought
him great joy, and he enthusiastically continued bringing more of them
into the world. His marriage to Julia remained the honeymoon it had
been since 1844. On his sixty-fifth birthday his doting wife could
lovingly tell him:
I would that I could add, love,
To wreaths that deck thy brow
A leaf of brighter hue, love
Than shines among them now.
But if my fondness serves, love,
To gild those wreaths of thine,
Then will thy path be marked, love,
By radiance divine!
On this thy natal day, love,
I will renew the vow
Always to keep undimmed, love,
The lustre on thy brow! 20
Luster John Tyler had achieved. His sincere efforts to stay the
sectional whirlwind seemed to him neither a mean nor a hopeless task,
and as he approached his seventieth birthday he could take pride in
the fact that his had been a firm voice for moderation on the slavery
question for a solid decade, a "wreath" not to be scorned. If his auto-
427
biography remained unwritten, if his speeches lacked the intellectual
power and incisiveness of bygone days, if the patronage-stingy Bu-
chanan commanded little of his respect, Tyler's psyche had healed from
the rude buffeting of 1841-1845. He was content.
Little did he suspect in 1859 that the final storm was about to
break in all its fury. The summer of 1859 was a relaxed and happy one.
The family spent three wonderful months at Villa Margaret. Juliana
and Harry visited there in August and found the six-acre retreat a
"gem of a place," its peach trees "filled with peaches not yet ripe
but large and fine looking." The children rode their ponies, swam, and
fished, Tyler accompanying them on their excursions and fish fries. For
the adults there were dances and masquerade balls at the Fortress.
Tyler commuted back and forth between Hampton and Sherwood
Forest, keeping one eye on his sickly wheat and the other on his vaca-
tioning family. When the trek back to Sherwood Forest commenced
in early October Julia was happy, relaxed — and pregnant again. She
saw Julie race eagerly off to her first day of school "as blithe as a
bird," and she busied herself with supervising the setting out of new
shrubs, evergreens, and fruit trees purchased from a nursery at Staun-
ton. Although Tyler's wheat crop had been a disappointing one for the
second successive year, the plantation had never been more beautiful
in its colorful fall clothing.21
Then it happened. The three days that shook the South. On
October 16, 1859, John Brown and his desperate little band struck at
Harpers Ferry, Virginia, briefly seized the federal arsenal, and called
for an armed insurrection of all Virginia slaves. Faced with this chal-
lenge to domestic peace, order, and safety, to say nothing of the seizure
of government property, Buchanan had no alternative under the Con-
stitution but to send a company of United States Marines and two
artillery units into Harpers Ferry. Taken prisoner by federal troops
on October 18, Brown was turned over to the hastily mobilized Vir-
ginia militia and brought to trial in Charles Town on October 25 for
treason against the Commonwealth of Virginia. Speedily convicted on
this charge and for criminal conspiracy to incite a slave uprising, the
psychopathic murderer of Pottawatomie fame was hanged on Decem-
ber 2. Northern abolitionists and "Black Republicans" who had financed
and encouraged the confused liberator's ill-starred venture now eulo-
gized their unstable pawn as a hero, martyr, and latter-day Christ.
They wept and screamed and gnashed their teeth in frustrated anguish.
They demanded an early end to the infamous slavery institution in
the most incendiary terms, disunion and civil war foremost among them.
"I feel," said Tyler in shocked response to the abolitionist outcry,
great concern about the present condition of things in the Country. Matters
have arrived at such a pass disunion must soon come. A few years ago a man
428
to have dared to utter such treasonable discourses as proceed from so many
lips at the North now would have been at once mobbed, stoned, and put
down instead of listened to — and they would have been pointed at as objects
of disgust — but how is it now? They are lions, and soon they will have follow-
ers enough to overthrow the government or create more terrible mischief.22
The audacity of the Brown raid, the mental picture it generated
of hundreds of thousands of slaves rising in armed revolt against the
handful of white masters who owned them, sent waves of panic through
the Southern aristocracy. Visions of widespread Nat Turner rebellions,
organized, coordinated, and directed from the North, even caused
moderates among Southern plantation owners, Tyler among them, to
begin stockpiling arms and preparing local defenses against an ex-
pected black revolution. Whatever sophisticated historians of another
century would say "caused" the Civil War, the primary issue at Sher-
wood Forest during the final months before the deluge turned on Negro
slavery — not on states' rights, Southern nationalism, Free-Soilism, the
semantics of the Constitution, or on any of the other reasons separately
and in combination since adduced to explain the origin of the 1861
catastrophe. To John Tyler, who labored as diligently and selflessly as
any man to prevent civil war, the fundamental question was nothing
more complex than the status of the Negro slave and the grim pros-
pect that the abolitionism sponsored by Northern Republicans would
eventually produce in Tidewater Virginia, and throughout the South,
tiny islands of privileged whites isolated in angry seas of shiftless, liber-
ated blacks. All other issues were subordinate to this, all other arguments
became mere rationalizations and extensions of this primary fear of ulti-
mate racial inundation. Especially was this true at Sherwood Forest
after the John Brown raid on Harpers Ferry.
In Charles City County, where Negroes outnumbered whites more
than two to one, the alarmed citizenry quickly began organizing an
armed mounted patrol for "general security." As Julia explained its
function to her mother in mid-November, "if it does no other good
it will prevent stealing and keep the black people where they ought
to be at night." By December i, as the date for John Brown's execu-
tion neared, Tyler's friend and neighbor Robert Douthat of Weyanoke
plantation had completed the mustering of the volunteer "Charles
City Cavalry" which he captained. At the same time, the "Silver Greys,"
a mounted unit of older men "who cannot leave home to do active
service," was raised. Tyler was offered the captaincy of this second-
line security force. It was an honor he promptly accepted. Meanwhile,
Ms son Dr. Tazewell Tyler joined the New Kent County militia as
its surgeon and marched with the outfit to Richmond to tender his
services to Governor Wise in the emergency. The Governor's energetic
mobilization of the Virginia militia, and his deployment of several of
its units to Charles Town during the trial and execution of Brown,
429
was vigorously supported by the former President and Ms neighbors.
"Wise's energy/' Tyler reported to Robert in Philadelphia, "receives
unqualified approval." 2a
On other aspects of the crisis, however, the Tylers differed. John,
Jr., wrote Wise two letters urging him to spare Brown's life on the
ground of political expediency. Robert, on the other hand, wanted
Brown and his little army of "thugs," murderers, and horse thieves hung
promptly and without a backward glance. "Why they should incite the
least sympathy is very surprising to all Virginians and I may say to most
conservative men," he fumed. Unless abolitionism were speedily crushed
root and branch, Robert predicted the South would be forced to "estab-
lish a separate Confederacy in less than two years." John Tyler was less
pessimistic than his eldest son, although for a moment in late December
1859 he gave ear to Ohio congressman C. L. Vallandigham's proposal
for three separate confederacies in the event of dissolution. "If broken
up, the fragments would collect around three centers, the North, the
West, and the South," Tyler explained. "You may rely upon it that
Virginia will prepare for the worst." 24
Tyler expected local slave uprisings would follow the hanging of
Brown. Fortunately, all remained quiet along the lower James. The
Sherwood Forest Negroes remained docile throughout the crisis. They
went about their usual routines without incident. They gave no evi-
dence that they understood what the furor at Charles Town was all
about. Very likely they had been carefully shielded from all information
about the events in Harpers Ferry. "They are a strange set, are they
not?" Julia asked her mother. "Generally kind and happy and don't
want to have anything to do with poor white people" Nevertheless, local
and state security measures were pushed energetically forward. "Virginia
is arming to the teeth," Tyler pointed out, "more than fifty thousand
stand of arms already distributed, and the demand for more daily in-
creasing. Party is silent, and has no voice. But one sentiment pervades
the country: security in the Union, or separation. ... I hope there is
conservatism enough in the country to speak peace, and that, after all,
good may come out of evil." 25
Enough conservatism was mustered to prolong peace, although little
lasting good came out of the Harpers Ferry evil. At the outset of the
Brown crisis Julia was positive that disunion was near at hand unless
there was an immediate and "important demonstration of good feeling
on the part of the North toward the South." Southerners, she warned,
"are now completely wrought up and will not be tampered with any
longer." Only when she learned that Americans as prominent as Edward
Everett and Caleb Gushing had spoken out at Boston's Faneuil Hall for
peace and conciliation did she decide that the Union could probably be
saved. "The best minds are really with the South," she said of the
Faneuil Hall rally. Still, she supported a movement originating in Rich-
430
mond to boycott the use of Northern textiles in the hope that suck
pressure on the Yankee pocketbook would awaken businessmen in that
section to the economic implications of "forcing" the South out of the-
Union on the Negro question. The "Wear- Virginia-Cloth'7 campaign,,
and the fashionable "Calico Balls" in Richmond that launched it,,
would, Julia calculated, compel New York City to "follow the example,
of Boston and Philadelphia in making such demonstrations as will soothet
the wounded South." 26
In spite of young Gardie's prediction that "the times are very-
threatening and I do not think there is much hope of a reconciliation,
between the North and the South," the "wounded South" was gradually-
soothed. "Old Brown" went to his doom, reaping, said the angry Julia,
"the miserable consequence of his shameful outrage." Conservative
Democratic newspapers in the North, like the pro-Southern New York
Express, mounted shrill attacks on Brown and the abolitionists. The*
Express, said Tyler, "is really battling the cause for the South bravely."
Julia was pleased to learn that unionist meetings and rallies in New-
York City and on Staten Island had received the full support of her
mother. The Shelter Island branch of the family also followed the-
Southern line during the Harpers Ferry crisis, urging sectional concilia-
tion and an end to abolitionist provocations. On the other hand, Julia,
was disturbed to hear from her mother that David Lyon had refused
to sign the call for a union meeting held on Staten Island in mid-
December. Inexplicably, he had also refused to endorse a formal denun-
ciation of abolitionist excesses emerging from the rally. This meeting,,
sponsored by Virginia expatriate W. Farley Grey and an organization
called "Friends of the Union and Constitution," convinced Sherwood
Forest, nevertheless, in Grey's words, that "the feeling here in New York
is all we could wish. An army of fifty thousand, I am persuaded, could
be raised here at the tap of a drum to march to your aid if necessary.
Many are as violent as any Southern man could be." Whatever David
Lyon's refusal to sustain incipient Copperheadism on Staten Island
boded for the future harmony of the family, Julia and Tyler were con-
fident by February 1860 that the threat of actual secession had passed.27
Neither Tidewater Virginia nor Sherwood Forest was ever again
quite the same after the Harpers Ferry upheaval. The relative merits of
union and secession were debated with such emotional fury throughout
Charles City and in nearby Richmond that few social functions could be;
held without the sectional crisis injecting itself into the gaiety. Every-
where nervous Virginians looked they saw abolitionist plots unfolding.
A Richmond reception held in February 1860 at the Exchange Hotel
in honor of Commissioner Christopher G. Memminger of South Carolina,
(dispatched to Virginia to address the state legislature on joint Southern
defense plans against future Brown raids) was ruined when one of the*
guests, a spurious Roman Catholic "priest" from Massachusetts,
43*
detected circulating among the Negro waiters, encouraging them to enter
the ballroom and dance with the ladies present. This, he whispered to
them, was their "right." The sham ecclesiastic was challenged and
severely beaten by outraged gentlemen at the reception. He barely man-
aged to flee the building before the police arrived, and he was run out
of town the next day. As Julia evaluated the incident, it conclusively
proved that "Northern intermeddlers have not ceased their mischief." 28
Even polite parlor conversation could produce explosions. In March
1860, for example, the drawing room at Sherwood Forest very nearly
became the scene of a fist fight when two of Tyler's neighbors, the
Reverend Dr. Wade, the local Episcopal clergyman, and planter John
Clopton angrily exchanged words on Governor Wise's handling of the
Brown affair. Wade, an outspoken Whig and unionist, argued that Wise
had over-reacted to the Harpers Ferry incident, needlessly contributing
to the tension by placing Virginia on a virtual war footing. The gov-
ernor had, Wade charged, misrepresented the relative calm prevailing at
Harpers Ferry after Brown's capture in order to whip up support
throughout the state for a militant policy of anti-abolitionism. At this
point Clopton sprang from his chair, fists clenched, shouting: "I have no
opinion of clergymen coming from the pulpit to make themselves Sun-
day evening politicians and slander and accuse of perjury such a man as
Governor Wise whose honor and word I have never heard doubted by
his bitterest political opponents." Fortunately, no blows were struck.
Tyler and his wife clearly sided with Clopton, however. Julia thought
he had acted with "a spirit and independence truly becoming," while
Tyler dismissed the thrust of Wade's arguments with the observation
that the clergyman was a fuzzy-minded Federalist who had "married
for his second wife one of the granddaughters of Chief Justice Mar-
shall." Obviously a bad sort.29
Parlor heroics of the Wade-Clopton type pointed up the fact that
Virginians were badly divided on the political issues of the hour after
the John Brown affair. The most dangerous legacy of the Brown incident
was its tendency in Virginia, and throughout the South, to polarize and
then freeze opinions ; to reduce complex sectional questions to the decep-
tive either-or simplicity of union or secession, abolitionism or civil war.
These post-Harpers Ferry pressures drove many Southern moderates,
caught in a no man's land of verbal cannonading between sectional
extremists, into frightened silence or pell-mell into the South's extremist
camp.
Other moderates, like Tyler, were fearful that if the Republicans
managed to win the election of 1860 that event alone would trigger a
civil war by converting thousands of Southern moderates into secession-
ists overnight, particularly if the new party nominated and elected aboli-
tionist William H. Seward as President. Seward's October 1859 state-
ment that the sectional controversy was an "irrepressible conflict" which
432
could only lead to a United States "either entirely a slaveholding nation
or entirely a free-labor nation" provided Dixie moderates few straws to
grasp in their desire for a long-range sectional accommodation.
To John Tyler the main question in 1859-1860 was no longer
whether slavery could or could not expand legally into the territories.
Although the Dred Scott decision of March 1857 declared that the
institution could expand, the controversial Supreme Court ruling had
elated Tyler not at all. Southern extremists, of course, cheered it as a
great victory. The whole argument over the legal status of slavery in
the territories remained to Tyler a "mere abstraction" since from a
practical standpoint the further expansion of slavery was topographi-
cally, climatically, and politically impossible. He had not been outraged
by the popular-sovereignty concept espoused as an article of political
faith by Douglas and the Northern Democracy at the time of the
Kansas-Nebraska controversy. Nor in 1858 did he share the South 7s
horror when Stephen A. Douglas, in his famous debate with Lincoln,
announced his so-called Freeport Doctrine, that politically motivated
clarification of popular sovereignty which argued that the people of a
territory could, in spite of the Dred Scott decision, lawfully exclude
slavery from their midst prior to drawing up a state constitution and
applying for admission to the Union. That Douglas was prepared to
subordinate legalistic abstractions to practical realities ("Slavery can-
not exist a day or an hour anywhere unless it is supported by local police
regulations/7 he maintained) infuriated Southern extremists and un-
doubtedly cost the Little Giant the nomination of a united Democracy
in 1860.
Tyler did not support Douglas' final bid for the White House. But
neither was he infected by the divisive anti-Douglas hydrophobia that
broke out south of the Potomac as the Presidential campaign got under
way. On the contrary, his political behavior immediately before the
crucial election of 1860 was conditioned almost entirely by his belief
that abolitionist radicals would eventually seize control of the overtly
sectional and rapidly growing Republican Party. By exercising a tyranny
of the majority in Congress, and ultimately in the Supreme Court, they
would soon be in a position to legislate and adjudicate slavery out of
existence in Southern states, where it had long been an economically
viable and constitutional institution.
Tyler was willing to go far toward adjusting the slavery controversy
peacefully. He was willing to surrender a great deal to prevent a civil
war. He had accepted the ominous upset of the Free State-Slave State
political balance of power inherent in the Compromise of 1850 and in
the popular-sovereignty basis of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. He
strenuously opposed Southern demands in the late 18503 that the in-
famous African slave trade be revived and legalized. In this unpopular
stand (among the extremists at least) he defended the Tightness and
433
morality of the antislave trade article of his Webster-Ashburton Treaty
when it came under severe attack by Southern fire-eaters in 1857-1858.
But Tyler could not accept the prospect of a Charles City County
dominated by emancipated Negroes, with or without financial compensa-
tion to their owners. Nor could he accept the risk of a "Black Republi-
can" Congress or an abolitionist-oriented Supreme Court depriving him
at some future date of his private property while it subjugated the
owners to the owned. He did not want secession or civil war, but at the
same time he could not abide the social and economic dislocations im-
plicit in abolition.
As viewed from the quiet of the Sherwood Forest piazza, the only
sure bulwark between these multiple dangers and the maintenance of the
status quo along the lower James was the continued unification of the
Democratic Party under the permissive leadership of its pro-slavery
Pierces and Buchanans, however innocuous and inefficient these men
might prove to be as Presidents. The long-range solution, as Tyler saw
it, was essentially political. The Republicans must not win the Presi-
dency in 1860 — or for that matter, ever. At the same time, he was re-
alistic in believing that no Southern Democrat could ever again hope to
gain the White House. "I am the last of the Virginia Presidents," he
lamented in July 1858. "The times indicate that the South has but little
out of the line of commerce to give the North but the patronage of
government to ensure the support of the latter." Instead, the South
would have to pin its future hopes on Northern or border-state Demo-
crats who leaned safely southward. This was the best the beleaguered
section could expect.30
In spite of these realistic views and his accurate impression that
Virginia's Governor Henry Wise was far too ultra on the slavery issue
to capture the White House, Tyler privately supported Wise for the
Democratic Presidential nomination during the spring of 1859. More
than anything else this gesture was an act of personal loyalty. He still
felt a substantial personal debt to Wise for his enlistment in the Corporal's
Guard of 1841-1842. And in the Wise-Letcher gubernatorial campaign
of 1859 the governor, as he had in 1856, took special pains to praise
Tyler for Texas annexation and his bank vetoes. "My acts while in the
White House and my course of conduct in office has been extensively
canvassed . . . my name has become more familiar to the lips of the
many than since I left Washington," he told Robert proudly. Convinced
that Buchanan himself had no chance of renomination (Bloody Kansas
and Dred Scott had settled that), Tyler in May 1859 began urging a
Henry Wise-Robert Tyler ticket. Indeed, the former President argued
that his eldest son should take advantage of his longstanding connection
with the politically doomed Buchanan and, utilizing his chairmanship
of the Pennsylvania Democratic State Central Committee, commence a
434
serious campaign for the Vice-Presidential nomination. Were this drive
successful (and Tyler dispatched much unsolicited political advice to
Philadelphia to insure its success), Robert would anchor to northward
a sectionally balanced ticket. This would re-create the Virginia-Pennsyl-
vania coalition that had held the disintegrating Democracy together in
1856. "The only possible objection to the union of your two names at
Charleston is in the fact of the birthplace of both being Virginia — but
that objection is easily met." Just how, Tyler did not say.31
Wise's ultraism on the slavery question was, however, approaching
outright secessionism. This and his increasingly angry attacks on the
wishy-washiness of the Buchanan administration caused dismay at
Sherwood Forest. Wise was talking himself out of any possible con-
sideration for the Democratic nomination. Thus when Robert told his
father that a Wise-Tyler ticket was "totally out of the question" be-
cause there were "forty men the Democratic Party would sooner take,"
Tyler quietly abandoned the extremist governor and gave ear to the
faint rumblings of a tiny boomlet for the squire of Sherwood Forest
himself.
In response to Robert's conviction that "Virginia can make you
the President if she will," Tyler admitted in July 1859 that he was re-
ceiving "daily assurances from plain men of an anxious desire on their
part to restore me to the presidency." At first he paid little attention
to these unorganized importunities. "I could not improve upon my past
career," he declared flatly. But by October 1859 his popularity in Vir-
ginia seemed so solid and enthusiasm for his moderate approach to the
slavery issue seemed so broadly based that he began seriously to weigh
his prospects as a compromise nominee should the Charleston convene
tion, scheduled for April 1860, reach a deadlock. "I verily believe," he
said somewhat immodestly, "that I should at this day meet with more
enthusiasm from the rank and file than has occurred since Jackson's
time." Fearful that a divided convention might well prove "the grave of
the Democratic party," he therefore encouraged the formation of a small
committee to direct the Tyler movement. And in the classic manner of
all American politicians seeking to project a disinterested availability,
he began cautiously to tell those of his friends who asked him whether
he would accept the nomination that "it will be time enough to respond
when it takes place." To a certain extent he coveted a nomination for
the contribution it would make to his historical reputation. It would be
valuable to Clio's recollection of John Tyler whether he won the White
House or not. "The historic page is the most that I look to," he told
Robert on October 6, "and that would be embellished by the thing and
would impart to it value." The thought of actually sitting in the Presi-
dential chair once again gave him pause. "Things are, too, terribly out
of sorts, and he who undertakes to put them right would assume or have
thrown upon him a fearful responsibility." Nevertheless, he pushed
435
forward with what he called his "movement." There was the barest
possibility that the Virginia delegation to Charleston, unable to unite
on either Wise or Senator R. M. T. Hunter as the Old Dominion's
favorite-son candidate, might toss his name into the ring as Virginia's
compromise favorite-son nominee for a compromise Democratic nomina-
tion.32
The Tyler movement of 1859 was headed by A. Dudley Mann of
Washington, editor James D. B. De Bow of the influential De Bow's
Review, and the Reverend Father James Ryder, S.J., former president
of Georgetown College in the District of Columbia. De Bow opened the
columns of his magazine to John Tyler, Jr., and John, under the
pseudonyms Python and Tau, supplied articles which praised his
father's administration while suggesting that only John Tyler was ex-
perienced enough and moderate enough to cope with the gathering
storm. Father Ryder served the minuscule Tyler crusade as liaison with
the Northern Roman Catholic community long assiduously wooed by
Robert Tyler in his capacity as president of the Irish Repeal Association
in Philadelphia. This, then, was the politically obscure triad which
planned to make "Honest John" Tyler "available" for the Democratic
nomination should a fortuitous combination of factors and flukes at
Charleston produce another lucky turn of the wheel for "His Accidency."
These men, said Tyler, should plan to be on hand at Charleston when
the convention met. When the iron of deadlock was hot they could
strike.
Tyler meanwhile did all the things a dark-horse candidate was ex-
pected to do. He let it be known that he would certainly support
Buchanan if the President was renominated by the party; he reminded
the friends of Henry Wise that his longstanding political obligation to
the governor had not weakened; he remained scrupulously quiet in
public on the controversial issues of the moment; and he predicted that
a Democratic split in 1860 would surely bring the hated and feared
"Black Republicans" to power. Under no conditions, thought Tyler,
should the Democracy therefore risk adopting a platform at its forth-
coming Charleston convention. Not only was a platform "at most a
useless thing," but it would surely atomize the party. "We had in 1839-
'40 far greater dissensions at Harrisburg, and a platform would have
scattered us to the winds," he recalled.33
The Harpers Ferry crisis in Virginia did nothing to harm the Tyler
movement. It did however severely damage extremist Wise's favorite-son
prospects for the nomination while strengthening those of Senator Hunter
and Tyler. More significantly, the resulting talk of secession in the
South stimulated speculation in New York City, within Tammany and
among various old-line Conservative Democrats in Gotham, that the
Democracy could bring forward no stronger compromise candidate in
1860 than experienced John Tyler. With visions of a Virginia-New York
436
political alliance that might sustain Democratic conservative principles
and prevent a party split, Robert Tyler, Prosper M. Wetmore, and other
former Tyler leaders in New York began working to transform this
casual talk into something politically solid. For a brief and exciting
moment the ambitious Julia was encouraged to believe that her hus-
band's public career was about to bloom again. The serious illness of
Stephen Douglas' wife in November 1859 would, she felt, "check
Douglas' wish for the Presidency" and open the field to a Southern
candidate. The distaff optimism at Sherwood Forest was further en-
couraged when editor John S. Cunningham of Portsmouth came to the
support of the Tyler cause in Virginia. While Julia did not go to the
extreme of planning the details of another White House reign, she did
inform her mother, in March 1860, that her husband was being talked
of "very freely as being the second choice of at least three candidates.
Wise, Hunter and Douglas, they say, will all turn to him if they each
find there is no chance for themselves, and all these you know, are
bitterly opposed to one another The President seems to have out-
lived the abuse of his enemies, and is every day more and more properly
appreciated by all parties." 34
Unfortunately for Julia's renewed dream of the Presidential Man-
sion, the Tyler "boom" collapsed as quickly and quietly as it had been
launched. Wise's loss of the governorship to the moderate if not outright
unionist John Letcher in the fall of 1859 brought R. M. T. Hunter
gradually to the fore as Virginia's most likely favorite-son candidate at
the Charleston convention. His skillful direction of the compromise 1857
tariff bill through the Senate had won Hunter many friends and sup-
porters in the North, and his relative temperateness on the sectional
controversy commended him to many Virginia Democrats who, like
Governor-elect Letcher, saw no future in political extremism. With the
decline of the fire-eating Henry A. Wise and the emergence of the ob-
viously more available Hunter, nothing more was heard of the possible
candidacy of John Tyler. At a banquet in Richmond on April 12, 1860,
honoring the memory of Henry Clay, Tyler removed himself from any
further consideration as Virginia's candidate for the Democratic nomina-
tion, citing (and slightly doctoring to fit the situation) those lines from
Poe's "To One in Paradise" which ran:
Alas! alas! for me!
Ambition all is o'er;
No more — no more — no more —
(Such language holds the solemn sea
To the sands upon the shore)
Shall bloom the thunder-blasted tree;
Or stricken eagle soar.35
On April 23, the day the Democracy convened at Charleston for the
purpose of committing political suicide, the Stricken Eagle left his
437
Sherwood Forest aerie for what would be his last trip to the North. The
occasion was the belated marriage of David Lyon Gardiner to Sarah
Griswold Thompson, a respectable New York lady whose humorlessness
was exceeded only by her considerable wealth. Julia, seven months
pregnant, was not well enough to make the trip. Nor was her enthusiasm
for the match high. She therefore confined her modest contribution to
suggesting what prominent Virginians David Lyon might invite to the
ceremony. The marriage was also opposed by the matriarchal Juliana,
who consented to it only when her forty-three-year-old son promised to
move with his bride into the Gardiner home at Castleton Hill. Two
earlier engagements had been broken off by David Lyon when the
ladies in question had categorically refused to accept such an arrange-
ment. The thirty-year-old Sarah Thompson consented to the cloying
conditions involved. She knew nothing whatever about housekeeping or
cooking. She had never even dressed herself for a formal occasion with-
out the aid of a servant. She was quite willing, therefore, to have her
mother-in-law usurp her function as housewife. She and David Lyon
also consented to having Juliana bear the entire cost of maintaining them
at Castleton Hill. Needless to say, this capitulation to rampant mom-
ism gave the lonely Juliana an opportunity to manage the private lives
of the couple literally down to and including detailed instructions on
how best to put the cat out for the night. To make matters even more
difficult, the sixty-one-year-old Juliana had, by 1860, come under the
influence of spiritualism and was beginning to "talk" regularly with her
departed husband and with Alexander and Margaret. Her migraine
headaches also became worse and more frequent with her advancing
years. Were this not enough, additional tensions were introduced into
the West New Brighton household when it became evident that David
Lyon and Sarah were as pro-Northern as Juliana and the Tylers were
pro-Southern.36
By the time John Tyler returned to Sherwood Forest from the wed-
ding in early May the political situation had taken an ominous turn.
Unable to agree on either platform or candidate, the Democratic con-
vention in Charleston had broken up in chaos and confusion. Northern
Democrats would not accept a platform plank declaring it the duty of
the federal government to protect slavery in the territories, and South-
ern Democrats would accept nothing less. Enough delegates from the
Deep South finally walked out to make it mathematically impossible for
Stephen A, Douglas, the leading candidate for the nomination, to amass
the necessary two-thirds majority for selection. Fifty-eight ballots
availed the Little Giant nothing. Before adjourning, the delegates
voted to convene again in Baltimore on June 18 and have another try
at nominating a candidate acceptable to all factions. Meanwhile, the
seceders from the shattered convention moved to another hall in
Charleston, chose Delaware Senator James A. Bayard their chairman,
438
and adopted a platform that was uncompromisingly pro-slavery. They
decided, however, to withhold a Presidential nomination until the re-
convened Democratic convention had acted in Baltimore in June. To
insure the choice of a man acceptable to the extremist South they voted
to hold their own watchdog convention in Richmond on June u.
The centrifugal developments in Charleston struck Tyler as ex-
tremely dangerous and unwise. The Democracy's bitter split filled him
with "apprehension and regret," and he could only hope that the Balti-
more convention would somehow magically produce a reunified party
able to salvage American conservatism and prevent the election of a
radical Republican. The strategy of the Southern delegates at Charleston
he considered stupid and self-defeating. Either they should have all re-
mained in the convention hall and pressed for the nomination of "some-
one whose name would have constituted a platform in itself," or they
should have all walked out together and instantly nominated a South-
leaning Northerner like Joseph Lane of Oregon or James Bayard of
Delaware. They had done neither. Instead, they had "played the game
badly by throwing away their trump card," their unity of action as a
solid sectional bloc.37
That unity of action would be needed to prevent the triumph of
"Black Republicanism" became more apparent on May 9 when a poly-
glot group of moderate Northern and Southern Whigs combined with
a body of Union Democrats and the remnants of the shattered Know-
Nothing sect in the South to launch the Constitutional Union Party. The
new group nominated John Bell of Tennessee and Edward Everett of
Massachusetts on a purposely vague platform calling for the Union, the
Constitution and the enforcement of the laws. Designed as it was to rally
moderates on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line with a call for peace
and patriotism, particularly moderates in the border states, the Con-
stitutional Union Party, whatever its ideological fuzziness, was definitely
more acceptable to Tyler than was the Republican Party which met in
Chicago on May 16 and nominated Abraham Lincoln.
The Republican platform, demanding as it did an end to slavery
expansion in the territories, the admission of Kansas as a free state, and
the revocation of the Dred Scott decision, struck Southern extremists as
little less than a call to arms. Tyler's reaction was much calmer and
more reasonable than this. After all, the Republican platform also called
for the preservation of the Union, disavowed abolitionism, and con-
demned armed attacks on the South in the John Brown manner. Too,
the Republicans had passed over the (by Southern lights) wild-eyed
abolitionist William H. Seward, and had nominated instead the moderate
and relatively unknown Abraham Lincoln. No missionary for the radical
notion of racial equality, Lincoln was mainly opposed to the further
extension of Negro slavery into the territories. In spite of his rather
inflammatory "House Divided" speech of June 1858 he was willing ta
439
accept the institution where it legally and traditionally existed. In this
sense, he was certainly no recruit to the abolitionist stand on the Negro
question.
For these reasons Tyler did not panic when news of the Republican
platform and Lincoln's nomination reached Sherwood Forest. He was
not happy about it, but he did not fly off in all directions as did so many
Southern slaveowners. Instead, he worried principally about the reaction
of the lunatic fringe in the Deep South should Honest Abe be elected.
"The consequences of Lincoln's election I cannot foretell," he wrote
Robert in July. "Neither Virginia, nor North Carolina, nor Maryland
(to which you may add Kentucky, Tennessee and Missouri) will secede
for that. My apprehension, however, is that South Carolina and others
of the cotton States will do so, and any attempt to coerce such seceding
States will most probably be resisted by all the South." 3S
The probability of Lincoln's election loomed large when the Democ-
racy failed to heal its wounds at the reconvened Baltimore convention
in June. Once again the Southerners present walked out in anger, leaving
the Northern Democracy to nominate Stephen A. Douglas on a platform
which reaffirmed the 1856 Cincinnati platform and assigned the specific
problems of slavery and slaves in the territories to Supreme Court ad-
judication. This was neither a radical nor an anti-Southern program. But
because it failed to demand that the federal government actively protect
slavery in the territories, the Southern extremists bolted the convention
and the party. The dissidents promptly convened nearby and, with Caleb
Cushing in the chair, nominated the conciliatory John C. Breckinridge
of Kentucky for President and the pro-Southern Joseph Lane of Oregon
for Vice-President. Vigorous federal protection of slavery in the slave
states and in the territories was demanded by the splinter party in its
platform. The Breckinridge-Lane ticket, more moderate in personnel
than in the platform it was forced to transport as baggage, was promptly
endorsed by the rump Democratic convention meeting simultaneously in
Richmond. With this action the Democracy was hopelessly and irretriev-
ably split.
Tyler surveyed the shambles of the Democratic Party first with
alarm, then with stoic resignation. "I fear that the great Republic has
seen its last days," he worried in August. Nevertheless, throughout the
summer of 1860 he supported attempts in Virginia to create a Breckin-
ridge-Douglas fusion ticket and similar efforts in New York to fashion
a Bell-Douglas alliance. He deplored the sniping back and forth between
Northern and Southern Democrats during the campaign, and between
Douglas and Breckinridge he found "nothing to approve on either
side." The defeat of Lincoln was "the great matter at issue," and he
saw no hope for this "unless some one of the so-called free States is
snatched from him." New York, he felt, was the great hope. As he
explained the situation to David Lyon in October,
440
There is a deeper gloom resting on the country than I ever expected to see.
Should New York rise up in her might, and declare against Lincoln, all will
unite in ascribing to her great glory. She will, in truth, be hailed as the great
conservative State. She will have rebuked the disorganizes, and imparted new
vitality to our institutions. Should, however, the picture be reversed, and her
great popular voice unite to swell the notes of triumph for the sectional hosts,
then indeed will a dark and heavy cloud rest upon the face of the country
Property has already fallen in value amongst us, and there is an obvious
uneasiness in the minds of all men. I will not permit myself to abandon the
hope that the cloud which hovers over us will be dispersed through the
action of your large and powerful State. I am busily engaged in seeding a
large crop of wheat. Shall I be permitted to reap it at its maturity in peace?
Time will decide ! 39
Tyler reluctantly supported the Breckinridge candidacy, embar-
rassed in so doing to find himself making common cause with some of
the worst fist-shakers in Dixie. While the logic of his convictions dictated
his support of Bell and the Constitutional Unionists, he endorsed
Breckinridge on the practical and arithmetical grounds that a vote in
Virginia for John Bell was a wasted and divisive vote. If the Southern
and border states could all be swung to Breckinridge, he reasoned, and
if Lincoln should lose either New York or Pennsylvania to Douglas, the
election would then be thrown into Congress, where practical politicians
might successfully negotiate a peaceful solution. It was Tyler's fervent
hope that neither Lincoln, Douglas, nor Breckinridge would secure the
152 electoral votes constituting a majority, and that Joseph Lane would
somehow emerge from the trial in Congress as the compromise President
of the United States. By this analysis, any electoral votes that Bell re-
ceived would weaken both Douglas and Breckinridge, strengthen Lin-
coln, and frustrate Tyler's prayer that the November balloting would
result in a neat standoff.40
In July and August 1860 this thinking was not unreasonable. Bell
narrowly carried Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky, although in all
three of these border states the combined Douglas-Breckinridge Demo-
cratic vote well exceeded the Constitutional Unionists' tally. Had BelPs
39 electoral votes been added to Breckinridge's 72, the Southern
Democracy would have secured in. And had the Douglas-Bell fusion
ticket won in New York (it lost by 50,000 popular votes of the 775,000
cast), Lincoln's electoral count would have been reduced to 145, seven
shy of a majority. It was the logic of this Electoral College numbers
game that caused Tyler to deplore Southern attacks on Douglas ("You
are too bitter on Douglas," he scolded Robert) and promote Douglas-
Breckinridge fusions that would frustrate the divisive Bell movement.
At the same time, he refrained from any attack on Lincoln. Instead, he
concentrated his fire on Seward ("a more arch and wily conspirator does
not live") and the Northern abolitionist extremists around Lincoln in
441
the hope "that a defeat of the negro-men now will dissolve their party."
He also attempted to link Seward to alleged British machinations to
"foment sectional divisions among us" by sending over abolitionist
agents and provocateurs. This, of course, was sheer campaign non-
sense.41
The confused political situation cast a distinct pall of anxiety over
the last summer vacation the family enjoyed together in peace at Villa
Margaret. In the epicurean spirit of Phoebe Gardiner Horsford, who
advised Julia that "we may as well have good times as long as we can,"
a determined effort was made to function normally and happily in the
midst of loud predictions of secession and civil war should Lincoln be
elected. Julia had made careful plans for the summer season and for her
seventh accouchement that would open it. A change in personnel at
Fortress Monroe assured a ready supply of new officers, "all equally
agreeable and accomplished." Juliana and Harry Beeckman, now an
active eleven-year-old, were expected to visit the Villa, Harry to join
the play of Julia's own brood of six (she called them "my troop"), whom
she pronounced "pictures of health and happiness ... all fat and rosy,
gay as larks . . . progressing and improving in all respects." In the mean-
time, Tyler's niece Patty, who had lived for several years at Sherwood
Forest as Julia's companion, would be married in May 1860 and her
place in the family circle would be taken by her sister Maria Tyler.
This assured Julia a "useful intimate" as the time for her confinement
approached in early June. She was determined to hold off the event until
all had been made ready for her comfort at the Villa. "You may depend
upon it I shall try to reach the seaside before the event transpires with
me," she informed her mother. In mid-May Tyler was dispatched to
Hampton with furniture and household goods and a knocked-down frame
house that he erected on the property for the use of the body servants
and house slaves making the trip.42
All was in readiness for Julia at Villa Margaret when she arrived
there on May 25. Juliana reached Hampton on June 12; her presence
was a signal that labor could officially begin. Julia therefore promptly
delivered herself of a nine-and-a-half-pound baby girl at 9 A.M. on June
13. Save for a "nervous blind sick headache" the birth was accomplished
without incident. At first it was decided to name the infant "Margaret
Gardiner Tyler," but this nostalgic idea was dropped and the child was
christened Pearl. Within a few days the hardy mother was up and
around, the older children were happily shouting, playing, fishing, and
crabbing again, and Tyler was commuting up to Sherwood Forest to
supervise his wheat harvest.
Gardie and Alex, now fourteen and twelve respectively, accom-
panied their father to the harvest and while at Sherwood Forest took
several hours' instruction each day at Mr. Ferguson's school in Charles
City where they were in regular attendance during the winter months.
Harry Beeckman and the school-age younger Tyler children attended
442
as part-time students a small private school in Hampton during the
summer months. It was conducted by a "well educated lady" from
Baltimore, for young ladies seeking to become well educated. Harry
strenuously objected to being sent to a "girls' school." He would have
much preferred attending the highly regarded Hampton Academy
nearby. Tyler was an honorary "Old Boy'7 of the institution, and in
1858 Julia had considered wintering at Hampton so that Gardie and
Alex might attend the Academy as day pupils. Tyler did not "fancy
staying at Sherwood alone/' and he vetoed the idea with the clinching
argument that the "air would be too severe for his health — the planta-
tion being inland is milder." The Academy was military in its discipline,
and from the porch at Villa Margaret the hundred-odd cadets, clad in
gray uniforms, could be seen drilling and exercising. Occasionally Gardie
and Alex would stroll over to watch the cadets perform, but neither of
them gave any evidence at this time of a yearning for the military life.43
While the children combined vacations with educations, harvesting
with French verbs, the adults picnicked, danced, and visited at the
Fortress. Colonel Justin Dimick, USA, later brigadier general in com-
mand at Fort Warren Prison in Boston, was senior officer present that
summer, and he did everything in his power to see that the former
Commander-in-Chief, his wife, and his mother-in-law were entertained
royally. In mid- August the British liner Great Eastern, largest iron
ship ever built, visited Hampton Roads and provided the family a
"merry and exciting" day of shipboard tourism. Julia, only eight weeks
from childbed, clambered up and down the steep ladders with cautious
indecision. But she managed it.44
By the time the family returned to Sherwood Forest in early
October it appeared to Tyler that Lincoln would very likely win the
election. The former President did not feel, however, that such an out-
come would necessarily mean disunion. Indeed, on November 5 he ad-
vised his grandson, Cadet William G. Waller, not to resign from the
plebe class at West Point "until Virginia had distinctly and plainly
marked out her course after the election." Disunion was not inevitable,
he instructed Waller, and there was also a practical military considera-
tion involved in remaining at West Point: "May it not prove very
injurious to the interests of the South for all the Southern young men to
leave, thus giving exclusive command of the army, at least to the extent
of the present classes, to the North? My advice is to stay where you
are until events have fully developed themselves." 45
Five days later, however, John Tyler was cast into gloom. "So all
is over, and Lincoln elected. South Carolina will secede Virginia
will abide developments For myself, I rest in quiet, and shall do so
unless I see that my poor opinions have due weight." He was right.
Lincoln was elected, receiving 180 electoral votes on 39.8 per cent of the
popular vote. The South Carolina legislature immediately called for a
state convention which, several weeks later, on December 20, passed an
443
ordinance of secession without a dissenting vote. In a "Declaration of
Immediate Causes" issued on December 24 the aroused Carolinians
called attention to Lincoln's 1858 "House Divided" speech as damning
evidence of the President-elect's intractability on the slavery question.
"A house divided against itself cannot stand/7 Lincoln had remarked.
"I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and
half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved; I do not expect
the house to fall; but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will
become all one thing, or all the other." This enigmatic utterance which
carefully avoided any specifics on the how or the when, was (and has
since been) interpreted in a variety of ways. Suffice it to say here that
the South Carolina radicals in December 1860 preferred to view it as
a virtual declaration of sectional war. Their action in Charleston
was also justified with the further argument that the North had long
attacked the slavery institution and that a crudely sectional party
had finally seized power under the leadership of a President-elect "whose
opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery." That Lincoln's opinions
were not hostile to slavery as such, that his purposes with regard to it
were far from formed, was not the point. The lunatic fringe in South
Carolina took the bit in its teeth and ran crazily away. From Northern
abolitionists came shrill demands for instant and bloody retaliation
against the South Carolina secessionists.
In the midst of the immediate postelection confusion, Tyler at-
tempted to maintain some degree of emotional and intellectual equilib-
rium. He found this increasingly difficult to do as extremist bleatings in
one section triggered extremist counterblasts in the other. Writing to his
old friend Dr. Silas Reed on November 16, he lamented that
We have fallen on evil times . . . the day of doom for the great model Republic
is at hand. Madness rules the hour, and statesmanship . . . gives place to a
miserable demagogism which leads to inevitable destruction The fate of
the Union trembles in the balance. Ever since a senator, regardless of his
oath to sustain the Constitution, set up a law for each man above the Con-
stitution, I foresaw that the game of demagogism and treason was fairly
started, and that unless arrested it would end in ruin. ... In the midst of all
this I remain quiescent. No longer an actor on the stage of public affairs, I
leave to others younger than myself the settlement of existing disputes . . .
sometimes I think it would be better for all peaceably to separate I sigh
over the degeneracy of the times
As the sigh escaped his lips Tyler did not lose sight of what the sectional
controversy was at bottom all about. To be sure, states' rights was part
of the problem, but only because it was related to the more deeply rooted
slavery question. Concluding his letter to Reed was a paragraph, omitted
from the 1885 version printed by his biographer, Lyon G. Tyler, which
indicated Tyler's primary concern with the Negro problem in Charles
City County and throughout Virginia:
444
Nor can I say what course Virginia will adopt On one thing I think you
may rely, that she will never consent to have her blacks cribbed and confined
within proscribed and specified limits — and thus be involved in all the conse-
quences of a war of the races in some 20 or 30 years. She must have expansion,
and if she cannot obtain for herself and sisters that expansion in the Union,
she may sooner or later look to Mexico, the West India Islands and Central
America as the ultimate reservations of the African race. But now everything
is reversed, and no more Slave States has apparently become the shibboleth
of Northern political faith.46
Earlier, of course, Tyler had been quite willing to accept the pros-
pect of "no more Slave States." His position on the Compromise of 1850
and on the Kansas-Nebraska Act demonstrated that beyond question.
That he was now, for the first time, seriously proposing slavery expan-
sion as a fundamental condition for the preservation of the Union pro-
vides an accurate barometric measure of the panic that swept Charles
City County in the first weeks following Lincoln's election. Relatively
speaking, Tyler remained less agitated than some of his neighbors, but
he too began evidencing signs of the political hypertension that seized
Tidewater Virginia as South Carolina prepared to secede. Within four
months Tyler himself would become a leader in Virginia's secession
movement. His conversion to this position was dictated by military
rather than political considerations. Nevertheless, the metamorphosis
in his thinking began shortly after South Carolina departed the Union
on December 20.
Virginia, to be sure, was predominantly unionist in sentiment dur-
ing these trying months. The state had gone for Bell over Breckinridge
by 74,681 to 74,323 in November. Douglas had polled 16,290, mainly
in the western counties, and even Lincoln had commanded 1929 votes.
The election of 1860 in the Old Dominion was no mandate for secession,
no call for radical experimentation with the organic structure of the
federal government. In the Tidewater counties, however, particularly in
Charles City where the Negroes so decisively outnumbered the whites,
there was alarm. Renewed visions of John Browns descending upon
Virginia produced nightmares along the lower James. To these fears
Tyler was not immune. Indeed, he frankly advised his neighbors to
prepare for the worst. They should sell their slaves outright or move
with them into the Deep South, where the germs of Northern abolition-
ism would be less likely to infect the master-slave relationship. This was
advice for others, advice he would not follow himself. He considered his
obligation to his own slaves based on something more elevated than a
mere property relationship. For this reason he felt a strong and con-
tinuing moral obligation to stand by and protect their physical and ma-
terial welfare, come what may. He was determined, therefore, neither
to sell his servants south nor abandon his plantation, although given
the severe drought and bad harvests of 1858-1860 it would have been
44S
to his financial advantage to have liquidated his slave property at the
high prices then prevailing in the lower South. Instead, John Tyler stood
firm, hoping that some compromise political solution to the sectional
controversy would appear, one that would guarantee the private prop-
erty of the plantation aristocracy from abolitionist expropriation and
in so doing preserve the social and racial status quo of the Charles City
neighborhood.47
Firsthand reports reaching Sherwood Forest from the Deep South
permitted little optimism that such a compromise would be allowed to
emerge. In mid-December 1860 Tyler's neighbor and physician, Dr.
James Selden, returned to Charles City from a survey trip through
Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina. He had gone there, on Tyler's
advice, to study prospects for moving his plantation and his slaves to
the cotton belt. He brought back to Sherwood Forest the disturbing
news, as Julia relayed it, that "the South is perfectly ripe for secession.
„ . . The South Carolina ladies say they would rather be widows of
secessionists than wives of submissionists ! and that they will never
again attend a ball in the United States. Blue cockades are as thick as
hops " Still, the mistress of Sherwood hoped that "the Union on a
right and just basis will be preserved," and Tyler took pen in hand to
plead anew for sectional harmony. "It is the duty of every citizen," he
wrote, "however profound his retirement from public affairs, and what-
ever may have been his position in relation to them and the country in
other days, to contribute his best efforts to restore harmony when dis-
cord prevails, and aid in rescuing the country from danger." By De-
cember 14, less than a week before South Carolina finally seceded, Tyler
had matured a tentative plan for sectional unity, although by this date
he was beginning to blame the deepening crisis more on the Northern
extremists than on the Charleston hotheads. As he explained the tragic
situation to Caleb Gushing,
I confess that I am lost in perfect amazement at the lunacy which seems to
have seized the North. What imaginable good is to come to them by com-
pelling the Southern States into secession? I see great benefits to foreign
governments, but nothing but prostration and woe to New England. Virginia
looks on for the present with her arms folded, but she only bides her time.
Despondency will be succeeded by action. My own mind is greatly disturbed.
I look around in every direction for a conservative principle, but I have so
far looked in vain. I have thought that a consultation between the Border
States, free and slaveholding, might lead to adjustment. It would embrace six
on each side. They are most interested in keeping the peace, and if they
cannot come to an understanding, then the political union is gone. . . . When
all things else have failed, this might be tried. It would be a dernier ressort.48
It was.
446
FROM PEACE TO PARADISE
1861-1862
These are dark times, dearest, and I think only of
you and our little ones. . . . / shall "vote secession.
JOHN TYLER, APRIL 16, 1861
John Tyler was not the only American casting about for a dernier ressort
to stave off civil war. In his last Annual Message to Congress on De-
cember 3, 1860, Buchanan blamed the crisis on the "long-continued and
intemperate interference of the Northern people with the question of
slavery in the Southern States" and offered a three-point pacification
proposal to this end in the form of an amendment to the Constitution
which would recognize slavery as a property right where it already
existed, provide federal protection of slavery in the territories until such
time as a given territory elected to enter the Union as a free state, and
uphold the right of a master to have his runaway slave promptly re-
turned to him through the police action of the federal government. In
the same breath, the nervous Buchanan (desiring little more than to get
safely out of office before the dam broke) confessed his belief that the
"Executive has no authority to decide what shall be the relations be-
tween the Federal Government and South Carolina. . . . He possesses
no power to change the relations heretofore existing between them." Not
surprisingly, these tired proposals from a supine administration caused
little stir among the political literati of the North. Still, they struck
Tyler as reasonable. Encouraged by Buchanan's modest example, he
offered on December 14 his own proposal for a peace convention of the
twelve border states, six slave and six free.1
As the former President matured his plan and began soliciting
support for it in Richmond political circles, Senator John J. Crittenden
447
of Kentucky offered a peace resolution in the Senate on December 18,
two days before South Carolina formally seceded. The resolution con-
tained as its central feature the legalization and recognition of slavery
in all territories south of 36°3o'. Under the proposed Crittenden amend-
ment to the Constitution, states formed from territories below 36°3o'
could enter the Union slave or free as their inhabitants decreed, but
until such decision was rendered by the territorials themselves, slavery
was legal in and could extend into areas south of 36°3o'. This projected
revitalization of the Missouri Compromise which had been repealed by
the Kansas-Nebraska Act and declared unconstitutional in the Dred
Scott decision, Lincoln could not accept. He was unalterably opposed
to any further extension of slavery even if extension was accomplished
by democratic means. The Republican platform had been clear on this
point, and Lincoln had campaigned on the platform. Consequently, the
joint Senate committee appointed to consider the Crittenden proposal
was hopelessly deadlocked by December 31. "No ray of light yet ap-
pears to dispel the gloom which has settled upon the country," Tyler
wrote David Lyon on New Year's Day. "A blow struck would be the
signal for united action with all the slave States, whereas the grain
States of the border are sincerely desirous of reconciling matters and
thereby preserving the Union. . . . They are so deeply interested in pre-
serving friendly relations. . . ." 2
Events moved swiftly as the new year opened. Between January 9
and January 19 Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida all seceded
and, following South Carolina's example, seized federal forts and
arsenals as they departed the Union. On January 5 Buchanan dispatched
the unarmed Star of the West to Charleston harbor to reinforce and
provision the small garrison at Fort Sumter, still in federal hands. The
ship was fired upon and turned back on January 9, and a confused
Buchanan resumed playing the role of an undulating cobra transfixed
by secessionist flutes. This nonprovocative White House policy, virtually
paralytic in its effect, Tyler considered a "wise and statesmanlike
course." He was willing to appease the South Carolina radicals without
shame if such a policy would buy cooling-off time, however little. On
January 15 his advocacy of appeasement seemed justified when the
Virginia General Assembly proposed that a peace convention of all the
states convene in Washington on February 4. Although this mitigatory
gesture was largely the legislative work of Governor John Letcher and
William C. Rives, Tyler's behind-the-scenes work in the Virginia peace
movement was so prominent that in a very real sense he was the father
of the peace convention.3
Paternity has its problems as well as its joys. The specific proposal
passed by the General Assembly seemed to Tyler a horribly misshapen
child. Unfortunately, Virginia had called for a convention of all the
states. Tyler, conversely, favored a convention of commissioners from
443
twelve "border" states — New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Il-
linois, and Michigan from among the free states; Delaware, Maryland,
Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri to represent the slave
states. Correctly seeing that a convention of all the states would merely
add to the number of extremists present from both sections and would
produce an administratively unmanageable bedlam, the former Presi-
dent marched into the columns of the Richmond Enquirer for January
17 to call loudly for the smaller, more efficient convention. If the twelve
border states could agree, Tyler argued, "I think their recommendation
will be followed by the other States and incorporated into the Constitu-
tion If they cannot agree, then it may safely be concluded that the
restoration of peace and concord has become impossible." The bloody
alternative to speedy accommodation Tyler also outlined to his fellow
Virginians:
If the Free and Slave States cannot live in harmony together . . . does not the
dictate of common sense admonish to a separation in peace? Better so than
a perpetual itch of irritation and ill feeling. Far better than an unnatural war
between the sections. . . . Grant that one section shall conquer the other, what
reward will be reaped by the victor? The conqueror will walk at every step
over smoldering ashes and beneath crumbling columns. Ruin and desola-
tion will everywhere prevail, and the victor's brow, instead of a wreath of
glorious evergreen . . . will be encircled with withered and faded leaves be-
dewed with the blood of the child and its mother and the father and the son.
The picture is too horrible and revolting to be dwelt upon.4
The picture was horrible and revolting. For this reason Tyler sug-
gested that should a convention fail, the secessionist states should be
permitted their exit from the Union in peace. These departed states, he
felt, might then convene, adopt the United States Constitution as their
own constitution, amend it with "guarantees going not one iota beyond
what strict justice and the security of the South require," and then
invite the other states "to enter our Union with the old flag flying over
one and all." This interesting if wholly impractical idea had the ad-
vantage of confusing the question of just who would be seceding from
whom, and Tyler apparently offered it to delay and complicate the
formulation of a legal basis for federal military coercion should the sec-
tional crisis come to that. In mid- January 1861 he was still willing to
buy peace at nearly any price and he was anxious to frustrate any
prospect of aimed intervention.5
On the very day Tyler's appeal for a twelve-state peace convention
saw print in Richmond, the legislatures of Pennsylvania and Ohio, two
of Tyler's "border" states, were reported in Virginia papers as having
offered troops and funds to the federal government to subjugate the
seceded states. At the same time, the General Assembly in Richmond
rejected Tyler's convention concept and voted for a conference of all
the states. "The course of the Pennsylvania and Ohio Legislatures . . .
449
leaves but little hope of any adjustment/' lie wrote Robert in dismay.
"The Legislature of Virginia have so trammelled their [peace] conven-
tion bill that I fear that we shall have a doubtful result." Since none of
the five already seceded states would be likely to send delegates to such
a conference (they did not), the rump conclave could scarcely be ex-
pected to restore the Union. Further, the free states would have such a
pronounced majority in the convention that no truly meaningful dialogue
could be expected to take place.6
Gloomy as the future seemed, Tyler reluctantly accepted appoint-
ment as one of Virginia's five commissioners to the peace convention.
His colleagues were James A. Seddon, William C. Rives, John W. Brock-
enbrough, and George W. Summers. Summers and Rives were moderate
Constitutional Unionists; Seddon was a fire-eating Virginia secessionist;
Brockenbrough was more moderate than Seddon but tended to lean
toward the secessionist point of view. Tyler, of course, was still a
moderate, albeit a frightened one, in search of some panacea that
would prevent federal military coercion of the seceded states. If that
happened, he reasoned, Virginia's secession was inevitable and with it a
civil war. He wanted to preserve the Union and keep Virginia in it, but
not at the price of having his slave property liberated around his ears,
or at the cost of having to watch federal troops march through Virginia
en route to slaughter South Carolinians and Georgians. His, it will be
remembered, was the only vote against Jackson's Force Bill in 1833.
Given the temper and confusion of the times, Virginia's delegation
to the peace convention was remarkably well-balanced in attitude. It
fairly represented a state in which sectional opinions ranged from pre-
dominantly secessionist in the eastern Tidewater to predominantly
unionist on the Ohio River. All shades and intensities of viewpoint were
to be found between these terminal points and even at both ends of the
geographic scale. Nor did the General Assembly's instructions to the
Virginia delegates manifest overt extremism. They were directed to work
for peace along the general lines of the Crittenden compromise resolu-
tions, the principles of which Tyler had already endorsed.7
On the day Tyler was named a peace commissioner, January 19,
he was also appointed Virginia's special commissioner to President
Buchanan. Similarly, Judge John Robertson was dispatched to Charles-
ton as special commissioner to the seceded states. Both men were in-
structed to persuade their respective charges to "agree to abstain . . .
from any and all acts calculated to produce a collision between the
States and the government of the United States," pending the conven-
ing of the Peace Conference on February 4, the day Alabama had chosen
for the seceded states to meet in Montgomery to establish the Confeder-
ate States of America. News of his two appointments and the details of
his instructions reached Tyler at Sherwood Forest on January 20. He
was feeling quite unwell at the time, but Julia gave him heavy doses of
450
hydrargyrum cum creta (mercury with chalk), and by the morning of
the twenty-second he was feeling shaky but strong enough to depart for
Richmond for a conference with Governor Letcher prior to taking the
train to Washington that afternoon. "The P started off very un-
well/' Julia informed Staten Island, "but he felt that go he must, and I
hope as the excitement of convention always agrees with him he will im-
prove and not grow worse." On the eve of his departure a family confer-
ence had determined that Gardie would accompany his father to Wash-
ington as a bearer of dispatches between Brown's Hotel (where Tyler
would stay) and the White House; it was also decided that Tyler would
return briefly to Sherwood Forest before the peace convention officially
opened. Julia would then accompany him back to Washington.8
Julia was elated at the prospect of a return to the capital. When
she learned, on January 22, that her husband had also been elected by
Charles City, James City, and New Kent counties to serve as their
representative in the emergency Virginia State Convention called for
February 13 in Richmond, she knew that her return to Washington
would be as the wife of a very important man indeed. She immediately
instructed her mother to send her Margaret's silk evening dresses, and
she promised her family that with her husband serving as special Vir-
ginia commissioner to Buchanan, Virginia commissioner to the Peace
Conference, and Charles City delegate to the state convention, all would
be well: "The seceding States on hearing that he is conferring with Mr.
Buchanan will stay, I am sure, their proceedings out of respect to him.
If the Northern States will only follow up this measure in a conceding
Union, peace will be insured. The South asks no other than just treat-
ment, and this she must have to be induced to remain in the Union."
Juliana needed no such propaganda from Sherwood Forest. She was
already a convert to the Southern line. The problem was with David
Lyon and Sarah.9
While Tyler had received, in Julia's words, "honor enough to
gratify the most ambitious," his mere presence in the capital did not
cause the rumbling glacier of secessionism suddenly to stand still, respect
or no respect for the tenth President. Within ten days of his arrival
Louisiana and Texas seceded, and Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and
North Carolina had all warned Buchanan they would oppose any federal
attempt to coerce a seceded state militarily. But Buchanan, as Tyler
quickly discovered during an interview on January 24, was in no con-
dition, psychologically or emotionally, to coerce anybody. The man was
in a daze, and he whined to the former President that "the South had
not treated him properly; that they had made unnecessary demonstra-
tions by seizing unprotected arsenals and forts . . . acts of useless bra-
vado which had quite as well been let alone." Tyler could see that his
job in Washington was going to be quite a bit easier than Judge
Robertson's in Charleston. He assured Buchanan that these Southern
actions were minor things, calculated only "to fret and irritate the
Northern mind . . . the necessary results of popular excitement which,
after all, worked no mischief in the end if harmony between the States
was once more restored." Grasping at any straw floating past, Buchanan
accepted this strained interpretation without comment.10
A few days later the Virginia commissioner scored another success
in the reduction of tensions when Buchanan cooperatively helped him
quash two groundless rumors which had inflamed many Virginians. Had
either been true, the whole purpose of Tyler's mission to Washington
as a special commissioner would have collapsed instantly. The rumor
mill had it, first, that the USS Brooklyn had been sent to Charleston
with a load of federal troops; and, secondly, that the guns of Fortress
Monroe had been trained menacingly inland upon the Virginia country-
side. Buchanan, pressed by a nervous Tyler, assured the commissioner
that the Brooklyn had sailed for Pensacola on an errand of mercy and
relief, and that the guns of Fortress Monroe still pointed peacefully
seaward. Tyler's relief at these assurances turned to positive gratifica-
tion on January 28. On that date the President, at the Virginia com-
missioner's request, sent a special message to Capitol Hill communicat-
ing to Congress the resolutions of the Virginia General Assembly calling
for peace and compromise. To these resolutions Buchanan added the
personal plea that Congress refrain from any hostile act against the
South. "What he recommends Congress to do he will do himself/' Tyler
reported with satisfaction. "His policy obviously is to throw all re-
sponsibility off of his shoulders." Given the appeasing paralysis of the
Buchanan administration, Tyler felt free to return to Sherwood Forest
on January 29. There would be no federal military coercion of the South
so long as nervous Old Buck was still in the White House.11
The question now, however, was whether South Carolina would
militarily coerce the United States. On January 31 the Charleston
government dispatched Colonel I. W. Hayne to Washington to demand
formally of Buchanan the surrender of Fort Sumter. Hayne 7s request
took the form of a "highly improper letter" which Buchanan refused
to receive. The President stalled and fretted for a few days, but finally
on the advice of Secretary of War Joseph Holt he rejected the Game-
cock ultimatum with the argument that since the fort was federal
property he had no power to sell it or otherwise divest the federal gov-
ernment of its possession without authorization from Congress. Be-
cause the fort was still legally a federal military installation he main-
tained the right, as Commander-in-Chief, to reinforce its garrison if
the situation called for such a step. He did not, however, contemplate
this necessity. Delivered to Colonel Hayne on February 6, two days
after the Peace Conference convened, the Holt-Buchanan rejection of
the South Carolina demand (which the agitated Hayne termed "highly
insulting" to him personally) brought the nation to the brink of war.
452
This was the immediate crisis Tyler would face shortly after he re-
turned to the capital for the peace convention. He arrived on February
3, accompanied by Julia, Alex, baby Pearl, and the body servant Fanny.
No sooner had the Tylers settled into their suite at Brown's Hotel
than their rooms were filled with a throng of milling, frightened people
all looking to John Tyler, the probable president of the Peace Confer-
ence, to work some quick miracle to save the Union. Letters and tele-
grams poured in pleading for peace, many offering plans and formulae
to accomplish this end. Julia described the chaotic scene, heavy as
it was with portents of disaster. "Perhaps I am here during the last
days of the Republic," she told her mother on February 3.
The President has been surrounded with visitors from the moment he could
appear to them It would interest you to see how deferentially they gather
around him. They will make him President of the Convention, I presume,
from what I hear. . . . All of the South or border States will enter upon the
deliberations with very little expectation of saving the Union, I think. There
seems such a fixed determination to do mischief on the part of the Black
Republicans. General Scott's absurd and high-handed course here in Wash-
ington is very much condemned. The rumor today is afloat that he is collect-
ing here troops to overawe Virginia and Maryland. If the President concludes
so, upon observation, I think he will recommend the Governor of Virginia
to send five thousand troops at once to Alexandria to stand on the defensive
side and overawe General Scott's menacing attitude; but this is entre nous
and a "State secret." . . . There seems to be a general looking to him by those
anxious to save the Union. I wish it might be possible for him to succeed in
overcoming all obstacles. They all say if through him it cannot be accom-
plished, it could not be through any one else.12
Julia did not accompany her husband to Washington solely to
satisfy her "most intense interest" in all things political. Instead, she
planned the trip as a social reconquest of the capital she had left to
the dry mercies of Sarah Polk sixteen years earlier. Nor was she dis-
appointed in her ambition. With her husband "the great center of
attraction" as the nation's political Moses7 Julia tripped happily through
the social bulrushes to the point of physical exhaustion. Parties, recep-
tions, dinners, and balls broke out like measles as proper Washing-
tonians made one last effort to drown the throb of martial drums in
a sea of alcohol and in the lulling swish-swish of dancing slippers. This
suited Julia. "You ought to hear the compliments that are heaped
upon me. ... I haven't changed a bit except to improve, etc., etc.,"
she boasted to her mother. At forty Julia had energy to burn; at nearly
seventy-one Tyler had difficulty keeping up with her, although Julia
assured her mother that her aging husband was "quite bright, bearing
up wonderfully and looking remarkably well." His ego sustained by
the thought that he was "looked to to save the Union," his stomach
disorder made endurable by massive doses of hydrargyrum cum creta,
453
John Tyler rode boldly forth to grapple with all dragons, sectional and
social, while Julia danced on. "I have not been allowed a moment's
leisure/' she wrote her mother on February 13:
Within the hotel it has been an incessant stream of company, and then I have
had visits to return, the Capitol to visit, etc., etc. Last night I attended, with
the President, the party of Senator Douglas. ... I paraded the rooms with the
handsomest man here, Governor Morehead of Kentucky — one of the best
likenesses to Papa you ever saw in appearance, voice, laugh and manner. I
suppose I may conclude that I looked quite well. No attempts at entertain-
ment have succeeded before, I was told, this winter, and to the hopes that are
placed upon the efforts of this Peace Convention is to be attributed the suc-
cess of this. People are catching at straws as a relief to their pressing anxieties,
and look to the Peace Commissioners as if they possessed some divine power
to restore order and harmony.13
John Tyler had no divine power. Instead, he had a bad stomach
and a socially ambitious wife; the combination rendered his role at
the Peace Conference a difficult one. Convening in Willard's Hall on
February 4, the convention adjourned to the following day to permit
more delegates time to arrive. On the fifth, as expected, Tyler was
unanimously elected president of the gathering. As he mounted the
rostrum to deliver his welcoming address he could see the faces of several
old political friends — Robert F. Stockton of New Jersey, Charles S.
Morehead and Charles A. Wickliffe of Kentucky. There were also
ancient enemies in the hall — Francis Granger of New York, David
Wilmot of Pennsylvania, and Thomas Ewing of Ohio. He could also
see that the free states outnumbered the slave states fourteen to seven.
Of the 132 delegates assembled most of them were as old, tired, and
sick as himself. John C. Wright of Ohio was blind and feeble and would
die within the week; Charles A. Wickliffe was lame; the lungs of
Missouri's Alexander W. Doniphan were "so much inflamed that I deem
it unsafe to go out in the damp atmosphere." To some, Tyler himself
appeared a "tottering ashen ruin." But there was much political skill
and experience present. The group numbered six former Cabinet
officers, nineteen former governors, fourteen ex-United States senators,
fifty former congressmen, and a scattering of former ambassadors, min-
isters, state supreme court justices, and circuit court judges.14
Tyler's speech to this distinguished if spent assemblage was not
one of his better forensic efforts. Calling attention to his own "variable
and fickle" health and to his personal ambition to be numbered among
those history would remember as saviors of the Union, Tyler devoted
the major part of a cliche-ridden address to pleading in general terms
for peace, compromise, reconciliation, and adjustment. In eulogistic
detail he recalled the past historical glories of each state with a delega-
tion present. For the first time in his life, however, he admitted that
the Founding Fathers had "probably committed a blunder" in not
454
rendering the Constitution more easily amendable. He began dimly to
see that the document was a living, growing thing, not the dead fossil
strict obstructionists had for years insisted it remain. Unfortunately,
said Tyler, the Fathers "have made the difficulties next to insurmount-
able to accomplish amendments to an instrument which was perfect for
five millions of people, but not wholly so as to thirty millions." This
defect he thought the assembled delegates might remedy by their
patriotism and by their willingness to "accomplish but one triumph in
advance ... a triumph over party." The convention applauded enthu-
siastically.15
February 6, 1861, was an eventful day. As the twenty-one-member
resolutions committee under the direction of Kentucky's James Guthrie
settled down to the task of hammering out a proposed constitutional
amendment that would stave off civil war, Tyler, encouraged by the
almost-universal acclaim his speech the preceding day had generated,
hurried with Julia to the White House to snuff out the sputtering Fort
Sumter fuse. He pleaded with Buchanan to accept the South Carolina
ultimatum of January 31 and abandon Sumter. The government, after
all, had already given up other forts and arsenals in the seceded states.
Furthermore, the fort could not possibly be defended by "that noble
boy/7 Major Robert Anderson, and his tiny garrison of eighty-odd
men. Indeed, the very presence of Anderson in the fort, Tyler insisted,
was a provocation that imperiled the prospects of the peace convention.
In daily threatening an overt collision at Charleston it risked precipitat-
ing the nervous border states headlong into secession. Why not, Tyler
suggested, reduce the garrison to a token guard of six men and thereby
appease the South Carolinians who "in spite of the Northern bluster
that denounces them as rebels in arms thirsting for blood are bent on
peace." Buchanan would not agree to a reduction in force. There was
really no force to speak of in Sumter. But he did authorize Tyler to
enter into direct communication with South Carolina Governor Francis
W. Pickens, Julia's old admirer, to assure the governor that the ad-
ministration was interested only in peace. His refusal of South Caro-
lina's ultimatum was in no manner intended, in tone or wording, to
"insult" Colonel Hayne or anyone else, Buchanan averred. This im-
portant task Tyler immediately undertook. Within a few days he and
Judge Robertson had calmed Pickens and Hayne and had snipped the
fuse of the crisis in Charleston Harbor. For this service Buchanan
was extremely grateful. On the evening of February n he showed his
appreciation by paying Tyler the singular compliment of calling at his
parlor to thank him personally. "I suppose it is the first visit he has
paid since being the nation's chief," Julia exclaimed, thrilled at the
social coup.lQ
Scarcely had this small blow for peace and sanity been struck
when Tyler began to realize that the deliberations of the Peace Con-
455
ference were destined to end in abject failure. Not only was debate on
the floor often a raucous and disorderly affair (Tyler occasionally lost
control of the proceedings entirely), but the dissension within Guthrie's
resolutions committee became so severe Tyler despaired that any
proposal would emerge from it at all. Northern extremists in the com-
mittee and on the floor of the convention argued that any concession
to the South's position on slavery extension in the territories would be
a rank betrayal of the Republican platform of 1860 and would stand no
real chance of ratification before Republican-dominated state legis-
latures in the North. Southern spokesmen argued that unless the North
at least accepted the possibility of slavery extension along the demo-
cratic, popular-sovereignty lines of the Crittenden proposal, the seven
seceded states could not possibly be enticed peacefully back into the
Union. From February 6 to February 15 the matter stood thus dead-
locked in the resolutions committee while the convention as a whole
marked time. There were sincere men of good will on both sides, men
dedicated to genuine compromise, but Tyler soon saw, as he had earlier
feared, that the convention had attracted too many delegates and too
many extremists to function either harmoniously or efficiently.17
By February 13, two days before the resolutions committee fi-
nally reported, Tyler's thinking had undergone a significant change.
Despairing that there could be any workable or acceptable compromise,
he began to consider the sectional problem in military terms. Specifi-
cally, he began to worry about Virginia's military security should the
convention fail and war result. Tyler came to the convention in search
of peace through political compromise; he left it wedded to a plan for
peace through a military balance of power. This fundamental change
in his thinking had taken place by the end of the ninth stormy day of the
Conference. Publicly, he still urged the Virginia State Convention, which
convened in Richmond on the thirteenth, to adjourn its deliberations
from day to day until the Peace Conference in Washington had acted
one way or another. Privately, he began toying with the idea of secession.
Julia, who invariably reflected her husband's thinking in her own, told
Staten Island on the afternoon of February 13 that
All is suspense, from the President down. The New York and Massachusetts
delegation will no doubt perform all the mischief they can; and it may be, will
defeat this patriotic effort at pacification. But whether it succeeds or not,
Virginia will have sustained her reputation, and in the latter event will retire
with dignity from the field to join without loss of time her more Southern
sisters; the rest of the slave Border States will follow her lead, and very
likely she will be able to draw off, which would be glorious, a couple of
Northern States. It is to be hoped that this state of suspense, which is bring-
ing disaster to trade everywhere, will soon be removed in one way or another.
If this result could be counted upon to follow on the heels of Virginia's
secession, if "a couple of Northern states" could indeed be drawn out
of the Union by the Old Dominion, the weakened North would likely
not feel itself strong enough militarily to crush so powerful a con-
federacy. There would therefore be no war. Or so Tyler reasoned. In-
stead, a peaceful balance of power would be created — two scorpions
in a bottle — and Virginia would be spared invasion and bloodshed. This
calculation was, of course, a wild gamble. It was based on a dangerous
overestirnation of Virginia's prestige and pulling power, a disastrous
underestimation of South Carolina's urge to lunacy when the Fort
Sumter crisis was resumed in April 1861, and a tragic misevaluation
of the temper of Abraham Lincoln. Nevertheless, Tyler embraced it as
preferable to either civil war or a supine acceptance of the occupation
of Virginia by the armed forces of an abolitionist regime.18
The proposed constitutional amendment brought in by the Guthrie
committee on February 15 was an eight-section proposal which closely
followed the Crittenden plan. Section i, the key clause, permitted
slavery south of 36°3o', prohibited it north of that line, and allowed
slaveowners to carry their property into a territory anywhere south of
the designated boundary until such time as the inhabitants of the ter-
ritory drew up a state constitution specifically prohibiting involun-
tary servitude. However unacceptable this slavery-expansion program
was to President-elect Lincoln and to the Republican Party in general,
it was not from the Southern standpoint a radical proposal. For this
reason Tyler might well have supported it. That he did not was in
sharp contradiction to what he had been advocating, publicly and
privately, for nearly a year. Instead, Tyler supported James A. Seddon 's
disruptive minority report. This would have amended the Constitution
to permit the South a virtual veto on Executive appointments south of
3603</. Not only did the Seddon amendment visualize the South as a
state within a state, it also maintained the constitutional right of any
state to secede from the Union whenever it wished.
There is some evidence that Tyler had a Machiavellian hand in
forging the extremist Seddon amendment, acceptable only to the most
rabid secessionists. Whether he did or not, it is clear that Virginia's
subsequent vote against the resolutions committee's majority report
was largely Tyler's doing. He joined with Seddon and Brockenb rough
to outvote Rives and Summers on each test within the Old Dominion's
delegation. In the end, Virginia's unit vote was not found on the side
of conciliation and adjustment. Tyler's motives in his apostasy were
dual. He had arrived at his hopeful peace-through-secession-and-balance-
of-power idea; in this plan he had growing confidence; and he could
see immediately that the resolutions committee's proposed constitu-
tional amendment, however conciliatory, had no mathematical chance
whatever of adoption. With seven states already out of the Union,
every one of those still remaining in would have to approve it to
command the necessary three-fourths majority required under the Con-
stitution. Realistically, this could not be expected to happen.19
The final vote on the Guthrie committee's majority resolution and
457
Seddon 's minority report did not take place until February 26. In the
interim, a period characterized by parliamentary chaos and a floor
debate that often threatened to degenerate into blows, Tyler maintained
public silence on the issues. On the eighteenth the Confederate States
of America was proclaimed in Montgomery and Jefferson Davis in-
augurated President. This, however, brought no new sectional incidents
and Tyler continued as before his close liaison with Buchanan in their
joint efforts to maintain peace until the convention had officially
spoken. Although he was seen increasingly in the company of seces-
sionist delegates, he did not step down from the neutrality of the chair
and openly support the radical Seddon proposal on the floor of the
convention until February 25, two days after his interview with Lincoln.
Following that revealing experience Tyler's muted secessionism came
loudly, positively, and publicly to the fore.20
The confrontation with Lincoln took place at 9 P.M. on Febru-
ary 23, fifteen hours after the President-elect had arrived secretly in
the capital. Tyler and other delegates to the Conference waited upon
Lincoln in his Willard Hotel suite. It was a tense moment which
Lincoln sought to relieve with a show of sincere good will, even jocu-
larity. Then the fire-eating James A. Seddon began to bait him, ac-
cusing him of supporting in the past the most extreme abolitionist
excesses — from the John Brown raid to the distribution throughout
the South of William Lloyd Garrison's incendiary pamphlets. Lincoln's
mood suddenly hardened.
"I beg your pardon, Mr. Seddon," he said. "I intend no offense,
but I will not suffer such a statement to pass unchallenged, because
it is not true. A gentleman of your intelligence should not make such
assertions."
As the political temperature in the room cooled, delegate William
E. Dodge, New York merchant-capitalist, said, "It is for you, sir, to
say whether the whole nation shall be plunged into bankruptcy, whether
the grass shall grow in the streets of our commercial cities."
"Then I say it shall not," replied Lincoln. "If it depends upon
me, the grass shall not grow anywhere except in the fields and meadows."
"Then you will yield to the just demands of the South. You will
not go to war on account of slavery!" Dodge pressed him.
"I do not know that I understand your meaning, Mr. Dodge,"
Lincoln answered stiffly. "If I shall ever come to the great office of
President of the United States, I shall take an oath . . . that I will, to
the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution
of the United States . . . not the Constitution as I would like to have
it, but as it is. . . . The Constitution will not be preserved and defended
until it is enforced and obeyed in every part of every one of the United
States. It must be so respected, obeyed, enforced and defended, let
the grass grow where it may."
458
With that declaration some of the Southern delegates stalked out
of the room in anger. But Tyler stayed to hear Lincoln say further,
in answer to a question whether territories democratically choosing
and legalizing slavery could ever again hope to enter the Union as slave
states, "It will be time to consider that question when it arises. ... In
a choice of evils, war may not always be the worst." 21
Tyler had heard enough. This ugly, rawboned man was no Bu-
chanan. Rumors reaching him next day that Lincoln might be persuaded
to withdraw federal troops from Fort Sumter if Virginia would promise
to stay in the Union failed to stay Tyler's decision on secession. As-
surances from Secretary of State-designate Seward that there would be
no coercion, that Sumter would very likely be abandoned, likewise
had no effect on his now single-track thinking. He was completely con-
vinced that Virginia must secede quickly, pulling the border states "and
perhaps New Jersey" with her into the Southern Confederacy. Only
this could insure a lasting peace. Only this could produce the military
balance of power that would give Lincoln pause in his coercive instincts
and intents.
For Tyler, then, the last three days of the Peace Conference were
entirely anticlimactic. From the enforced detachment of the chair he
descended onto the floor to support the disruptive Seddon amendment.
When it was overwhelmingly disapproved by 16 to 4, Virginia then
voted against Section i of the resolutions committee's majority report.
The crucial section similarly went down to an n-to-8 defeat. A pe-
riod of panicky logrolling followed. Demands for another vote were
voiced. Fear and confusion stalked the convention, on the verge now
of accomplishing absolutely nothing. Thanks in part to New York's
angry abstention from the second vote, Section i was finally approved
by a narrow Q-to-8 count, with Virginia still in stubborn opposition.
With that shaky decision made, the remaining sections of the proposed
constitutional amendment slipped through with small majorities.
In his farewell address to the delegates Tyler promised he would
submit the Conference's decisions to Congress with a "recommenda-
tion" for their adoption. He had no heart for this task, however. In
his eagerness to return to Richmond and enter into the secession debates
of the state convention, he merely forwarded the suggested constitu-
tional amendment to Congress with the laconic comment that he had
been instructed to do so. There, as Tyler expected, it reposed without
action. Ridiculed and unsung, it was a blank cartridge fired by a
spiked gun into an angry mob. Several Northern state legislatures
immediately denounced it, as did both of Virginia's senators. Within
a few weeks it was dead and buried as a live option, hastened to its
grave by Northern extremists, Southern fire-eaters — and by John Tyler
himself. As he would say nine months later of the failure of the Peace
Conference, "No man could have been more earnest to avert the sad
459
conditions of things which now involve us in the terrible realities of
war than myself, but at the Peace Conference I had to address 'stocks
and stones' who had neither ears to hear or hearts to understand.
Blinded by lust of power, they have heedlessly driven the ship of
state upon rocks and into whirlpools which have dashed it to pieces." 22
.MO^
Memories are short. On the foundered ship of state John Tyler
was one of the chief pilots. Arriving back in Richmond on February
28, he delivered an incendiary speech from the steps of the Exchange
Hotel — denouncing the Peace Conference and all its works and calling
for Virginia's immediate secession as the only means of preserving the
general peace and the safety of the Old Dominion. The following day
he took his seat in the Virginia State Convention meeting in the hall
of the Mechanics' Institute. There he began working actively with
extremists Henry A. Wise and Lewis E. Harvie for secession. He had
been elected to the state convention on January 22 as a moderate who
would make "every effort in his power to effect a reconciliation." He
had returned from the peace convention breathing fire and brimstone.
For a few days he worried that he had betrayed his constituents. "Have
you any information of what is the sentiment of Charles City?" he
asked Julia nervously. Whatever her answer, Tyler learned a few days
later that Robert and Priscilla's eldest daughter, nineteen-year-old
Leti-tia Tyler, had hoisted the new Confederate flag to the top of the
Capitol at Montgomery in ceremonies on March 5. The Tylers were
seceding with commendable dash.
Not until March 13 did Tyler gain the floor of the state con-
vention to deliver his slashing speech for secession, Lincoln's Inaugural
Address of March 4 had breathed a mixed spirit of menace and ad-
justment, and Tyler was fearful that the latter element in it might
seduce the Old Dominion into a policy of continued inaction. True,
Lincoln had announced his intention to enforce the Constitution. He
had defined secession as unconstitutional. But he had also rejected a
violent solution to the nation's sickness "unless it be forced upon the
national authority," and he declared he had no "purpose directly or
indirectly to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where
it exists." While Tyler complained that the speech had certain gram-
matical deficiencies, he could not deny its impact in Virginia, where
unionist sentiment was still running strong. A large bloc of delegates
in the state convention, well over half, was willing to endorse either
the Peace Conference compromise or the Crittenden compromise. Any-
thing but secession and war.23
The Tyler who rose to his feet on March 13 to begin a speech
that lasted well into the next day was the oratorical Tyler of old.
Although the pain in his abdomen was intense, it did not still a voice
filled with equal measures of indignation, pathos, morality, derision,
460
and bitter sarcasm. The address had everything: an arithmetical analy-
sis which demonstrated the impossibility of the adoption of the Peace
Conference's proposed constitutional amendment; a point-by-point se-
mantic and legal demolition of the amendment itself; a healthy twist
of the British Lion's tail; a eulogy of Henry Clay; a gratuitous de-
fense of the Tyler administration; the coronation of King Cotton; a
review of the glories of Colonial Virginia; a defense of the Seddon
amendment; the economic need for slavery expansion; the Heaven-
ordained racial suitability of the African Negro for work in hot fields;
an attack on the abolitionists, their murderous plans, and their under-
ground railroad ; and an assault on Abraham Lincoln for ordering home
the Pacific and Mediterranean squadrons for the sole hostile purpose
of "intimidating" the South. Let Lincoln abandon Fort Sumter and
Fort Pickens in Pensacola, suggested Tyler. Let him recognize the
Confederate States and begin to negotiate commercial and defensive
alliances with the Montgomery government and all would be well. But
this the stubborn Lincoln would probably not do. Virginia, Tyler con-
cluded, must therefore secede. Her long frontier, stretching from Nor-
folk on the Atlantic to Wheeling on the Ohio, was indefensible. Only
by seceding and drawing the border states, New Jersey, Pennsylvania,
and New York City ("the South is her natural ally, and she must
come with us") out of the Union with her could Virginia hope to pre-
serve peace and avoid invasion and subjugation:
Brennus may not be yet in the Capitol, but he will soon be there, and the
sword will be thrown into the scale to weigh against our liberties, and there
will be no Camillus to expel him. ... I look with fear and trembling to some
extent, at the condition of my country. But I do want to see Virginia united.
... I have entire confidence that her proud crest will* yet be seen waving in
that great procession of States that will go up to the temple to make their
vows to maintain their liberties, "peacefully if they can, forcibly if they must."
Sir, I am done.24
Powerful as it was, Tyler's speech triggered no stampede toward
secession. Instead, the former President was forced to sit and listen,
hour after hour, day after day, to speeches variously advocating union,
secession, or continued inaction. It was clear that there was yet no
majority for secession in Virginia. On week ends Tyler left his room at
the Ballard House and visited with Julia and the children at Sherwood
Forest. Gardie stayed with him for a few days at the Ballard, and
while he was in town father and son visited Julie, boarding at Miss
Pegram's school. If secession were not large enough a problem for
Tyler to handle, Julie got measles, gave them to Gardie, and he demo-
cratically spread them to all his brothers and sisters at Sherwood.
And to make quite sure Tyler had enough to keep Mm busy between
convention sessions and the innumerable dinners to which the delegates
461
were invited ("Dinner party succeeds dinner party," he complained),
Julia loaded him down with shopping commissions.
Meanwhile, Tyler fretted that the Richmond Enquirer was slow
in printing his secession speech, which, he told Julia, had been called
the "great speech of the session." When it finally saw print on March
30 he immediately sent a copy to David Lyon in Staten Island. Copies
were also distributed throughout his Charles City-New Kent- James
City district in an effort to bring his constituents to the level of his
own fever-pitch secessionism. Through Julia he kept David Lyon and
Juliana informed on the course of the debates at the Mechanics' In-
stitute. For example, he characterized Professor James P. Holcombe's
speech for secession a "magnificent effort. His invective against Seward
was one of the most terrible invectives I ever heard. The Convention
and galleries were greatly moved." On the other hand, when a group
of Richmond "Union Ladies" came into the chamber to present Staun-
ton delegate John B. Baldwin a floral tribute for his powerful three-
day antisecessionist speech, Tyler was so "disgusted with the proceeding
I left the room as did many others." Similarly, the debate on and the
demise of the Peace Conference's proposal, the vain attempts of the
state convention to create an alternative based upon it, and the progress
of Tyler's own fly-by-night plan to create a separate Union comprised
of seceded states and border states were reported to Castleton Hill.
"A number of the Northern States will come into the plan which he
proposes," Julia assured her mother. Not mentioned in these reports
to Staten Island was the fact that on April 3 the state convention
firmly voted down a secession resolution 90 to 45. On the eve of
Lincoln's call for 75,000 volunteers on the fifteenth, the convention,
in a secret vote, again divided 60 to 53 against secession. Although
Tyler spoke of "great changes" in the public mind and predicted that
Virginia would "adopt an ultimatum. . . . The people of the State are
becoming very restless," there was no majority for secession in Rich-
mond until after Lincoln's call for troops.25
Lincoln's April 6 decision to provision the helpless little garrison
at Fort Sumter triggered the great carnage of 1861-1865. The guns of
General P. G. T. Beauregard's Confederate artillery, in noisy rejoinder
to the President on April 13, blew Virginia out of the Union just as
decisively as they reduced the Fort to untenable rubble. Whether
Lincoln provoked South Carolina's angry response, or whether he was
merely responding to the four-month-old provocation inherent in South
Carolina's unconstitutional act of secession, cannot be decided here.
A century later it remains an open question in historical interpreta-
tion. Tyler, however, solved it neatly and quickly to his own satisfac-
tion with the observation that "Mr. Lincoln, having weighed in the
scales the value of a mere local Fort against the value of the Union
itself resolved to send ships of war and armed men to bring on that
462
very collision which he well knew would arise." Tyler admitted that
Lincoln's strategy at Charleston had been brilliant. The whole purpose
of the provocative Sumter provisioning had been "to rally the masses of
the North around his own person and to prevent the faction which had
brought him to power from falling asunder. In this he has succeeded.
The upheaving of the people of the North fully attests to this.'7 What-
ever the truth concerning Lincoln's motives, it is certain that his de-
cision to punish the Confederacy for the Fort Sumter outrage by calling
75,000 volunteers to the colors on April 15 gave Virginia little choice
but to defend her soil. Quickly meeting in secret session on April 16,
the state convention debated a new ordinance of secession. That evening
Tyler wrote Julia that
The prospects now are that we shall have a war, and a trying one. The battle
at Charleston has aroused the whole North. I fear that division no longer
exists in their ranks, and that they will break upon the South with an im-
mense force. . . . Submission or resistance is only left us. My hope is that the
Border States will follow speedily our lead. If so, all will be safe ... do not
understand me as saying an ordinance will be passed. On the contrary, it will
be in doubt until the vote These are dark times, dearest, and I think only
of you and our little ones. ... I shall vote secession.26
Tyler's theory that peace could be preserved through a balance
of power had collapsed overnight, although he still hung grimly to a
shadow of it. By being maneuvered into firing the first shot, the
Charleston hotheads had effectively unified the North, leaving Tyler
only the faint hope that the immediate secession of Virginia and all the
border states might still provide safety for the Old Dominion by
creating a balance of power which would preserve peace or, at worst,
an initial military stalemate from which a negotiated peace might
emerge. But he was realistic enough to see now that the coming war
would likely be more blitzkrieg than sitzkrieg and he warned Julia
accordingly.
Julia regarded it at the outset as a medieval tournament fought
by Southern White Knights against Northern Black Knaves. The
Charles City Cavalry, under Captain Robert Douthat, comprising
"eighty well-horsed, well-armed, and well-drilled and brave, true, high-
toned gentlemen, who love the right and scorn the wrong," could only
be victorious in any engagement it fought. She heard heavy cannonad-
ing all day on the seventeenth from the direction of Richmond and
assumed, correctly, that the vote in the state convention there had
been for secession. She immediately wrote her mother the glad tidings,
thanking her for her past pro-Southern views and expressing the hope
that like-rninded New Yorkers would "now make a demonstration and
form a party against coercion." Juliana needed no urging. From the
moment the war began she was a full-fledged, charter-member Copper-
head.27
463
Julia soon learned from her husband in Richmond that secession
from "the Northern hive of abolitionists" had indeed been voted by
a margin of 88 to 55 (adjusted to 103 to 46 when some members later
changed their vote for the record) on the afternoon of the seventeenth.
Virginia troops, she was informed, were already marching to seize the
arsenal at Harpers Ferry and the Navy Yard at Norfolk. More im-
portantly, she heard from her husband that Robert Tyler had been
threatened with "mob violence" in Philadelphia. "Do, dearest," Tyler
pleaded with her, "live as frugally as possible in the household — trying
times are before us." This, of course, was like asking a hurricane to
stop hurrying.28
The excitement of the final secession vote and the unrestrained
celebrations in Richmond which followed it were too much for John
Tyler's ailing stomach. He accepted membership on a state commission
to negotiate a union with the Confederate States government and he
personally drafted the agreement placing Virginia's armed forces under
the direction of Jefferson Davis. Nevertheless, he turned down an ap-
pointment to the Provisional Confederate Congress at Montgomery.
He was simply too "debilitated from a protracted participation in the
exciting scenes of the convention" to make the long journey to Ala-
bama. He thus missed an opportunity to see John, Jr., who, com-
missioned major in the Confederate Army, was attached to the War
Department at Montgomery. Fortunately, the mountain was brought
to Mohammed. When the seat of the Rebel government was moved
from Montgomery to Richmond in May, John Tyler was unanimously
elected by the Virginia State Convention to serve in the Provisional
Congress of the Confederate States of America.29
During the first few weeks of confusion following Virginia's
secession one of the family's main concerns was the safety of Robert
Tyler. Robert's outspoken defense of the Southern position in the early
months of 1861 had made him less than popular in Philadelphia. He
had publicly criticized the Peace Conference as a plot to "demoralize
the people of the Southern section." The Crittenden proposals were
designed, he charged, "to prepare the South ... for final submission
to Squatterism or Abolitionism, or both." On several occasions he had
loudly predicted that Pennsylvania "will assuredly wish to secede from
the Northern Confederacy . . ." in the event of civil war. Not surpris-
ingly, a speaker at a mass patriotic meeting in Independence Square
on April 17 condemned him as a traitor, and cries of "He ought to be
lynched 1" sent one of his friends hurrying to Robert's office to warn
him that a Vigilance Committee mob was stirring. Quickly hiring a
hack, Robert escaped to Frankford. There he caught a train to Bristol,
where he hid for a day in the attic of a friend's house while a mob
of his neighbors burned him in effigy in his own front yard. On April
19 he managed to slip aboard a steamer for New York, where he was
464
taken in by Priscilla's sister, Julia Cooper Campbell. A few days later
Priscilla joined him in New York to plan their next move. It was de-
cided that Robert should proceed alone to Richmond. He arrived there
on May 8, thankful that he had left "no creditors among the savages"
back in Pennsylvania. "Poor Bob Tyler!" lamented Buchanan when
he learned of Robert's flight to Richmond and his subsequent employ-
ment by the Confederate government. "He was a warm hearted and
eloquent man, and a true and faithful friend. I am truly sorry he went
so far astray from his line of duty. I knew he was as poor as a church
mouse. ..."
Priscilla returned to Bristol with her sisters Julia and Louisa. The
ladies closed up the old Cooper homestead while Priscilla procured a
pass through the lines from General Robert Patterson. Gathering up
her children and a few personal items, she proceeded to Richmond via
Washington. Departing Bristol was a wrenching experience. "The grief
of my children is more than I can stand," she wrote her sister Mary
Grace. "I can't tell you how many people accompanied us to the
landing. . . . Poor Major [the family dog] ran along with the chil-
dren, evidently knowing something to be wrong. And the last thing
I saw while the boat steamed away was Major held by two or three
boys, and the last thing to be heard was the crying of the children
on the shore and mine in the boat responding." By May 28, after a
brief stopover at the Exchange Hotel in Richmond, Priscilla and her
children were safe at Sherwood Forest. "How terrible the times are,"
she lamented. "Richmond and Washington both bristling with bayonets.
I saw a S.C. Regiment pass the hotel while I was there. Such a splendid
looking set of men! With a bouquet, thrown by the ladies, upon every
bayonet. Every man you see is in uniform. Even Father [John Tyler]
talks of fighting. ... I very much fear that Mr. [Robert] Tyler will
go into the army. He is exceedingly anxious to do so himself, and
Father also wants it. The thought of it gives me the greatest agony." 80
At seventy-one John Tyler could only talk of fighting. Even the
forty-four-year-old Robert was considered a little advanced in age for
combat duty. Therefore he accepted from President Davis an ap-
pointment as Register of the Treasury of the Confederacy at $3000
per annum, and he satisfied his martial spirit by enlisting as a private
in the "Treasury Regiment." Composed of civil servants, it was a second-
line unit organized especially for the defense of Richmond. In this he
saw action on several occasions during the war. The rest of the family
also speedily mobilized when the trumpets sounded in Richmond. Major
-John Tyler, Jr., served as an assistant to the Secretary of War. Taze-
well Tyler became a surgeon in the Confederate Army. James A.
Semple resigned his purser's commission in the United States Navy,
moved from Brooklyn to Richmond with his wife Letitia, and took a
post in the Confederate States Navy Department. Henry and Robert
^
Jones, sons of Henry L. Jones and the deceased Mary Tyler Jones,
entered the Army of Northern Virginia. Both were mentioned in orders
for gallantry, and young Robert was awarded a field commission for
bravery at Gettysburg, where he received three wounds. William
Griffin Waller, son of William and Elizabeth Tyler Waller, resigned
from West Point when Virginia seceded and joined the Confederate
Ordnance Department. His younger brother, John Tyler Waller, "a
gallant but rash young officer," fell in combat during the conflict. The
Long Island Gardiners, on the other hand, did not rush forward to
save the Union with quite so much enthusiasm as the Tylers came
forward to destroy it, although John Lyon Gardiner, later the eleventh
proprietor of Gardiners Island, did serve as a colonel in the New York
Sixth Brigade, National Guard. No one in the family on either side
of the fight surpassed Julia in her eagerness for the war. She joined
various local ladies' volunteer groups to help the war effort, and she
encouraged Gar die and Alex to enlist in the Charles City Junior Guard,
in which the thirteen-year-old Alex served as second lieutenant. The
boys, in turn, solemnly warned their cousin Harry Beeckman in Staten
Island that they would have nothing further to do with him "if he
countenances the invasion of Southern homes." 31
David Lyon Gardiner did countenance the "invasion." When Julia
learned from her mother on May 6 that her own brother supported the
North, she was beside herself with rage:
I think D. lias been bitten by the rabid tone of those around him and the
press. It seems he belongs to a different school of politics from his experienced
friend, the President, and is ready to deny State-sovereignty. Therefore he
opposes the movement of the South to save itself from destruction through
an abolition attack, and sympathizes with the dominant power of the North.
I was so unprepared for his views that I read his letter aloud to the President
without first perusing it, which, if I had done, I should not have committed
so decided [a] mistake. He says the government at Washington will not in-
vade, but will only reclaim its property, and take by force the forts now in
possession of Southern States. What is that but invasion, I should like to
know? The government at Washington has no business with the forts that
were built for the protection of the States that have seceded. . . . For my part,
I am utterly ashamed of the State in which I was born, and its people. All soul
and magnanimity have departed from them — "patriotism" indeed! A com-
munity sold to the vilest politicians. The President tells me ... to ask D. if he
does not recognize the existing blockade a positive war upon the South. Even
our river boat would be fired at and taken, if that impudent war steamer,
lying off Newport News could get the chance.32
Juliana was entirely sympathetic with her daughter's Southern
nationalism. The other New York Gardiners, however, remained loyal
to the Union and this fact produced complications. A chill wind soon
blew into Juliana's relations with her eldest son and his wife, and the
home at Castleton Hill, like so many others in America, became a house
466
divided. Her first worried reaction to the commencement of hostilities
was to suggest to Sherwood Forest that Julia bring her children to
the safety of Staten Island. Tyler vetoed this idea. Virginia, he told her
confidently, was "clad in steel" and had more troops in the field "pant-
ing for conflict" than could readily be armed and trained. Given the recent
secession of Tennessee and North Carolina, and a Southern population
"filled with enthusiasm" for war, he was certain his children were in
no danger. "In a week from this time," he told his mother-in-law on
May 2, "James River will bristle with fortifications, and Charles City
will be far safer than Staten Island." 33
Convinced this was true, Julia called loudly for the blood of the
Yankee aggressor. She reported as great Confederate victories battles
that never took place and she repeated as gospel truths war rumors
that bordered on the fantastic. A group in Massachusetts was said to
have offered $20,000 for the severed head of Henry A. Wise, for ex-
ample. Tyler demanded in the Confederate Congress that a strong cav-
alry force be immediately sent to seize Washington. Considering the chaos
in the capital at that moment, this was not a bad idea. But the sug-
gestion was voted down on grounds that the state should take no
offensive military action until the ordinance of secession had been
ratified by the voters. By a 96,750^0-32,134 count this formality was
finally accomplished on May 23.
Julia was slow to realize that war was not a delightful game played
by "high-toned gentlemen." She seemed to feel that it should take place
in a large field, distant from Camelot, where it might be observed and
enjoyed as an exciting spectacle without its interfering in the normal
routine of the castle. She was disturbed, therefore, to discover that it
unsettled her regular correspondence with her mother and otherwise
upset her accustomed pattern of life. Moreover, it was no respecter of
private property. This insight she began to grasp in late April when a
Massachusetts outfit ("these scum of the earth," Julia called them)
landed at Old Point Comfort to reinforce Fortress Monroe and promptly
seized Villa Margaret for use as a barracks. The loss of the Villa earned
for the Tylers the dubious distinction of being among the first Southern-
ers to lose their property by act of war.
As the Union garrison at Fortress Monroe was gradually increased,
fear momentarily swept Sherwood Forest that a Yankee foray into
Charles City County might be attempted. Sherwood Forest itself might
even fall to the "fiendish" invaders. By early May there was nervous
talk at the plantation of an evacuation "into the mountains." While
flight did not become necessary, thanks to the rapid fortification of
the river below Richmond, the loss of Villa Margaret to the Yankees
infuriated Julia. "Was there ever such a savage wicked war?" she
fumed. To make the Villa Margaret matter more disturbing, Julia
learned in June that Quartermaster T. Bailey Myers of New York had
467
proudly exhibited before the City's Union Defense Committee a Con-
federate flag which he claimed he had "captured from Villa Margaret."
The New York Commercial Advertiser described the alleged trophy as
"a dirty looking affair of red, white and blue flannel with eight stars
. . . roughly made, the sewing having been done by half -taught fingers."
That Quartermaster Myers was a tradesman with whom Juliana had
done business in peacetime suggested that war was also no respecter of
socially prominent persons.34
Unlike her mother, who felt that the North could not lose the war
("My fears are they will overpower the South with numbers and their
Blockade"), Julia never for a moment doubted Southern victory. She
had absolute faith that the invaded South was "favored of Heaven."
She had complete confidence in President Davis and General Lee. They
were both "splendid" men of proper social background, a judgment
strengthened after she had met and mingled with them socially in Rich-
mond in 1862. So desperately did she want to believe in military myths
that she had no difficulty converting the little skirmish at Big Bethel
in York County on June 10 into a major Confederate victory. When
the myth momentarily took on the flesh of reality at Manassas on July
21 she was nearly overcome with glee. "What a brilliant victory for
the South has been the battle at Manassas!" she exulted. "[We] may
talk now of the revival of feudal times, for never in the days of chivalry
were there such knights as this infamous Northern war has made of
every Southern man." Tyler, sick abed at the time, was equally elated.
When he heard the news of Manassas, he raised himself up in bed,
"called for champagne, and made his family and friends drink the health
of our generals." Big Bethel and Manassas convinced Julia that the
South was unconquerable. Excitement over the victories ran so high
in Richmond that Gardie and Alex ("all fired up with enthusiasm
for . . . such a sacred cause as the defense of their soil from the wicked
and cruel invader") wanted to join the army at once. "It makes the
heart beat and the eyes fill to witness such noble resolution on the
part of all," Julia told her mother. "In particular on the part of
those who, bred in ease and luxury, still cheerfully accept every and
any hardship that comes with a soldier's life. . . . The men have become
heroes. . . . An unlawful war has been waged against them, and if the
possession of every warrior trait will enable them to 'conquer a peace,'
there will soon be one for us." 35
Sustaining Julia's confidence in Southern victory at the outset of
the conflict were frequent reports from her mother that England might
enter the war on the Confederate side. "England will and must have
Southern cotton and war with her is threatened by the Government if
she tries to enter the [blockaded] ports," read one hopeful pronounce-
ment from Staten Island. Similarly, Juliana assured the Tylers that
there was much Southern sentiment in New York City, and this news
cheered Sherwood Forest considerably.
468
This horrible war keeps me excited and harassed all the time [she said] ....
I can give slight attention to anything else. I do not pretend to visit friends
or neighbors. I have such a dread of opposition. I understand, however, there
are a great many Southern sympathizers on this [Staten] Island who are
entirely opposed to this war. I have no doubt there will be a great reaction in
public sentiment, but I fear nothing will be effected before another dreadful
battle will be fought. How much I wish such a dire calamity could be pre-
vented.
The calamity could not be averted and the "dreadful battle" was the
first fight at Bull Run.36
Three and a half months later Tyler swept the field of the Vir-
ginia Third Congressional District with equal elan. Running in Novem-
ber 1 86 1 for a seat in the Confederate House of Representatives on
a platform of patriotism and more patriotism until the enemy was
crushed, the old politician signally defeated two of his devoted personal
friends, William H. Macfarland and Richmond attorney James Lyons,
brother-in-law of Henry A. Wise. In his last race for public office,
Tyler flanked both his opponents and amassed twice their combined
vote. His record of never having been defeated in a public election
remained intact.
His success at the polls and the joy it occasioned within his
family and among his neighbors could not conceal the fact that after
six months of war and blockade a pinch was already beginning to be
felt at Sherwood Forest and throughout Charles City. Julia began to
"miss a few luxuries." But she bore up bravely and carried on at home
as if all were normal. Gardie, Alex, Lachlan, and Lonie (Julia some-
times called him Lionel at this age) were in school as usual in Charles
City. Julie was withdrawn from Miss Pegram's in Richmond "until
better times," and was being tutored at home. Fitz was still underfoot,
too young to go to school but not too young to begin his instruction
in French conversation. Pearlie was still in arms. Discouraged by the
three-year drought which had cut severely into his corn and wheat
yields, Tyler shifted some of his acreage to potatoes in an effort to help
feed the Southern armies. The 1861 potato crop was "truly astonish-
ing." This, Julia admitted, was "fortunate under the circumstances."
The two older boys, meanwhile, made their contribution to the South's
wartime economy by trapping the rabbits of the plantation ("Their
skins are in great demand," Julia noted) and selling the pelts in the
Richmond market. In spite of shortages of luxury items, optimism pre-
vailed at Sherwood Forest as the first winter of the war began.37
During the week of January 5, 1862, Tyler left Sherwood Forest
and went up to Richmond to take his seat in the Confederate House
of Representatives. Julia planned to join him in town the following
week, pausing first for brief New Year's visits at Brandon and Shirley.
On the night of January 9, however, she had a singular dream which
caused her to abandon her plans to visit the Harrisons and the Carters
and to proceed straight to Richmond. She dreamed that her husband
had fallen dangerously ill and had taken to his bed at the Exchange
Hotel. Unlike her mother, who took seances, levitation, and other
manifestations of the occult seriously, Julia thought spiritualism ridicu-
lous, the celebrated Fox sisters fraudulent, and levitation no more than
a parlor game. Nonetheless, she had long put great store in dreams.
So had Margaret. Julia believed, in a vague way, in what a later genera-
tion would call extrasensory perception. While she made no fetish of
these alleged psychic phenomena, she felt that dreams served as vehicles
for thought-transference. For this reason and in this belief, she gathered
up Pearl and hastened to Richmond to tend her "fallen" spouse. She
arrived at the Exchange Hotel on Friday evening, January 10 — and
found Tyler entirely well.
On Sunday morning, January 12, Tyler arose early. He felt nau-
seated and dizzy and he soon began vomiting. Julia was half awakened
by the sound of his retching and he told her to go back to sleep. He had
only a slight "chill," he said, and he would go down to the hotel din-
ing room for a cup of hot tea. The tea seemed to restore him. Rising
to leave the table, he suddenly staggered and fell unconscious. He
was carried to a sofa in the parlor and regained consciousness in a few
minutes. Assuring the early diners who had gathered around him that
he was quite all right, he somehow managed to stumble back upstairs
to his room. Julia, still abed, saw him totter into their chamber, his
collar open, cravat in hand. "I would not have had it happen for a good
deal," he exclaimed, still badly shaken by the experience. "It will be all
around the town." True to his foreboding, friends were soon streaming
into the parlor to help. Before Julia could get out of bed and get
dressed, he had been persuaded to lie down again on the sofa. Dr.
William Peachy arrived and pronounced his condition "a bilious at-
tack, united with bronchitis." This did not come very close to the
cerebral vascular accident he had had, but at least he was seen by a
doctor.
Save for frequent and severe headaches and a persistent cough,
Tyler seemed well enough for the next few days. He sat in his parlor
and received his political friends, lucidly discussing with them the
aff airs of the new nation. Peachy treated his cough with morphine,
and the former President slept well. Robert Tyler moved onto the
sofa in the parlor to be near his father at night, and his brother Dr.
Tazewell Tyler, stationed in Richmond, looked in on the patient from
time to time. When neither the headaches nor the cough responded
to treatment, however, Peachy ordered the congressman to return to
Sherwood Forest for a complete rest. It worried Tyler that he was
missing the opening sessions of the Confederate Congress, but he finally
decided he would go home on Saturday, the eighteenth.
470
During the night of January 17-18, Julia suddenly awoke to the
sound of her husband's gasping for air. The vascular thrombosis had
spread, paralyzing the respiratory center. Robert was awakened and im-
mediately ran to summon a Dr. Brown who had a room on the same
floor of the hotel. Pearl, who occupied a cot on Julia's side of the bed,
awoke and began crying. "Poor little thing, how I disturb her," Tyler
apologized. While the nurse was comforting the baby, Julia rubbed her
husband's head and chest with alcohol. Brown arrived and prescribed
brandy and mustard plasters. "Doctor, I think you are mistaken/7 said
Tyler, refusing the plasters. But he took a sip of brandy/ At that
moment Dr. Peachy also appeared.
"Doctor, I am going," Tyler sighed when he saw Peachy at his
bedside.
"I hope not, Sir," replied the physician.
"Perhaps it is best," said the former President.
Julia moved to put the brandy glass again to his lips. His teeth
chattered on the rim. Then he looked at her and smiled, and, "as if
falling asleep," he died. It was 12:15 A.M., January 18, 1862. The bed
in which he died, Julia recalled, "was exactly like the one I saw him
upon in my dream, and unlike any of our own." 38
It was Tyler's last wish that Julia continue to make Sherwood
Forest her home. This at least was Julia's recollection of his final re-
quest after the Civil War, when she was fighting so desperately to hold
onto the plantation. But in May 1865 when she was being criticized by
Tazewell for having abandoned the estate to flee to the safety of Staten
Island with her children, she challenged her stepson's version of his
father's last entreaty. "Julia, let no consideration induce you to go
North," Tazewell remembered Tyler's having said. This, Julia retorted,
was a faulty recollection. What her husband had actually said, "only a
few hours before my trembling fingers closed the lids of his departing
sight," was "Ah, dearest, you will go North— [but] don't bring up the
children there. I prohibit it." And she had answered him, "Dearest, I
will never do anything that you do not approve." Then the President
had smiled and said quietly to her, "Love piled on love will not convey
an idea of my affection for you. It is idolatrous." 89
Whatever his final wishes about Sherwood Forest, John Tyler's
death left his forty-one-year-old widow frightened and unsettled. With
seven children to rear, one still in arms, a plantation of sixteen hundred
acres and seventy slaves to manage, Tyler's debts to face, and a savage
war still to be reckoned with, Julia was understandably shaken. Her
religious ideas had never transcended the moralistic, anthropomorphic
Protestant Christianity of the mid-nineteenth century, nor had she ever
penetrated theologically beneath the beautiful rote of the Book of
Common Prayer. She did not, therefore, turn to her Anglican God in
lamentations. She turned instead to her mother in New York, and to
471
Robert and Priscilla in Richmond. But most characteristically, she dried
her eyes, put on mourning clothes, and fell back upon her own consider-
able inner strength.
On January 20 Tyler's body lay in state in the black-draped hall of
the Confederate Congress. The Stars and Bars covered him, and on his
chest rested a wreath of evergreens and white roses. Several thousand
citizens filed mournfully by his open casket to "take a last look at his
well-known features." The business of Congress that day was devoted
entirely to eulogies to the former President of the United States. Funeral
services were held the following day in St. Paul's Episcopal Church, the
Reverend Dr. Charles Minnigerode and the Right Reverend John Johns,
Bishop of Virginia, officiating. The church was jammed with Confederate
dignitaries headed by President Jefferson Davis. After the ceremony a
solemn train of 150 carriages, stretching a quarter of a mile, followed
the hearse through the drizzling rain to Hollywood Cemetery. There on
a knoll overlooking the James River he loved so much, John Tyler was
buried beside the tomb of James Monroe.40
Although his will specified his wish to be buried simply and un-
ostentatiously in the grove at Sherwood Forest, his funeral had been
conducted with great pomp and circumstance in Richmond. No official
notice was taken of his passing in Washington by the nation he had
served for half a century. John Tyler had died a rebel and a "traitor."
Julia must have winced at the high-flown obituaries, the political
eulogies, and the propaganda-laden tributes that drummed her departed
husband into his grave. None caught the spirit of the man. None cap-
tured his wry humor, his selfless devotion to his wife and children, his
stubborn loyalty to his friends. None saw the soft, human side of his
personality — the John Tyler struggling to meet a payment due, or rid-
ing through his fields in his floppy straw hat; or the Tyler who laughed
and danced and bounced his babies and fiddled on his piazza for the
children of the plantation. None saw John Tyler the man, the husband,
the father, the poet, or the planter. Virginia unfurled her battle flags,
sounded her bugles, shook a mailed fist at the Yankees — and buried a
Confederate caricature of the real man. He was, said Henry A. Wise,
"an honest, affectionate, benevolent, loving man, who had fought the
battles of his life bravely and truly, doing his whole great duty without
fear, though not without much unjust reproach." The flag-draped patri-
otic ceremony that was his funeral caught little of this.41
472
MRS. EX-PRESIDENT TYLER
AND THE WAR, 1862-1865
Will President Lincoln have the kindness to inform
Mrs. Ex-President Tyler whether her home on the
James River can be withdrawn from the hands of
the negroes who were placed in possession of it by
Gen. Wild and restored to the charge of her man-
ager . . . even though her estate has been subjected
to wreck and devastation within doors and without?
JULIA GARDINER TYLER, AUGUST 1864
Juliana Gardiner made every effort to procure a pass through the lines
to reach her daughter's side during the melancholy weeks following John
Tyler's death. She even bearded old General Winfield Scott in the lobby
of the Brevoort Hotel and demanded that he help her reach the South.
But her request was denied in Washington "for military reasons," and
Julia discouraged further efforts in this direction for fear her mother's
health was not up to the rigors of a wartime journey to Sherwood Forest.
Nevertheless, Juliana kept trying to obtain a pass to the South. To
accomplish this she worked through an old New York friend, Louise
Ludlow, wife of Major William H. Ludlow, who was then in charge of
prisoner exchange at Fortress Monroe. Unfortunately, she had no suc-
cess. The preliminary movement of Union soldiers assigned to Mc-
Clellan's Peninsula campaign had begun and civilian travel into and out
of Virginia was sharply restricted.1
That a great battle was developing below Richmond, near Sherwood
Forest, worried Juliana considerably. Great concern for Julia's welfare
and safety, and that of her children, ran strongly through the Gardiner
family as McClellan made ready to end the war in one crushing blow
473
against the Confederate capital in the spring of 1862. Although Phoebe
and Eben Horsford were "strong Union people" (Horsford resigned his
Harvard science professorship in 1863 to manage the explosives division
of the Rumford Chemical Works near Providence), they were not in-
sensitive to Julia's plight. Being for the Union "does not make us love
our friends the less/3 Phoebe said. This too was the feeling of Mrs.
James I. Roosevelt and other of Julia's prewar friends in New York.
They did everything in their power to help her.2
Julia was frightened as McClellan's advance up the Peninsula in
April threatened to engulf the plantation. To make matters more dif-
ficult, she and all her children fell seriously ill with influenza that month.
Fitzwalter's life "hung by a thread for days," and Pearl experienced
"two shocking convulsions." Priscilla rushed down to the plantation
from Richmond to help the stricken household, and Doctors John
Selden and James B. McCaw interrupted busy practices in town to
journey to Sherwood Forest and treat the immobilized family. The
Reverend Dr. Wade also stayed with Julia and her children at the
plantation at night, as did various of the neighbors. By the end of April
the disease had run its course and the family was functioning again.
Fortunately, Julia was able to communicate with her worried
mother during this crisis. She worked out a system of sending letters by
private hand to occupied Leesburg in Loudoun County. From Leesburg
they were transmitted regularly to Baltimore and on to the North by
United States postal authorities. In this manner she kept her mother
informed of her situation at Sherwood Forest and her determination to
stay at the plantation, come what may. Thus on April 28, two months
after Tyler's funeral, she told Juliana:
Though we shall be within hearing of the roaring battle when it takes place
on the Peninsula at Yorktown I do not intend to desert my home whichever
army carries the day. If I am molested by brutal men it will be more than I
expect in this civilized age though it would seem as if we had collapsed into
barbarism from the quantity of kindred blood that has already flowed upon
the battlefield. I cannot flee and leave all my servants who would consider it
a cruel act to desert them. If I leave they wish me to take them along, but
how would it be possible to remove so many women and children? No, I have
concluded to remain where I am and have the worst, and as you know my
timidity you can judge I do not anticipate much inconvenience . . . would
that the better class at the north would have the sense and feeling to put a
stop to this war. I know I am dreadfully tired of it.3
Not only was Julia finding the war an increasing inconvenience and
bore, she became aware of the fact that people were killed in combat.
When the Reverend Peyton Harrison, a kinsman of the Harrisons
at Brandon, lost one son at Manassas and another at Fort Donelson,
Julia soberly concluded that knighthood was no longer in flower. War,
she finally decided, was "sad, sad, cruel and melancholy." More and
474
more she gave heed to her mother's pleas to bring her children to the
safety of Staten Island. At one point she even began considering a
European trip "for the sake of educating the children."
Juliana, meanwhile, continued her efforts to secure a pass into
Virginia, and she praised her daughter's spunk in staying with the
plantation during the Peninsula fighting. "Under the circumstances/'
she told Priscilla's sister, "I think it would be cruel to run away and
I am glad she is determined to remain. I shall make all haste to join
her, but I must get well first to prepare, and we are now in the midst of
house cleaning which renders everything confused here." First things
first.4
While Juliana finished her spring cleaning, the war swirled around
Sherwood Forest. Moving steadily up the Peninsula toward Richmond,
McClellan's patrols reached the plantation shortly after the Union oc-
cupation of Yorktown and Williamsburg on May 5-6, 1862. By May 14
Sherwood Forest lay well behind Union lines as McClellan established
his headquarters at White House on the Pamunkey River twenty miles
from the Confederate capital. No harm befell Julia or the estate during
these troop movements. Thanks to the direct intercession of Mrs. James
I. Roosevelt through her friend General John E. Wool of Newburgh,
New York, McClellan placed a protective guard at Sherwood Forest.
There was no looting, raping, or burning of buildings. Save for the dis-
appearance of the plantation's fencing into a hundred soldiers' camp-
fires, nothing of substance was destroyed. Julia was quite safe during the
great battle for Richmond, although she was cut off from her kin and
friends in the city and was entirely dependent on the protection of the
invader. To keep the plantation going during these trying months the
inexperienced Gardie was given the task of overseeing the harvest and
the planting. Although he worked hard at his new responsibility, lie
managed to get in but a "meager crop of wheat" that summer. Crop or
no crop, Julia and her brood were secure.
They were also thoroughly isolated. Julia did not learn until later
that Robert had taken up a rifle in the defense of the capital. Nor could
she assist the gallant Richmond ladies who furiously made sandbags for
the breastworks. She was not present to cheer the Confederate soldiers
from the Shenandoah Valley as they were deployed through the city to
do battle with the Yankees on the Peninsula. She could not comfort the
nervous Priscilla. Nor was she on hand to witness the patriotic self-
assurance of sixteen-year-old Grace Tyler, Priscilla's daughter:
When I think of the rivers of blood that must flow in a few days from now
[Priscilla wrote] , my heart sinks and faints within me. Our soldiers, our noble
soldiers, travel-worn and weary, have been arriving here from Manassas and
going down to Yorktown for the last two weeks. Thousands and tens of
thousands of them have passed within a few yards of our door. Every en-
couragement that waving handkerchiefs, smiles, tears and prayers could give
475
them . . . bunches of flowers, and kisses blown from fair fingers, they have
received. And sometimes warmer words and wishes than are usual upon a
first acquaintance. Imagine Grace, for instance, with all her reserve, beckon-
ing a young lieutenant from the ranks of the gallant Georgia yth, leaning
over a bank, handing him a bunch of flowers and saying with the tears flow-
ing over her cheeks, "God bless you. I shall pray for you every night." He
with an earnest look of gratitude, "While you ladies do the praying, be sure
we shall do the fighting." Then joining his ranks and looking back at Grace
till his column passed out of sight.5
Julia was wholly cut off from her family until Lee's counterattacks
in the Seven Days' battles of late June drove the invaders back down
the Peninsula toward Hampton. Her main problem during these uncer-
tain days of bloodshed was the unheard-of behavior of two of the Negro
women of the plantation, one a "free negress whom charity alone, from
pity for her friendless condition, had induced me to give a home/7 the
other a slave, "my supposed faithful maid and seamstress." On the eve-
ning of May 24 the two women gathered up as many of Julia's and the
children's clothes as they could carry and made off in the night. Julia
was outraged to lose several of her best dinner gowns, and she immedi-
ately dispatched a strong letter to the commanding officer at Williams-
burg demanding that federal authorities arrest and punish the thieves,
then return them to Sherwood Forest lest "the success of the expedition
be apt to produce a restless feeling among the rest of my hitherto happy
family of Negroes who are in fact blessed in being situated above every
want with a very moderate effort on their own part." The women were
not apprehended.6
The incident did produce a "restless feeling" among the slaves. The
Negroes on the plantation remained relatively quiet and in place during
McClellan's campaign. But when it was over the young male slaves
began to drift away one by one, making their way to Hampton and the
protection of the Union forces at Fortress Monroe. Julia could do noth-
ing about this leakage. She fell quite ill again in July, this time with
malaria, and her mother could "almost wish her negroes would decamp
as she would then feel more at liberty to join me. If the war continues I
suppose her plantation would not avail her much for a house, and she
will be obliged to come to me for safety. ... I shall use every effort to
join Julia I go to try to save the life of Julia if possible. I shall
endeavor to bring her North. The climate during the summer is all but
death to her." Try as she might, and in spite of the helpful efforts of
Major Ludlow at Fortress Monroe and General Egbert L. Viele, Mili-
tary Governor of Norfolk, Juliana could still procure no pass into
Virginia. She did manage to work out a way of getting an occasional let-
ter to her daughter through a commercial forwarding service in Franklin,
Kentucky. Aside from that, she could only wait and worry and console
herself with the observation that "the fashion of Washington are seces-
476
sionists — this must be uncomfortable to the occupants of the White
House." Weeks became months at Castleton Hill without word of Julia
and her children. Rumors reaching her that Villa Margaret had been
burned, that the Sherwood slaves had decamped en masse, and that
eastern Virginia lay desolated turned her in a desperate search for as-
sistance to her old New York friend from Tyler administration days and
before, General John A. Dix, Chief of the Seventh Army Corps of the
Department of Virginia. Dix promised her a pass to Virginia just as
soon as the military situation permitted. Thus she stewed and fretted
and waited for news of the second great battle pending at Bull Run,
which, she hoped, would clear Virginia of Yankees and permit her to
reach Sherwood Forest.7
Julia survived the fever as well as the departure of the first of her
field hands. By October 1862 she decided that Charles City County was
destined to become a great battlefield in all future campaigns around
Richmond. It would therefore be wise to begin removing her children to
the safety of Staten Island. In November 1862, through the cooperation
of General Dix and various officers of his staff, principally Captain
Wilson Barstow, whose wife was one of Juliana's friends, Julia procured
a federal pass which permitted her to board the weekly flag-of-truce
boat on the James River and proceed with her children to Hampton.
There she was authorized to board a bay steamer to Baltimore. Leaving
Sherwood Forest to the management of sixteen-year-old Gardie and his
cousin Maria Tyler, Julia's personal companion, she took Alex, Julie,
Lachlan, Lyon, Fitzwalter, and Pearl to Staten Island.
The homecoming was not particularly pleasant although Juliana
was overjoyed to see her daughter at long last. The house was crowded
with adults and noisy children. It was so crowded, Julia told David
Lyon, that he and his family would certainly have to seek other quarters
before she returned in the near future for the duration of the war. To
this declaration her brother replied testily that he would leave his
mother's house only when she ordered him out. Brother and sister also
argued bitterly about politics and the war. Fortunately, her tense visit
was a short one. Before leaving for Virginia, however, Julia transferred
the ownership of Villa Margaret to her mother, who in turn instituted
correspondence designed to secure indemnification and compensation
from federal authorities for the occupation and use of the property by
Union soldiers.8
Soon after New Year's Day Julia, Fitz, and Pearlie returned to
Virginia, arriving at Hampton by bay steamer from Washington on
January 8, 18^63. Again General Dix and Captain Barstow saw to it that
the former First Lady received every consideration. Barstow even man-
aged to get Julia and her two small children off the packed little steamer
and into a room at Willard's Hotel in Old Point Comfort. The re-
mainder of the passengers were confined to the boat for the night, "hud-
477
died together like so many animals." After a comfortable night ashore,
Julia was put aboard the flag-of-truce boat on the morning of January 9
and deposited safe and sound at her own landing that afternoon. Hap-
pily, she found everything in order at the plantation and in the county:
Everything in the Southern Confederacy is most auspicious [she wrote
Juliana] — a more hopeful, determined community cannot be imagined. Separa-
tion is the one thing believed in and all their deprivations are borne without
a murmur so far as they themselves are concerned, but oh! how the wicked-
ness of the North is stamped upon their very souls! It is a perfect surprise
to them when I assure them there is some good feeling there. They are hardly
prepared to believe in the exceptions It is well I am back. Many persons
were beginning to murmur at my wishing to be North. . . . Property is selling
very high You may depend upon it I shall not hold back Sherwood if I
consider it best not to do so I passed without search — thanks to Capt.
Barstow, Capt. [John E.] Mulford, and last but not least Gen. Dix. Do not
take the charge of the children entirely upon yourself. It worries me very
much to think how much care I left upon your hands — but how could I
have helped it!! ... The negroes are well disposed and in order. There are
[Confederate] soldiers dispersed all over the County so that we were never
more safe 9
Julia's return home signaled a round of visits and modest celebra-
tions. The war in the Virginia theater was going well for the South.
Patriotism ran high and the Charles City neighborhood ignored the
presence of the Union garrison at Fortress Monroe and the federal gun-
boats on the river. The flag-of-truce boats plied regularly up and down
the river, bringing in the mail and news of the outside world. On the
lower James, at least, the war was temporarily stalemated. The Yankees
controlled most of the river and the Confederates controlled most of the
hinterland, and both sides had learned for the time to live with the
other's tactical situation.
With four of her children safe in New York, Julia began to plan for
the immediate future. It was her determination, regardless of those who
might "murmur at my wishing to be North," to place Gardie in school
in Virginia, sell Sherwood Forest if possible, and go with her two young-
est children to Staten Island for the duration. Julia was thoroughly fed
up with the conflict and the thought of another fever-ridden summer at
Sherwood Forest was too much to contemplate. Berkeley plantation had
recently sold for $50,000 although it was "in its present horrible state/'
and Julia was confident that Sherwood could be also disposed of with-
out sacrifice — indeed, at a considerable profit.
With these thoughts in mind, Julia entered her husband's will in
probate at the Charles City courthouse on January 15 and let it be
known that the plantation was for sale. The following month she took
Gardie to Lexington and enrolled him in Washington College (now
478
Washington and Lee University). She was distressed at having to leave
him by himself "away off there among entire strangers/7 but he adapted
well to the new situation, socially and academically. Within two months
he was elected to membership in the school's select Washington Literary
Society, and by October 1863 he decided he really "preferred College to
Farming." 10
Attempts to find a buyer for Sherwood Forest were not successful,
although Julia did manage to sell the plantation's well-stocked wine
cellar for an inflationary $4000 and dispose of two fine riding horses for
$800. But both transactions were made for rapidly depreciating Con-
federate dollars. No buyer for the estate itself came forward. Even had
there been one, the plantation was so encumbered by various claims,
large and small, against John Tyler's estate that it would have been
difficult to have effected transfer of a clear title in 1863. To pay these
claims, totaling at least $2000 in sound pre-Civil War United States
currency, and the principal and interest on several notes Tyler had left
unpaid behind him, Julia deposited $5000 in Confederate money (the
proceeds from the wine and horse sale, no doubt) in the Farmer's Bank
of Virginia in March 1863.
Unable to sell the plantation, she reluctantly decided to continue
operating it during her projected absence in the North. To this purpose
she hired John C. Tyler, her deceased husband's nephew, son of Dr. Wat
Henry Tyler, as her plantation manager; she also engaged two white
men ("the only two white men about here") as farm laborers. She de-
cided to hold on to the remaining slave population, especially the younger
Negroes. But she left instructions that they should be sold south im-
mediately or hired out to the Confederate government for service in
labor battalions should the reappearance of the Union Army in the
neighborhood give them notions of freedom and flight. "I should not
keep them even now," she explained to her mother in April, abut release
myself of all anxiety concerning them . . . but it is impossible to hire free
labor. There are no working free people around, either black or white,
and at Richmond the wages of the common whites are so high they
would not come into the country for any consideration a farmer would
be willing to pay." u
By mid-May Julia could report that she was ready to leave again
for Staten Island. Inflation had by this juncture become a major prob-
lem in Virginia. With calico and cotton goods at $2.50 to $3 per yard,
"homespun will soon be entirely worn by at least the country people. I
am spinning altogether for the servants," she confessed. Still, inflation
had its advantages and the "immense prices we get for everything," even
the "meager" 1862 wheat crop, encouraged Julia to believe that she
might pay off all the claims against the Tyler estate in cheap Con-
federate dollars. "What a fortunate thing I came home when I did," she
boasted to her mother, "for no one could have managed as I have done."
479
Much to her dismay she discovered that Tyler's creditors were in no
hurry to press their claims against the estate. Better to wait and collect
in sound dollars, they reasoned.
Working with "the small force we have left," John C. Tyler began
seeding oats and planting corn at Sherwood Forest as Julia departed the
plantation on May 15 for Richmond. She had decided to stay in the
Confederate capital until the necessary arrangements could be made
with Union authorities for another pass to the North. On the eve of her
removal to the city she informed her mother that inflation, however
inconvenient for the poorer classes, had not disturbed the Virginia
aristocracy or the Southern war effort. Even the death of Stonewall
Jackson at Chancellorsville was not regarded an insurmountable disaster
among Richmond fashionables:
Ladies and gentlemen dress as well and tastefully as ever and calico is rarely
purchased. It is not considered worth wasting money upon ... rich things
direct from Paris are worn as much as ever in dress at prices of course
enormously high. A wedding took place in Petersburg the other day at an
expense of ten thousand dollars ($10,000) for the wedding supper and other
hospitalities — everything imported from France, the rarest confectionery, etc.
. . . The South has lost a beloved General, but no difficulty is found in supply-
ing his place as heroism and skill is the rule, not the exception.12
Julia's return to Staten Island could not come too soon to suit
Juliana. Five children (including Harry Beeckman) were more than she
could handle. And with David Lyon and Sarah's two infants also in
the house, the din and confusion were considerable. Grandmother
Catherine Beeckman died in May 1863 and with her passing the entire
responsibility for Harry devolved upon Juliana, who found to her con-
sternation that the mere "keeping of these five children in a comfortable
wardrobe has reduced me to the dimensions of a skeleton." Clothing
bills, dental bills, and tuition bills (the children attended Mr. Major's
private school near Castleton Hill) steadily mounted. In August 1863,
at a great expense of money and energy, she transported the entire "little
troop" to the Catskills for a vacation. At other times she consoled Alex
and Harry when they were intimidated by neighborhood children
("rowdy . . . untrusted Irish children," Juliana called them) for articu-
lating their pronounced Southern views. Indeed, she had all she could
do to keep the two little Rebels from running away from home to join
the Confederate Army. "Alex appears to be resolved upon a desperate
determination to return South and Harry equally earnest to prepare for
a gunning excursion," Juliana exhaustedly reported in April i863.13
In addition to her energy-draining obligations to Julia's children,
Juliana's spirits were steadily beaten down by the unfavorable war news
from the South. The Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in
July 1863 she correctly interpreted as the disasters they were for the
480
Confederacy. "The cause of the Confederacy looks gloomy," she con-
fessed to Julia in August. "When will this awful war end? It Is horrible.
The next thing, they will have Gardie in the Army unless you can all
come North. Do try to send him to Europe." The crushing of the draft
riots in New York City also distressed her, since for a short time during
the summer of 1863 they gave much aid and comfort to the South and
encouraged some of New York's more optimistic Copperheads to hope
that the city might be wrenched out of the Union. "Many think this is
the commencement of civil war at the North/7 Juliana remarked hope-
fully in July. "I hear from all quarters that the Irish in particular are
opposed to the introduction here of Negro labor and are resolved to do
no more fighting as they are dissatisfied with the objects of the war."
The death of the brilliant Stonewall Jackson further saddened her and
her Copperhead friends, as did their realization that the federal block-
ade, for all the times it was successfully run, was slowly crushing the
South to death. Only the hope of Anglo-French intervention on the
Confederate side gave Juliana any comfort at all. And this too had faded
for her as a real prospect in mid-i863. But the situation that gave her
the greatest concern in 1863 was Julia's tardiness in coming North. "I
sometimes think it is destined that we shall never meet again," she
worried.14
Julia stopped at the Ballard House in Richmond while she worked
on the increasingly difficult problem of obtaining a federal pass to New
York. She had no trouble securing permission from the Confederate
government to leave Virginia. She had easy access to both President and
Mrs. Davis. She knew them socially and she visited them frequently.
Indeed, William G. Waller, Tyler's grandson, was engaged to Mrs.
Davis' youngest sister, Jenny Howell (they were married in the Con-
federate White House in November 1863), and the South 's First Lady
already delighted in calling Julia "my beautiful step mother," even
though Julia's actual connection with the Davis family would be that
of step-grandmother-in-law to the First Lady's sister. However remote
the relationship, Varina Howell Davis thought Julia "positively did not
look one day over twenty" and always appeared "so fresh, agreeable,
graceful and exquisitely dressed."
The problem with the pass stemmed therefore not from high Rich-
mond officials but from Union authorities, who insisted that all Virginia
applicants for passes take an Oath of Allegiance to the United States at
Fortress Monroe before receiving clearance north. This oath Julia would
not and, in all honesty, could not take. Letters from Juliana in Staten
Island to President Lincoln requesting that the degrading requirement
be waived for "Mrs. Ex-President Tyler" were unavailing. Julia told
General Dix that "while I would be ready to give my parole d'honneur
to be inoffensive in all respects to the U.S. Govt. I wish to be spared the
presentation of any other oath — which I could not take." Since she
481
was a female noncombatant and only wanted to "see the faces of my
darling mother and my little children who are with her," she was certain
an old Washington friend like former New York Senator Dix would not
insist on "forms and ceremonies which I learn are imposed on others/'
Old friend or no, Dix could do nothing for Julia (save graciously for-
ward her mail to New York) without the oath.15
All hope of leaving Virginia legally dashed, Julia began making ar-
rangements to depart illegally — from Wilmington, North Carolina, by
blockade runner. From his post in the Confederate Navy Department
James A. Semple was instrumental in helping Julia make the necessary
plans. Actually, his task was not a difficult one. It was complicated,
however, by Julia's desire to take a few bales of cotton out of the coun-
try with her for speculative purposes and to travel with the shipment to
Bermuda, where she could personally dispose of it. Working through
William G. Waller, who was attached to the Confederate Ordnance De-
partment's arsenal at Augusta, Georgia, and through Colonel Josiah
Gorgas, Chief of Confederate Ordnance, Julia finally secured an Ord-
nance Department authorization, dated August 10, 1863, directing
"J. M. Seixas, Esq., Special Agent of the War Department, at Wilming-
ton, N.C., to furnish free passage to yourself, two young children and
one servant on the Govmt. R. E. Lee, as requested, with permission to
take out also on same Str. Five bales of Cotton." Since the R. E. Lee,
Captain John Wilkinson, had just sailed, Julia was told she would have
to wait for her next voyage "probably early in September." Unfortu-
nately, when the R. E. Lee was ready to depart Wilmington again in
late September, Julia had not yet completed arrangements for the
cotton she wanted to take with her. Her tardiness in leaving the South
was due entirely to her inability to get herself and her cotton allotment
together on the same ship. While trying to solve this logistic problem
she was constrained to turn down passage for herself, her children, and
her Negro servant Celia Johnson on vessels leaving port in early and
middle October. While the delay afforded her an opportunity to press a
niggling claim against the Confederate War Department for a horse and
some oats commandeered from Sherwood Forest by a cavalry foraging
party, Semple urged her to leave as quickly as possible for Bermuda,
permit him to handle the claim, and let Seixas consign the cotton to
Nassau. To this importunity Julia finally agreed. She sailed, therefore,
from Wilmington on October 28 aboard the CSS Cornubia, Captain
R. H. Gayle, and arrived in Bermuda on November 2. The five bales of
cotton were shipped to Nassau in December aboard the steamer Eugenie.
There an agent sold them for Julia to a Spanish buyer for the handsome
sum of £225.n.6d. So handsome was the sum, in fact, that Julia would
attempt, unsuccessfully, in May 1864 to get another profitable cotton
lot through the ever-tightening blockade.16
Scarcely had Julia settled down to enjoy briefly the pleasant society
482
that peacetime Bermuda afforded, while waiting for passage to New
York, than she learned of the capture of the gallant Captain Gayle and
the Cornubia on the vessel's return trip to Wilmington. Gayle, who was
in his early thirties, had treated his distinguished passenger with great
kindness on the outward voyage to Bermuda, and it may be assumed
that the eligible and still attractive widow did not discourage his flatter-
ing attentions. In any event, his capture distressed her terribly. Not
until January 1864, after she had safely reached Staten Island, did she
learn that he had heroically stayed with his ship, attempting to burn the
vessel, while his panicky crew fled to the boats in a vain attempt to
escape. He was the only man remaining on deck when the Union board-
ing party came over the side. "If Capt. Gayle's commands had been
obeyed," Jefferson Davis was reported to have said, "the ship could
have escaped." Whatever the truth of the loss of the Cornubia and the
responsibility for it, the dashing Gayle, member of a distinguished Rich-
mond family, was sent to Fort Warren Prison in Boston.17
Equally disturbing to Julia was news from Gardie in Lexington that
the Washington College students had marched off to war, or at least in
eager search of war. Under the emergency-manpower provisions of a
proclamation by Governor Letcher, the college had formed a reserve
infantry company which was attached to the Rockbridge Regiment of
the Virginia Home Guard, Colonel Thomas Massey commanding. Ac-
tually trained for less than two weeks, the Washington College boys,
together with the more experienced Virginia Military Institute Cadets,
were ordered to Alleghany County in late October 1863 to help repel a
federal cavalry raid in the area. Under the command of Professors
Alexander Nelson and John L. Campbell, the civilian undergraduates
hiked the forty-five miles into the mountains " 'spiling7 for a fight." It
was a lark. Passing through the Rockbridge Alum Springs, Gardie and
his mates "found the place entirely deserted and drank alum water to
our heart's content free of cost!" Marching on, the column learned that
the enemy was at Covington. "We immediately began to advance against
them," wrote Gardie. "Everybody expected a fight and while on our way
an old woman came out of her house and commenced cheering us on
saying that the Yanks were only two miles ahead. This greatly excited
us and we marched ahead with loud cheers." The information from the
small Rebel cheering section proved wrong. Only when they reached the
vicinity of Clifton Forge did they learn that General J. D. Imboden's
Cavalry Brigade had already driven the Federals out of Covington and
back toward the West Virginia line. There would be no fight. So the
boys and their professors turned around and marched back to Lexington,
arriving there "pretty well worn out." To seventeen-year-old Gardie the
whole experience was wonderful. "I liked camp life amazing," he told
his mother. "I try to study as much as possible but I find it quite hard
to do so as everything is so full of war fever." 18
483
With all her worries about Captain Gayle and her eldest son, Julia
nonetheless found a pleasant life awaiting her among congenial friends
in peaceful, booming Bermuda. She immediately attached herself to the
gay community of Confederates who for various reasons — business,
pleasure, escape, adventure — had established themselves in St. George.
Confederate officers and civil servants, Confederate purchasing agents
and ship's captains, Confederate speculators, transients, and tourists
were present in number in Bermuda, many in the company of their ladies
— or someone else's lady. Along with the British officers and officials
stationed on the island, they peopled the numerous dances and dinner
parties, the opulence of which made wartime Richmond with its growing
shortages and inflation seem another world. The British 39th Regimen-
tal band generally played for these gala affairs and there were always
plenty of "Red coats to liven the scene." Mrs. Norman J. Walker, wife
of a Confederate Army purchasing agent, became Julia's principal
friend during her two-week stay in St. George prior to her voyage to
New York on the British ship Harvest Queen in mid-November. The
Walkers' Christmas party was a typical Southern function of the time
and place. It was dedicated more to the birth of the Confederacy than
to the birth of Christ:
We are becoming quite gay in our little Island home [Mrs. Walker wrote
Julia in January 1864] ; that is the civilians and military are The Con-
federate Flag gaily decorated my little cottage [on Christmas Day], and at
supper, I myself, proposed the health of "Our President" which was drunk
with a hearty good will; and then went up one cheer after another, which
resounded to every corner of the house- We were body, and heart, and soul
Confederates; and I laughingly remarked to the [British] Colonel at my side,
"Now we may cheer our own Flag and abuse, if we choose, all the rest of
the governments of the earth." ... I had made them forget the war, and that
was certainly next to spending their Xmas night in Dixie! Of course, we had
our own national drink, "egg-nog," made in the old Virginia style.19
Fortunately, Julia, Fitz, and Pearlie were quite safe at Castleton
Hill on Christmas Day, 1863. And if their arrival there on November 24
brought the resident population of the Gardiner homestead to four
adults, nine children, Juliana's nurse, and Julia's maid (four other
servants lived out), there was, at first, general satisfaction that the
family was united again. Juliana, old and sick, more often confined to
her room than not, was relieved to have her daughter with her again.
But the premises were terribly crowded. In December Mr. Ralph Dayton
of New York was introduced into the already bursting household as
private tutor to the children.
By Christmas Day, while Southern patriots celebrated in Bermuda,
there was little peace on earth at Castleton Hill. Tension between Julia
and her brood of Rebels and David Lyon and his Union family in-
creased during the holiday season and became almost unbearable during
484
January 1864. Political arguments raged incessantly. With so many
children underfoot there was also constant confusion. Alex and Harry
enjoyed playing harmless pranks on their Yankee uncle and, predictably,
the humorless David Lyon, "very much tried by the children," retali-
ated. On at least three occasions he cuffed Alex and Julie around
severely, actions which produced screams of bloody murder from the
children and angry exchanges between Julia and her brother. During one
of these scenes with David, Julia was struck and knocked to the floor.
Sarah Thompson Gardiner was caught in the middle of this acrimony.
"My position is a most unpleasant one," she told Juliana. "I cannot
take sides against my husband or his Mother It makes me sick to
think of what has taken place." Juliana experienced no mixed loyalties.
She sided completely with Julia and she protected Julia's children from
David Lyon's abuse. On one occasion she told her nurse that she "didn't
feel safe in the house when Mr. Gardiner was with the children." In-
deed, so angry did she become with her son that on February 10, 1864,
with Julia's urging, she removed all her business affairs from his hands
and summarily ordered him and his family from her house. He returned
to his own farm at nearby Northfield and never saw his mother alive
again. He made no effort to.20
There is little doubt that underlying this tragic family split was the
sectional emotion engendered by the Civil War. No sooner had Julia
arrived in Staten Island and treated herself to a series of shopping
sprees in the well-stocked New York City stores, notably Lord & Taylor,
than she began involving herself in local Copperhead activities. These
were subversive enterprises to which the patriotic David Lyon strenu-
ously objected.
Julia's first and most extensive, certainly her most trying and dedi-
cated, project was to secure the exchange and release of Captain R. H.
Gayle from Fort Warren Prison. At this task she worked throughout
1864 and into 1865. Gayle was no ordinary war prisoner. His sister was
Mrs. Josiah Gorgas, wife of the capable Chief of the Confederate
Ordnance Department. Another of his brothers-in-law was Brigadier
General H. K. Aiken of the Sixth South Carolina Cavalry. Nor was
Gayle, as he himself disdainfully put it to the military commission
examining his exchange status in April 1864, a mere "blockade runner."
He was, he told the commission proudly, "an officer in the Navy of the
Confederate States, and am consequently a 'prisoner of war.' " The fact
that the Cornubia had been operated by the Confederate government,
Gayle being paid according to his naval rank, elevated the Captain
above the status of the free-enterprising Rhett Butlers of the South and
legally placed him in a prisoner-exchange category. Julia thus had great
hopes that she might hasten his passage to freedom through the red-tape
blockade.
485
Meanwhile he was allowed to receive a single-page letter a week
from each of his correspondents on the outside, and no week passed
that Julia did not send him a cheering missive. She also made arrange-
ments regularly to send him books, cigars, food, wine, and small sums
of money. Fort Warren was no Andersonville. But mainly she worked
directly through and on General John A. Dix, now stationed in New
York, to effect Gayle's exchange. She also listened patiently and under-
standingly to the complaints and frustrations of an active man, cooped
up in prison, dreaming of freedom and a return to the wars, "When I
read in the papers of all the bustle and busy life that is sweeping over
the land," he wrote his benefactress in March 1864, "I almost am
tempted to attempt the leap of Fort Warren's high walls." Julia, of
course, was permitted to write him no politically oriented letters — these
were subject to confiscation. But Gayle and his fellow prisoners kept
abreast of the war through the Boston newspapers and he interpreted
for Julia the military implications of passing events. "We can tell what
Grant will do, and know what Lee ought to do," he laughed. "To hear
us talk, one would think the combined military talent of the country
was wasting itself within these walls."
By May 1864 the bored and lonely prisoner's letters to Julia were
becoming increasingly personal. He asked her for her picture, received it,
and sent one of himself in return. "Photographs seldom do justice to
their subject," he told her, "but he must indeed be a poor artist, who in
your case, could make a failure with such a model." Her picture helped
him pass the lengthening months of his captivity. "I feel no longer
alone," he thanked her. His boredom became unbearable when exchange
negotiations were suspended during Grant's 1864 summer campaign
around Richmond. Gayle began to wonder whether he would ever leave
Fort Warren: "I shall consider the loss of my liberty for a whole year
as equal to the loss of a leg," he complained to Julia. "I might have
been a Commodore by this time." The weeks and months dragged on.
On August 28, 1864, the claustrophobic Gayle finally learned from
Colonel Robert Ould, Confederate agent for prisoner exchange in Rich-
mond, that he would soon be exchanged for Lieutenant Commander
Edward P. Williams, USN. Julia shared his joy and excitement. At the
beginning of October the necessary papers had been arranged, and
Gayle, in company with other Confederate naval officers from the Ten-
nessee, Selma, Atlanta, and Tacony, left Fort Warren for City Point,
below Richmond. There on October 20 he was duly exchanged. "For my
part," he wrote Julia before leaving Boston, "I should look back upon the
last ten months as a hideous nightmare, to be remembered only with a
shudder, were it not for the bright beams which you, my dear Madam,
have occasionally darted within these frowning walls." 21
Within a few weeks Gayle had another ship, the steamer Stag, and
was "employed again" on the Wilmington-Bermuda run. "I ran her out
486
of Wilmington while the fleet was thundering at Fort Fisher," he hap-
pily wrote his "ministering angel" from Bermuda on New Year's Day.
Leaving Bermuda for Wilmington on January 14, 1865, the Stag reached
the Cape Fear River around midnight on the nineteenth. There she was
captured, the last Confederate ship attempting to run the Union block-
ade to be taken in the war. Her captain could not appreciate the histori-
cal uniqueness of the event. "Imagine, my dear Madam," Gayle fumed
from Fort Warren in February,
how astonished I was when, fancying myself safely at home, I found myself a
prisoner. No intimation of the fall of Fort Fisher had ever reached me, and
without a suspicion of anything being wrong I confidently ran my ship up to
the usual anchorage. At the entrance to the harbor there was no suspicious
appearance — the usual lights were properly set, and I unsuspectingly ran into
the trap so cleverly laid . . . and here I am once more, as quietly settled
down in my old quarters as if I had never left them I find it somewhat
difficult to realize that I have had a holiday. I was exchanged on the 2oth of
Oct. and captured again on the 2oth of Jan. — only three months. Had my
ship been shot to pieces, or fairly run down at sea, I would not mind it so
much; but to have deliberately walked into a trap purposely prepared for me
makes me feel so foolish that I can hardly look anyone in the face. Most of
the prisoners whom I left behind me are still here, and you can imagine what
a commotion there was when I made my appearance within the sally-port.
Upon my word, Mrs. Tyler, I felt as if I had been caught in a theft Tell
Pearly that I appreciate her sympathy
And so Julia again took up her Fort Warren-Gayle project.22
Other war ventures had meanwhile been pressed with vigor. With
her inflated Confederate money Julia loyally purchased sinking Con-
federate war bonds. She sent money and clothes to needy friends in the
South and to Confederate soldiers of her acquaintance who were lan-
guishing in Union prison camps. She became a working member of a
small cell of Staten Island Copperheads, a group of women who distrib-
uted peace pamphlets, conducted relief activities in Southern cities oc-
cupied by the Union Army, cheered Confederate victories and plugged
for General George B, McClellan's election to the Presidency in 1864. In
these activities she was assisted by her mother and by Louisa Cooper
(Priscilla's sister) who lived in the city.23
Throughout 1864 Julia held as an unimpeachable article of faith
the belief that the Confederacy would eventually win the war even
though all the private information she could gather from her Southern
friends and correspondents told her otherwise. She knew that inflation
was completely out of hand in Virginia; she realized that the blockade
was squeezing the Confederacy to death; she knew also that the strug-
gling nation was split militarily in twain, and that Union armies and
cavalry units were plunging deeper into the vitals of the South with
less and less opposition. Yet she preferred to believe that somehow all
487
would turn out well. She believed in slogans, not facts; and this at a
time when the history of Charles City County alone told her all was lost,
that the Old South was dying. "The news from home certainly gives us
• no occasion for rejoicing,'' Mrs. Walker wrote her from Bermuda in
February 1864. Julia simply would not believe it.24
The last full year of the war opened quietly in Charles City. Maria
Tyler reported everything at Sherwood Forest in excellent condition as
of January 1864, "all the servants are well and their clothing attended
to." Only a single Union cavalry raid, which destroyed the county
courthouse in November, had disturbed an otherwise peaceful winter in
the neighborhood. The Confederate Congress had passed a new draft act
extending the military age from eighteen to fifty-five and this promised,
in Maria's words, to "swell our army it is thought to two hundred thou-
sand." Except for complaints about the soaring inflation from the
poverty-ridden Richmond masses, confidence in the future was generally
high in the Tidewater. "Things look brighter for our cause," Maria told
Julia. "Our soldiers here are perfectly confident of success and Gen. Lee
is the same good Christian and great General." The local Charles City
Cavalry was disbanded and its personnel, in search of rest and relaxa-
tion, whiled away the time jousting for the hands of fair maidens at
mock medieval tournaments. "Charles City has been unusually gay this
winter, party after party, dinners and even Tournaments," John C.
Tyler wrote Julia. He had great hope that a normal crop would be
planted and harvested at Sherwood Forest. At the end of March 1864,
then, the only winter casualty sustained by the plantation was one
raided smokehouse and the theft of the meat therein.25
At Lexington Gardie remained impatiently in college, struggling
unequally with Tacitus and Xenophon. "The truth is my mind is so full
of war and rumors of war that I cannot study with any sort of plan."
The march to Covington had whetted his martial appetite and filled him
with the most intense patriotism. He spent most of the winter of 1863-
1864 trying to decide which branch of the Confederate service to join
when he became eighteen in July. The thought of slaughtering Yankees
filled him with delight. "Come one, come all," he crowed to Alex, "we
are ready for them Our army was never in such a fine condition as
it is now. With the exception of a few delicacies we live as well as we
ever did. Never believe a word about our starvation, etc." 20
Heralded in early April 1864 by Union cavalry raids through the
county and gunboat reconnaissance along the river, the opening of
Grant's spring campaign in May struck Charles City and Sherwood
Forest like a thunderclap. Striking south from Culpeper through the
Wilderness, Grant's ioo,ooo-man Army of the Potomac coordinated a
massive attack on Richmond with General Benjamin Butler's 36,000-
man Army of the James, which moved up the south side of the river
488
from Norfolk to hit the Confederate capital from the east and south.
In the Shenandoah Valley Franz SigePs force of 20,000 began to advance
southward toward Staunton and Lynchburg in a twin effort to pin
Jubal A. Early in the Valley and strip Virginia's granary of food and
supplies that might otherwise reach Lee at Richmond. In the west
Sherman departed Chattanooga on his celebrated march to the sea. The
Confederacy was coming apart at the seams. Or so it seemed.
Once again Sherwood Forest was in the midst of a Peninsula cam-
paign as Butler drove toward Richmond along the south bank of the
James. This time, however, the plantation was not spared. On May 7,
1864, the ist Brigade, Hink's Division, XVIII Corps, Negro troops
commanded by Brigadier General Edward A. Wild, crossed the river at
Kennon's Landing and occupied Sherwood Forest and the surrounding
countryside. Save for a sharp scrap at Wilson's Landing with roving
units of Fitzhugh Lee's cavalry, the Negro troops easily took possession
of Charles City County. It was during this fighting, however, that some
of the outbuildings were burned at Sherwood Forest, probably by re-
treating Confederate cavalrymen. A reign of terror was soon unleashed
against the defenseless county by the conquerors. Mr. Lamb Wilcox was
shot dead in his yard by Negro soldiers for refusing to salute them.
George Walker was shot down by colored soldiers for resisting their
plunder, although he was more fortunate than Wilcox and lived to go
to prison. Throughout the county plantations were plundered, homes
sacked, livestock driven off, and outbuildings burned. Slaves were
"liberated" and carried away by their dusky emancipators. William H.
Clopton, reported by "some of my negro women" for being a "most
cruel master," was seized by Wild's troopers, stripped naked, and lashed
while his slaves stood by and cheered. John C. Tyler was arrested. He,
Clopton, G. B. Major, A. H. Ferguson, R. J. Vaiden, J. C. Wilson,
Thomas Douthat, and other civilian planters and professional men of
the neighborhood were hauled down to Fortress Monroe where they
were imprisoned. "My wife and family are at Weyanoke/' said Douthat
sadly, "everything lost on the farm and themselves surrounded by U.S.
Colored troops. God will protect them I feel assured, and in his hands I
leave them." As at Weyanoke, the Sherwood Forest farm buildings were
raided, meat seized and livestock expropriated. Fortunately, James A.
Semple and John C. Tyler had managed to get most of the deceased
President's papers and all of the family silverware and portraits to a
warehouse and bank vault in Richmond during the cavalry raids in
April. On the farm, however, "they have not left five dollars worth,"
John C. informed Julia on May 20, So brutal was the Yankee visitation
in Charles City that even the infamous General Butler was shocked.
General Wild was reprimanded and his rampaging troops finally brought
under control. The detained planters were treated with "marked respect"
at Fortress Monroe by Butler and formal charges against the most
489
vicious of the looters, plunderers, and lashers were entertained by
Butler's Provost Marshal. Clopton promptly preferred charges against
General Edward A. Wild. Needless to say, nothing came of them.27
When Julia learned of the Yankee deluge in Charles City she im-
mediately wrote letters to General Butler and to President Lincoln,
signed "Mrs. Ex-President Tyler/' asking that her friend, William
Clopton, and her plantation manager, John C. Tyler, be released from
prison and returned to their farms. They were needed at home to pro-
tect what property remained. The presence of John C. Tyler was espe-
cially required at Sherwood Forest to give comfort, succor and protec-
tion to Miss Maria Tyler, "the delicate orphan girl . . . exposed to a fate
I dread even to think of." Julia pleaded with Lincoln: "By the memory
of my Husband, and what you must be assured would have been his
course in your place, had your Wife appealed to him, remove from me
these causes for anxious suspense." Benjamin Butler may have been the
"Beast77 of New Orleans, but he promptly responded to Julia's entreaty
and saw to it that Maria Tyler was made safe. "For your prompt action
in this respect I owe you many thanks,77 Julia admitted.28
Her plea to the President was less expeditiously processed. Lincoln
referred Julia's letter to General Butler and he in turn forwarded it back
to Colonel Joseph Holt, Judge Advocate General, in Washington with
a request for instructions. Holt, meantime, had received a direct tongue-
lashing from Julia protesting the whipping of Clopton and the "complete
dismantlement of Sherwood Forest." She demanded, as the widow of a
former President of the United States, immediate restoration of "the
resources of which I have been suddenly and violently deprived.77
Thanks in part to the former First Lady's paper barrage, John C. Tyler
and Clopton were finally released, Clopton in late June, Tyler in mid-
July.
But while this round-robin correspondence was in progress, Sher-
wood Forest was turned over to local Negroes and they sacked its in-
terior. Early in June General Wild placed the plantation house in the
possession of two of the Tyler slaves, Randolph and Burwell. Within a
few days the house furnishings had disappeared. Beds were carted off,
marble table tops were smashed, and furniture was removed to the
open-air Negro camp Wild had established near his command post at
Kennon's Landing. Sofas were stripped of their velvet and "mirrors
crushed all to atoms.7' Busts and windows were broken. "Old Fanny was
the leader in tearing down the curtains and gathering things up gen-
erally,77 Clopton reported. Randolph, Burwell, and some half-dozen
other Negroes from surrounding plantations (the remaining Tyler slaves
had run aimlessly off) temporarily moved their women and children
into the debris. Under Wild's orders the Sherwood Forest barns and
smokehouses still standing were opened to the drifting neighborhood
Negroes and the last of the livestock was seized and distributed among
490
them. "They kill a hog nearly every day. The negroes have eaten all the
sheep that were left and the hogs and are now going on upon the neigh-
bor's stock." Structurally, the main house was not harmed beyond a
few smashed windows and a split door or two, but the plantation itself
was rendered a wasteland. The white laborer, Oakley, was "no better
than the negroes," and he joyously joined in the plunder. When John C.
returned to Sherwood in mid- July the Negro occupants sassily refused
to vacate the main house. "Give up nothing to anyone," Wild had in-
structed them.29
When she received the news of General Wild's arrogance Julia
wrote the White House: "Will President Lincoln have the kindness to
inform Mrs. (Ex-President) Tyler whether her home on the James River
can be withdrawn from the hands of the negroes, who were placed in
possession of it by Gen. Wild, and restored to the charges of her man-
ager, Mr. J. C. Tyler . . . [even] though her estate has been subjected
to wreck and devastation within doors and without " While she was
in the letter-writing mood she also demanded of Lincoln that the govern-
ment either vacate Villa Margaret or begin paying rent for using it.
These requests were also referred by the President to General Butler,
who had already received similar missives directly from Julia. Under
this bombardment of pen and ink from Staten Island and Washington,
Butler undertook an investigation into Julia's complaints. General Wild
assured his commanding officer that he had placed no impediment in the
way of John C. Tyler's recovery of the estate. As for the Negroes living
there, they were, said Wild, merely " three colored men (two old and
one middle-aged) with their families, said to be claimed by Mrs. Tyler as
her servants, who now live as they have done for many years upon the
estate of the late Mr. Tyler. . , . They have cultivated some portion of
the estate and I suppose desire to reap where they have sown." This
view, endorsed by Butler, became the official one and was made known
to Julia in September.30
The federal authorities at Fortress Monroe did not see fit to inform
Julia that the downstairs rooms of Sherwood Forest had been converted
into a temporary schoolhouse for "negroes and whites" in June. This
distressing information came from William H. Clopton, whose release
from the Fortress Julia had been instrumental in securing and whose
wife, Lu Clopton, had given Maria Tyler refuge in her home during the
upheaval in Charles City in May. "It is occupied yet as a School house/'
William wrote Julia on July i. "The trees are nearly all destroyed and
a good many houses erected around the lot. The land is all ploughed up
and cultivated pretty close to the Dwelling. The house looked to be in
very good repair outside as far as I could see from the road." 31
Sherwood Forest was not unique under the new order of things in
Charles City County. An entire social system had disappeared overnight.
The two-to-one Negro majority in name had become a two-to-one
491
majority in fact. King Numbers was enthroned. The whites were stunned
and bewildered by the swiftness of the revolution. When planter Clop-
ton's slaves denounced him and had him thrashed by Negro soldiers, his
reaction was outrage. But when his servants fled his property, his feeling
was indifferent. "The loss of my negroes gives me no concern
My feelings have been so changed in regard to them that I don't feel
that I ever care to see another." Julia felt much the same way. When
Celia Johnson, her Negro maid on Staten Island, asked to be sent home
to Charles City, Julia did nothing to dissuade her. She arranged the
necessary pass with Butler's headquarters. She too had had enough of
Negroes. The benevolent paternalism of the plantation system was dead,
casually abandoned by the very people it had sought to civilize. Julia
felt that, having bitten the hand that fed them, the ungrateful Negroes
could begin looking after themselves on a free-enterprise basis. She was
through with them.32
Among the numerous tidings of disaster that wended north to
Julia from Charles City during the summer of 1864, none distressed
her so much as the sudden marriage of Maria Tyler to a Yankee
soldier. Soon after the Union Army overran Charles City and turned
Sherwood Forest over to the local Negroes, Julia received a pitiful
letter from the frightened woman asking to be allowed to come to
Staten Island. She was sick and she was panicky, and with Clopton
and John C. Tyler both incarcerated in Fortress Monroe she was also
helpless. "I do not know what is to become of me" she moaned to
Julia. "My health is feeble, very [and] ... I am surprised that you do
not seem yet to understand the complete wreck at Sherwood Wish I
could have an interview if only of one hour's duration with you, dearest
of all friends — perhaps you could then form a more correct idea of my
desolate condition . . . provisions are scarce I assure you — almost to
starvation. The prospect is gloomy in the extreme." Julia had a lively
imagination when it came to THE FATE WORSE THAN DEATH. In a
letter to the New York Evening Post on June 26 she pictured the
twenty-seven-year-old Maria as "a delicate orphan girl . . . deprived of
her protector and exposed to the terrible vicinity of an unscrupulous
colored soldiery." She was naturally much relieved when Mrs. Clopton
took Maria in at Selwood, more relieved when she later learned that
Generals Butler and Wild had consented to Maria's departure for the
North whenever she wished to go. Further, the Union officers assured
Julia the girl would be shielded from THE FATE; she could also receive
any clothes or money Julia wished to send to her through Federal
lines. Thus when General Wild informed Staten Island in mid- June that
Maria had suddenly decided not to leave Charles City, Julia was
puzzled. But she accepted Wild's explanation that Maria was "liable
to haemorrage [sic] and troubled with rheumatism." 83
The real reason for Maria's hesitancy soon became apparent.
492
"Maria is married to a little Dutchman/' Clopton informed Castleton
Hill in shock on August 2,
who will be twenty one in August from Buffalo, N.Y., entirely without any of
the civilities of life about him. He sits in the parlor or dining room and spits
on the floor as though he was outdoors. When I got home [to Selwood] she
had made it all up to suit herself. He was left at Mr. Major's in hire for a
guard Lu thinks it awful she did not consult anyone about it, John
[C. Tyler] nor me. . . . She passed herself off for 23 Mr. James Christian
came and married them. ... He spits on the floor and piles fish bones on the
table around his plate — but enough! I feel that I am lowered in the world by
being compelled to admit such a thing to take place in my house. But the
force of circumstances could not be overcome.
"Beast" Butler filled in the harrowing details for Julia a few days
later. The happy groom who spat on the floor was Private John Kick
of Company F, 2nd Regiment, New York Mounted Rifles. If Julia was
to see no humor in the marriage, Butler did. He had been extremely
polite to Julia and to all her kin in Charles City. Every possible con-
sideration had been extended them by his headquarters, even while he
was brilliantly botching up Grant's campaign before Richmond. Ben-
jamin F. Butler was one of the most incompetent general officers ever
to wear a United States Army uniform. But he knew something of the
intense Gardiner-Tyler concern with proper marriage alliances, and he
could not resist the comment that Julia need no longer worry about
Maria's virtue. In Private John Kick, Maria Tyler had at last found
"a natural protector."
I have just taken measures to give the bridegroom a furlough to spend the
honeymoon in. This step of Miss Tyler's may tend to relieve your mind of
any anxiety as to her health which you have suffered for some time past.
Allow me my dear Madam to congratulate you upon so loyal an alliance of
your relative and so happy a recovery of her health.
Julia was no amateur in the barbed-words game. Declining Butler's
offer of a pass to come to Charles City to visit the newlyweds, she
testily informed him that poor Maria had for some weeks been
bordering on insanity. The terrible scenes she depicted [in her last letter]
have evidently banished reason from its throne. Otherwise I think she would
have braved the starvation which by her account stared her in the face, or met
death in any form rather than have taken the step of which you inform me.
It is to be hoped, however, that the loyalty of her husband to which you
particularly allude will soon promote him to high military rank. . . ,34
The Cloptons would not let Maria bring her Yankee husband to
live with them at Selwood, and they ordered her from their home. Mrs.
Henry Holt of Charles City at last took the girl in, but she would
not accept Maria's bridegroom in her house either. It did not matter
493
in the long run. Private Kick was shortly arrested by Union military
police and sent out of the area when it was discovered he already had
a wife in New York state. The "marriage" therefore was bigamous and
illegal from the beginning.
While the marital exploitation of the hapless Maria was under
•way, Julia in New York and Major John Tyler, Jr., in Richmond
wrote various newspapers in the North and South announcing to one
.and all that Maria Tyler was neither the daughter nor the "adopted
daughter" (as the New York Herald had identified her) of the tenth
President. James A. Semple advanced the theory that Maria had mar-
ried the Yankee soldier as part of a plot to seize Sherwood Forest:
"Maria's plan was to marry and then quietly settle at Sherwood as
.owner of it and if the war lasted long enough possession would have
given her the right She is a bigger goose than I gave her credit
tfor." This thesis, wrongheaded as it was, was generally accepted within
the embarrassed family. That Maria was a frightened, insecure, half-
isick, hungry, confused, unmarried twenty-seven seems not to have
occurred to anyone as a possible explanation of her strange behavior.
JBut the initial shock of the thing was a little too much to absorb.
Virginia ladies normally did not marry common Yankee soldiers in the
middle of the Civil War.35
The opening of Grant's spring campaign of 1864 in Virginia put
ran end to Gardie's helpless struggle with Tacitus and Xenophon at
Washington College. Franz Sigel's drive up the Shenandoah in May
produced a manpower crisis in western Virginia of serious proportions.
To help stem the Union tide in the Valley the young Cadets of the
Virginia Military Institute, boys fifteen to seventeen, were hastily
marched north to New Market and attached to General John C.
Breckinridge's command. At the Battle of New Market on May 15 they
"behaved splendidly, driving the enemy off the field and capturing 6
pieces of artillery." Gardie watched them form up and march out of
their barracks the night they left Lexington for New Market, hopes
high, drums throbbing. So many of his friends were among them. "I
would have liked so much to have been with them/' he lamented to
!his mother. "None of the Cadets were killed that I was acquainted with.
Only five were killed and forty wounded." 30
The defeat of the hapless Sigel at New Market and his retreat
north to Cedar Creek seemed for a moment to write finis to the Valley
campaign of 1864. A large segment of General Breckinridge's force in
western Virginia was confidently deployed to the Richmond area to
reinforce the beleaguered Lee. Brigadier General William E. Jones was
left in the Valley, headquarters in Lynchburg, with little more than a
scratch army to keep an eye on the battered enemy. The replacement
<of Sigel by Union General David Hunter caused no particular alarm
494
in Jones' undermanned camp. Hunter was known to be no Bonaparte
even though he could muster, all told, some 18,000 men to oppose the
6000 Rebels left in the Shenandoah. It was therefore a matter of some
surprise to Confederate commanders in the Valley to learn in late May
that the unskilled Hunter actually harbored notions of offensive warfare
and was preparing an advance south from Woodstock into the Staunton-
Harrisonburg area.
On May 26 the Rockbridge reserves, old men and young boys,
including among the boys Gardie Tyler and a number of other Washing-
ton College students, were called to the colors and marched north to
Staunton on what was identified at the outset as a routine "training
operation" in the field. They reached Staunton on May 29, the same
day Hunter's army of 8500 departed Woodstock for Harrisonburg. This
ominous movement of the Yankees put an end to all prospects of a
training exercise. Instead, General Jones ordered the attachment of
the untried Rockbridge troops to his force as combat reinforcements
while he hastily moved his meagerly supplemented little army north-
ward from Lynchburg to stern the Yankee plunge up the Valley. For
nearly a week, from May 29 to June 4, the Rockbridge soldiers
marched, countermarched and prepared fortifications near Mount Craw-
ford, Virginia, under Jones' command, as the Confederate general
maneuvered to stay between Hunter and Staunton. Into this exciting
real-war situation Gardie joined enthusiastically. He had learned of the
sacking of Sherwood Forest before leaving Lexington, and he burned
with vengeance as he waited impatiently to come to grips with Hunter's
despicable Yankees.
Unhappily for young Tyler, he reported sick with "ague and fever"
on June 2 and was ordered by the surgeon to a military hospital in
Staunton. He therefore luckily missed the disastrous Battle of Piedmont
(variously called Mount Meridian and New Hope) eleven miles north-
east of Staunton on Sunday, June 5. Here a superior Union force of
8500 flanked the Confederate right, crushed it, rolled it up, and drove
the stunned Confederates streaming from the field in disarray. It was
Hunter's finest hour. General Jones himself died in the fight. In addi-
tion to 460 Confederates killed and some 1450 wounded, more than
1000 Rebels were taken prisoner. Jones' mixed arrny of 5600 regulars
and reserves practically disintegrated under the shock of the Union
attack. "Gen. Wm. E. Jones was in command on our side," Gardie
dejectedly wrote his mother, "and altho' he was a brave man and a
fine cavalry officer yet he showed himself to be no infantry leader.
He was killed in the battle while gallantly striving to rally his men.
The reserves fought with the steadiness of regular troops and were the
last to give way. They suffered severely. We lost i killed, 3 wounded
and two captured out of our company."
The decisive defeat at Piedmont opened Staunton to the enemy.
495
At eleven o'clock on the night of June 5 Gardie hastily fled the hos-
pital there and made his way by carriage to nearby Waynesboro, where
he managed to rejoin his retreating comrades. He narrowly missed being
captured by Hunter's victorious army when it entered Staunton at
2 A.M. on the sixth and took prisoner 400 sick and wounded Con-
federate soldiers caught in the town. Dispirited and dejected, and
somewhat disabused of the widespread Southern myth that one Rebel
soldier in the field was somehow worth ten Yankees, Gardie straggled
southward through Rockfish Gap toward Lynchburg with his unit, now
temporarily under the command of Brigadier General John C. Vaughn.
Meanwhile, Lee detached General Breckinridge and his division from
the Army of Northern Virginia and rushed them by forced marches to
the defense of crucial Lynchburg, the southern anchor of the entire
Valley defense system.
Fortunately for the Confederate cause in the Shenandoah, the con-
quering Hunter suddenly developed a severe case of hesitancy, the pe-
culiar tactical malady that so frequently debilitated Union generalship
throughout the Civil War. Instead of vigorously pursuing the beaten
and retreating Confederates directly south through Rockfish Gap to-
ward Lynchburg, Hunter rested a day in Staunton and then marched
obliquely southwestward to Lexington. There he casually frittered away
another two days accomplishing little but the vindictive burning of
V.M.I, and the home of Governor John Letcher on June 12-13. Wash-
ington College was also sacked by Hunter's soldiers. Its science equip-
ment was destroyed, its library scattered, doors and windows were
broken, geological and fossil specimens were thrown around the campus
like rocks, and army horses were stabled in the college dormitory. By
the time the dilatory general finally appeared before Lynchburg on
June 17, Breckinridge had reached the town. Jubal A. Early and his
Second Corps, also detached by Lee from the Richmond theater and
rushed to Lynchburg, were arriving in the area, elaborate trenches and
fortifications had been dug, and Confederate forces in the Valley had
been thoroughly reorganized. A frontal assault by Hunter on the Lynch-
burg trenches on June 18 produced no more than a small-scale Union
blood bath and an opportunity for young Gardie Tyler to shoot at the
hated Yankees at last — and from the relative safety of a shoulder-
deep rifle pit at that. Following his predictable repulse at Lynchburg,
the confused Hunter withdrew westward through Salem and into West
Virginia, hotly pursued by Early. This foolish tactic abandoned the
entire Shenandoah Valley to the Confederates and virtually ended the
summer campaign in the region. What had opened brilliantly for the
Union commander at Piedmont ended in a gloom rivaling that which
gripped the Yankee army following Sigel's disaster at New Market.
By the time Gar die's unit returned again to Lexington to be de-
mobilized in late June the inadequate Hunter was wandering aimlessly
496
and ineffectually through the West Virginia mountains. He had, how-
ever, left his mark on Lexington. Gardie found the proud V.M.I, re-
duced to "a mass of ruins." The Yankee visit to the little town had
also terminated the semester at Washington College. The institution
was in no fit condition to function, although some students stayed on to
complete the disrupted term. The desolation of the rifled campus and
the excitement of the jaunt to Staunton and Lynchburg and back com-
bined to convince Gardie that he could not return to the stricken col-
lege in the fall "I am going to join the Drewry's Bluff battery," he
told his mother firmly. "You must get over the notion that I am only
a child for indeed I feel fully able to take care of myself." David
Gardiner Tyler had become a soldier and a man simultaneously. On
July 12, 1864, he turned eighteen.37
Gardie arrived in Richmond from Lexington on July 23 and
moved into a flat occupied by James A. Sernple. The capital was
quiet and confident still, and young Tyler expressed to Harry Beeckman
something of its defiant mood:
From, present appearances one would infer that the war is fast drawing to an
end, but appearances are deceitful sometimes; God grant it may be so this
time. Still, if our enemies are determined on war we are better prepared than
ever before to meet the shock. Our cry will be, and is: "Come one, Come all I"
This is not the language of a few enthusiasts only but of the whole nation
The Northern people are at last coming to their senses and begin to see the
war in its true light. They have only two alternatives upon which to decide
and those are: peace or subjugation of, not the South, but of the North itself,
for they are fast losing every vestige of their former boasted freedom and
are lapsing into a despotism worse than that of Russia.88
There were, more persuasively, solid military reasons for the op-
timism felt in Richmond that the war might yet be brought to an end
by a negotiated peace recognizing Confederate independence. By Sep-
tember 1864 Grant's casualties in the Wilderness, at Spotsylvania, and
at Cold Harbor had added up to a total so staggering that the bloody
record had been introduced into the 1864 Presidential campaign as an
anti-Lincoln issue. Unable to take Richmond by frontal assault, Grant
had slipped around the city to the east and south in June and laid
siege to Petersburg in an attempt to enter Richmond by the back door.
By the end of July this maneuver had bogged down in the trenches be-
fore Petersburg. Butler's Peninsula campaign had also come to grief.
Badly mauled by an inferior force under General Beauregard in June,
the incompetent Butler had managed to get himself locked up in the
Bermuda Hundred Peninsula on the James River some thirty miles be-
low Richmond where, in the words of one historian, his army was
"actually as much out of the war as if they had been transported bodily
to South America." In the Shenandoah Valley Sigel's defeat at New
Market in May, followed by the containment of Hunter before Lynch-
497
burg in June, might not have been such a Union disaster had not
Hunter stupidly withdrawn from Lynchburg to the west. This un-
covered the Valley and permitted Jubal Early's daring and psycho-
logically satisfying raid to within five miles of Washington on July
ii. Only Sherman in Georgia had met with success in the 1864 summer
campaigns. But if Atlanta was under his guns on September i, Rich-
mond, for the moment at least, was safe. Ringed by powerful entrench-
ments and batteries, the Confederate capital appeared inviolable.39
After discussing the matter thoroughly with Semple, Gardie de-
cided to join one of the artillery units protecting Richmond. As a soldier
in the Virginia Home Guard, he had been assigned duty guarding
prisoners at the Libby Prison shortly after his arrival in town in late
July. This he found to be uninteresting and unheroic work. Therefore
on September i he volunteered for service in the Rockbridge Battery,
a distinguished artillery unit which had earned much glory earlier in
the war when attached to the famous Stonewall Brigade under Jackson.
At one time it had been commanded by Lee's son, G. W. C. Lee. It was
now under the direction of Captain Edward Graham. Former Maryland
Senator William D. Merrick's son and other young men of quality
served in its enlisted ranks. When Gardie joined it the outfit was at-
tached to A. P. Hill's command and was stationed fourteen miles below
Richmond at Deep Bottom. The unit, as Gardie assessed its multiple
advantages, was "so convenient to Richmond" and was "composed of
gentlemen of the best standing belonging to the F.F.V.'s." Several of
Gardie's classmates had also joined the Rockbridge Battery, so there
was something of the atmosphere of a Washington College alumni
reunion about the whole enlistment venture.
For the next few months David Gardiner Tyler served with the
Battery in various defensive positions around Richmond. During these
months he quieted Julia's fears with constant assurances that he was
in no danger whatever. Save for shelling an occasional Federal gun-
boat on the river, the Battery had little to do. The food served the
gunners was good. There was ample coffee and sugar in the battery
mess. Guard duty was light and leaves into town were frequent. "My
dear mother do not be anxious about me," he wrote her, "for you know
that I am just as safe where I arn as I would be were I at a peaceful
home. . . . The artillery is by far the easiest service. ... I would have
been ashamed to show my face if, after we had gained our independ-
ence, it should be said that I did not assist to establish it Further-
more I like soldiering first rate." 40
His brother Alex thought he would like soldiering first-rate, too.
As early as April 1864 he began nagging Julia to be permitted to go
south and join his brother so that he too might "take my stand in
Dixie's land, to live, fight and die in Dixie's land." Translating Sallust
bored him. It was no decent occupation for a red-blooded, no-per-cent
498
Confederate patriot all of sixteen years old. He wanted to massacre
Yankees. Julia pleaded with her son not to go. But he insisted, and
she finally gave way — after Alex had run away from home in mid- April
and gone to Baltimore, determined to leave for Virginia whether his
mother approved or not. Brought back to Staten Island, he was pun-
ished for disobedience. This formality attended to, Julia then reluc-
tantly helped him make plans to leave for the South. She made him
promise her, however, that he would join the Confederate Navy rather
than the high-casualty-rate infantry. For a moment in July 1864 she
considered going south with him. She was at this juncture very much
worried about Maria Tyler (whose "marriage" to Private Kick had
not yet taken place), and she thought she might be able to salvage
something from the reported chaos at Sherwood Forest. But Semple
strongly advised her against the trip. "I do not want you to run the
risk even of being maltreated by the Feds, much less by the abominable
Yankee darkies who would be all around you," he warned. So Alex
departed New York for Halifax alone in July, determined to join the
Confederate Navy when he reached Richmond. Arriving in Bermuda
from Halifax on July 31, he contacted Major Norman Walker, who saw
that he got aboard the speedy CSS Mary Celestia, Lieutenant Arthur
Sinclair, CSN, sailing for Wilmington on August 3. As he observed
Confederate naval officers strolling in the streets of St. George, Alex
decided the makeshift naval uniform Julia had fitted him out with in
New York "will not do at all." He told his mother to send him gold
lace, gray cloth, a Bowditch Navigation text, and, most important, a
dress sword. And to do it promptly.41
By his own account, Alex had a perfectly "bully time coming
through the blockade, and boy the old Yanks were as thick as bees
round a man's head when he goes to get the honey; but they didn't
happen to see us ere they were all after the privateer Tallahassee who
was agoing out when we was acoming in." For sixteen days, however,
the grammatically retrograde patriot was quarantined aboard the Mary
Celestia "because we had the yaller fever on board." Not until August
26 did Alex walk casually into his brother's tent at Camp Lee where
Gardie was living while he was attached to the Libby Prison guard
detail.
It was a happy reunion, and it called for a family conference.
Semple made it clear to Alex, and later in a letter to Julia, that the
boy would have great difficulty securing a midshipman's warrant.
Few midshipman appointments were being made in September 1864 as
the Confederate Navy fast disappeared from the seas. Nevertheless,
Semple arranged personal interviews for Alex with President and Mrs.
Davis and with the Confederate Secretaries of the Navy and the
Treasury. "Strong influences" were thus brought to bear in behalf of
Alex's naval ambitions, but to no avail. He was, Semple argued, "en-
499
tirely too young to enter the Army and it is not desirable that he
should do so." And since he could not get into the Navy, Semple
recommended to Julia that the youngster be sent to Washington Col-
lege for the fall semester. In October 1864 the embryonic Confederate
admiral found himself right back at his Latin translations. He was
one of the tiny band of twenty-two students the battered institution
enrolled that term. He remained in Lexington until December, when
the threatened closing of the college for lack of students brought him
back again to Richmond to resume his vain quest for a midshipman's
commission.42
The appearance in Richmond of Gardie in July and of Alex in
August 1864 swelled to nine the number of adult Tylers in the city
who had taken their stands "in Dixie's land." Present in the beleaguered
Confederate capital for the last Christmas of the war were Robert and
Priscilla, John, Jr., Dr. Tazewell Tyler and his wife, Nannie Bridges
Tyler, and James A. Semple and his spouse, Letitia Tyler Semple. If
they disagreed on other questions, they were all vigorous Rebels.
They kept the remainder of their relatives and in-laws informed of their
activities and the progress of the war. The shared hardships of life in
a city virtually cut off from what was left of the Confederacy gave
them a strong degree of adhesion. From Gardie and Alex's standpoint,
Semple was the linchpin in the group. He gave the boys their room
and board when they reached Richmond, arranged their financial affairs,
and helped them with their military ambitions. "The kindness of
Brother James/7 Alex told his mother, "we will never be able to repay.
He is the best man that ever lived without any exception. I love him
next to yourself and the children." Semple did all he could for the
Tyler boys, and through him Julia maintained close contact with her
sons and stepsons. It was a liaison she desperately needed after Juliana
died in October 1864 and as Julia's relations with her brother came to
a point of showdown in December 1864. "I am so sorry to hear that
you are likely to be troubled by that man, Mr. G.," Gardie sympathized
with her. "I have heard of his cowardly course towards you. But per-
haps one of these days he will have occasion to repent it." 43
-•ay^-^-^n*.
David Lyon's course toward Julia involved his decision to con-
test the deathbed will Juliana left when she expired on October 4, 1864.
It was, indeed, a controversial will which raised the legal question of
whether Julia exerted "undue influence" on her rapidly failing mother
when Juliana formally executed the document a bare four hours before
her passing. The case was a long and stormy one. Following hearings
before the Surrogate Court of Richmond County, New York, hearings
demanded by David Lyon, the will was denied admission to probate
on August 29, 1865, on the ground that undue influence had been ex-
ercised by the chief beneficiary, Julia, on the testatrix. Julia promptly
500
carried this ruling to the New York Supreme Court. There, on May
18, 1866, by a vote of 4 to o, the Surrogate's decision was reversed
and the will ordered admitted to probate. David Lyon, in turn, ap-
pealed the Supreme Court decision to the New York Court of Appeals,
the Empire State's highest tribunal. On January 2, 1867, the Court of
Appeals ruled, in a controversial s-to-3 decision, that the will was void
because of undue influence. Lacking a valid will, both parties then
went back into the Supreme Court to fight over the actual division of
the estate. A compromise was eventually hammered out on October
3, 1868. This gave Julia the Castleton Hill house and three eighths of
the Gardiner real estate in downtown New York; David Lyon got
three eighths of the city property; and Harry Beeckman received one
quarter. The financial burdens of the various assessments, taxes, and
mortgage payments on and against the estate were fairly distributed
along these fractional lines, as was the income from the inheritance.
Personal and household items of sentimental value were also divided
equally. To help heal the family breach opened by three years of
bitter litigation,( the 1868 compromise agreement, on its face, accepted
the principle that "the last will and testament of Juliana Gardiner shall
be deemed and adjudged a valid instrument." In broad outline, this
was true. The fractional grants were similar, but the severe restrictions
on David Lyon's enjoyment of his three-eighths share, written into his
mother's 1864 will, were properly abolished.
Actually, the final compromise in 1868 hewed closer in spirit to
an earlier will Juliana had drawn in 1858, after Margaret's death, than
it did to her deathbed testament six years later. Under the prewar
1858 will, David Lyon, Julia, and Harry were each to have received
one third of the Gardiner properties in New York City. David Lyon,
however, was given the Castleton Hill property, then valued at $20,000,
in special consideration for having managed his mother's legal and
financial affairs in the city after his return from San Diego in 1851.
But since he was also saddled with carrying the $5000 mortgage on
the Staten Island house, this extra boon under the original will was not
unreasonable — even though he had been a poor manager of his mother's
interests. Julia, after all, would eventually inherit Sherwood Forest
and have it for her own home as long as she lived.
The deathbed will of 1864, however, was quite different in orienta-
tion from the equitable 1858 document. Under its provisions Julia re-
ceived Castleton Hill, now valued at $27,000, while David Lyon was
charged with carrying the mortgage payments on the property. Harry
Beeckman received one quarter instead of one third of the residue of
the estate. The remaining three quarters were divided equally between
Julia and David Lyon, three eighths each, but with the proviso that
all of the rental income and interest from David Lyon's portion was to
go to Julia "until her losses in the rebel States should be made up to
501
her" by the federal government or until such time as she died. Never-
theless, David Lyon was expected to shoulder three eighths of the taxes,
maintenance, and mortgage payments on the downtown Gardiner rental
properties. These discriminatory provisions disappeared in the final
compromise of 1868 — as indeed they should have. In addition, under
the 1864 will Julia was named Harry's trustee with the power to con-
trol the income from his one-quarter inheritance until he attained his
majority in 1869. The estate, including Castleton Hill, was valued at
roughly $180,000 in 1864. Outstanding mortgages on the rental parcels
amounted to about $35,000. Steadily increasing in market value under
the impact of Civil War prosperity, it was an estate worth fighting
over.
The tragedy of the contested 1864 will was that it was unfair; so
unfair that it raised the suspicion (however untrue) of a dark con-
spiracy, mired in greed, carried out by a Copperhead subversive against
a dutiful and patriotic son over the expiring body of a foolish old woman
as she attempted to make psychic contact wth relatives beyond the
grave toward which she herself was hastening. The will might have been
challenged on the moral ground of rank inequity rather than on the
tricky undue-influence proposition. This latter emphasis admitted into
consideration, implicitly and explicitly, numerous political, psychic,
and economic irrelevancies. Juliana fully appreciated the fact that the
1864 arrangement was inequitable. In the language of the will she
pointed to Julia's army of dependent children and noted that her daugh-
ter, whom she admitted she was consciously favoring, had been "sub-
jected to much injury and loss during the existing war." Sherwood
Forest, she announced, was "in ruins" and "could afford her no in-
come— none whatsoever."
Actually, Sherwood Forest's physical wounds were more super-
ficial than real, a fact better appreciated in 1866 than in 1864. The
main house remained intact. Only the fences and outbuildings had been
destroyed. The furniture, livestock, and farm implements, to be sure,
had been carried off. It was true, therefore, that the plantation might
no longer be expected to produce a livable income for a family the
size of Julia's. Still, the garbled and excited reports on the condition
of the plantation which Julia received from Charles City in the late
spring and early summer of 1864 were grim enough to convey the im-
pression of near-total destruction that found its way into the will. As
Juliana told Louisa Cooper three months before she died: "Julia is
poor, has a large family and is unprotected. She cannot afford to be
poor. She must have enough. David is a man and he has one of the
handsomest farms on the island. His wife's father is rich. Don't think
that I don't care for David, but I must take care of Julia."
That David Lyon had married well and was capable of sustain-
ing himself with Thompson money was but one of the irrelevancies
502
dragged into the case. Julia's lawyers, among them the brilliant William
M. Evarts, later Secretary of State in the Hayes administration, made
much of the point that David Lyon had managed his mother's busi-
ness and legal affairs in the city from 1851 until his expulsion from her
household in February 1864 with an indifference and inefficiency
bordering on the chaotic, and that he really deserved no more than the
will allowed him. This charge was true. David Lyon never was much
of a businessman or a lawyer. But the argument was scarcely germane
to the undue-influence charge. Similarly irrelevant was the fact that
during a family quarrel in January 1864 Gardiner had struck his sister
and knocked her senseless to the floor.
The entire case was also conditioned, if not actually influenced,
by Julia's arrant Copperheadism and by the converse fact that David
Lyon and Sarah were loyal Unionists as well as old-line citizens of
wealth and social standing in New York City. Newspaper accounts of
the litigation, as it made its weary and bitter three-year journey through
the courts, invariably emphasized Julia's connection with the deceased
President and identified him as one of Virginia's leading slavers and
secessionists. On the other hand, David Lyon was pictured as a staunch
American patriot. Indeed, in December 1864 he threatened to have
the rest of the members of the Staten Island Board of Supervisors, on
which body he served, shipped to Fort Lafayette for Copperhead dis-
loyalty. He was a patriot's patriot.
Finally, the whole question of undue influence was not nearly so
clear in the law of 1865-1867 as it would be a century later. Not that
it is an open-and-shut proposition today. The conflicting legal prec-
edents offered by opposing counsel in their attempts to define the term
were inconclusive to the point of mutual cancellation. The plaintiff's
case thus turned essentially on specific evidences of Julia's actual
physical interference in the drawing and signing of the will, with a view
toward demonstrating that the degree of this influence constituted cir-
cumstantial evidence of a premeditated conspiracy. The main con-
tentions of the plaintiff did not center on the emotional and psycho-
logical intent of the parties to the alleged conspiracy.
At the risk of pronouncing a gratuitous obiter dictum on the case
a full century after it was argued, it must be pointed out that there
was on Julia's part no conscious intent to conspire. While her actions
did, in fact, manifest some evidence of "influence" over her dying
mother, Juliana clearly wanted her 1864 will to read exactly as it did.
The deep personal relations between mother and daughter, the intimate
tone of their private correspondence during the Civil War, their long
concern for each other's health and welfare, the identity and similarity
of their political views, their mutual concern for the financial fate of
Julia's young children after Tyler's death and after Sherwood Forest
was plundered and its labor f orce militarily manumitted all support the
503
contention that the provisions of the overturned will were exactly
what the dying Juliana wished them to be. The fact that she was
desperately ill (organically, not mentally) when she authorized Julia
to have the document drawn did not necessarily uphold David Lyon's
argument that she was incapable of straight thinking because disease
had reduced her will power to jelly. On the contrary, Juliana Mc-
Lachlan Gardiner died at the age of sixty-five with her considerable will
power still intact. And while she imagined herself in communication
with her husband and her departed children, that quaint notion did
not establish her as mentally incompetent in a legal sense. Much, how-
ever, was made of her psychic peculiarity by David Lyon's counsel and
this irrelevancy found its way into the majority opinion of the Court of
Appeals.
It was the specific manner in which the will was executed that
brought ultimately the undue-influence decision that negated it. On
the surface it looked bad. For several months prior to the drawing of
the will Julia had been writing all her mother's letters for her. She
also spent a great deal of time closeted with her mother in Juliana's
sickroom. Indeed, Juliana spoke to no one else. She relied exclusively
on her daughter for her every need and want. She appeared to be, as
the plaintiff later argued, under Julia's "influence" -during her last
months on earth.
On Saturday, October i, when it appeared Juliana had taken a
bad turn, Julia wrote out certain provisions her mother wished in-
corporated in a new will. On Monday morning, October 3, tutor Ralph
Dayton carried these suggestions to Mr. Clark, Juliana's lawyer. Clark
called at Castleton Hill early that evening and said he could not pre-
pare a new will without personal instructions from the devisor. Julia
told him to return the following morning for an interview with her
mother. Accordingly, at 9:30 A.M. on Tuesday, October 4, Clark reached
the house and spoke with Juliana. He found her at this time cogent,
but "exhausted, vomiting, weak, signifying her wishes and assent some-
times by words and sometimes by nods." Nevertheless, a rational con-
versation ensued during which the lawyer suggested some minor changes
from Julia's written list of provisions. He promised to return that after-
noon at five o'clock with the finished document.
At noon, however, Clark was instructed by a messenger from
Julia to complete the work at once and come quickly to the house,
as Juliana was dying. The lawyer arrived at 2 P.M. and found Juliana
attended by Dr. Rice, an Islip, Long Island, physician who had treated
her the preceding summer. Julia had called Rice into the case on
Monday, October 3. That evening she had been informed by the doctor
that in his opinion her mother's illness was terminal. When Clark
reached the bedside Juliana was indeed so far gone that Julia had to
hold her head for her while she coughed and vomited. She could not
504
speak. Clark read the finished will to her after asking Dr. Rice whether
in his judgment his patient still possessed the ability and capacity to
make a will. The physician said he thought so. As Clark read, Juliana
nodded her head in assent to the provisions. Julia then raised her mother
up and held her steady while Juliana affixed her signature. Rice and
Dayton then signed as witnesses. Juliana slumped back in the bed. Four
hours later, at 6 P.M. on October 4, 1864, the powerful matriarch of
the Gardiner family passed silently away. "I am so happy to see with
what Christian fortitude you stand the blow," Gardie sympathized from
Richmond. "Oh! how I wish that I could have seen her before her
death." David Lyon probably wished the same thing.
At no time during these final crucial days and hours was David
Lyon told that his mother was dying, or summoned to her house, or
informed that she had executed a new will. It seems clear, as David
Lyon argued and as the Court of Appeals later held, that Julia had
persuaded, or influenced, her mother to order her eldest son and his
family away from Castleton Hill in February 1864. It may also be true
(the evidence is not quite so conclusive) that Julia somehow induced,
or influenced, her mother to believe that David Lyon had purchased his
Northfield farm in 1853 with her money. If so, this false accusation
on the part of the daughter, whatever its morality, merely compounded
a split between mother and son produced earlier by political differ-
ences and the tension of too many people of unlike mind and habit
living together under the same roof. In any event, the precise relevance
of these two evidences of Julia's "influence" over her mother remains
obscure in a case turning on the physical execution of a will several
months later. To argue, as the majority opinion of the New York Court
of Appeals subsequently did, that this puissant matron was "infirm
of purpose, sick and old . . . imbued with false impressions, and brought
to a condition of nervous and causeless suspicion and alarm" by a
Machiavellian daughter under whose nefarious influence she supinely
ordered and executed her will, is, in retrospect, difficult to accept. More
reasonable is Justice Peckham's minority opinion that
undue influence within the meaning of the law . . . must be an influence exer-
cised by coercion or by fraud to set aside the will of a person of sound mind.
. . . This undue influence cannot be presumed, but must be proved to have
been exercised, and exercised in relation to the will itself and not merely to
other transactions This will was executed according to law when the mind
of the testatrix was sound and clear. It was carefully read over to, and fully
understood by, her. She expressed her gratification that it was made. It was
also prepared by her own personal directions and instructions. It was in sub-
stance in accordance with her wishes expressed in New York, when her
daughter was not present, several months prior to its execution. There is
nothing rising to the dignity of evidence, to show any undue influence over
the testatrix.44
SOS
Be that as it may, Julia ultimately lost her battle. The will was
formally overturned in January 1867. And for a period of nearly three
years after the Civil War, while Tyler vs. Gardiner was being fought,
the income from the estate was held in escrow and dribbled out by a
court-appointed referee pending the final decision. During these grim
Reconstruction years Julia was, by Gardiner standards at least, poor.
She borrowed to the hilt to make ends meet in the style to which she
had been long accustomed. Sherwood Forest was almost lost for back
taxes. The education of her children at home and abroad was deficit-
financed. Old mortgages were extended and second mortgages were
negotiated to cover these expenses. And the bitterness she developed for
her brother was absorbed in all its intensity by her progeny. It split
the Gardiner-Tyler family alliance to the bone, creating a gaping wound
that could not be bandaged with a compromise settlement, however
fair, four years after the event. In the final analysis Tyler vs. Gardiner
was a small-scale Civil War.
Julia began her long legal battle in October 1864 by warning her
brother that a will contest could only expose Gardiner dirty linen to a
sensation-hungry public and bring discredit upon the whole family. She
pleaded with him not to undertake a suit. His response to her plea was
to force his way into Castleton Hill, armed with a search warrant and
in company with a policeman "bearing a club," to gather evidence to
sustain his side of the contest. Julia's 1864 winter campaign thus opened
rather inauspiciously.
One thing was clear to her, however. She would have to hold on
to Castleton Hill in the legal trials that lay ahead. Continuing reports
from Charles City gave her little confidence that Sherwood Forest would
ever again suffice the needs of her family. To be sure, a few of the
former Tyler slaves — Bennett, Burwell, Randolph, Randall, and their
women — had drifted back and settled down on the place. "In con-
nection with some free negroes" they had even harvested a "tolerable
crop of corn" in the fall of 1864, Having always lived at Sherwood
Forest they had no other home. Emancipation as an idea came through
to them only dimly. And without tools or money they could not begin
repairs on the demolished farm buildings or on the house they had
foolishly helped sack. So they squatted on the land and waited, and
pleaded for their old mistress to return and help them. Her former
servant, Celia Johnson, reported to Julia in November 1864, how-
ever, that the house was completely uninhabitable. Only two carpets
had been salvaged. "One or two tables I think are whole but they are
the ends of dining tables." In the early winter Julia again sought a
Union Army pass to return to the plantation, if only "for a day," to
evaluate for herself its livability and bring away whatever was left
worth saving. Again she was dissuaded. "Don't you let mother think of
coming south" Alex told his sister Julie. "If she goes anywhere let it
506
be England or the Continent." News that "Confed scouts" had burned
some of the outbuildings during the confusion in May and June made
the estate no more livable than if the hated Union Army had set the
fires. And as Julia and everybody else with clear vision could see, the
sands of the Confederacy were running out. She decided therefore to
heed her son's objections and not return to the plantation.45
—•MBfr <& •gBBtm-
Increasing inflation, shortages of raw materials, and widespread
desertions from the Confederate Army badly compromised the South's
ability to carry on the unequal struggle. President Davis1 desperation
proposal in November 1864 to arm the Negro slaves was an oblique
announcement of the gathering disaster staring the Confederacy full
in the face. The fall of Fort Fisher in January 1865 (which landed the
unlucky Captain Gayle back at Fort Warren for his sophomore year
and closed Wilmington, the South's last open port) raised the curtain
on the final act of the bloody drama. As Sherman slashed boldly up
through the Carolinas in February and March, Lee and his Army of
Northern Virginia, outnumbered 115,000 to 54,000, made their last
heroic attempts to break through Grant's lines and lift the siege of
Petersburg and Richmond. These efforts failing, Lee had no choice
but to abandon Petersburg and Richmond on April 2, 1865, and begin
his last march westward toward Lynchburg away from the jaws of the
closing Yankee trap. The Confederate government fled to Danville,
where, it was hoped, the Army would eventually catch up with the
politicians and then, somehow, all would join General Joseph E. John-
son's battered forces in North Carolina and carry on the fight in the
mountains. It was, of course, a hopeless prospect.
But the Tylers caught in Richmond at the end refused to abandon
hope. Convinced that the collapsing government still had prospects,
Major John Tyler, Jr., announced himself a candidate for the Con-
federate Congress in February and commenced a brisk campaign. Until
late March, Alex Tyler kept working for a midshipman's commission
in the Navy even though there were no Confederate ports left from
which to sail. In early April, when Lee's evacuation of the capital
began, Alex joined the Virginia First Artillery Battalion and together
with his older brother began the last, sad march to Appomattox,
"tugging and pulling at the cannon" all the way. As the lower city rose
in the flames set by the retreating army, neither he nor Gardie could
know that the Moncure and Dunlap building where John Tyler's papers
and the family portraits were stored would go up in the holocaust. The
bank where the family silver was vaulted also caught fire and burned,
badly scarring the metal. Before leaving Richmond, Gardie, Alex,
Semple, and Robert all forwarded their trunks to Danville, determined
to fight on for the Confederacy as long as any semblance of a govern-
ment or an army remained.46
507
The end came with merciful suddenness. Surrounded at Appomat-
tox Court House on April 7, Alex's seventeenth birthday, Lee had no
choice but to surrender his starving, wet, and bedraggled army of
30,000 thoroughly beaten men and boys — among the latter the dis-
pirited Tyler brothers. On April 9, 1865, it was over. Grant paroled
Lee's veterans to their homes, and the once-mighty Army of Northern
Virginia disappeared into song and legend down a hundred country
roads. For Alex it had been a very short war. As he described his
two-week experience to Ralph Dayton, his old Staten Island tutor,
from occupied Richmond on April 19,
I arrived on "Parole" three days ago after a weary inarch of 14 days — some-
times up in mud to my knees, tugging and pulling at the cannon and fighting
nearly every day and rations of two ears of corn a day with no where to
parch and burn it. It is true we had two days "rest," but then it was no rest
for both days it was raining "pitchforks" and we had nothing to cover with
but our blankets which were soon wet through which you can readily perceive
was far from making us more comfortable — but pish I I am telling only what
will worry you so I'll stop. I was sorry to hear of the death of Mr. Lincoln
for I expect it will be very hard for us "Rebels." . . .
A conference between the paroled brothers was held at Appomattox
immediately after the surrender. It was decided that Gardie should
proceed to Lexington and re-enter Washington College; Alex would go
to Sherwood Forest and "try to fix things up there." And so the boys
separated, Alex reaching Richmond again on April 16 "completely in
rags," Brigadier General John E. Mulford, USA, the polite New Yorker
who had done Julia several favors during the war in his capacity as a
prisoners-exchange officer at Fortress Monroe, befriended the lad, help-
ing him cash a check on his mother's account in the Manhattan Bank
and providing him with a pass to New York City. But Alex was de-
termined to return to Sherwood Forest. This he did, reaching the planta-
tion on May i. Meanwhile, Robert Tyler had returned to Richmond
via Danville from Charlotte, North Carolina, where he and Semple
had gone with Jefferson Davis in the last-ditch stand of the Confederate
government.47
As the Confederacy breathed its last, Julia experienced her own
Appomattox, a degrading and humiliating defeat that clouded her ex-
pectations of receiving judicial impartiality in the "Yankee Courts"1
on the status of her mother's will. At ten o'clock on the rainy Saturday
evening of April 15, fifteen hours after Abraham Lincoln's tragic death
in Washington, three inflamed and vengeful local toughs, armed with
"swords and clubs" and led by one Bertram Delafield of Staten Island,
burst suddenly into the parlor at Castleton Hill and demanded that
Julia give up the "Rebel flag" she was "known" to be displaying some-
where in the house. Spying a flag of sorts hanging over a picture in
508
the parlor, the muddy-booted invaders climbed up on chairs, ripped it
down, knocked over some furniture, and made off into the night with
their trophy. "Secessionism, open or secret, will not be tolerated here,"
boasted one of the patriotic trespassers in an anonymous letter to
the New York Herald two days later. "You are aware that we are blest
with having as a resident among us, Mrs. Tyler, widow of the deceased
rebel ex-President John Tyler. She seems to be successful in passing
the lines of our army, and of returning at her pleasure, and with her
two eldest sons in the rebel army would seem to be a privileged per-
son." Other city newspapers picked up the story, playing it as a timely
blow against latent Copperheadism as the martyred Lincoln went to
his Rebel-dug grave. None of the published accounts pointed out that
Julia's "Rebel flag" was actually a small piece of nondescript, tricolored
bunting sewn by Margaret ten years earlier as a handkerchief for
Harry and sentimentally retained in the family as a souvenir of Mar-
garet's handicraft. Julia was an out-and-out secessionist and Copper-
head, but she was not so foolish in her sentiment as to have risked
displaying an actual Confederate flag in her parlor.
She strongly suspected that David Lyon was behind the violation
of her home. Delafield later implied this much, confessing that a "near
relative" of Julia's had told him of a Confederate flag hanging in the
subversive den that was Castleton Hill. She muted these suspicions of
her brother, and in her angry protests to the newspapers and to Union
Army authorities in New York she emphasized only the cowardly
audacity of the Delafield gang in its raid on a parlor inhabited by
helpless women and children. She demanded the return of the souvenir,
and she pointed out that the only flag at Castleton Hill was an Ameri-
can flag. But what the newspapers referred to casually as a "spirited
little affair" that had rid Staten Island of a "secesh banner" Julia saw
as a preview of dark things to come for Confederate sympathizers
caught in the North during the emotional period following Lincoln's
assassination. Anonymous threats to burn down her house were received.
So frightened did she become that she moved her family into a New
York hotel for a few days for safety. Simultaneously, she pressed
charges against Delafield for trespass through General Dix's head-
quarters, asking also that the general protect her from future mob
violence. Dix investigated her complaint and admitted that Julia had
indeed been "subjected to insult and calumny without in the slightest
degree deserving it." Little more came of it than that. Margaret's
handkerchief was not recovered and Delafield was not punished.48
From Fort Warren prison Captain Gayle wrote Julia a gentle
note expressing sympathy for her in her harrowing experience with the
superpatriot fringe. From Lexington came an outraged expression of
Cardie's frustrated desire to have been present in the parlor to thrash
the rascals when they pushed their way in. To Alex the Delafield
509
incident argued for but one decision: "Now my dear mother/7 he ad-
vised her as he was leaving Richmond for Sherwood Forest,
I cannot see for my life how you can live North where you endure such
insults. It is the wish, and I pray of you, for both Gardie and myself to sell
out directly all your property and go to Europe — anywhere so that you leave
and take the children from the U. States. I would even sell Sherwood, for if
the South is conquered, which with the help of God it never will be, neither
G or A will ever live here under Northern rule. My mother, grant
our prayer.49
As Julia considered Alex's suggestion she wondered what there
was left of the old way of life worth struggling to preserve. The
prospect of Europe was appealing. The Old South was dead. Her hus-
band, her father, and her mother were all dead. Alexander and Margaret.
were gone. Her plantation was destroyed and its labor force forever
scattered. Her two oldest sons, bitter and disillusioned in defeat,,
advised her flight. Her surviving brother had broken with her entirely
and ahead lay a rigorous and expensive legal battle with him. Her
Copperhead sympathies actually endangered her younger children and
threatened to bring down on their heads the fiery destruction of her
Castle ton Hill refuge. From Gardie in particular, and from her friends1,
in the conquered South generally, came a picture of despair and hope-
lessness. "Here I am," Gardie wrote from Washington College in June,,
without home, without means and, I may almost say, without hope. Some-
times I begin to think that I will have to hire myself out as a day-laborer-
My clothes are entirely played out and I have had them patched. So you see
I am a perfect "rag, tag and bobtail." How much happier I was in the army
than I am now. I would rather have remained in it twenty years than be in
the situation that we are now in. No country, no home, no freedom. What a,
deplorable case we present. I will not be able to come to you as I (even if I
could get the necessary funds) have only my uniform which I am not per-
mitted to wear.50
Julia pondered, then she decided. She would stay in the United
States and fight — for the Gardiner estate, for Sherwood Forest, for her
children's educations, for the standard of living to which the Gardiners
were accustomed, for the social and political principles her husband
had embraced, and for the sheer cussedness of it. This was what John.
Tyler would have wanted her to do.
RECONSTRUCTION AND EPILOGUE
1865-1890
Desolation has set its seal upon all around us, and
the gloom like the veil of the grave has settled upon
the land. , . . It can never again be as it was.
DAVID GARDINER TYLER, JUNE 1 868
The first bleak months following Lee's surrender found Julia hard at
work trying to help old friends in the conquered South who had lost
everything in the "late political contest.77 Pleas for clothes, money
and food could not go unanswered. The situation of Varina Davis was
particularly piteous. The former First Lady of the Confederacy was
destitute. Her husband had been arrested as a traitor and was im-
prisoned in Fortress Monroe. While his fate was still uncertain, there
was much wild talk in the North of a firing squad. His wife was des-
perate. Because of her relationship to Julia through Jenny Howell
Waller she felt no embarrassment asking her "beautiful step mother7*
for help. "We are very poor,77 she wrote Julia in July from Savannah.
"In what a maze of horrors we have been groping for these two months.
... I sometimes wonder if God does not mean to wake me from a terrific
dream of desolation and penury. . . ." To Mrs. Davis7 plea Julia
promptly responded with gifts of shoes and clothing for her and for
those of her children who were bound to school in Canada away from
"Yankee influences.77 Julia had been thinking along the same educa-
tional lines herself. All over the South schools and colleges were closed.
She knew her children would not accept education under Yankee
auspices. Therefore, like Varina Davis, she started investigating Cana-
dian and German institutions.1
Simultaneously, she undertook to ease Captain Gayle7s last boring
months in Fort Warren Prison with packages of food and tobacco. "We
have become assured that under no circumstances will a man of us be
liberated without taking the amnesty oath/' Gayle sadly informed her.
"As the Confederacy has ceased to exist, I do not see what else remains
for us to do ... but to accept with as good a grace as possible the exist-
ing condition of affairs and subscribe to the 'oath.7 " Julia agreed there
was no other choice.
Gayle's realism was not as widespread among some defeated Con-
federates as it might have been under the blunt new circumstances of
the post-Appomattox world. Thousands, like Gardie and Alex Tyler,
could not absorb the idea that the war was really over and that the
gallant South had been beaten. It was as though personal bravery,
suffering, dedication, and devotion had counted for nothing — that God
had somehow made a frightful mistake in permitting the Yankees to
win. "Sometimes I think," said Gardie, "that the heroes who fell during
the war are ten thousand times better off than the survivors. All the
future is dark and cheerless before us, our sorrows can only end in the
grave." At first, the confused and dejected nineteen-year-old thought he
might join the stream of high-ranking Confederate officers and officials
who were fleeing the South for lives of exile in Brazil and Mexico. Cer-
tainly he could not accept the prospect of living under the flag of the
invader; nor could he abide the humiliation of having to take the
"damnasty oath" and come crawling back "like a whipped cur" into the
United States. For a brief time in August 1865 he prayed to God that
the diplomatic crisis over the Emperor Maximilian's continued presence
in Mexico would lead to a rousing war between the United States and
Napoleon Ill's government. "You would know very well which side I'd
be apt to join in such an event," he told his cousin Harry.2
When a war with France failed to materialize, Gardie reluctantly
decided that his mother's idea of sending him, Alex, and Harry Beeck-
man to college in Germany was a good one. After all, the season for
"'slaughtering larger game such as Yankees" was over, and he did not
think he could accustom himself to watching the former Sherwood
Forest slaves riding around Charles City in their own buggies free and
sassy as you please. Alex, meanwhile, had had no luck getting the
plundered plantation functioning again during the late spring and early
summer of 1865. The job was much too big for him and Julia had
matured other plans for farming the estate anyway. Discouraged and
beaten, he too was ready for a change of occupation and scenery.
So it was that in September 1865 the two Tyler boys and their
cousin Harry were aboard the SS Hansa bound for Europe and for
college in Karlsruhe, Germany. They sailed in the company of the
Reverend John Fulton and his wife, old Copperhead associates of
Julia's from Staten Island. It was Fulton's plan to open a boardinghouse
in Karlsruhe and take in British and American students there for a
512
livelihood. "Our crowd is a jolly one/' Gardie wrote his mother from
shipboard, "all except five being southerners. We talk 'Secesh7 as much
as we please and sing Southern songs on deck every evening." Behind
him Gardie Tyler left an iambic record of his attitude toward the
Yankees and all their works, a parting salvo into the Union positions
as the youthful artilleryman retreated into distant Baden. It was
schoolboyish verse, but it made crystal-clear the fact that David Gardi-
ner Tyler, former Confederate gunner, future Virginia farmer, lawyer,
state senator, Circuit Court judge, and United States congressman,
would live and die proudly "unreconstructed."
Yes, we'll fight them again,
Tho' vanquished as before;
We'll break the tyrant's chain,
Or die Jmid cannon's roar.
Better die as they have done,
Than live as we do now;
With no rights beneath the sun,
And shame upon our brow
We fought for four long years,
For liberty and fame;
Our flag went down 'mid tears,
Shed for our country's shame.
But we'll up at them once more,
With Jehovah for our shield;
This time we'll whip the foe,
Or be left upon the field.3
It was one thing to anathematize the hated Yankees in verse. It was
quite another to learn to function normally again under their heavy-
handed occupation of the South, to try to reclaim something of the
ante-bellum way of life from the junkpile of defeat and subjugation. To
this difficult if not impossible task Julia turned during the summer of
1865 in an effort to get Sherwood Forest once again into production.
Shortly after Appornattox she hired Si evert von Oertzen as her
farm manager and dispatched the immigrant Swede, cousin of a Staten
Island acquaintance, to Sherwood Forest to begin the restoration of the
plantation. Julia had read many novels of castle and manor life in the
Middle Ages, Walter Scott's Ivanhoe and kindred works, and it was her
plan to reproduce something resembling the medieval manorial system in
Charles City. But instead of employing freed Negroes as her peasant
labor force she contemplated the hiring of Swedish immigrant farmers
and their families on an informal contract basis. Under her verbal agree-
ment with Oertzen and the four Swedish farmers and their families who
were subsequently recruited in New York in June and sent down to
Sherwood, each immigrant was given a "few acres" of ground for his
personal use. In return, the farmers agreed to work four days each week
513
on Sherwood land and two days on their own. Julia, in turn, paid the
transportation costs for each family from New York to Virginia, and
she agreed to supply her Nordic laborers with food and clothing, seed
and tools, until the first crop was harvested. After this they were to be
on their own until the three-year agreement had expired. John C. Tyler
thought this an excellent arrangement, "the best scheme I have had pre-
sented to my mind; for as to the negroes, they, so far, are perfectly
worthless." Similarly, other Charles City plantation owners, faced with
the same labor problem as Sherwood Forest, watched the Swedish ex-
periment with considerable interest. "Everyone who has heard of it
thinks it excellent," Alex wrote his mother in July.4
The Swedish interlude began on July 3, 1865, when the first of
the immigrant families arrived at Sherwood. Oertzen had purchased two
"condemned" U.S. Army horses at Fortress Monroe and his small labor
force immediately began plowing the caked and long-neglected earth in
an attempt to get turnips, beans, and potatoes into the ground before
undertaking the major job of planting a wheat crop. In addition to the
funds sent to Oertzen for the horses, Julia dispatched the first of several
shipments of beef, flour, sugar, salt, nails, and tools from New York to
the plantation to feed and provision her Swedes.
What began in optimism ended in gloom. By the beginning of Sep-
tember Oertzen was demanding more and more cash for groceries,
horses, harnesses, seed wheat, and farm equipment. "We are doing
nothing/' he confessed. "It is so very dry here that everything is dying
away. The ground so hard that not two horses are able to get a plough
through the ground, and so we are waiting for rain or money or both. . . .
We are living already on milk and peaches and peaches and milk morn-
ings, noons and nights. The meat is nearly all gone ... we do not know
how sugar looks." Julia did not respond very sympathetically to this
urgent appeal for "a few hundred dollar now," coming as it did within
a week of the Surrogate Court's ruling that her mother's will was in-
admissible to probate. Still, she sent $400 to John C. Tyler with instruc-
tions to purchase mules, plows, fencing, and other farm gear for Sher-
wood. In the same mail, however, she summarily discharged Oertzen
and ordered him from her property. She was fortified in this precipitate
action by John C. Tyler's opinion that the Swede "is of no earthly
account. None of the persons you sent here have earned their salt since
they have been here ... it would be to your interest to get rid of all of
them." Julia agreed, and the Swedish experiment ended a few months
after its inception.
To fill the labor void and keep something growing on the old plan-
tation, the mistress of Sherwood Forest accepted the pattern into which
most of the postwar agricultural South was gradually drifting. She
followed John C. and Gardie's advice to let out various parcels of Sher-
wood land to the "damned niggers" on a straight sharecrop basis. "I
SI4
have applications from several persons to work portions of it on shares/'
her former manager informed her in late September 1865, "and have no
doubt but the whole or nearly all the plantation could be worked that
way. I let out a part of [your] land this year to two persons to cultivate
in corn. They will make about eighty barrels and they are to pay one
half of what they make." 5
Von Oertzen did not accept his summary discharge in good spirit.
On the contrary, he calculated the value of the work he had already
done at Sherwood Forest at $20 per month and suggested that Julia pay
him $100 or "what you think proper." Julia did not think more than half
that amount "proper/7 and her decision in the matter prompted the
Swede to sue her for $100 in March 1866. The suit was eventually
thrown out of court, but not before Julia had spent nearly the amount
of Oertzen's claim in legal fees.6
Thanks to David Lyon Gardiner and Sievert von Oertzen among
others, Julia was rapidly becoming one of the most sued women in
America. From 1865 until 1874 she was almost constantly before the
courts in one capacity or another and for one reason or another. There
was the long struggle over Juliana's will, the numerous claims against
her husband's estate, various suits involving tax liens and real estate
transfers, the attempt to regain control of Villa Margaret, and a desper-
ate struggle to hold onto Sherwood Forest in i87o-i874.7
The fight to regain possession of Villa Margaret, if not typical of
Julia's multiple legal tribulations, revealed something of the difficulties
encountered by a "Rebel lady" in securing satisfaction from the federal
government during the Reconstruction years, and the massive amounts
of sheer patience the process demanded. Actually, Julia anticipated no
conscious obstructionism from the Johnson administration in the Villa
Margaret matter. Shortly after hostilities ended and Andrew Johnson
of Tennessee had taken office, she dispatched a strong letter to the new
President lecturing him on how he should run the distracted country.
Only a policy of kindness and conciliation toward the conquered South,
she assured him, would earn him the everlasting plaudits of Southerners
like himself:
Now, President Johnson, you can redeem yourself in the hearts of your real
fellow countrymen, your brave and noble fellow citizens of the South, whose
blood runs in your veins, for whom you must have a mellow feeling, a natural
sympathy. . . . You have only to move in the right way — the way of righteous-
ness, peace and mercy — with a memory of the terrible trials and sufferings
that have rent the hearts and souls of your own people in flesh and blood to
be blessed thrice by them May your heart be the abode of gentle mercy,
so that when your last hour shall come you can hope to be forgiven, even
as you forgave.8
Since one of the "terrible trials and sufferings" Julia herself had
sustained during the war was the loss of Villa Margaret, she began a
SIS
heavy pen-and-ink bombardment of the White House and Washington
officialdom demanding the return of her Hampton property. Unfortu-
nately, the problem was complicated by the fact that the Tyler house
was occupied in early 1866 by white schoolteachers from the North sent
down to Virginia by the Freedmen's Bureau to instruct the emancipated
Negroes in the Hampton area. The Bureau, however, did not directly
control or administer the property, so Julia's protesting letters to Gen-
eral O. O. Howard, Bureau chief in Washington, fell on fallow ground.
Instead, the Villa was managed by the American Missionary Society in
New York under an authority secured directly from the Secretary of
War. The Missionary Society provided room and board at the Villa for
the "school marms" and other Freedmen's Bureau officials in the area.
Julia therefore began a correspondence with the Reverend George Whip-
pie, Secretary of the American Missionary Society, asking that he clear
the Negro squatters and their ugly little shacks from the six acres sur-
rounding the main house. She suggested also that the Society either
begin paying a fair rent for the continued use of the property ($250 per
year was mentioned) or commence evacuating it altogether. Whipple
referred her demands to the Freedmen's Bureau and to the War Depart-
ment. They in turn passed Julia's complaints around Washington and
then threw them back into Whipple's lap. As the bureaucratic buck-
passing became an exact science, Julia and her lawyers tried to ascertain
whom to sue, in what court, and on what charge. For three frustrating
years this merry-go-round spun around while the property deteriorated
alarmingly in appearance and value. "They have never yet surrendered
willingly one foot of property real or personal that they could possibly
make use of," lawyer Charles B. Mallory had accurately warned her in
August 1866.
In October 1868 the War Department did authorize the not overly
generous payment of four dollars rent per month for the property, but
when Julia at last obtained control of the once-beautiful Villa in 1869
it was in dreadful condition. It was, she protested angrily to President
Ulysses S. Grant, "shorn of its beauty — the furniture gone, the out-
buildings destroyed and the grounds covered with negro huts." Since
she had no available funds with which to restore it herself, she suggested
to Grant that the government buy it. "The house which is of the Italia
gothic style can be restored without much cost to good condition," she
informed him. "It seems to me a desirable piece of property for the
government to possess being near the Artillery School which you have
instituted." The government was not interested. Julia was therefore
forced to sell the unsightly Villa Margaret privately in September of the
depression year 1874 for a mere $3500, less than a third of its 1860
value. She was lucky to get that for it.9
As the former First Lady became suffocatingly immersed in the
complex world of wills, suits, depositions, tax claims, and real estate
transfers, she did not lose sight of or sympathy for the difficult adjust-
ments, emotional and economic, faced by all the Confederate Tylers
during Radical Reconstruction. Sending her oldest sons and Harry
Beeckman off to college in Germany and putting her plantation into
marginal operation were but the first evidences of her determination to
do all she could to help the Tyler family regain its ante-bellum status
and dignity. To be sure, some members of the proud family responded
better to the challenge of the new order than others and needed her
assistance not at all. Some were nearly helpless and clung to her bounty
and psychological support tenaciously.
Robert Tyler, for example, adjusted quickly. He moved with Pris-
cilla to Montgomery, Alabama, after the conflict. There he did what had
long come naturally to Tyler men. In November 1866 he became a
candidate before the state legislature for the office of Adjutant General
and Inspector General of Alabama. "To live at all is a great struggle to
us/7 he told his stepmother in October 1866. "This country is almost
unredeemable. The negroes are violent politicians and I look forward
with dread to the election next month, not that I would mind much the
dying, but I hate the idea of being murdered." Robert neither won the
election nor was he murdered. Too proud to accept financial assistance
graciously offered him by James Buchanan and some of his old prewar
Pennsylvania political friends (he returned a check for $1000 to Bu-
chanan), he accepted instead a loan of $1000 from Priscilla's brother-in-
law, Allan Campbell, to sustain his family until he secured the editor-
ship of the Montgomery Advertiser in 1867. As editor of the influential
newspaper and as chairman of the State Democratic Executive Commit-
tee and a leader in the racist White Man's Party, Robert spent the last
years of an active life successfully fighting the Radical Republican-
Negro domination of Alabama. He died of a stroke on December 3,
1877, but not before he had seen the Carpetbagger power broken in
1874 and suffering Alabama freed of corrupt and venal Radical rule.
Montgomery, Priscilla wrote in 1866 when she and her husband first
arrived there, was a town where
Negro women sit along the sidewalks with their baskets of provisions while
the men fill the street. They never move an inch to let a lady pass and
actually at times I walk into the streets to get around them. They are dirty
and ragged, looking unhappy, restless and hungry The Negro is the in-
habitant of the town, the arbiter of its destinies, while over all floats in every
direction the Stars and Stripes, a hollow mockery! God only knows where
it will all end.
Thanks in part to editor Robert Tyler, it all ended in White Supremacy,
a racial despotism as morally corrosive as the one it replaced.10
If Robert Tyler found the key to Ms personal reconstruction in a
crusade against Negro rule in Alabama, King Numbers in Black, James
A. Semple found his in mental fantasy and political make-believe. He
was incapable of absorbing psychologically the reality of the South's
defeat. For the first year and a half after Appomattox he spent most of
his time attempting to organize Confederate underground cells in Can-
ada. Dedicated to the dubious proposition that the South would some-
how rise again militarily, these little expatriate groups, as short-lived
as they were ineffectual, maintained contact with Confederate officials
who had fled the country, opposed the Union military occupation of the
South, fought Radical Republican political policy, attempted to get un-
reconstructed Confederates into public office (Semple worked hard, for
example, to secure Robert Tyler's election in Alabama in 1866), sought
the release of Jefferson Davis from Fortress Monroe, and generally
labored to maintain focal points of Southern resistance pending the ar-
rival again of Der Tag. In this pathetic comic-opera cause Semple func-
tioned as liaison man, courier and propagandist, and as a working scribe
in an unofficial Confederate Committee of Correspondence patterned
after the Colonial models of 1772-1773. Throughout this period he
teetered dangerously on the brink of a complete psychological crack-up,
occasionally drifting across the thin dividing line into moments of ir-
rationality.
Refusing to take the amnesty oath in 1865, Semple went under-
ground. He changed his name, first to John Doe and then, with a shade
more imagination, to Allan S. James, took a disguise, and became a
cloak-and-dagger fugitive from the Union occupation. "So far I am free
and have no fears," the forty-four-year-old conspirator informed Julia
in November 1865, "as I am pretty well by this time acquainted with
my own powers of adroitness, courage, etc., and can provide pretty well
for emergencies." He helped Julia maintain contact with Varina Davis,
and Julia in turn gave him shelter when he passed through New York
en route to and from Canada.
Semple soon discovered with considerable disgust that the Confeder-
ate sympathizers in Montreal were mutually suspicious of one another
and hopelessly split in doctrine and policy. "There is the devil to pay
among the 'tribe' here," he informed Julia from Canada in August 1866.
"No one speaks to the other and I have heard the most astounding re-
ports and been questioned by a member of the 'tribe' and had no hesi-
tation in at once answering all questions in writing, and I tell you now
that by my own volition I will never pass another word with one of the
members here I shall write to Mrs. Davis and inform old Jeff of the
circumstances ... at the same time, I am ready to engage in any matter
which will further the interests of the South." But after eighteen months'
work he was ready to quit the whole futile business. Old friends wrote
Mm that his work for the defunct Confederacy was really hopeless. The
South, said one, "should yield at once to inevitable fate and accept the
Constitutional Amendment [Fourteenth] which it is shown that nothing
can defeat. It seems to me all Idle to prolong the struggle, especially after
the sword has proved so worse than useless Would that all had your
wise and manly views!" Semple finally agreed that the lost cause was
beyond resurrection. "I am tired of being hunted down," he confessed
to Julia in November 1866. Thus when Jefferson Davis, Semple's "For-
tress Monroe correspondent/' asked him to visit Mississippi on a "con-
fidential matter," Semple declined the commission. With that decision,
James A. Semple, alias John Doe, alias Allan S. James, acknowledged at
last the Civil War victory of the United States of America.11
It was a decision dictated by a near-total nervous breakdown in
October-November 1866 and by the final rupture at that time of his
never very satisfactory marriage to Letitia Tyler Semple. Indeed, while
Semple was playing cat and mouse with the Yankees in 1865-1866,
Letitia left him, moved to Baltimore, and opened a private school there
called the Eclectic Institute. During his mental illness in late 1866 Julia
nursed him, worried about him, and gave him shelter at Castleton Hill.
She paid for his room and board in a New York hotel while he was
convalescing in 1867. She also urged the purser to abandon the sea of
alcohol on which the South's defeat, the failure of the Confederate under-
ground, and his own despair had launched him. He did not heed her
advice. Wine, women, and cards temporarily became his life's work. And
he worked hard. Tazewell Tyler saw him in New York in October 1866
"constantly around the Theaters, traveling about the country with
actresses, gallivanting them to Central Park." January 1867 found
him in New Orleans, drinking and gambling heavily, threatening suicide.
For a time the confused Semple even imagined himself in love with
Julia. "You are good, / know, and beautiful to my eyes, but you are not
mine! ! My love you know you have taken, one day share my lot ... my
Sister darling," he wrote her in March 1866. Julia was mildly flattered
by all this, but she quickly put Semple straight on her feeling for him.
"Shall I admit," she asked,
that it gave me pleasure to read your professions of ardent affection? Per-
haps it should have been otherwise, and I shall rather chide you for avowals
that do not entirely agree with the abiding friendship I wish should grow up
between us— but it is so sweet to be caressed when the heart finds little
difficulty in responding that I will forgive you the mere expressions of a
letter and reproach only myself for suffering their influence to be so agreeable
and soothing. But why should I not regard you most tenderly? To that ques-
tion there are many answers in my heart, each one so satisfactory that I
shall not under any circumstances strive to weaken the tie which I trust with
time will rather grow firmer between us. ... [But] if necessary Cestorus
himself must be invoked to stand guard between us. I will become your
mentor to guide you into the right path whenever there is danger of your
needing [guidance] , Thus I am sure our friendship will be unmistakable. . . .
Nevertheless, reports of Sample's debauchment in New York and
New Orleans and Julia's patient attempts to snap him out of his moral
and mental decline reached Letitia in Baltimore and convinced her that
her errant husband and her still-attractive stepmother were up to no
good. She had never liked Julia anyway. To be sure, Julia owed Semple
a great debt of gratitude. He had done much for Gardie and Alex in
Richmond during the war, and for Julie after the war. Julia fully repaid
this debt to him, but not in the fashion the suspicious Letitia imagined.
And while Semple had indeed "led a wild, roving and checkered life,"
Julia had not figured in that side of it. She was never the "other woman'7
in any triangle, and she strenuously objected to Letitia's insinuations
that she was. Semple also challenged those insinuations after he emerged
from his illness and intemperance in July 1867 and was able to see
clearly and sensibly the sad drift of affairs.
Your remarks relative to Mrs. T. are not worthy of a daughter of John Tyler
[he told his estranged wife] . No matter what I may think of a lady, I rather
think I would keep it to myself. I was suffering and Mrs. T. offered me a
home (I have never had one before) and I accepted it and passed many
pleasant hours there. As to your terms relative to her I throw them back with
the scorn which they deserve, a lady she is and always will be. As to "carrying
my name" to save it from disgrace, it is incredulous. I am the custodian of
my own honor You are yet on the sunny side of maidenhood. Take your
own steps and resume your own name.
There was no formal divorce. Semple never lived with his wife again,
however. The acrimonious Letitia sought to punish Julia for her innocent
role in Semple's erratic postwar behavior by instituting a petty legal
fight with her stepmother over possession of some family portraits
Semple had salvaged from Sherwood Forest during the war.12
If the various emotional problems of Semple and Letitia distressed
Julia, the outward adjustment of John Tyler, Jr., to the new order of
things in the South gave her cause for great happiness. Psychologically
the least stable of the deceased President's children by his first wife,
John's maturation was hastened and fixed by the trauma of the conflict.
Forty-six years old when the organized bleeding stopped, he left Rich-
mond and his post in the collapsed Confederate War Department for
Baltimore. For a short time he lived with his sister Letitia on Mount
Vernon Place while he began building a law practice. He brought his
drinking habits under control. He did not, however, resume his marriage
with Martha Rochelle Tyler, who died January n, 1867, at the age of
forty-six. In 1869 he was appointed to a position in the Internal Revenue
Office in Washington. By 1872 he was in Tallahassee, Florida, at work
in the Assessor's Office of the Internal Revenue Bureau there, a patron-
age post that required him to announce publicly for Grant in the 1872
campaign. Julia defended his shocking defection from Rebel orthodoxy
with the argument that "the political parties are so mixed that one
should not be judged harshly for any course he chooses or sees fit to
take." She thought Republican Grant terrible, but not much worse than
former abolitionist editor Horace Greeley, nominee of both the Demo-
520
cratic and Liberal Republican parties. Privately, of course, John Tyler,
Jr., remained politically unreconstructed until his death in 1896. He
was always a Rebel patriot and eager secessionist ready to join in a
new civil war. In the late i88os he was known as "General" John Tyler,
his military rank having increased more rapidly as a Confederate
veteran than it had while he was on active duty in the Confederate
Army. His only reconstruction was in the spiritual realm. Finding the
Episcopal Church in Tallahassee weighed down with dogmatism and
ritualism, he converted to Methodism in 1873. For a time he even con-
sidered entering the Methodist ministry in order better "to hammer the
wicked and denounce sin." This urge fortunately passed. General John
was simply not the ecclesiastical type.
Still, John adjusted better to the postwar world in the South than
his younger brother, Dr. Tazewell Tyler. Taz broke angrily with Julia
after the conflict, accusing her of cowardly running away from Sher-
wood Forest to the comforts of Staten Island during the war. Embittered
by the collapse of the Confederacy, refusing to live under the Yankee
occupation of Virginia, he drifted to California in 1867. There he at-
tempted to mix the practice of medicine with the "wine cup." The com-
pound was not stable. Divorced in 1873 for his "dissipation" by Nannie,
his wife of sixteen years, the broken Taz found surcease at last in an
early grave. He died in California on January 8, 1874, at the age of
forty-three. In a real sense he was as much a casualty of the Civil War
as if he had fallen in combat in the Wilderness. n
While Julia sympathized with the postwar problems of her step-
children and their families, she was naturally more concerned with the
fate of her own children. After sending Gardie and Alex off to Germany
in September 1865 she realized that something would also have to be
done with her sixteen-year-old daughter Julie, who was already very
much a woman and "as wild as the waves that dash upon the shore."
Actually, Julie was not that wild. She was just boy-crazy, and, as she
put it herself, "only a little gay" West Point Cadets and young Army
officers particularly captivated her. Flirtation came naturally to her.
Julia decided the time had come to curb her romantic activities with at
least one semester in a boarding school. She had long considered Roman
Catholic schools "generally very thorough — much better than any
other." Thus when she learned something about the Convent of the
Sacred Heart in Halifax, Nova Scotia, she decided to enroll Julie there
for a few months. It was inexpensive, cultured (classes were conducted
in French), and located in Canada, well removed from Yankee educa-
tional influences.14
On March 31, 1866, young Julia Gardiner Tyler left New York
for Halifax in the care of James A. Sample, who was bound in that
direction on one of his clandestine voyages for the Confederate under-
ground. Just as Juliana Gardiner had once lectured her daughter when
521
Julia had departed East Hampton for the Chagaray Institute in New
York City, so now, thirty years later, Julia introduced Julie to the ways
of the world and to the expected deportment of young ladies therein:
Do cultivate your voice to the best of your ability and do not waste your
time as you have done. People do blame me so much for letting you flirt
around among the beaux and neglect all your studies. I am particularly sorry
you ever wrote to any of them. Miss Julia Tyler is expected to hold herself
in reserve. ... I wish you could see the carriage bill from Quarantine of your
various drives from there and back! It mounts up nicely. You must buy
nothing in Halifax that is not absolutely necessary for your school You
must write every week to me, telling me everything, and write to very few
others — and to no gentlemen. I shall be very much offended if you disobey me.
I wish you to attend particularly to your spelling and arithmetic in your
English studies. You must learn to be a good accountant.
Julia had great ambitions for her daughter in society and was cer-
tain Julie would be "a great belle one of these days judging from her
commencement." Like her mother at the same age, Julie was an incor-
rigible flirt. Indeed, on the ship to Halifax she took a young West
Pointer "in tow" -and soon had his photograph on her dresser. "She
certainly has 'Army' on the brain," Semple reported to Julia in amaze-
ment. Amazed for quite different reasons was Gardie, who thought it
positively seditious that his sister could become interested in West
Pointers. "They may be very brave boys, as you say," he snorted, "but
it would be a source of much unhappiness to me to see a sister of mine
hanging on the arm of one of those mighty heroes who are being bred up
now for the express purpose of tyrannizing over the South. ... I hope
never to see an infernal Yankee in the house. They have ruined our
country and we are, morally speaking, bound to hate every one of 'em
without exception, which I do with an intensity you can't under-
stand." 15
That heated statement from Karlsruhe ended Julie's West Point
phase and she began concentrating on the civilian youth of Halifax. At
the same time she settled down to the challenge of being a Protestant
student in a Roman Catholic school. She liked the Roman Church im-
mediately. "Don't be astonished if in the course of three or four months
you hear of my becoming a nun" she warned her mother. "I don't know
what may happen, I like everything in the convent so much." Even
Semple, who believed in very little beyond the divinity of Jefferson
Davis, was impressed with what he saw of the school. "Say what you
will," he told Julia, "these Romish Bishops are the best educated and
smartest men you can find anywhere almost, and on all subjects are
agreeable and entertaining." All in all, the brief experience at Sacred
Heart was a good one for the young Tyler lady. She became no nun, of
course. She studied diligently and responded constructively to the mild
discipline of the convent. And when she returned to New York in July
522
i866, leaving behind her a small blizzard of unpaid bills in various Hali-
fax stores, she also left at least one broken-hearted male admirer in
Nova Scotia. It was not all prayer and no play at the Sacre Coeur, and
she experienced no difficulty resuming her flirtatious ways in New
York.16
For the Tyler boys in Germany, formal education was a more
difficult matter. Arriving in Karlsruhe in late September 1865 after a
brief sightseeing trip through northwestern Germany, the Confederate
innocents abroad took counsel with John Fulton, their guide and men-
tor, and made their educational plans. At first they did little except
study German intensively with private tutors. Within a few months,
however, they were all taking formal courses — Gardie in the sixth class
of the local Lyceum, Harry and Alex in the fourth and sixth classes
respectively at the Karlsruhe Burger Schule. Gardie quickly abandoned
his interest in engineering and settled down instead to a not overly
successful study of modern languages and classics with a view toward
entering law. The German language came very slowly to him and he
often felt he was wasting his time and his mother's money sitting in
classes in which he barely understood what was going on. By October
1866 he was discouraged enough with his lack of linguistic progress to
think seriously of returning home. "I have never believed that I could
do as well here as in an American College," he confessed to Julia.17
Alex, on the other hand, did extremely well at the Burger Schule.
He leaped the language barrier easily and decisively. When, therefore, in
the spring of 1866 it threatened to come down to the simple financial
question on Staten Island of which son Julia could afford to maintain
in Germany, both boys agreed it should be Alex. He had a flair for math
and science, and his desire to become a mining engineer was no passing
fancy. "I am tolcl that I have first rate talents for Mathematics," he
boasted to his mother in September 1866. "Well, if I haven't, I haven't
talents for anything." Fortunately, he did have scientific talents, and his
academic ambitions carried him far beyond wanting to become an "edu-
cated country gentleman" in Virginia. The Burger Schule would ready
him for the mathematics curriculum at the Karlsruhe Polytechnic, and
this in turn would prepare him for the engineering course at Freiburg.
And a Freiburg education in mining engineering would, he reasoned, be
worth uan income of from five to six thousand yearly in gold." a8
Harry Beeckman did not belong in Germany at all. Deprived of a
father in infancy and a mother at the age of nine, raised first by a crotch-
ety grandmother and now by his Aunt Julia, the seventeen-year-old boy
possessed neither emotional stability nor professional goals. He was a
good enough student, but he much preferred the beer halls and the
friendly jrdulein of Karlsruhe to the disciplined quiet of the study and
the library. He gave up engineering before he really tried it. Instead, he
523
began to study for a business career with the vague idea of someday
entering his Uncle Gilbert Beeckman's retail dry goods store in New
York City. Gardie did not think the Beeckman store "at all fit for a
young man to commence his career in" and he soon came to feel that
Harry was by and large wasting his time in Karlsruhe. Had Margaret
lived it might have been different. As it was, Harry's decline began be-
fore his rise was completed.
It was a decline to which Julia unwittingly contributed when she
empowered Fulton to dole out very little spending money to her sons
and nephew. Possessing little conception of currency-exchange ratios,
Julia put the boys on an allowance which came to about twenty cents
a week in German money. This scarcely covered the cigars, beer, late
suppers, and other pleasures to which the student community of Karls-
ruhe was addicted. Even haircuts were well beyond the economic
competence of the Tylers. The bare trickle of allowance money through
Fulton's spigot produced much tension between the clergyman and his
charges, and it eventually led to a flurry of bitter protests to Julia de-
manding more money and the discharge of the penurious Fulton. Fulton,
of course, was not to blame. He merely carried out his instructions from
Staten Island. Julia knew this and she supported him. "His sympathies
with the South cover a multitude of faults," she told her sons. Never-
theless, she did finally promise more realistic currency dispensations,
although several thin months passed before the new allowance schedule
went into effect.
Julia had grave money problems herself during her long will fight
with David Lyon. But severe as these were, she managed in May and
June 1866 to find $768.15 for the purchase of four dresses and one $40
black silk petticoat at Mme. Gigon-RusselPs exclusive New York shop
preparatory to vacationing in Newport. "You must spend as little as
you can," she pleaded with her sons and nephew, "for you must remem-
ber your expenses are enormous, or at least will seem so to me until my
affairs are fully settled." Her entreaties did not influence young Beeck-
man. So desperate did Harry become for funds that he sold his gold
watchchain in February 1866. Punished by Fulton for the deed by
having his meager allotment suspended altogether, he enlisted Cardie's
aid with Julia. "Money makes the mare go here as well as elsewhere,"
Gardie told his mother patiently. "It is all very well for you to tell us we
make ourselves unnecessarily uneasy but a fellow is very apt to incline
that way when he puts his hand in his pocket and finds no comfort
thar!"10
Before Julia eased the boys7 financial agony Harry foolishly took
money matters into his own hands. Unable to buy cigars or borrow them
from Gardie ("How can I supply the whole school with cigars on twenty
cents a week?" his cousin snapped), he approached a breaking point.
This craving and Julia's refusal to let him purchase a guitar and take
524
instruction on it at forty cents a lesson finally conspired to force his
hand into Fulton's locked desk and remove forty florins (about $15)
from it. For a few days he was the big-spending sport of the school,
treating the other boys to billiards, beer; and cigars. Promptly found
out, he contritely returned most of the money to Fulton. Still, Harry's
unthinking act was reported to Julia and she immediately removed him
from the school. With Fulton escorting him as far as Bremen, Harry
was returned to New York in August 1866. Gardie and Alex were much
embarrassed by their cousin's indiscretion. They were gratified to learn,
however, that their mother had decided to send the wayward lad to
Washington College in Lexington. "It is much better than a Yankee
college and he will be less liable to be led astray," said Gardie.20
Harry's disgrace notwithstanding, the Tyler boys found Germany
an interesting experience. If their studies were difficult, if pangs of
homesickness occasionally seized them, there were the compensating
educational and social advantages of Karlsruhe's extensive cultural life.
The city of some 30,000 population was a delightful one, strewn with
beautiful walks and parks. Its band was "superior to any I ever heard
in the United States," admitted Gardie. The palace of the Grand Duke
of Baden was the local architectural and political attraction. Old wine
cellars vied with older churches for the boys' attention. Schiller's Joan
of Arc was only one of the first-rate plays the Karlsruhe theater ran
during their stay in Baden (its main impact on Gardie was to make him
"feel like eating something after coming out").21
The Germans even thoughtfully provided a war against the Aus-
trians in June 1866 to amuse the militant young Confederates during
their residence in Karlsruhe. This brief and decisive conflict disturbed
the flow of funds from Staten Island, put an end to plans for a summer-
vacation tour of Central Europe, and threatened for a time to force
them to seek refuge in Switzerland. Nevertheless, it provided the Tylers
with a look into the Prussian character and an opportunity to play
amateur war correspondent. They were impressed with what they saw
and heard of the war, and they reported its course with mounting ex-
citement to Staten Island, Prussian efficiency and military precision truly
amazed the young veterans of Appomattox. They had brought with
them to Karlsruhe the curious notion that all German soldiers were like
those ill-trained Cincinnati and New York immigrant troops under Franz
Sigel who had been routed at New Market by Breckinridge. "Great
people for talking and not much for acting, except in the running away
style," Gardie had sized up German soldiery in April 1866. The smash-
ing Prussian victory over Austria changed his opinion radically. The
Seven Weeks' War was over almost before it fairly commenced, so bril-
liantly did the well-honed Prussian army sweep each field of combat
against the hopelessly outclassed Austrians and their German Catholic
allies (Baden among them) in the doomed Germanic Confederation. The
S2S
boys could not, however, understand the stolid manner in which the
Germans seemed to make war and alliances with one another.
These folks over here [Gardie reported in July] don't act in regard to military
matters like we do in America, that is, pitch in with immense enthusiasm, fight
six or seven battles in so many days, then gradually cool down 'til we fight
on a certain line all the summer, more with spade than musket Instead
. . . these Germans go at it with a great deal of circumspection and delibera-
tion, whetting their swords with as much care as a butcher does his knife,
listening now to what this nation [and that] has to say in regard to their
little family quarrel, not being the least offended at an outsider's meddling in
family matters . . . and on the whole acting with astonishing coolness and not
at all disturbed by patriotic appeals . . . but looking on with a cairn and com-
posed air deliberating whether it would be more for their interest to go with
sister Austria or cousin Prussia. As a general thing most of them have de-
termined to take sides with their nearest relation anot because they hated
Prussia more but because they loved themselves the best."
The young Confederates could only conclude, therefore, that the Ger-
mans were an impassive, mechanical people devoid of all emotion, all
values save that of calculating self-interest. "Confound the Germans/7
Harry cursed them, "they are in fact good for nothing but to work out
mathematical problems and that they are really good at." Or as Gardie
put it; "Just suppose these thick-skulled Germans could hear a regular
Confederate yell; wouldn't that make them open their eyes in won-
der!"22
The German girls certainly elicited no Rebel yells from the Con-
federate expatriates in Baden. "The ladies are passing up and down our
street this morning in great numbers," Gardie told his sister with mock
salaciousness, "but the wind isn't blowing strong enough, so it isn't
worth the trouble to look out the window." Sex, when it reared its ugly
head at all in 1866, reared it no higher than a well-turned ankle — at
least not for the Tyler boys. By their critical standards there wasn't
much to look at anyway. "I haven't seen a pretty girl since I have been
in Germany," said Gardie disgustedly to his mother. "They are without
exception the ugliest set of beer-barrels you ever heard or read of. I am
nearly dying to see a pretty face again. If I conclude to settle down
here I will have to import my wife ... I will let you know when I want
her ... so you can send her on, 'right side up with care.' " Harry, less
difficult to please, or less bashful in such matters, found a "great many
pretty girls" in Karlsruhe, "and between the girls and the Lager Beer
we are halj tipsy all the time'' This was an exaggeration, obviously,
since Julia had exacted strict prohibition pledges from her sons and
nephew prior to their departure for Europe. She had, however, excluded
beer and egg-nog from the promises so that Karlsruhe was not entirely
transported to the Gobi Desert for the thirsty young men. Still, Gardie
considered the maternal prohibition on wine and hard liquor an un-
526
realistic one and he begged to be released from it, "For you will know
that I am cut off from all social enjoyment The Germans consider
it really a breach of etiquette not to partake of the jovial bowl. ... It Is
the last temperance pledge you will ever get from me.77 Julia was un-
moved by his arguments.
Even without wine and liquor the social enjoyments in Karlsruhe
were considerable. American Consul George F. Kettell of Massachusetts
and his young wife ("She is quite pretty, but, ye heavenly powers, what
a foot and ankle!") often entertained the American students resident in
town. Frau Steinbach, Gardie and Alex's landlady after Harry's de-
parture in August 1 866, saw to it that they met young German girls
of good bourgeois background. It was a pleasant enough life. "The
theaters and music of Karlsruhe are splendid," Gardie admitted, "and
with ten thousand a year how a fellow could live. Life in Germany is
certainly very pleasant if one has the where-with-all to enjoy it." 23
Other leisure hours were filled with sports. With the dozen or so
other American students in Karlsruhe, most of them Confederate ex-
patriates like the Tylers, the boys formed an American baseball club in
February 1866, the first of its kind, surely, in Germany. Together with
some English students they also helped organize a local cricket club.
In addition, Gardie absorbed the German passion for gymnastics and
urged his mother to put up parallel bars for his younger brothers at
home to exercise on. He also joined a student shooting fraternity. He
and Alex both took up boxing so that "during leisure moments we may
scientifically bung up each other's peepers. It is a pleasant and healthy
amusement and saves the expense of calling in a doctor for bleeding
purposes." Julia put her foot down when it came to fencing, fearful that
it would lead her combat-happy sons straight into the dangerous student
dueling clubs. But Gardie assured her that he would eschew fencing and
dueling completely, "When I fight it will be with 'pistol and coffee for
two/ or perhaps with the 'Arkansas Toothpick' [bayonet]. I ain't
pertickular, anything from a cannon to a pen knife!" Alex complained
that both his athletic and social life was being compromised by the
lingering "camp itch" he had picked up during his brief tour with the
Army of Northern Virginia, "I don't like to go to a Doctor here," he
told his mother, "for it is considered dreadful, so please send me by first
opportunity a good remedy," 24
With all the academic, social, cultural, and athletic advantages
Karlsruhe afforded, Gardie still wanted to come home. "Notwithstand-
ing all these attractions I would rather be in 'Old Virginia,7 " he told his
mother. He was disturbed with the way the fight against David Lyon
was going in the courts, and he found it frustrating to be able to con-
tribute nothing more to the family effort than harmless anathemas
hurled at his uncle from a distance of four thousand miles. He followed
the will suit closely and was alternately elated and depressed as the
527
direction of his mother's cause was first up and then down. As he ex-
pressed his deep concern to Julia in April 1867:
He [David Lyon] seems to be lost to all feeling of gentleness and moderation
and deserves to be branded as a public coward and woman-insulter Never
mind, we'll have a settlement with the gent one of these days or I'm a
Dutchman. I am sorry that I am not with you. I don't relish this idea of your
being eternally troubled by a pack of villains and we over here at our ease.
I'd feel much more satisfied if I could share your troubles or do something
to mitigate them I feel savage about the way those dogs have treated
you. ... I know we have never heard half of what you have suffered since
that confounded lawsuit commenced. However, the calm follows the storm
and we'll have a good time together yet. . . . The whole concern has been
bribed and you are among the meanest people in the world — and no good
will ever come out of Nazareth.25
Similarly, Gardie was distressed at reports of what was happening
in the South under the Reconstruction program of the Radical Republi-
cans. So angry did he become over his mother's treatment in the
"bribed" Yankee courts, and over the South's treatment by the Yankee
occupation, he could hardly study or think about anything save return-
ing home to take a stand against such slings and arrows of outrageous
fortune. He hoped that President Johnson and the Radicals would come
to such an impasse that civil war would again break out. "It would be
my duty to be with Gen. Lee (God bless him) again. How I would like
to meet my old comrades once more under the 'Bonnie Blue Flag,7 "
he sighed. News of the Reconstruction Act of March 1867, which di-
vided the South into five military districts, and the subsequent station-
ing of federal troops (including Negro militia) throughout the section
to supervise the registering and voting of Negroes, filled the Tyler boys
with sadness. "Our poor South," Gardie mourned. " 7Tis too dreadful to
contemplate It absolutely makes one sick. Farewell to States' rights
and liberty! Triumph, Puritans and negro-worshippers! But remember,
we bide our time." Threats of the Radicals to impeach Johnson struck
them as insane. They cheered the President's courage in vetoing Radical
Republican legislative excesses, just as they hailed the good news of Jeff
Davis' parole from Fortress Monroe. "We yelled with joy," Gardie re-
ported. "That Andy Johnson is something." There was actually very
little to yell about. The passage of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth
amendments cast the boys into despair. The Report of the Joint Com-
mittee of 15 in June 1866, recommending that the former Confederate
states be denied representation in Congress, impressed them as the be-
ginning of a "yoke of servitude, for in reality we are nothing else but
slaves, however we may hate to say the degrading word." The only en-
couraging news reaching them from the South was a much exaggerated
report from Lexington of riots there in March 1867. White boys had
smashed and looted a Negro school, and the V.M.I, cadets had teamed
528
up with Washington College students to "turn the Yankee Garrison out
of the town." Or so it was said. "By Jove! " exulted Gardie, "there's life
in the old Land yet!"26
David Gardiner Tyler could not sit safely on the sidelines in far-
away Karlsruhe forever. His agitations to return home, begun as early
as February 1866, increased in tempo and intensity. He procured cata-
logues from the University of Virginia and from Washington College.
He carefully compared the schools and decided he would re-enter the
Lexington institution, now under the direction of Robert E. Lee. "To be
under Gen. Lee is ... one of the greatest honors, whether in war or
peace," he told Julia in October 1866. Also, the professors there were
"among the most enlightened men of the South." Julia finally consented,
and on September 24, 1867, just two years from the time he had arrived
in Karlsruhe, he left for home. Five hundred students were expected at
Washington College for the 1867-1868 session and Gardie was sure that
"with so many young Southerners together 'twill be the freest place in
America. The Yanks won't dare to try their negro equality politics
there!"27
Alex remained behind in Germany by choice. He was subsequently
graduated from both Karlsruhe and Freiburg as a mining engineer, and
not until March 1873 did he return to the United States. He arrived
home speaking fluent German and French and displaying a "magnificent
physical development and ... all the polish and address of a foreigner."
In the intervening years he had run up a series of monumental debts.
On one occasion his creditors saw him into a Baden "dungeon keep"
where he spent several defiant weeks. Julia painfully paid off enough of
these longstanding obligations for Alex to escape Germany for home.
She was not at all happy about his free-spending ways in college.
But she thought he had completely lost his mind when he volunteered
to fight for the Germans in the Franco-Prussian War. Failing in an at-
tempt to join the Baden Army in October 1870 because he was too well
known in Karlsruhe as an American citizen, he dropped out of school
for a semester, took an assumed name, and finally, in December 1870,
managed to enlist in the ist Company, i5th Regiment of the Saxon
Army. Two weeks under Lee had not been enough war to suit Mm.
While he missed the heavy fighting at Mars-la-Tour, Gravelotte, and
Sedan in August and September 1870, he did serve as a Uhlan trooper
in the occupation of France for several months early in 1871. For this
modest military contribution he was awarded a ribbon by the Kaiser for
"faithful service" in the German Army. He admitted his enlistment had
a "romantical" cast about it, but he enjoyed himself thoroughly. It was
quite an adventure and he managed to amass some wonderful new debts
in occupied France. "You know how excitable I am," he told his mother,
"and then I think Germany perfectly right." 28
The war Gardie saw after Ms return to Staten Island was of a
529
quite different sort. Andrew Johnson was locked in mortal struggle with
the Radical Republican Congress over the Tenure of Office Act and the
related question of Edwin M. Stanton's status in Johnson's Cabinet. As
Gardie observed the political situation from Castleton Hill in January
1868, "a very serious collision between the President and Congress is
anticipated ... the Dogs of War are very like being loosed again, and
this time we can look on and rub our hands with great satisfaction."
While this bitter contest between the President and the Congress was
approaching the showdown of the unsuccessful Radical attempt in
February to impeach the Chief Executive, Gardie left Staten Island for
Lexington to enroll in Washington College for the spring semester.29
There he found a distinguished student body of unreconstructed
young Rebels like himself. Among them were Henry Clay's grandson, a
cousin of John C. Calhoun, two nephews of General Lee, General John
C. Breckinridge's son, and many others "from the best families" of the
South. Harry Beeckman was there too. "Look out, ye Yanks," Gardie
shouted in glee, "we are a-coming." Mainly he was impressed with
Robert E. Lee, the revered president of the college who had already
become a folk hero in the South. His matriculation interview with the
general left Gardie misty-eyed:
I found the Old Hero as erect and noble looking as ever [he told Julia] , and
affable and kind and — but it is no use to attempt to describe him; all the
adjectives in the English language could not begin to do him justice. He is
universally beloved and reverenced by all the students, and his word is law
with them. His influence and energy alone have made what was formerly a
simple Academy one of the finest colleges in America; aye, I believe in the
world. . . . The European plan has been adopted, and everything is carried on
with the most perfect order. "Old Marse Bob" is good at everything he
turns his hand to.
Under the stimulus of Lee's kindness and encouragement ("I never meet
the General but that he asks after you," Gardie wrote his mother)
young Tyler became a hard-working student of the law, classics, and
modern languages. He saw his beloved general frequently on campus,
and Mrs. Lee, who had known Julia in Richmond in 1862-1863, oc-
casionally invited Gardie and other students into her home for tea.
While Gardie was constantly forced to dun his mother for money to
meet the most obvious college expenses — tuition, board, clothes, books
— he remained in good spirits until his graduation in 1869 very near
the top of his class. White rule had by that time been firmly re-estab-
lished in Lexington. "No news except the knocking down of an African
by a Student last week, which is no unusual occurrence," he informed
Julia in June i868.30
Even before he was graduated Gardie was fighting against any form
of political accommodation with the carpetbagging Radical Republicans
530
and their scalawag allies who ran the Old Dominion with the aid of
Negro votes. Instead, he preached resistance and nothing but resistance
to the Yankee occupation. "If we remain quiet," he exploded to Julia
on the eve of the 1868 election, "and submit to ... Radical enormities,
allow ourselves to be insulted, knocked down, and spit upon without
resistance," the South would never escape its bondage. Similarly, the
Radicals' proposed new state constitution, the so-called Underwood
Constitution, which enfranchised the Negro and permitted him to hold
public office, was to young Tyler nothing more than a "political mon-
ster, born of Radical malignity and scalawag negrophilism." The idea of
the Negro's voting in Virginia or receiving any of the normal rights of
citizenship there was a notion Gar die (in common with most other white
Southerners) could not readily absorb. "No true Virginian is going to
give an assenting vote to his own degradation. I for one will never by
my vote allow the Negro to exercise such a right." In spite of Cardie's
opposition the Underwood Constitution was overwhelmingly ratified in
June I86Q.31
These views, as politically unrealistic as they were emotionally
sincere, were partly conditioned by Gardie's visit to Sherwood Forest
during his vacation from college in the summer of 1868. There he looked
out over weed-choked fields and saw that
Desolation has set its seal upon all around us, and the gloom like the veil of
the grave has settled upon the land. Sherwood looks as forlorn as ever,
everything is going to yet greater ruin. With the exception of some one hun-
dred acres which are being cultivated by negroes on shares, all the plantation
is fast growing up in scrub pine, sassafras, and red oak bushes. The house . . .
is gradually rotting, and in a few years longer it will be beyond the possibility
of repair. Deserted, tenantless, forsaken, the once beautiful home of our then
happy family! Can I ever forgive or forget the fiendish wretches who have
wrought this work of desolation? If I should ever affiliate or stand on a
friendly footing with a single one of this foul brood, may the direst vengeance
of the Omnipotent fall upon me and mine. ... It can never again be as it was
. . . when the negroes work merely on shares they are so indolent that they
often entirely neglect what little they have under cultivation, and the whites
have now no authority over them unless they are hired monthly as in the
North. . . ,^
Julia twice visited the decaying plantation in 1866-1867, but she
had virtually given up on the place after the failure of her Swedish ex-
periment in 1865. In 1866 she again made up her mind to sell the
property. Only the pained protests of Gardie and Alex from Karlsruhe
and the knowledge that depressed farm land on the peninsula was
selling for $40 to $50 per acre caused her to procrastinate. "I really think
that the loss of our working population has decreased the real value of
the land at least one fourth to one third," Sample correctly informed her
at the time. The boys, of course, had strong sentimental attachments to
the scene of their childhood. Gardie was determined to restore the estate
and live on it.
After reading law in the Richmond offices of family friend James
Lyons in 1869-1870 and gaining admission to the Virginia bar in June
1870, Gardie moved back to Sherwood Forest to do what his father and
grandfather before him had done (and what his son is now doing) —
combine the practice of law in Charles City with farming and local
politics. He turned down an appointive county judgeship on the sensible
ground that he first needed actual experience in the law. He was, after
all, only twenty-four years old in 1870 and he had never practiced law
a day. Not that the stipend for the post would not have been welcome.
Ready cash was so tight in the Tyler family in 1870 that to satisfy a tax
lien of $58.09 on the plantation the Sherwood cattle (three cows) were
ordered put up to public auction by the local sheriff. Fortunately Julia,
who hastened to Charles City to attend to this crisis, managed to buy
the cows herself, and she picked up three heifers in addition, all for
$79.00. "If I had not been present I do not suppose anyone could have
made so good a bargain for me," she boasted happily.33
Her good luck in this single instance did not conceal the fact that
Sherwood Forest, like almost all the other Tidewater plantations, re-
mained in serious financial trouble throughout the entire Reconstruction
period. The price of guano, seed wheat, and hired labor was so high in
1870 — and the potential market for wheat so uncertain — Gardie decided
it would not pay to put in a wheat crop at all. Brother Lonie was sched-
uled to enter the University of Virginia that year, and to Gardie it did
not seem a good gamble to have his mother "strain and scuffle" to raise
two or three hundred dollars to invest in a wheat crop that would prob-
ably bring in no more than three or four hundred. Better to invest the
money in college tuition in the fall and plant oats in the spring, a crop
for which guano was not required. A wheat crop would simply tie up too
much capital. "The negroes will not work unless they are paid punctually
every Saturday night, dependent as they are on the proceeds of their
daily labor for sustenance," he explained to his mother in September
1870. "You already find it very difficult to throw up temporary dams to
keep back the tide of debt. . . [and] as matters now are, a bird in the
hand, let him be ever so poor a one, is certainly worth two in the
bush." 34
Julia agreed. Cash was extremely scarce. Overwhelmed with law-
yers' fees, tuition payments, taxes, the everyday expenses of her smaller
children, the maintenance of Castleton Hill, and claims against the
Tyler estate, she was in no mood to gamble two hundred dollars in
the unpromising Sherwood fields to win, at best, three hundred and fifty
in return. Nor did her financial situation improve. In 1871 the little herd
of livestock almost went on the sheriff's block again to satisfy a $85 tax
bill. Judgments totaling $2000 against the plantation kept Gardie fre-
532
quently in court after 1870 and nearly resulted in the forced sale of the
estate in 1872 to satisfy the creditors. In that desperate year of 1872
Gardie had but one lone worker on the place, David Brown. "He has
a mule, and supplies the labor and I have the land and my mule on
terms of % the product. This is the best I can do, and has the merit of
avoiding the outlay of money." As he looked out upon the snowy Christ-
mas season of 1872 it pained him to see his "poor cattle standing shiver-
ing on the dreary hillside, and no feed to warm the poor beasts in the
barn. I hope this will be the last winter our herd will be forced to en-
dure, unsheltered and uncared for, the piercing blasts of winter. Christ-
mas greetings " 35
Gardie's political career in Charles City County began almost as
inauspiciously as did his attempt to re-enter the ranks of the landed
gentry astride a long-neglected farm. The Old Dominion political arena
contained more lions than Christians. The Republican governor of Vir-
ginia in 1870 was Gilbert C. Walker of Norfolk. He had been elected to
the office in 1869 by an informal coalition of relatively moderate white
Radical Republicans and old-line white Virginia Democrats. The latter
group had opportunistically supported him because he was a lesser evil
than Radical Republican New Yorker Henry H. Wells, the demagogic
candidate of the militant Negro bloc. General Wells had served as Vir-
ginia's governor from 1867 to 1869 under a federal military appoint-
ment. While Walker was a great improvement over the rabble-rousing
Wells (the Norfolk Journal crowed that Virginia had been "redeemed,
regenerated and disenthralled" by Walker's victory), to Gardie Tyler he
was no more than a "superb apollo and guttermanly carpetbagger."
This harsh view was conditioned by the fact that twenty-seven Negroes
had also been elected to the General Assembly in the June 1869 state
canvass that swept the new governor in and approved the Underwood
Constitution. In October, soon after the Walker regime took power in
Richmond, the Republican-dominated General Assembly, to Gardie?s
disgust, formally ratified the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments.
Only by this action could Virginia comply legally with federal require-
ments leading to the restoration of her statehood. There was, therefore,
no practical or sensible (or moral) alternative to this belated decision in
Richmond. Gardie nonetheless viewed Governor Walker as a carrier of
bubonic plague because he was committed to a policy of sectional recon-
ciliation.
His reluctant decision to run for Commonwealth's Attorney of
Charles City County in the November 1870 elections seemed the only
way he could contribute in some small manner to the downfall of the
governor and his scalawag and carpetbagger friends. He believed that
if he ran as an independent on a platform of "political neutrality and
residence in the County," he might draw enough local Negro votes to
slip into office. He certainly could not run as a white-supremacy candi-
533
date in a heavily Negro county, and he knew he could not win at all
unless the Charles City whites united solidly behind his candidacy.
"Unless an out-and-out Radical is run by the Negroes my chances for
election are good," he decided. Unfortunately for Cardie's ambition
and for the logic of his nonracist tactics, the Republicans ran in John
Talley an extremist Radical. Nor did the whites fall in solidly behind
young Tyler. They were unimpressed with his moderate position on race
relations and Radical Reconstruction, and they failed to see that it was
mainly a campaign stance designed to "split the Black vote." They
stayed home from the polls in droves. Only a third of the eligible whites
bothered to vote at all, and Gardie attracted but forty scattered Negro
ballots. Talley pulled the Negro bloc and beat Tyler by an "over-
whelming" majority. "This is the last time that I shall run as an Inde-
pendent," Gardie told Julia in disgust, "with one foot on shore and one
at sea. I was opposed to it all along and yielded at the expense of my
feelings and^ better judgment to the advice of soi-disant friends. From
this day forth I am a Rebel, Democrat, or whatever you choose to call
it here, but never more a Trimmer." 36
The national political scene of the early 18703 cast a light no more
bright by Tyler standards than Radical rule in Charles City. Julia railed
bitterly against military Reconstruction in the South, condemned the
venal and corrupt Grant administration, and did what she could in the
way of letters of recommendation to help her politically correct friends
obtain patronage appointments. The Democratic Party, however, seemed
to offer the distracted nation little more than did the corrupt Republican
regime of the bewildered Grant. The plunders of Boss William M.
Tweed's infamous Ring in New York City, and Tweed's cynical use of
Tammany Hall as a vehicle for municipal piracy on a classic scale,
struck Julia and Gardie as the end of the Democracy John Tyler had
loved. "It is rotten to the core," Julia proclaimed in full exasperation.
"Let the cry be reform anywhere. . . . New York seems like a paralyzed
city — so dull is business." 37
A breath of political fresh air in Virginia, the first since Appomat-
tox, seemed to stir in the "refreshing victory" the white Conservative
Democracy achieved in the state elections of November 1871. Thanks
to "a complete fusion of old-line-Whigs and dyed-in-the-wool Demo-
crats," the white-supremacy party captured Richmond. Though the
Radicals continued their local domination of Charles City, Gardie was
now hopeful that an anti-Grant, anti-Radical Reconstruction, anti-
Tweed coalition reform movement on the national level, crossing party
lines North and South, might save "what little there remains of con-
stitutional liberty by a defeat in '72 of the stupid dog that kennels in
the White House." The stunning defeat of the Democracy in the Empire
State in November 1871, a setback occasioned by the unsavory Tweed
exposes in New York City, dashed this momentary optimism at Sher-
wood Forest. It was, Gardie argued, "the severest blow that has befallen
534
the South since the downfall of the Confederacy, because it insures us
four years more (perhaps a perpetuation) of carpet-baggers, ku klux
legislation and military tyranny Grant's hands are strengthened and
the bulwark of our safety overthrown."
Nor did the emergence of the Liberal Republican movement in
1872 impress Gardie. Although it was dedicated to reform, the inter-
ment of the "bloody shirt," and an end to the military occupation of the
South, its nomination of former abolitionist Horace Greeley seemed "a
nasty dose to take even to get rid of Butcher Grant.77 The Tylers thus
strenuously opposed Democratic Party endorsement of the Liberal Re-
publican ticket of Greeley and B. G. Brown. Indeed, Gardie was instru-
mental in seeing that Charles City delegates to the Virginia Conservative
[Democratic] Convention on June 27, 1872, went to Richmond com-
mitted to no endorsement of "such a vile concoction as Greeley." When,
however, the national Democratic convention, meeting in Baltimore on
July 9, did accept and endorse the Greeley-Brown ticket, Gardie re-
luctantly came out for old Horace with the rationalization that anybody
would be an improvement over Grant. Greeley had, after all, helped
bring about Jefferson Davis' release from, prison, and his election would
encourage some hope of an end to carpetbag rule in the South.
The Democratic-Liberal Republican coalition ticket was a "nauseous
emetic," but Gardie held his nose and swallowed it. He was not sur-
prised, however, when Grant, "bloody shirt" flying in the political
breeze, overwhelmed "Horace of the White Hat" with a popular ma-
jority of 763,000 and an electoral vote margin of 286 to 66. "In our
County," Gardie reported to his mother, "the negroes thronged ... to the
polls, voting nearly as a unit for Grant; the white vote was small, many
refusing to take Greeley, casting their ballots only for County officers
and Congressional candidates. . . . Many of the lower classes of whites
voted for Grant." The Democratic Party, concluded Julia after the elec-
tion, "is at present defunct and I pity all wedded to it." 38
The institutional problems of the Democratic Party in the early
18705 were no more complicated than the personal problems of Julia
Gardiner Tyler. Nor were they any more susceptible to ready solution.
On the surface of things, however, Julia seemed to have more effective
stabilization machinery in her hull than did the floundering Democracy.
In her early fifties, she was still a very attractive woman. She had
started getting plump, but she remained quite pretty and she enjoyed
excellent health throughout the decade. To James Lyons she was "the
best as well as the loveliest of women." She could still race in and out
of Richmond stores with a speed and a determination that left her
sturdy children trailing far behind. "A few more days of shopping,77
Gardie complained to her in 1870, "would, I have no doubt, have made
me a fit inmate of the Lunatic Asylum at Staunton." Her flying visits to
535
Washington were invariably noted in the papers of the capital. In March
1872, with considerable newspaper fanfare and much to Cardie's dis-
may, she visited Julia Dent Grant in the White House. Her correspond-
ence with Laura Holloway promised her a secure historical niche in that
author's forthcoming Ladies of the White House. Her portrait had been
hung in the President's Mansion with appropriate ceremony. She was not
obscure. News that Henry A. Wise was writing a eulogistic memoir of
her husband (published in 1871 as Seven Decades of the Union)
pleased her a great deal even though the crusty Wise had "once told
the President that he did very wrong to marry me!" Wise laughed at
her sally and promptly assured her that she had "certainly proved ex-
ceptional in making the President the most discreet and winning of wives
on whom he doted to the last." 39
But with all of these safety nets separating her from sickness and
obscurity, Julia was by 1872 a very distraught woman. Entirely aside
from her multitudinous legal and financial worries, she was unhappy and
rootless. She was pained to learn in 1870, for example, that she was still
considered "a bitter enemy of the Government" in Internal Revenue
circles. More importantly, she watched the continuing decline of Harry
Beeckman with sadness. She had always felt a special responsibility for
Margaret's child. After he reached his twenty-first birthday in 1869 he
withdrew from Washington College, moved to Sherwood Forest, and
began a life of aimless dissipation. Julia lost all control over him. He
was a pleasant, generous young man. On several occasions he loaned his
Aunt Julia money, income from his quarter of the Gardiner estate, that
she might remain a tiny step ahead of her creditors. But all attempts by
Julia and Gardie to persuade him to buy land in Charles City and settle
down to the stable life of the planter failed. "He is irreclaimable and
neither affection nor duty demands that you should trouble yourself
about him more than you have already done," Gardie told Julia. "Let
him run his course . . . between us, I am tired of him as a dweller under
the same roof." 40
Of all Julia's postwar experiences nothing elated her quite so much
as the marriage of the nineteen-year-old Julie to William H. Spencer in
1869; and nothing broke her so decisively as the young bride's death in
childbirth at the age of twenty-one on May 8, 1871. Little is known of
Will Spencer's background or of his courtship with Julie save that he
was an impecunious, debt-ridden young man who wrote insipid love
letters to his intended. But Julie loved him and that was what mattered.
They were married in the Church of the Ascension in New York City on
June 26, 1869, exactly twenty-five years to the day after Julia's wedding
there to John Tyler. Following their marriage, they moved to Tuscarora,
New York, where Spencer had a mortgaged farm. Not surprisingly, Julia
packed her newlywed daughter off to her new home with the reminder
that she must "do your duty in society. . . . You should not hold back
536
when an occasion presents itself worth your exertions.7' To encourage
this exertion and to instruct Julie further in the nuances and ramifica-
tions of her social duties, Julia visited the young couple at Tuscarora
in 1869. The three of them also vacationed together at Saratoga Springs
in the summer of 1870. Then, without warning, Julie died in May 1871
following the birth of a daughter, Julia Tyler Spencer, nicknamed
"Baby." No death in the family struck Julia so powerfully — not even
Margaret's or John Tyler's. She was absolutely crushed. She spent the
rest of her life mourning Julie while she provided a home for and raised
Baby Spencer as her own child. For several years she loaned Will
Spencer money, made good his bad debts, and settled his overdue notes
(one of them for $2650). Will, in turn, wandered aimlessly to the silver
mines of Colorado and the citrus groves of California, and back again,
in search of fame and fortune. He found neither, and Julia was that
much the poorer. In the mid~i88os he disappeared from the family's
sight forever.41
The death of young Julie brought Julia back to Washington. In
1871 she decided to quit Staten Island, sell Castleton Hill, the upkeep
and taxes on which were becoming oppressive, and move to Georgetown
in the District of Columbia. There she could be near the scene of her
great triumph of 1844-1845 and closer to Sherwood Forest. Equally
important in her decision was the prospect of placing fifteen-year-old
Fitz and eleven-year-old Pearlie in the excellent Roman Catholic schools
the District afforded. She had been very well impressed with Julie's
earlier experience at the Sacred Heart in Halifax, and she was persuaded
that the Roman Church ran better and less expensive schools than were
generally to be found under other auspices. Accordingly, she moved into
a flat on Fayette Street in Georgetown in January 1872. Pearlie was
immediately enrolled in the nearby Georgetown Academy of the Visita-
tion, and Fitz entered Georgetown College the following fall. Julia was
delighted with both institutions and with the friendliness and kindness
of the priests and nuns with whom she soon came in contact.42
Her return to Washington permitted Julia to involve herself once
more in the social swirl of the capital. The newspapers again became
"frequent in their allusions to me" as she happily made the social
rounds. A friendly reception by Grant at the White House caused James
Lyons to remark that "your witchery — your beauty . . . have enlightened
the President and softened him to the South." Julia, of course, had noth-
ing but contempt for the Grant administration and it is doubtful that
anybody could have enlightened the dull-witted Chief Executive. But
the more she was entertained in Republican homes in Washington, some
of them the homes of Radical Republicans, the more developed became
her Paris-is-worth-a-Mass social philosophy. In January 1873 sne de-
scribed one of these Radical Republican affairs and her reaction to it
to her son Lyon, who was then at the University of Virginia:
537
I went, and the consequence was the handsomest attentions ... as the ladies
crowded in at the reception and were introduced to me as "Mrs. Ex-President
Tyler." I was enthusiastically received by those who had formerly met me
I was taken by surprise ... at the warmth of my old acquaintances — with the
gulf of so many years between. The fact is, dear Lonny, the only way now
to get along is to take the world as you find it and to make the best of it. It
will be the means of satisfying your feelings much better than by showing
them your dislike or opposition. That is the way to triumph and to make your
enemies even speak well of you. People can hold to all their opinions without
pressing them forward on unnecessary occasions And so I was glad I
went, though it was as much as I could do to have the spirit to dress myself
for it beforehand.
When Gardie heard that his mother was consorting with the Republicans
he gave her a proper tongue-lashing:
Were I in your place, and remembering circumstances past and present, I
should have nothing to do with the present Administration or any of its satel-
lites. Our family have suffered so much from the acts of those people as any
in the North or South, and nationally and privately we would have too much
to forgive and forget to ... benefit from association with them. . . . Before the
public you occupy a position similar to that of Mrs. Gen'l Lee, the widow of
one of the leading men in a dead cause, and that position must be exclusive.
. . . Think of the widow of Marco Bazzan's entertaining a Turkish governor of
Athens.
After that explosion from Sherwood Forest, Julia began choosing her
Washington friends with more care.43
Her recaptured social life did not put to flight her basic loneliness
or bring young Julie back from the grave. The social adulation her per-
sonality had long fed upon for its psychological nourishment no longer
sufficed to make her happy or contented. Julia needed something else to
sustain her in her middle years, something more substantial than party
dresses, pretty compliments, crowded ballrooms, dependent babies, and
loving relatives. During this period of financial crisis and mourning
for Julie she began reading deeply in the history and theology of the
Roman Catholic Church. She also began a serious investigation of
spiritualism in the hope that it might give her an answer to the meaning
of human existence and permit her to "talk" with the departed Julie.
For the first time in her life she searched frantically for God and for
some means of approaching the Godhead. She desperately needed
spiritual comfort. As her search progressed she quickly and sensibly re-
jected the spiritualists and their spurious seances and table tremblings.
Instead, she gravitated more and more toward the rigid ideology and
discipline of the Roman Church in the belief that Rome's ancient
dogmas and mystical ceremonies might provide an anchor to a life that
had become increasingly storm-tossed since John Tyler's death in 1862.
Much to the surprise of her children and some of her oldest and
538
dearest friends, she finally made up her mind to convert to Roman
Catholicism in March 1872. The following month she formally embraced
the Roman Church and took Pearlie into the new faith with her. Bishop,
later Cardinal, James Gibbons performed the appropriate rituals in
Washington. Guiding her study and instruction as she prepared for this
important transition was the Reverend Father Patrick F. Healy, S.J.,
Professor of Philosophy and Vice-President (later President) of George-
town College. Sister Loretto of the Convent of the Visitation and Father
Daubresse of Georgetown also helped Julia with her search, advising
her and answering her theological questions. During this preliminary
period of instruction and preparation for conversion no pressure of any
kind was exerted on the former First Lady. No emotional appeals to her
despair for the dead Julie were made or suggested. On the contrary,
Julia came willingly and eagerly into the Roman communion. The
Church neither pursued her, manipulated her, nor promised her pie in
the sky. She was treated honestly, fairly, and intelligently throughout
the catechistical process. Indeed, Sister Loretto tried to talk Julia out
of the idea of rebaptism that possessed her. "The fact of another baptism
will avail nothing — it will be but an empty ceremony/7 said the Sister.
Nevertheless, Julia firmly insisted on a second baptism and it was
granted her in May 1872. In August Pearlie Tyler was also rebaptized.
Julia demanded this when her twelve-year-old daughter fell ill that
month, and she stuck to the demand even though Father Healy saw no
reason why the "empty ceremony" should be visited upon the child.
Julia's conversion was a spiritual coup for the Roman Catholic
Church. Much favorable newspaper publicity was derived by the often-
persecuted Church in America and Julia began receiving letters from
other troubled women all over the United States asking her to help them
find their way into the Roman communion. Even Father Healy, who
became Julia's "godfather," was not unmindful of the pleasant realiza-
tion that his convert and new godchild was none other than "Mrs. Tyler,
widow of the late John Tyler, President of the United States." It was
about as close as the Roman Church would come to the White House
until Alfred E. Smith threatened its Protestant doors in 1928 and John
F. Kennedy finally battered them down in 1960. When newspapers in
New York and Richmond carried accounts of her conversion and re-
baptism, Julia assured her politely skeptical family and friends that it
was all her own idea. As she explained to Lonie in May:
I suppose you see by all the papers that I have turned Roman Catholic. I
have indeed, and much to my satisfaction. No Priest or nun had anything to
do with it. It was simply from my conviction of its being the best and truest
religion as well as the oldest. There is unity and system in it, as well as
beauty and real Christianity. The other sects I came to see were like ships at
sea without anchor or rudder, though until one comes to understand this
one is not to blame for continuing with them.44-
539
Julia seldom did things halfway. Once converted to the " unity and
system" she so desperately craved, she began heavy mailings of Roman
Catholic literature to her friends and kinsmen. This pamphlet and
letter- writing crusade was blessed by Father Healy. "To disarm people
of prejudice is the first step toward inculcating sound principles," he
told her. "May our good God bless your efforts with success." To
Phoebe Gardiner Horsford "it seemed very natural . . . [that] left alone
as you have been you should seek shelter in the protecting arms of
the Church"; and Julia's friend Belle Chalmers of Nyack, New York,
agreed she "did perfectly right to become a living member of the church
that roused you from a life of coldness." But almost all Julia's heretical
Protestant intimates soon wearied of the stream of Roman Catholic
propaganda from her escritoire. Gardie put the matter to her most
forcefully in May 1872:
Of course, such an addition to their Church Catholics will not fail to express
their jubilant satisfaction over, and the knowledge thereof will soon be
diffused over the Continent. Well, ma ch&re, if you feel all right about it I
shall not deprecate the step. It doesn't clash with any sectarian feelings of
my own Don't fear an argument from me. ... I wouldn't take any great
satisfaction in roasting a fellow-mortal because he happened to differ with
me as to what kind of fish swallowed the unquenchable Jonah, nor would I
care to be grid-ironed myself. ... I have learned too well . . . how unavailing
and futile it is to talk logic with you Catholics. . . . What are you going to do
about your embryo Spiritualism? ... In fact, my dear mother ... I have some
curiosity to see what sort of a Catholic you will make. All those I have yet
seen are so supremely complacent about their dogmas that I could find no
other name for their state of mind but bigotry You threaten to convince
me. That is an utter impossibility. If I am ever to be a Christian the Church
of my Fathers will fully satisfy [me] I place no sort of value upon
forms . . . and if a man is conscientious and obeys moral law, the Church is
simply a house for the soul to worship in, and whether its style of architecture
is that of the cathedral or of a chapel is not of the slightest importance. . . .
Gardie's curiosity was soon satisfied. Julia turned out to be an ex-
cellent Roman Catholic, although she finally did give up trying to
proselytize the rest of her family. Only Pearlie among the Tylers em-
braced Roman Catholicism and she did not bring up her own children
in the Church. She remained a "very mild" Catholic all her life.45
ii«MH» * iBBiiiii
Julia's newfound faith in the Church carried her safely through the
serious economic crisis that confronted her when the great Panic of
1873 and the long, deep depression that followed it struck the nation.
Income from her rental properties in Manhattan quickly dropped from
a monthly average of $750 to less than half that amount. By 1878 there
was scarcely any income from this source at all. Mortgage payments,
taxes, and assessments on the properties remained the same. The Tyler
540
tenants either ducked out without paying or asked for extensions and
moratoriums on their rent. New York City itself ground to an economic
standstill. "You cannot by any means calculate safely that the tenants
of any property in New York are to pay their rent when it becomes
due under present circumstances," Julia's New York agent informed
her. "We would be glad to get $2000 per annum for property formerly
bringing $4000. There is scarcely a full building in the neighborhood
[Chatham St.]. Landlords are ready to take anything they can get in
preference to having empty places." Julia decided she too had better
take what she could get. Lachlan, now studying medicine at the New
York College of Physicians and Surgeons on Fourth Avenue, reinforced
this decision with his report of "terrible times in Wall Street." He told
his mother she had no idea "how hard up everybody here is. ... I can't
imagine where the mischief so much [of our] money goes to! Every
little five cents seems to amount up to so many dollars, though at the
time it seems to be almost nothing!"
Indeed, cash dried up so rapidly in the Tyler family after the
onset of the Panic of 1873 that the purchase of the simplest necessities
of life often had to be postponed. At Sherwood Forest the financial
situation became critical. In July 1873 the Bank of Virginia finally en-
tered suit against the estate for payment of the longstanding Tyler note
due it. On top of this new threat to the plantation, disease decimated
the small herd of cows in September. "The spirits of deceased cattle
are ascending in battalions towards the bovine Heaven all over this
section," Gardie sadly informed his mother.46
On the eve of these financial difficulties Alex returned from Ger-
many in March 1873, penniless but happy. Thanks to Julia's efforts and
to those of William M. Evarts and Prlscilla's brother-in-law, railroad
executive Allan Campbell, Alex immediately found work in the Floyd
Aspinvale mines near Salt Lake City. But within a few months he too
joined the growing army of American unemployed made jobless by the
Panic and depression. For nearly a year he could find nothing suitable
to do in spite of Julia's intercession with various Washington politicians
to secure a government job for him. In October 1874 Allan Campbell
finally found him a modest position with the Southside Railroad Com-
pany at $800 per annum. Between these jobs the impoverished Alex
lived at the still-unsold Castleton Hill. Physically he was a handsome
man, cultured and well educated, and he soon became quite a social lion
on Staten Island. Known as "Captain" Tyler, "much to the gratification
of his vanity," said Lachlan, Alex attended all the right balls and recep-
tions. He found Staten Island a miserable place to live yet he agreed it
was a good place to hide from his German creditors while searching
for employment. "What a treadmill they make of me. I would think the
dogs would weary." His sense of humor never deserted him during these
jobless months. "I am penniless," he told Julia, "but I suppose golden
days will yet come. Lachlan says I laugh too much; I'm always
laughing." 47
Julia was not laughing. So dangerous had her economic situation
become in late 1873 she was fearful the hard-pressed Lachlan might
have to drop out of medical school. The simple fact of the matter was
that Julia was badly overextended financially. With Lachlan at Physi-
cians and Surgeons, Lyon at the University of Virginia, Fitz at George-
town College, and Pearlie in boarding school, she had an immense room,
board, tuition, books, and clothing load to carry. There was also Baby
Spencer to support. In addition, she was trying to maintain Castleton
Hill, Sherwood Forest, Villa Margaret, an apartment in Georgetown,
and all her rental properties in New York. Her hotel bills, as she flitted
back and forth between New York, Washington, and Richmond, were
enormous. She could not and would not economize on her own clothes.
Her personal appearance had to be maintained at all costs and for
Julia the costs were invariably high, even by modern standards. Sher-
wood Forest had long since become economically marginal. The Castle-
ton Hill house leaked badly and extensive repairs were needed. Villa
Margaret was in appalling condition. Alex was unemployed, his German
creditors pressing him vigorously. Faced with this situation, Julia had
no choice but to accept the advice of her sons, her New York agent,
A. J. Mathewson, and her lawyers and effect a radical consolidation of
her entire financial position.48
Castleton Hill, Villa Margaret, and the Tyler property on Green-
wich Street in New York City were all advertised for sale in 1873-
1874. Castleton Hill, offered privately to the Roman Catholic Church
for $20,000, attracted no buyers, secular or ecclesiastical. The Green-
wich Street property, placed on the market at $60,000, found no takers
at that depressed price. Villa Margaret produced no stampede of eager
realtors. For a period in the spring of 1874 Sherwood Forest was there-
fore in grave danger. The Charles City sheriff again stalked the insecure
(and presumably not contented) Sherwood milch cows for a $60 over-
due tax bill. Even the animal kingdom conspired to bring the planta-
tion to ruin. The "enormous expenditures of this family have been
still more increased by the recent addition of three blind kittens,"
Gardie wrote in dismay. Finally, a Richmond court ordered the planta-
tion sold in May 1874 to satisfy the Bank of Virginia's $1300 judgment
against the Tyler estate. Although Harry Beeckman helped out with
a small loan, the proud plantation was actually advertised for public
sale. Indeed, Julia had already received a letter from Father Healy
expressing Jesuit interest in buying the historic property when, Deo
gratias, salvation came. Villa Margaret suddenly and unexpectedly
found a buyer, and the $3500 realized in the sacrifice transaction
lowered the Damoclean sword hanging over Sherwood Forest. "I am
542
so glad you have dear old Sherwood secure," wrote Alex with joy from
Staten Island. "At all events we have a place to 'retire' to!"49
As part of Julia's economy-and-retrenchment program, she gave
up her Georgetown apartment in the spring of 1874 and moved with
Baby Spencer to Sherwood Forest. She refused, however, to withdraw
Pearlie from the Academy of the Visitation and place her in the less
costly and not so fashionable St. Joseph's Academy in Richmond. Still,
the responsible Gardie could now watch his mother's personal accounts
more closely. Seldom did she venture forth to visit Pearlie in George-
town without his warning ringing in her ears: "And, Madam, be careful
about your own expenses while in Georgetown and beyond my restrain-
ing control. . . . Economy must be the watchword for, as I regard it, this
is our last chance for recuperation."
Gradually the family financial situation improved. Lachlan began
the practice of medicine in Jersey City in 1876 and became more or less
self-sufficient. He also married Georgia Powell of Richmond that year.
Lyon finished college at Charlottesville in 1874, took a master's degree
there in 1875, and, after a brief stint on the William and Mary faculty,
moved to Memphis to continue his teaching career. In November 1878
he married Annie Baker Tucker, daughter of the gallant Colonel St.
George Tucker of the Confederate cavalry, and began raising his own
family. "I do not know how we could teach nine long months if we were
not cheered by the prospect of our summer visit to Sherwood," Annie
wrote from distant Memphis in 1881. Still, a job was a job in these de-
pression years. While there was no money to waste in the Tyler family,
Gardie complained in April 1878 that his farm "hands are clamorous for
their wages." At least he had "hands" — plural. And while "every dollar"
remained to him "as precious in my sight as the ruby drops that visit my
sad heart," he had sufficient credit in 1878 to secure a Riggs Bank
loan of $5000 and he was creditor for $2000 to a neighbor. Also by
1878 Julia was able to employ a governess at Sherwood for seven-year-
old Baby Spencer. By the end of the decade the Tylers had gradually
struggled back from the twin blows of Reconstruction and the Panic
of 1873, and from the depths of the financial crisis of May-June 1874
when, for a time, everything had seemed lost. All Julia's children had,
in the meantime, been educated. Tuition had proved, after all, a better
investment than seed wheat and guano. Nor in 1880 was David
Gardiner Tyler any longer poor. Like his father before him, the master
of Sherwood Forest had recaptured the status of being seasonally cash
poor in the manner of all American farmers in the 18705 and i88os.
In terms of respect and self-respect it was a vastly different kind of
poverty .5(>
Julia's return to Sherwood Forest in 1874 allowed her without
gratification to witness the final chapter of Harry Beeckman's ill-starred
543
life. Disappointed in love, the income from his inheritance reduced to
near zero by the Panic of 1873, Harry took the liquid way out. By
April 1874 the twenty-six-year-old playboy was on "a continuous
debauch for an indefinite period." He had, said the disgusted Gardie,
"squandered enough to have insured the happiness of a prudent man."
Early in August 1875 the rootless Harry was killed one night while
riding back to Sherwood Forest. The party he had attended had lasted
late into the evening and Harry was in no condition to ride a horse.
Galloping along homeward at high speed, he struck his head accidentally
on a low-hanging branch. The impact broke his neck instantly and
pitched him to the ground dead. Julia was heartsick. She blamed herself
for Harry's death. His will left her his quarter share of the Gardiner
estate in Manhattan, but that economic balm did little to salve her
deep sense of guilt at his death.51
Happily, the unexpected blow was softened somewhat by the joy
she experienced when her son Alex married his third cousin, Sarah
Griswold Gardiner. The ceremony was performed by the Reverend
Mr. Charles Gardiner in the Presbyterian Church in East Hampton
on August 5, 1875. It was a good match for Alex. Sarah — or Sally,
as she was called — was the daughter of the prominent Samuel Buell
Gardiner, tenth proprietor of Gardiners Island and a New York State
Assemblyman. Alex had met her on Staten Island before leaving Castle-
ton Hill for Richmond in 1864 to fight the Yankees. He had kept in
touch with her during his eight years in Germany and upon his return
in 1873 a serious romance flowered. Sally was not a beautiful woman,
nor was she extroverted like so many of the Gardiners, but she did
have (as Phoebe Horsford described her) a great deal of style. "I think
her appearance, especially in some of her elegant dresses, is exceedingly
aristocratic." Alex was very much in love with her. Following a wedding
and reception for five hundred people, he brought her to Sherwood
Forest for part of the honeymoon.52
Sally Tyler was not to have a very happy life. She lost her first
baby at birth in June 1876. Within a year of her marriage her hus-
band was again unemployed, and for two years he remained jobless. The
first of her children to survive infancy, Gardiner Tyler, born in Janu-
ary 1878, died in March 1892 at the age of fourteen. Her second child,
Lillian Horsford Tyler, called Daisy, contracted an unfortunate mar-
riage in August 1910 with Alben N. Margraf, a German naval officer,
and divorced him before the birth of their daughter in March 19x2.
She died in May 1918 at the age of thirty-nine. Most tragically, Sally
lost her husband on September i, i883.53
Julia moved heaven and earth in Washington in 1877-1879 to
get the idle Alex a job with the Department of the Interior as an en-
gineer or surveyor. Working through her old friend and lawyer, Wil-
liam M. Evarts, President Hayes' Secretary of State, Julia made several
544
trips to the capital seeking her son's appointment to a government post.
She also buttonholed various legislators in a campaign for larger In-
terior Department appropriations in the hope that Alex might secure
employment of some kind in an expanding department. During this
dogged quest she was several times entertained in the White House by
Lucy Webb Hayes, "That's right/' Alex cheered when he learned of
his mother's social contact with the First Family, "go it while you can! "
Fortunately, she and Evarts were successful in securing from Congress
a $20,000 appropriation for one Daniel G. Major to survey Indian lands
in the Dakota Territory. Major was an experienced surveyor; he had
executed similar contracts for the Department of the Interior for many
years. The private understanding behind this particular appropriation
was that Major and Alex would form a partnership to execute the con-
tract. Crews would have to be hired and supplies for months in the
wilderness would have to be purchased. This took capital, and Alex
agreed to supply $4000 to cover the initial operating costs of the part-
nership. "Hurrah for Mr. Evarts!" Alex shouted when Major's con-
tract finally came through in November 1878; "God knows I have
struggled to get employment in every way I could. . . . What a wonderful
friend in need he has been!" Julia, of course, supplied the money for
Alex to buy into the deal with Major. "I only want four thousand
dollars ($4000) — three thousand ($3000) cash and one thousand
($1000) to hold in reserve . . . ," Alex told her blandly. Without Ms
investment the agreement with Daniel Major was void, Alex was cer-
tain he would make a $5000 profit on the Dakota venture. Thanks to
his energetic mother's influence and money, and the intercession of
Secretary of State Evarts ("God bless him!"), J. Alexander Tyler was
launched into the Indian lands surveying business in the summer of
1879. Sally saw him infrequently after that.04
After he had gained experience in the desolate Indian country,
Alex was appointed United States Surveyor in the Department of the
Interior. On September i, 1883, while serving as Government In-
spector of Surveys in New Mexico, the thirty-five-year-old Alex Tyler,
graduate of Karlsruhe and Freiburg, Uhlan for the Kaiser, artillerist for
Robert E. Lee, died suddenly at the Governor's Palace in Santa Fe.
He apparently ran out of fresh water on a surveying expedition in
the nearby desert, drank alkaline water in desperation, and contracted
the dysentery that killed him. But Julia learned in Richmond in April
1884 from a Virginia engineer and surveyor named Coleman, "lately
arrived from Santa F6," that "Alex was murdered." This is a much more
poetic version of his demise than the alkaline-water story, but it is
untrue. The sorrowing Sally was left with two small children, both of
whom she outlived, and the prospect of a lengthy widowhood. When
she died in East Hampton on September 25, 1927, at seventy-nine,
she had been a widow for forty-four years.55
545
Julia had as much success getting Lachlan on the public payroll as
she did finding Alex a position in the federal government. After prac-
ticing medicine for a year in Jersey City, Lachlan discovered he had
few patients, fewer dollars, and a bride to support. In June 1877 he
sought his mother's aid in an application for the job of Police Surgeon of
the town. Julia had no influence in Journal Square and that hope died
aborning. Disgusted with Jersey City, Lachlan moved to Washington
to seek federal employment. So pinched for funds did he become by
early 1878 that he was forced to consider the then-radical idea of
permitting his wife, Georgia Powell Tyler, to seek work in the Depart-
ment of Agriculture. Indeed, several Virginia congressmen were sounded
out on this and they agreed to help Georgia find employment. Mean-
while, Lachlan began working for a surgeoncy in the Navy Depart-
ment. He knew his medical knowledge was adequate for the post, but
he feared that his grasp of grammar, orthography, geography, history,
and modern languages was insufficient to win the stiff comprehensive
competitive examination for one of the Navy's "soft berths." He could
only hope that "perhaps they modified things to those applicants who
came forward highly recommended, or were undoubtedly gentlemen.79
Under no circumstances did he want to risk the "discomfiture and
degradation of a failure." He therefore asked Julia to find out if "my
name and the Teace Policy' of the [Hayes] Government towards the
South will go a sufficient way in the examination to almost certainly
insure my success." Urged to enlist the aid of the ever-helpful Evarts
("Ask Mr. Evarts point blank if influence amounts to anything in
the matter"), Julia again approached the Secretary of State on behalf
of one of her children. He was helpful and sympathetic. Unfortunately,
Lachlan failed the Navy's preliminary physical examination in October
1878 for reasons of "general debility" which, he explained to Julia,
"means in the medical vocabulary everything and nothing." Dr. Tyler
also ruefully discovered that on the Board of Medical Examiners he
had "no friends or influence as you [Julia] supposed I would have, and
I had to tell the Board who I was and everything." It was a shock.
Nevertheless, Lachlan and his mother persisted. Julia went to work
on Evarts and Evarts spoke with Secretary of the Navy R. W. Thomp-
son. Both Cabinet officers led Lachlan to understand confidentially,
through Father Patrick F. Healy, that if he could pass the Navy phys-
ical the remainder of the examination would "present no difficulty."
Lachlan promptly began a body-building regimen and in July 1879 he
passed both the physical and the academic examinations and was certi-
fied for appointment as a surgeon in the United States Navy. Com-
bined with an outside private practice the post afforded Lachlan a
secure future. Straightway he called on Evarts to thank him for his help
and encouragement. He found the Secretary to be "the same grand
gentleman, ever attentive and kindly disposed to me." Evarts suggested
546
that if Lachlan preferred not to take the Navy post, he might be in-
terested instead in a position in the Pension Office or on the District of
Columbia Board of Health. But the struggling young physician de-
murred. The Board of Health post paid very little, and "a certainty,
however small, is more than an uncertainty, and I have a certainty of
some kind here [with the Navy] ." Julia had again prevailed in Wash-
ington. You are, Lachlan confessed to his patronage-wise mother, "a
remarkable woman in all respects." 56
Julia's own campaign for a federal pension as a President's widow
also ended in success. The precedent for such a pension was established
in July 1870 when Congress passed legislation giving Mary Todd
Lincoln an annual stipend of $3000. Needless to say, Julia saw no
reason, particularly after her friend Evarts became Secretary of State,
why she, Sarah Childress Polk, and Caroline Fillmore should not receive
the same consideration from the Congress. The Hayes administration
was embarked on a policy of burying the "bloody shirt'1 of the Civil
War which Grant and the Radicals had waved so frantically from the
White House staff for eight corruption-sodden years. Consequently,
former Rebels were in somewhat better repute in the capital. By
Julia's reckoning, 1879 seemed a propitious year for the launching of
her pension campaign.
Enlisting the assistance of Secretary Evarts and former Colonel
Robert E. Withers, CSA, now Senator from Virginia and Chairman of
the Senate Committee on Pensions, and the aid of various Old Dominion
congressmen, principally Representative John Goode of Norfolk, Julia
manned her trusty desk and began firing letters at Capitol Hill de-
signed to enlist legislative support for the pension proposition. These
she combined with occasional trips to the capital to beard the law-
makers in their dens. It was a maximum effort in every respect.
First, however, she claimed the $8 per month allowed the widows
of all veterans of the War of 1812 who had served actively for over
fourteen days. This she received without contest. Her claim that the
payments should be made retroactive to January 1862, when the legisla-
tion was passed, was denied. Nonetheless, her argument that she was
entitled to the retroactive pay because "Captain" Tyler had died
before the legislation came into law and had never been placed on
the disallowed list as a "traitor" had a certain ingenuity. The War
of 1812 pension payments to Julia commenced in March 1879 and m~
eluded five months' accumulated benefits in the first payment. It was
a modest triumph, but one "gratefully received."
"Do you not think now would be a favorable time to suggest that
the only two other Presidents' widows now living shall be generously
allowed the same pension that Mrs. Lincoln receives?" she inquired
of Evarts. This rhetorical interrogatory was followed by letters to
Representative Goode in January 1880 asking him to prepare, intro-
547
duce, and manage the necessary legislation on the floor of the House
when it convened again in March. In her instructions to Goode she
asked only for the same $3000 treatment Mary Lincoln had received.
Letters to Representative James B. Garfield of Ohio and other legis-
lators stressed her "impatience to be heard" and produced still an-
other version of John Tyler's deathbed wish: "With my pension of
three thousand dollars my days will be made comfortable. ... I now
remember the exclamation of my Husband when he was so suddenly
taken with his last illness to the group around him and when he thought
he was passing away immediately: 'I leave my wife and young children
to God and my country/ Well, the time has come when the necessity
arises for me to turn to the country he spent his life in serving for
relief. . . ." 5r
Gardie was very much opposed to his mother's quest for a federal
pension. It was, he thought, degrading to have to appeal to former
Union Army officers like Generals Rutherford B. Hayes and James A.
Garfield for charity. Evarts and Senator Withers also advised her against
pushing the pension campaign in 1880. They feared that to agitate
the question in a Presidential election year would hand the Radical
Republicans in Congress another "bloody shirt" political issue with
which to flail the Democracy. Rebel John Tyler had been the only
American President who seceded with his state from the very Union he
had governed. "The stalwarts of the Republican party are ready to
catch at anything out of which political capital can be made," Withers
informed Sherwood Forest. So the matter was temporarily dropped,
even though Julia was assured by her Washington friends that she had
strong support on Capitol Hill for the pension concept.58
In 1 88 1 she was resolutely back in action. She had carefully
drawn up a petition in 1879 detailing her financial needs and pointing
out the extent of her property losses during the Civil War at Sherwood
Forest and Villa Margaret. This petition was now formally submitted
to the Congress. In it she outlined the heavy costs of four years of
litigation in the will fight with her brother, and argued that she simply
could not live on the income "from the remnant of my mother's estate,"
in spite of the fact that "my distinguished counsel Hon. Wm. M.
Evarts (present Secretary of State), Judge Edwards Pierrepont (now
Minister to England) and Hon. James Lyons of Richmond, Va.? pro-
posed to forego their claims for arduous and indefatigable services
rendered me." She concluded her plea with the heartrending observation
that
By great effort and economy I have continued to struggle up to this period —
have educated my children as far as it was possible, and paid many debts
for which I was not originally accountable. But now, so depressed have my
fortunes become, I am forced, though reluctantly, to appear before you to
seek that aid that was not denied Mrs. Lincoln. . . . The continued financial
depression permeating the remotest corners of the country has deprived me
548
for two years of the rents I depended upon, foreclosures of mortgages are
threatening, and executions on judgments will leave me without means to
satisfy the most necessary expenditures. Against this torment of misfortune I
can no longer contend without assistance. . . . Surely the Widow of a President
who served his country so arduously and successfully during fifty years, and
held every position in its councils, deserves your consideration.50
The appeal was successful. In 1881 Julia was awarded by Con-
gress an annual pension of $1200, less than half that being paid Mary
Todd Lincoln. Before she had time to protest this inequity, the death
by assassination of President Garfield on September 19, 1881, added
a fourth "Mrs. Ex-President" to the group of widowed former First
Ladies — Julia Gardiner Tyler, Sarah Childress Polk, Mary Todd Lin-
coln; and now Lucretia Rudolph Garfield. Caroline Fillmore had died on
August ii, 1 88 1. The tragic addition of Mrs. Garfield to the trio solved
Julia's pension problem quickly.
On March 31, 1882, Congress awarded all four annual pensions
of $5000 each and ordered payments made retroactive to September
19, 1 88 1, the date of Garfield 's death. The Pension Act canceled Mary
Lincoln's earlier award of $3000 and Julia's lesser stipend of $1200.
Julia's small War of 1812 pension was not affected. Although she had
covertly written the Washington Post in October 1881 (signing herself
"A Lady Subscriber") suggesting a $10,000 annual payment to the
widowed First Ladies, "that they may be placed above want and
enabled in some measure to meet the requirements their actual position
in the society of the country imposes upon them — and let there be no
invidious distinctions," she was delighted with the 1882 legislation as
it stood. She immediately thanked Evarts for his influence on the
passage of the bill. But he informed her, through Lachlan, that "its
success was so certain that any movement of [mine] would have been
unnecessary." He playfully warned his former client, however, that she
should "not indulge in any extravagance" with her windfall. The advice
came too late. The sixty- two-year-old Julia had already overceleb rated
her good fortune. At Shirley and Westover dinner parties she had
"crammed" herself with "good and rich things" and suffered a bad at-
tack of indigestion. This indisposition passed swiftly and June 1882
found her healthy and happy once again in Newport, as in days of
yore, enjoying the summer season there in grand style. More im-
portantly, the pension permitted her to lease a town house in the Church
Hill section of Richmond. Later she moved into a house on the corner
of Grace and Eighth, opposite St. Peter's Roman Catholic Cathedral.
There she lived peacefully and comfortably the last few years of her
life. At the same time, the nation gradually emerged from the great
depression and the New York real estate and rental situations steadily
improved. Not all her income in the i88os was received from Con-
gress.60
Paradoxically, the Hayes administration, which through William
549
M. Evarts had done so much for Alex, Lachlan, and Julia, commanded
none of Cardie's respect. He remained as unreconstructed as ever. True
to his resolve in 1870, he had held himself aloof from all elective office.
In 1873 he turned down a chance to run for the state senate. With
a predictable Radical majority of nearly 5000 against any white Con-
servative Democratic candidate who might be put up for the state
senate the prospect of election seemed hopeless anyway. So Gardie
politely passed up the "glorious but extremely profitless honor of
leading a forlorn hope" in Charles City. Importunities from Julia and
from Samuel Buell Gardiner in 1875 to change his mind and run for
public office failed. Instead, he campaigned occasionally for Con-
servative Democrats who were leading less hopeless crusades against
Radical domination elsewhere in the Old Dominion. While affecting
this politically detached stance he watched in disgust as the Republicans
made off with the Presidential election of i876.ci
When the votes were counted in November, Samuel J. Tilden of
New York, the Democratic nominee, emerged with a 250,000 popular
margin over Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio. He also had 184 electoral
votes, one short of the necessary majority. Hayes had 165 undisputed
electoral votes. Twenty electoral votes, centering in South Carolina,
Florida, and Louisiana, were vigorously contested. Hayes needed all
twenty of these disputed votes to win the election. A Republican-domi-
nated fifteen-man Electoral Commission was finally appointed in Janu-
ary to investigate and certify the confused electoral returns in the
contested states, and by February 1877 the Commission, along straight
8-to-7 party lines, had awarded every one of the controversial votes to
Hayes. Hayes therefore "won7' the canvass of 1876 by an Electoral
College count of 185 to 184 and was duly declared elected March
2. Behind the scenes during this critical period stalked chicanery,
corruption, and multiple other pressures.
The main thing that reconciled the Democrats to being "counted
out" of the White House was a series of Republican promises to re-
move the last of the federal troops from the South, appoint a Southerner
to the Cabinet, and appropriate substantial sums for Southern internal
improvements. Also promised by the Republicans was the construction
of the Texas and Pacific Railroad from East Texas to San Diego. This
would provide the transcontinental rail route for which Dixie legislators
had been agitating since the 18503. These guarantees seemed to many
Democrats substantial — as good as anything they might secure for
themselves were they actually in the White House. And so the bargain
was struck. The Democracy accepted the Republican arithmetic, and
Hayes in turn delivered on most of the Republican commitments. (}~
Gardie considered this deal a supine surrender to the Yankees in
every respect, even though a Hayes administration gave every prospect
of following pro-Southern policies. He urged his mother, en route to
550
Georgetown in February 1877 to visit Pear lie, to "use your influence
with the Southern Congressmen and get them to prevent Hayes' in-
auguration by every possible means. " He was certain that "the people
would consider any evil preferable to the success of fraud and the
Radical Party. But I have long since despaired of seeing anything
like backbone among the Dems, Dem Jem!" Julia did not agree with
her angry son. When she learned that her friend Evarts would be named
Secretary of State in the Hayes Cabinet, her personal reconciliation
to the fraud developed speedily and realistically. She could not there-
fore accept Cardie's extremism when he declared in March 1877 that
My hatred, prejudice or whatever you may choose to call it, against Yankees
of whatever sort, Democrat or Radical . . . grows greater every day. . . . My
greatest wish is that I may live to strike another blow for Southern Inde-
pendence, with "Old Bob" God bless him, in the lead. If I did not live in hopes
of this, I'd be desperate. The idea of being forever under Yankee thrall-
dom . . . ! The bare thought is enough to set me crazy ! Excuse this effusion,
but if I didn't put my thoughts on this subject on paper sometimes I verily
believe I would burst with concentrated emotion. 7TIs such a luxury to curse
one's enemies! 0a
It was a luxury Julia no longer indulged after her federal pension
was voted and she moved to Richmond in 1882. Her last days there
were spent pleasantly although she was in failing health. In 1883 she
fractured an arm and the recurrent pain of it was with her until her
death. In 1885, and again in 1887, she had what was diagnosed as a
serious "congestive chill" that forced her to bed for several weeks. The
1885 attack rendered her unconscious for five days and nearly ended
her life then and there. But she struggled back. During these twilight
years Julia visited frequently with her friends in town and in Charles
City. Until Lachlan moved his medical practice from Washington to
Elkhorn, West Virginia, in 1887, she visited him regularly in the city
she loved so much. She was still "the subject of great attention from
the society people" when she returned to Washington. In spite of her
enthusiastic traveling about she invariably clothed herself in deep
mourning. She had so many dead to lament. The lines in her face
deepened, her hair grayed, and she put on a great deal of weight. In
the house on Grace Street the aging First Lady raised Baby Spencer to
young womanhood. She pursued her Roman Catholicism without os-
tentation at St. Peter's. No longer did she feel it her bounden duty
to convert anyone else to her faith, however.
During these final years she kept in close touch with her chil-
dren. She saw Fitz begin the difficult life of a Virginia farmer on leased
land near Ashland in Hanover County. She urged Gardie toward
marriage so that Sherwood Forest might have a new mistress, and she
became impatient with his lack of enterprise in the matter. "I still
sport in unfettered freedom amid my unhooked brothers of the deep
although there never swam a fish who made lustier efforts to get hooked,"
he teased her. Not until June 6, 1894, did he "hook" the attractive Mary
Morris Jones. More rewardingly, Julia saw her beloved Pearlie married
in St. Peter's Cathedral to Major William Mumford Ellis of Shawsville,
Virginia. He had formerly served as a Montgomery County repre-
sentative to the Virginia House of Delegates. The family that eventually
numbered eight Ellis children commenced its expansion almost im-
mediately. Julia and Baby Spencer often visited Pearlie and the Major
at Madison, their home near Roanoke, in the years that followed.
Julia was particularly proud when her scholarly son, Lonie, brought
out in 1885 his massive two-volume The Letters and Times of the
Tylers, and she was glad to have the author and his family in her
home while the extensive work was in preparation. Not surprisingly,
Lyon Gardiner Tyler's book was a detailed defense and justification
of his father's political career in every regard. For this reason it did
much to quiet the anger of Julia's other children when they happened
on memoirs that threatened to demote their revered father in the eyes
of Clio. "Poor old fools," Lachlan fretted when he read a less than
eulogistic article about John Tyler in the January 1880 Southern
Farmer and Planter by former Governor William Smith.
They thought that father was courting their wisdom whereas he was just
using them as old brooms to sweep [forward] his own and original ideas
What would have become of Wise, Smith, et al. if they hadn't in some way
or another been in association with John Tyler? It is the light from his name
that casts a glow upon theirs in the . . . remote corners of History.
Julia did not enlist again in the family crusade for her husband's
reputation. She had already served her tour of duty in that enterprise.
She now had sturdy sons to carry the banner for her. Indeed, Lonie
spent the remainder of his days, until his death in 1935, fighting and
refightmg his deceased father's battles. In dozens of books and articles
the distinguished president of William and Mary College maintained
the political, moral, and intellectual superiority of President John
Tyler over every one of his contemporaries — Abraham Lincoln promi-
nently and specifically included.64
Julia also watched Sherwood Forest gradually returned to its ante-
bellum beauty under Gardie's sure touch. And though she frequently
visited the plantation in the i88os, she tried to avoid the place in the
summer months. "How I do wish Sherwood agreed with me," she sighed
in July 1886, in one of the last of her letters that has survived. "I
think I would never care to leave it for I do love farm life. But there is
death in the ague and fever for me and for Baby Spencer too. Gardie
is young enough now to rise from such attacks, but they will injure
SS2
him yet The great remedy [for malaria] there no doubt is calomel
and quinine." 65
During these last years in Richmond Julia had no contact with
brother David Lyon or his wife Sarah. Their estrangement was com-
plete. The marriage of Alex Tyler to Sally Griswold Gardiner in 1875
had done nothing to heal the Tyler-Gardiner breach. Indeed, if the pro-
Confederate inscription on Alex Tyler's monument in the East Hampton
cemetery is any indication, Sally had accepted her husband's sectional
politics when she accepted his wedding ring. Lyon had some correspond-
ence with his Uncle David in 1882-1883 relative to collecting family-
held materials for inclusion in his biography of John Tyler. In this effort
David Lyon cooperated. "The letters arrived in the nick of time," Lonie
thanked him, "and I find them of immense importance in supplying
missing links and suggesting new ideas." This was the only contact be-
tween the Long Island Gardiners and the Virginia Tylers in the i88os.66
While the Tylers suffered severely (though never in silence) under
the dual blow of Black Reconstruction and the Panic of 1873, David
Lyon Gardiner remained comfortable. Armed with his own inheritance
and Sarah's, he experienced no difficulties. In 1878 he took his family
to Europe for a casual tour of the Continent. Through his New York
agent, William Cruikshank, he managed his New York City properties
with casual competence. He also sold his long-valueless San Diego lots to
excellent advantage when the Texas and Pacific finally pushed its tracks
into the reviving town. By 1885 he owned a large yacht and employed
a crew to sail her. His politics were, and remained until his death on
May 9, 1892, conservative and "bloody shirt" Republican.67
The older David Lyon grew, the more concerned he became with
defending the purity of the Gardiner name. His interest in family his-
tory and genealogy became a passion, and he devoted his leisure time
(which was all the time) to its study. He soon became the family
expert on all Gardiner matters. In 1871 he saw his father's unfinished
Chronicle of the Town of East Hampton posthumously into print. Thus
when Curtiss C. Gardiner of St. Louis published in the Brooklyn Eagle
and other Long Island papers in 1885 excerpts from his planned
Lion Gardiner and His Descendants, David Lyon, defender of the
faith, erupted in anger. Curtiss Gardiner had the temerity to suggest
that not all the descendants of Lion Gardiner were equal combinations
of Cincinnatus, Sir Galahad, George Washington, and thrifty Ben
Franklin. Perhaps eleven generations of Gardiners in America had pro-
duced fewer failures, wastrels, alcoholics, and wartime pacifists than
other prominent families over a comparable period of two and a half
centuries. But they had produced some. No family has been wholly
perfect. In a sharp letter to Curtiss Gardiner, David Lyon informed the
wayward genealogist that his vicious work was a failure. "You have
553
shown yourself to be entirely unfitted for literary work . . . your object
is notoriety." Curtiss Gardiner was not intimidated by this blast. "I
have received your letter . . . and placed it in our file for reference,"
he replied wearily.
This did not suit David Lyon. To stem the poison flowing from
distant St. Louis he encouraged the circulation of pro-Gardiner articles
and book reviews prepared by Martha J. Lamb, editor of the Magazine
of American History in New York City. "Concerning the St. Louis
assaulter . . . your letter to him was excellent and I thank you warmly,"
said the more malleable Martha. Her always-charitable accounts of the
Gardiner clan swiftly earned her the imprimatur of David Lyon. There
was never any suggestion in any of her work that "Gardiners Island
was never a manor, nor its early proprietors Lords." In fact, she be-
lieved this nonsense implicitly. David Lyon believed it too, and in
1888 he was a leading force within the family to provide an elaborate
tomb in the East Hampton cemetery for the remains of the magnificent
Lion, builder of towns, victor over the Pequots, founder of the family
in America. A reclining marble statue of the seventeenth-century for-
tifications engineer portrayed him impressively decked out in fourteenth-
century armor. Sergeant Lion Gardiner became a medieval knight at
last.68
The ex post facto knighting of Sir Lion in East Hampton, Long
Island, produced no flourish of trumpets on Grace Street in Richmond.
In many ways Julia was no longer a Gardiner. When she seceded fr^m
the Union she seceded from the family. Juliana's death and the court
battles with David Lyon had virtually ended her connection with the
other descendants of the immortal Lion. Julia was thus more interested
in the election of son Lyon to the presidency of William and Mary
College in 1888 than she was with the elevation of forebear Lion to
some mythical Round Table. It was with great pride in Lonie's ac-
complishment that she attended the first commencement exercise over
which he presided in Williamsburg, in June 1889. She attended the ball
that preceded it, and seemed in good health and excellent spirits. She
visited in Lome's home in Williamsburg for a few days after the gradua-
tion, and on Sunday, July 7, she returned to Richmond. Since her own
house had been closed up during the hot days of her absence, she and
eighteen-year-old Baby Spencer took a room in the Exchange Hotel.
It was her intention to consult with Dr. Hunter McGuire on Monday
morning about the pain her previously fractured arm was giving her and
then take the river boat down to Sherwood Forest that afternoon for a
visit with Gardie.
But on Monday morning, July 8, she felt so ill and her arm hurt
so much she summoned McGuire to her room. She complained of chills,
fever, and biliousness and the physician treated her accordingly. To this
554
therapy she did not respond. On Wednesday morning, the tenth, she
asked Baby to go for Dr. McGuire at his office. The young girl left her
grandmother with a chambermaid and set out on the errand. During
her brief absence, at about u A.M., Julia suffered a stroke. When
Baby returned she found Room 27 crowded with hotel employees.
Julia was nearly unconscious. A porter who lifted her from her chair
into bed said, "I believe she is dying." Baby immediately had telephone
messages sent to several physicians; Dr. Edward McGuire responded
first. He diagnosed Julia's ailment as "congestive chill" and summoned
his uncle, Dr. Hunter McGuire. Dr. J. B. McCaw, Julia's regular family
physician, was also called in. When someone at Julia's bedside sug-
gested that she be given a sip of liquor, she shook her head slightly
and whispered, "Tea." It was her last word. A moment later she lapsed
into unconsciousness. In midafternoon Father Dinneen was called from
St. Peter's to administer extreme unction. At 5:15 P.M., on July 10,
1889, Julia Gardiner Tyler died without regaining consciousness. Three
doctors worked over her until the end. At her bedside were Baby
Spencer and three Richmond ladies who were old friends of the former
First Lady. Room 27, the scene of her death, was only a few doors
down the hall from where John Tyler had died in 1862.
At noon on July 10 all of Julia's five living children were notified
of her illness by telegraph. Lonie was the first to reach the Exchange
Hotel. He left Virginia Beach where he was participating in an educa-
tional convention and reached Richmond at n P.M., too late, of course,
to see his mother alive. On July n Pearlie arrived from Shawsville in
Montgomery County, Fitz came on from Ashland, and Gardie arrived
from Sherwood Forest. The funeral was held in St. Peter's Cathedral at
u A.M. on Friday, July 12, Bishop-elect A. Van de Vyver officiating.
Julia's body, "with thoroughly natural features, was in a neat casket
covered with black." Reverend Father Charles E. Donahoe of Fred-
ericksburg celebrated the Requiem Mass for the dead. In the middle of
the service, Lachlan and his wife arrived at the church from Elkhorn,
West Virginia. The Cathedral was packed with Richmond notables and
fashionables, mostly Protestants. Indeed, Father Van de Vyver could
not resist the golden opportunity to instruct the captive Protestants,
several clergymen among them, in the meaning and symbolism of the
Roman Catholic service for the dead, and it was to this educational
subject that the Bishop-elect devoted much of his eulogy to Julia.
Neither David Lyon nor any of the New York Gardiners attended
Julia's funeral. When it was all over, "Mrs. Ex-President Tyler," Con-
federate patriot, the "Rose of Long Island," was taken to Hollywood
Cemetery and buried beside her distinguished husband and her beloved
Julie. Father Donahoe conducted the graveside prayers. At the age of
sixty-nine the former First Lady's energetic "reign" was over.
555
There in Hollywood Cemetery she lies today, beside John Tyler,
under the tall marble shaft belatedly erected by Congress in 1915 to the
memory of the tenth President of the United States. Within a few feet of
her grave rest such prominent Virginians and Americans as President
James Monroe and Matthew Fontaine Maury, "Pathfinder of the
Seas." It is a fashionable and accomplished group — "altogether select"
— just as Julia would have wanted it to be.69
556
NOTES
Key to frequently cited footnote abbreviations:
GPY: Gardiner Family Papers, Yale University Library
LTT: Letters and Times of the Tylers, by Lyon G. Tyler
TFP: Tyler Family Papers
TPLC: Tyler Papers, Library of Congress
Footnote citations have generally been placed at the end of paragraphs in the text
(sometimes at the end of two or three paragraphs in sequence) with a view toward
grouping the relevant citations to a particular point, argument or series of inter-
related facts in one place. References within each footnote have been arranged in
series corresponding to the order of the data each supports in the text above. For
this reason the pagination in a given citation may appear numerically out of se-
quence.
CHAPTER I
1 [Benjamin TJ Onderdonk to [Alexander] Gardiner, Memorandum of Ap-
pointment, n.d. [June 20, 1844], Gardiner Papers, Manuscript Division, Yale Uni-
versity Library. Hereafter cited as GPY (Gardiner Papers, Yale).
3 John Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Washington, April 20, 1844, GPY. An offset
print of this letter has been published in the Yale University Library Gazette. It is
accompanied by an excellent article analyzing the historiographical importance of
the Gardiner Papers at Yale by Howard Gotlieb and Gail Grimes. See their "Presi-
dent Tyler and the Gardiners: A New Portrait," Yale University Library Gazette,
XXXIV (July 1959), 2-~i2.
3 Juliana Gardiner to John Tyler, New York, April 22, 1844, Tyler Family
Papers. Hereafter cited as TFP (Tyler Family Papers).
*The account of the wedding is taken from the New York Herald, June 27,
1844. Two accounts of the ceremony appeared in that issue, the principal and most
detailed version being based on facts supplied by someone quite close to the family,
probably Alexander Gardiner. See also "Interview with Julia Gardiner Tyler,"
Washington, Winter, 1888-1889, in Philadelphia Press, July 11, 1889; reprinted in
Richmond Dispatch, July 12, 1889.
8 New York Herald, Nov. 17, 1844.
"Alexander Gardiner to Margaret Gardiner, New York, June 28, 1844; also
David L. Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, June 30, 1844, TFP.
7 New York Herald, June 27, 1844.
8 Ibid.
0 Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, June 28, 1844.
Juliana Gardiner confessed that "we have had something to laugh at you may
suppose although the effect upon the public never occurred to us in making our
arrangements," Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, June 28,
1844; Margaret Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, July n, 1844, TFP.
10 Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, July 10, 1844. Mar-
garet reported "a general stir among the congregation" when the usual Episcopal
prayer was read in church on Sunday, Aug. n, 1844, blessing the President of the
United States. "They gave a sly glance at me to see the effect," Margaret Gardiner
557
to Julia Gardiner Tyler, East Hampton, N.Y., Aug. n, 1844, TFP; see also David L.
Gardiner to Juliana Gardiner, East Hampton, N.Y., July 7, 1844, GPY; and
Alexander Gardiner to Juliana Gardiner, New York, July 14, 1844, Tyler Papers,
Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Hereafter cited as
TPLC (Tyler Papers, Library of Congress}.
u John Tyler to Mary Tyler Jones, Washington, June 4; 28, 1844, TPLC.
"Elizabeth Tyler Waller to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Lynchburg, Va., Sept. n,
1844, TFP.
13 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Washington, June 30, 1844, TFP.
u Ibid. So great were the demands for souvenir bits of the wedding cake that
Julia had a replica baked in New York for distribution to her friends and relatives
there. On the insistence of Priscilla Cooper Tyler, the President instructed Wilkins,
the White House cook, to prepare still a third replica for distribution in the Phila-
delphia area. Elizabeth Tyler Coleman, Priscilla Cooper Tyler and the American
Scene, i8i6-i8Sp (University, Ala., 1955), 112.
16 Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, [New York], July 4, 1844, TFP.
16 Margaret Gardiner to Juliana Gardiner, Washington, July 3, 1844, TFP.
17 Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, [July 61, 1844, TFP.
18 Margaret Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, July 8, 1844; see also
Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler [New York], July 10 [1844]; Julia
Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Old Point Comfort, Va., July [3], 1844, TFP.
wNew York Herald, Nov. 12, 1844; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner,
Old Point Comfort, July 1844, TFP.
20 Ibid., July 13, 1844; Sherwood Forest, July 14, 1844, TFP. The honey-
moon cottage was a one-story affair consisting of a living room, dining room, bed-
room, and pantry-kitchen. Colonel De Russy later served as brigadier general in the
Union Army during the Civil War and was cited for gallantry in action.
21 Ibid.; see also Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, July [8],
1844, TFP. William Compton Bolton began life as William Bolton Finch, changing
his name in 1831.
22 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Old Point Comfort, July [5], 1844;
Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, July [8], 1844, TFP.
^ Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Old Point Comfort, July [5], 1844;
Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler [New York], July 10 [1844!, TFP.
24 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, July 14, 1844,
TFP.
26 Ibid., Old Point Comfort, July 13, 1844; Sherwood Forest, July 14, 1844,
TFP. Today Sherwood Forest is a Registered National Historic Landmark, so
designated by the United States Department of the Interior. It is located on Vir-
ginia Route 5 midway between Williamsburg and Richmond. Open to the public,
it is a unique house in that it is not a formal monument to a bygone era. It is
the home of Mr. J. Alfred Tyler and his family, Mr. Tyler is the grandson of John
and Julia Gardiner Tyler, the son of David Gardiner Tyler.
20 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Margaret Gardiner, Washington, Oct. 14, 1844. Julia
sent the ballad to Alexander in New York urging him to see that it was published.
Apparently it never was. Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest,
July 14, 1844, TFP. A copy of the verse in Tyler's handwriting is found in TPLC.
The music has not survived. The verse was written for Julia shortly after her father
was killed on board the U.S.S. Princeton in Feb. 1844.
-^ Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, July [8], 1844, TFP;
Juliana Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, June 6, 1843 ; Margaret
Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, Washington, Dec. 25, 1842, GPY; Margaret Gar-
diner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Nov. 17, 1845; see also ibid., Oct. 12,
1845, in which Margaret says, "I believe I have a greater penchant for old people
than young. What does this augur? That I shall follow in the footsteps of rny
558
illustrious predecessor ? Heigh ho ! it will never do to print this" ; and also ibid., n.d.
[1844], TFP, in which she remarked that a daguerreotype of Tyler made him "look
as if he had put his veto upon everything but age"
28 Henry A. Wise, Seven Decades of the Union (Philadelphia, 1881), 233.
20 Julia Gardiner Tyler, UA Birthday Song," March 1852, TFP.
30 Wise, Seven Decades of the Union, 235.
81 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Washington, Sept. 8, 1844, TFP.
CHAPTER 2
1 Allan Nevins and Milton H. Thomas (eds.), The Diary of George Templeton
Strong, 3 vols. (New York, 1952), I, 238.
2 Pierre S. R. Payne, The Island (New York, 1958), 17; W. F. Williams to
David Gardiner, Norwich, Conn., Feb. 13, 1839, GPY.
3 Payne, The Island, 22-23; Curtiss C. Gardiner, Lion Gardiner and His De-
scendants (St. Louis, Mo., 1890), 3, 48-49; Lion Gardiner, Relation of the Pequot
Wars (East Hampton, 1660), reprinted in C. C. Gardiner, op. cit.t 9-13, 55, 24i I7»
6$, 21, 19.
* Ibid. , 57~$8; Payne, The Island, 77-82.
cLion Gardiner to John Winthrop, Isle of Wight (Gardiners Island), Apr. 27,
1650, in C. C. Gardiner, Lion Gardiner and His Descendants, 34; ibid., 3. Lion
Gardiner's East Hampton period, 1653-1663, is fully treated in David Gardiner,
Chronicle of the Town of East Hampton, County of Suffolk, N.Y. (New York,
1871) ; William S. Pclletrcau, History of East Hampton Town (New York, 1882) ;
and Benjamin Thompson, History of Long Island, 2 vols. (New York, 1843), Vol. I,
"Will of David Gardiner (1691-1751), fourth proprietor, May 16, 1751, in
C. C. Gardiner, Lion Gardiner and His Descendants, 108.
7 Ibid. The herds on the island at this time numbered 200 cows, 40 horses and
3000 sheep. Sarah Diodati Gardiner, Early Memories of Gardiners Island (East
Hampton, 1947), 73? 79~8o.
8 New York Herald, Nov. 17, 1844. On the slavery issue in New York at this
time, 1810-1820, see Dixon Ryan Fox, The Decline of the Aristocracy in the Politics
of New York (New York, 1919), 269-70. For Alexander Gardiner's pro-slavery
views see his "An Oration Delivered At Princeton College, July 4, 1838," GPY.
See also Sarah D. Gardiner, Early Memories of Gardiners Island, 73-74.
8 No two versions of John Gardiner and the Captain Kidd treasure agree in
details or in the degree of John's complicity, if any, in hiding the treasure on the
island. Compare Payne, The Island, 111-49; Sarah D. Gardiner, Early Memories
of Gardiners Island, 63-64, 17-18; C. C. Gardiner, Lion Gardiner and His De-
scendants, 98-101. The Payne account is the most detailed and best researched. See
also W. F. Williams to David Gardiner, Lebanon, Conn., Mar. 18, 1839, GPY;
Sarah D. Gardiner, Early Memories of Gardiners Island, 64-67; 75-87; C. C. Gar-
diner, Lion Gardiner and His Descendants, 101 ; Thomas Hardy to John Lyon Gar-
diner, HMS Ramillies, off Gardiners Island, July 31, 1813; Charles Paget to John
Lyon Gardiner, British Squadron off New London, n.d., GPY.
10 C. C. Gardiner, Lion Gardiner and His Descendants, 108-26. Abraham Gar-
diner married Phoebe Dayton in 1781. Their five children were Abraham (1782-
1827), Julia's father David (1784-1844), Mary (1786-1858), Samuel (1789-1859),
and Nathaniel (1792-1856). Julia's aunt and her three uncles all married and had
large families. Julia thus had twenty-two first cousins who survived infancy. She
was on intimate terms with only three of them, however: Mary, Phoebe, and
Frances (Fanny), daughters of her Uncle Samuel, who lived on Shelter Island, L.I.,
N.Y. Captain Abraham Gardiner (1763-1796) and his father, Colonel Abraham
: 559
Gardiner (1722-1782), were both residents of East Hampton. Gardiner family
genealogies list the marriage of David Gardiner to Juliana McLachlan as 1816.
Their first son, however, was born on May 23, 1816. Hence the wedding year was
very likely 1815.
11 David Gardiner to Mary Smith Gardiner, New York, May 27, 1805 ; July 31,
1809; and David Gardiner to Mary Smith Gardiner Van Wyck, Croton, N.Y.,
Aug. 25, 1814, GPY.
13 David Gardiner to Mary Smith Gardiner, New York, July 31, 1809; see also
David Gardiner to Phoebe Dayton Gardiner, New York, Dec. 18, 1809, GPY.
13 C. C. Gardiner, Lion Gardiner and His Descendants, 149; Franklin B. Dexter,
Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College (New York, 1911), V, 659-
60; David Gardiner Account Book, 1841-1844. These properties were located at
numbers 181, 183, 185, 187 Chatham St.; i, 3, 5, 7, 9 Oliver St.; 349* 3Si, 353 Green-
wich St.; and 22 Harrison St. Juliana Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, New York,
Dec. 9, 1850, GPY.
14 Julia Gardiner Tyler, "Reminiscences of Mrs. Julia G. Tyler," Cincinnati
Graphic News, June 25, 1887. Reprinted in Lyon G. Tyler, Letters and Times of
the Tylers, 3 vols. (Richmond, Va., 1884; 1894), III, 194-201. Hereafter cited as
LTT (Letters and Times of the Tylers). Alexander Gardiner to Samuel Gardiner,
New York, Feb. 19, 1849, GPY. The Gardiner home in East Hampton was pur-
chased in 1822 from a Mr. Jones who had bought it in 1819 from Abraham Smith.
w Sarah D. Gardiner, Early Memories of Gardiners Island, gi ; "The Guardians
of David J. Gardiner in Account with David Gardiner, 1818-1822," GPY; Assets
and Liabilities of David Gardiner (March 1844), TFP ; D. S. Gardiner to David
Gardiner, Gardiners Island, Mar. 22, 1828; David Gardiner to D. S. Gardiner,
New York, Apr. 19, 1828, GPY; East Hampton Cemetery Records, East Hampton
Free Library. Julia apparently did not know exactly when she was born. John Tyler's
son and biographer, Lyon G. Tyler, listed her birthday as May 4, 1820. Julia's tomb-
stone in Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond, uses the July 23, 1820 date. Julia often
mentioned, however, as did newspaper accounts of her wedding at the time, that
she was twenty-four when she married John Tyler on June 26, 1844. She never
mentioned her birthdate in any of her many letters.
16 Journal of the Senate of the State of New York, Forty-Seventh Session (Al-
bany, 1824) 28-29, 121, 129, 354-55, 364; ibid,, Forty-Eighth Session (1825), 118,
205, 338, 554-56; ibid., Forty-Ninth Session (1826), 212, 245, 546; 482-83; ibid.,
Fiftieth Session (1827), 29, 5i-5a> 92-93, 3i5~i6, 3S4~55, 544~45, 576-77J Jabez D.
Hammand, Life and Times of Silas Wright (Syracuse, N.Y., 1848), 56-59; De Alva
S. Alexander, A Political History of the State of New York, 3 vols. (New York,
1906), I, 334-56.
17 John Donley to David Gardiner [New York], Apr. 30 [1834] ; J. R. Hobble
to David Gardiner, Washington, Oct. 26, 1832; George B. Hanley to David Gardiner,
New Haven, Conn., Jan. n, 1834, TFP; Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner,
East Hampton, June 8, 1840, GPY. His work on East Hampton was first published
in article form in the Sag Harbor (N.Y.) Corrector and posthumously in book form
as the Chronicle of the Town of East Hampton in 1871. See Benjamin F. Thompson
to David Gardiner, Hempstead, N.Y., Dec. i, 1838; W. F. Williams to David Gar-
diner, Norwich, Conn., Feb. 13, 1839; Lebanon, Conn., Mar. 18, 1839; Juliana Gar-
diner to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, May 17, 1840; Alexander Gardiner to
David Gardiner, New York, June 3, 1840. David Gardiner's interest in Clinton
Academy, particularly in the hiring of teaching personnel, is seen also in David
Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, East Hampton, Sept. 6, 1835; N. D. Chagaray to
Julia Gardiner [New York], Dec. 8, 1838, GPY.
M Jonathan Thompson to David Gardiner, New York, Sept. 14; Oct. 2; 27,
1832 ; E. Hand to David Gardiner, New York, Nov. 4, 1832 ; John A. King to David
560
Gardiner, Jamaica, N.Y., Nov. 9, 1832, GPY. Jonathan Thompson, former Col-
lector of the Port of New York during the John Quincy Adams administration, was
a cousin of David Gardiner. He provided the $200 which Gardiner disbursed. Sarah
Frances Bering to Eliza Gardiner Brumley, Sag Harbor, Nov. 7, 1832, Gardiner
Papers, Long Island Collection, East Hampton Free Library.
10 J. G. Dychman to David Gardiner, New York, Jan. 2, 1834, TFP; H. Ketchum
to David Gardiner, New York, July 30, 1834, in [Lyon G. Tyler (ed.)], "Letters
From Tyler Trunks, Sherwood Forest, Virginia. Political Letters — 1832-1834,"
Tyler's Quarterly Historical and Genealogical Magazine, XVII (January 1936), 156.
(Hereafter cited as Tyler's Quarterly}. Ketchum was Clerk, Whig General Com-
mittee of New York City. Thurlow Weed to David Gardiner, New York, Dec. 14,
1837; L. Bassedill to David Gardiner, Albany, N.Y., Feb. 21, 1838; David Gardiner
to [N. N. Hunt], n.p., n.d. [East Hampton, Dec. 1838]; N. N. Hunt to David
Gardiner, Sag Harbor, Dec. 25, 1838; Jan. 12, 1839; Margaret Gardiner to David
L. Gardiner, East Hampton, July 16, 1840, GPY.
120 Joseph G. Albertson to David L. Gardiner, New Haven, Conn., Jan. 8, 1834;
David L. Gardiner to Juliana Gardiner, Princeton, N.J., n.d. [1834] ; Samuel B.
Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, East Hampton, Dec. x, 1833 ; David Gardiner to
James Carnahan, East Hampton, May 24, 1834; David Gardiner to David L. Gar-
diner, New York, Mar. 25 [1835], GPY; David L. Gardiner to Juliana Gardiner,
Princeton, N.J., Aug. 7, 1834, TFP; David Gardiner to David L. and Alexander
Gardiner [East Hampton], May 31, 1835; David Gardiner to David L. Gardiner,
East Hampton, Aug. 3, 1835; Alexander Gardiner to Margaret Gardiner [Princeton},
July 15, 1837, GPY. David Gardiner built a new home in East Hampton in 1835-
1836 which placed a temporary strain on the family resources.
21 Juliana Gardiner to Julia and Margaret Gardiner, Princeton, Mar. 1836, GPY;
David L. Gardiner to David Gardiner, Princeton, Dec. 13, 1833; Nov. 16, 1834;
Alexander Gardiner to David Gardiner, Princeton, Nov.; Dec. 18, 1834, in Lyon
G. Tyler, "Letters From Tyler Trunks," loc. tit., 157-58, 161-62; Alexander Gardi-
ner to Juliana Gardiner, Princeton, Nov. 22, 1835, TFP; David L. Gardiner to
Alexander Gardiner, Princeton, Aug. 24, 1834, in Lyon G. Tyler, "Letters From
Tyler Trunks," loc. cit., x6o-6x; Alexander Gardiner to Juliana Gardiner, Princeton,
Jan. i, 1835, GPY; David L. Gardiner to David Gardiner, Princeton, Dec. 13,
1833, in Lyon G. Tyler, "Letters From Tyler Trunks," loc. cit., 158; Alexander
Gardiner to Professor Alexander, East Hampton, Feb. 28, 1837, GPY. See also
Alexander Gardiner, Princeton Diary, 1834-1838, passim, GPY. Alexander Gar-
diner to Julia Gardiner, Princeton, Dec. 28, 1836; Alexander Gardiner to David
and Juliana Gardiner, Princeton, July 12, 1837, GPY; Alexander Gardiner to
Juliana Gardiner, Princeton, Nov. 22, 1835, TFP; Alexander Gardiner to David
Gardiner, Princeton, Dec. 18, 1834; David L. Gardiner to David Gardiner, Princeton,
Jan. 5, 1834, in Lyon G. Tyler, "Letters From Tyler Trunks," loc. cit.} 163, 158;
Alexander Gardiner to Margaret Gardiner [Princeton], July 15, 1837, GYP.
w David L* Gardiner to David Gardiner, Princeton, Jan. 5; Mar. 2; Mar. 1834,
in Lyon G. Tyler, "Letters From Tyler Trunks," loc. cit., 158-59, 161.
38 Alexander Gardiner, "Notes For an Essay in Classical History," Princeton
College, May 16, 1837; Alexander Gardiner, "An Oration Delivered at Princeton
College, July 4, 1838," GPY. A marginal note on this manuscript states that portions
of the speech "were suggested by Father." See also Alexander Gardiner, Princeton
Diary, 1834-1838, GPYf passim.
^Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner, East Hampton, Feb. 12, 1837, TFP;
David L. Gardiner to David Gardiner, New York, May 23, [1835], in Lyon G.
Tyler, "Letters From Tyler Trunks," loc. cit.} 160; Julia Gardiner to Juliana Gar-
diner, New York, May 22, 1835; Alexander Gardiner to Juliana Gardiner, Prince-
ton, Nov. 22, 1835, TFP. Eliza Packer Gardiner Brumley (1788-1863) was the wife
561
of Reuben Brumley (1799-1860). They had no children. East Hampton Cemetery
Records, East Hampton Free Library.
^Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner, East Hampton, Apr. ij 5, 1835; May i,
1837, TFP.
26 Julia Gardiner to Juliana Gardiner, New York, Apr. 23; May 22, 1835, TFP.
Minunet was Julia's phonetic spelling of the flower mignonette. This horticultural
information made available to the author by Helen Hales Seager, Granville Garden
Club, Granville, Ohio.
27 Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner, East Hampton, May 7, 1835; Feb. 12,
1837, TFP. Just where Margaret attended school is not known.
28 David L. Gardiner to C. F. Jones [Princeton], June 1836. David Lyon read
law and clerked in the offices of Richard and Emerson, 70 Wall St. Alexander studied
in the Anthon firm. Alexander Gardiner Notebooks — 1839; Julia Gardiner to David
L. Gardiner, East Hampton, May 19, 1842; Julia Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner,
East Hampton, May 30, 1842, GPY.
^Alexander Gardiner to David Gardiner, New York, June 15, 1839; Margaret
Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, May 20; June 19, 1840; David
Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner [East Hampton], July 16, 1840; Alexander Gar-
diner to David L. Gardiner, East Hampton, June 28, 1842 ; David L. Gardiner to
Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, Jan. 2, 1843; David L. Gardiner to David
Gardiner, New York, Jan. 24, 1843 ; David L, Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, New
York, Mar. 7, 1843 ; East Hampton, May 4, 1843 ; Margaret Gardiner to Alexander
Gardiner, East Hampton, May n, 1843, GPY. The Gardiner law office at 14 Wall St.
rented for $70 per month. When the rent was raised to $90 per month they moved
to 49 Williams St,
30 Juliana Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, Oct. 31 [1842];
Alexander Gardiner to David Gardiner, New York [Oct. 1842]. A large room with
small attached bedroom on the second floor, adequate for two, could be had for $13
per week at Madame Garcia's. Board was included. Juliana Gardiner to Alexander
Gardiner, East Hampton, May 4 [1840], GPY, This warning was delivered on the
occasion of the move of her sons to Mrs. Boyd's house at 422 Houston St., a few
doors from Madame Chagaray's Institute.
31 Alexander Gardiner to [Julia Gardiner], [New York], June [1839] (draft
copy of a letter) ; Julia Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, June 14,.
1839; Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner, New York, June 2; May 24, 1839;
Alexander Gardiner to [David L. Gardiner] [New York], June 9, 1841 (fragment of
draft copy of a letter). In 1843 the connection with the Livingston family was
broken when Julia informed Alexander: "Ma says she would prefer you not to visit
the Livingstons again this summer — No reason only no object" Julia Gardiner
to Alexander Gardiner, June 4, 1843 ; Julia Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, East
Hampton, May 31, 1840; Alexander Gardiner to J L [Julia Lane] [New
York], June 14, 1841, GPY.
33 David L. Gardiner to Margaret Gardiner [New York], May 1840; Alexander
Gardiner to Julia Gardiner, New York, May 24; June 2; 15, 1839; Alexander Gar-
diner to Margaret Gardiner, New York, June 2, 1840, GPY ; see also Caroline Clark-
son to Julia Gardiner, New York, June 2, 1840, TFP.
33 Alexander Gardiner to Margaret Gardiner, New York, June 2, 1840; Margaret
Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, June 8, 1840, GPY.
34 Julia Gardiner to David L. Gardiner [East Hampton], April 5, 1840; see also
Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, May 10, 1840; Julia
Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, May 12, 1840; David L. Gardiner
to [Margaret Gardiner] [New York], May 1840, GPY.
^'Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, May 10, 1840;
Julia Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, East Hampton, May 31, 1840; see also Mar-
garet Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, June 8, 1840; Margaret Gar-
562
diner to David L. Gardiner, East Hampton, June 29, 1840. Juliana did not dispute
this characterization, but she softened it considerably in her view that "he is not very
great as a preacher." Quoted in ibid. He was to become a good, loyal, and dear
friend of the Gardiners. Julia Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, June
14, 1840, GPY.
36 Margaret Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, East Hampton, June 29, 1840,
GPY; printed invitation from Corps of Cadets, United States Military Academy,
to Ball given August 28, 1839, with notation: "Will Miss Gardiner be so good to
fill up the enclosed invitations at her pleasure and much oblige Cadet Rogers." That
Julia corresponded with beaux in New York and that on occasion she would receive
poetry from them is indicated in Alexander Gardiner to Margaret Gardiner, New
York [May], 1840, GPY.
37 Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner, New York, May 24, 1839; Julia Gar-
diner to David L. Gardiner, East Hampton, May 31, 1840; Julia Gardiner to Alex-
ander Gardiner, East Hampton, July 27; Aug. r; 27 1842; [Summer] 1843, GPY.
33 Ibid., June 14; May 4; 10; 12; June 29, 1840; May 30; July 27, 1842, GPY.
80 P. S. R. Payne recounts this incident interestingly in The Island, 202-3, but
adds some colorful speculation not warranted by the facts. He guesses, for instance,
that the strange man present "looks suspiciously like" David Gardiner "disguised with
mustache and chin whiskers." That Julia posed voluntarily would seem indicated by
David Gardiner's failure to press a lawsuit against Bogert and Mecamly.
*° Julia Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, May 17, 1840, GPY.
Julia guessed that the author of the poem was a "Mr. G-," otherwise unidentified.
41 Nathaniel Gardiner to David Gardiner3 New Haven, July 8, 1840; Benjamin
F. Butler to Lewis Cass, New York, Sept. 22, 1840; Charles King to Georges W.
Lafayette, New York, Oct. r, 1840, GPY. Charles King was the son of Rufus
King of New York, Federalist Vice-Presidential nominee in 1808; Georges Wash-
ington Lafayette was the son of the celebrated marquis.
4a Juliana Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner [New Haven], Aug. 3, 1840; Juliana
Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, New York, Washington, Aug. 9 [1840]; Philadel-
phia, Aug. 27, 1840, GPY.
43 Margaret Gardiner, Leaves From a Young Girl's Diary, 1840-1841, Sarah D.
Gardiner (ed.), (privately published, 1926), Sept. 28; Nov. 3, 1840, 8, 24-25. Here-
after cited as Margaret Gardiner, Diary.
44 David Gardiner to Samuel Gardiner, London, Nov. 2, 1840, GPY.
^Margaret Gardiner, Diary, Nov. 10, 1840, 29-30.
40 Ibid,, Nov. 28; Dec. 2, 1840; Jan. 6, 1841, 38-40, 49-50.
47 David Gardiner to Editor, New York American, Paris, Jan. 14, 1841; Alex-
ander Gardiner to Samuel Gardiner, [New York], Mar. 28, 1841, GPY; New York
American, Mar. 25, 1841. The piece in the American was captioned "Presentation at
Court."
^ Juliana Gardiner to David L. and Alexander Gardiner, Rome, Feb. 21, 1841;
David Gardiner to Nathaniel Gardiner, Florence, Apr. 20, 1841, GPY; Margaret
Gardiner, Diary, Apr. 13 ; July 4, 1841, 97-98, 135; Margaret Gardiner to [David L.
and Alexander Gardiner"], Rome, Feb. 23, 1841, GPY; Margaret Gardiner, Diary,
Feb. 21, 1841, 70; Leonard Wood to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Brunswick, N.S., Dec. 2,
1872; J. Alexander Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Karlsruhe, Baden, Jan. 10, 1867;
David Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Karlsruhe, Oct. 19, 1866, TFP.
Wood, who had served as an intermediary in the romance, recalled it as "that con-
quest of yours of which I became a witness." David Gardiner Tyler feared that if
he and his brother Alex did find the baron he might become "so far wrought up as
to 'kiss us for our mother.' "
40 Margaret Gardiner, Diary, Mar. 12, 1841, 84-8$; David Gardiner to Nathaniel
Gardiner, Florence, Apr. 20, 1841; John J. Bailey to Andrew Stevenson, Genoa,
Apr. 15, 1841, GPY; Margaret Gardiner, Diary, Apr. i5~July 3, 1841, 100-35; Julia
563
Gardiner Tyler, "Reminiscences," in LTT, III, 194; Margaret Gardiner Beeckman to
Julia Gardiner Tyler, [New York], Aug. 2 [1849] , TFP. A brief romantic fling with
a Belgian count was so successful for Julia that according to Margaret the gentle-
man was on the verge of leaving Brussels for America to ask for her hand when he
learned of her marriage to Tyler.
50 Juliana Gardiner to David L. and Alexander Gardiner, Leamington, Aug. 27,
1841, GPY.
51 Julia Gardiner Tyler, "Reminiscences," in LTT, III, 194.
53 Alexander Gardiner to David Gardiner, New York, Apr. [9], 1841, GPY.
63 [Alexander Gardiner] to the Editor of the New York Courier and Enquirer,
Oct. ii, 1841 (Private), GPY.
54 Julia Gardiner Tyler, "Reminiscences," in LTT, III, 195.
55 Ibid., 194-95-
^Coleman, Priscilla Cooper Tyler, 93; Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gar-
diner, Washington, Jan. 21, 1842, GPY.
57 Ibid,; Julia Gardiner Tyler, "Reminiscences," in LTT, III, 196-97.
58 Julia Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, Mar. 6, 1842; Mar-
garet Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, Nov. 9; 13, 1842, GPY. John
Griswold Gardiner (1812-1861), ninth proprietor of Gardiners Island, died un-
married.
50 Juliana Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, East Hampton, June 26, 1842; Mar-
garet Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, Nov. 13, 1842 ; Julia Gardiner
to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, July 27, 1842; Julia Gardiner to David L.
Gardiner, East Hampton, May 19, 1842 ; Julia Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, East
Hampton, July 27, 1842 ; Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton,
Nov. 13, 1842; Julia Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, July 27;
May 30, 1842, GPY.
80 Ibid., Aug. i, 1842; J. J. Bailey to David Gardiner, New York, Sept. 12,
1842; David Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, Mar. 6; Nov. 13,
1842; Alexander Gardiner to David Gardiner, n.p., n.d. [New York, Nov.-Dec.
1842], GPY.
81 Moses Yale Beach, Wealth and Pedigree of the Wealthy Citizens of New York
City. Comprising . . . Persons Estimated to be Worth $100,000 and Upwards, Third
Edition (New York, 1842), 2. Beach was the editor of the New York Sun.
62 Ibid., 8. Following his death in 1844^ David Gardiner was listed in the 1846
edition as "Estate of $200,000." The figure was a bit high. Gardiner's brother
Nathaniel of Sag Harbor (Julia's Uncle Nathaniel), did not make the 1842 edition
of Beach, but he was included in the 1846 version at a comfortable $100,000. Julia
Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, June 21, 1842, GPY. The sur-
prised lady whose parlor was violated was Sarah Griswold Gardiner (1781-1863),
wife and widow of John Lyon Gardiner (1770—1816), seventh proprietor of Gar-
diners Island, and mother of John Griswold Gardiner.
^Ibid.; David Gardiner to David L, Gardiner, East Hampton, June 21, 1842;
Juliana Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, East Hampton, June 19, 1842, GPY; Beach,
Wealth, 6, 9, 19.
04 Alexander Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, Norwich, Conn., June 27, 1842;
Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, Nov. 13, 1842 ; Alex-
ander Gardiner to David Gardiner, n.p., n.d. [New York, Nov.-Dec. 1842], GPY.
CHAPTER 3
1 Oliver P. Chitwood, John Tyler: Champion of the Old South (New York,
1939), 10, 202-3; LTT, I, 198-200; John S. Wise, Recollections of Thirteen Presi-
dents (New York, 1906), 13-16; Julia Gardiner Tyler to David Gardiner Tyler,
Staten Island, N.Y., Oct. 30, 1869, TFP; A. G. Abell, Life of John Tyler (New York,
1844) > i-io; Rudolph Marx, The Health of the Presidents (New York, 1960), 134;
Katharine Tyler Ellett, Young John Tyler: A True Story -for Boys and Girls
(Richmond, Va., 1957), 10-12, 29-33. In the Ellett book for children (ages S-io)
the story is told that Tyler had memorized large passages of Patrick Henry's "If
this be treason" speech at the age of eight. See also W. Burlie Brown, The People's
Choice: The Presidential Image in the Campaign Biography (Baton Rouge, La.,
1960), passim,, for a delightful discussion of the hokum surrounding the youthful
years of American Presidents. For some inexplicable reason the marbles-at-dawn
story found its way into the otherwise excellent Hugh Russell Fraser, Democracy in
the Making: The Jackson-Tyler Era (Indianapolis, 1938), 152.
2 John Tyler to William Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Oct. 29, 1854, TPLC;
LTT, I, 200; Chitwood, Tyler, 17-18; Wise, Seven Decades of the Union, 32—33.
8 Over the years Tyler served as William and Mary's benefactor, legal adviser,
Rector of its Board of Visitors, and Chancellor. He spoke frequently on the campus
and in 1825 he blocked an ill-considered scheme to move the college to Richmond.
See LTT, I, 344,' Henry A. Wise to John Tyler, Onancock, Va., Aug. 7, 1855; John
Tyler to , Sherwood Forest, Oct. 22, 1860; John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Sher-
wood Forest, Feb. i, 1851; Prof. W. E. Hopkins to John Tyler, Williamsburg,
Aug. 21, 1850; John Tyler to Prof. George F. Holmes, Sherwood Forest, Jan. 31,
1848; Williamsburg, Feb. 22, 1847; John Tyler to Prof. Ewell, Sherwood Forest,
Feb. n, 1859, TPLC. For Tyler's legal training see Abell, Tyler, 136; Chitwood,
Tyler, 20-21; LTT, I, 280-81, 204, 272; John Tyler to Henry Curtis, Washington,
Dec. 8, 1820, in ibid., 336.
A Ibid., 55-56, 70; John Tyler to William Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Jan. 12,
1852; Dec. 23, 1859. For additional evidence of Tyler's genealogical interests see
ibid., Feb. 15, 1848; Nov. 12, 1850, TPLC; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gar-
diner, Sherwood Forest, Dec. 14, 1859, TFP.
*LTT, I, 41-42; Chitwood, Tyler, 10, 64-65, 122; John Tyler to John C.
Hamilton, Sherwood Forest, July 14, 1855, TPLC,
9 LTT, I, 142-143, 149-50; John Tyler, Sr., to George Tucker, Greenway,
July io? 1795, TPLC; John Tyler to William Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Jan. 12,
1852 ; May 22, 1854, in LTT, II, 496, 510; John Tyler to Robert Y. Hayne, Glouces-
ter, Va., June 20, 1831, TPLC.
7 LTT, I, 154, 567-70; John Tyler to Henry S. Foote, Sherwood Forest, May 21,
1850, in ibid., II, 489; see also John Tyler's speech at Jamestown on May 13, 1857,
in which the point is made concerning slavery in British colonial policy, ibid., I,
10-11 ; Chitwood, Tyler, 154; LTT, I, 266-67; Margaret Gardiner Becckman to
Juliana Gardiner, Niagara Falls, Sept. 21, 1851, TFP.
8 John Tyler to Henry Curtis, Woodburn, Sept. 30, 1821, TPLC; John Tyler to
Mary Tyler Jones, Washington, Jan. 20, 1836, in LTT, I, 531; ibid., 280-81; III,
183; Anon., John Tyler: His History,, Character and Position (Pamphlet; New
York, 1843), ii J Chitwood, Tyler, 20-21.
9 Richard B. Morris (ccl.), Alexander Hamilton and the Founding of the Nation
(New York, 1957), 266; for a brief history of the first Bank of the United States
see Davis R. Dewey, Financial History of the United States (New York, 1903), 98-
101.
10 John Tyler to Hugh Blair Grigsby, Sherwood Forest, Jan. 16, 1855, TPLC;
Chitwood, Tyler, 27-28; LTT, I, 274. The Tyler resolution was introduced on
Jan. 14, 1812,
ia[Lyon G. Tyler (ed.)], "Will and Inventory of Hon. John Tyler," William
and Mary College Quarterly Historical Magazine, XVII (April 1909), 231-35. The
estate of John Tyler, Sr., also included 40 slaves. John Tyler to Letitia Christian,
Richmond, Dec. 5, 1812, in Laura C. Hollo way Langford, The Ladies of the White
House; Or, In the Home of the Presidents (Philadelphia, 1881), 309-10.
M John Tyler to Henry Curtis, Greenway, Mar. 23, 1813 ; Richmond, May 18,
1813, in LTT, I, 276, 277; Chitwood, Tyler, 22-23.
565
13Letitia Tyler to Letitia Christian Tyler, Parsonage, Jan. 7, 1837, TFP; John
Tyler to Mary Tyler, Washington, Dec. 26, 1827; Feb. 24; Apr. 30, 1828; Mar. 4;
Apr. 28; Dec. 24, 1830, in LTT, I, 389-92, 546, 549, 551-52; Armistead C. Gordon,
John Tyler: Tenth President of the United States. An Address at the Dedication of
the Monument Erected by Congress in Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond, Va., in
Memory of President Tyler, Oct. 12, 1915 (Pamphlet; [Richmond], 1915), 19;
Anne Royall, Letters From Alabama (Washington, 1830), 189; LTT, I, 550; Mar-
garet Gardiner to David L. and Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Mar. 9, 1843, GPY ;
Langford, Ladies of the White House, 312-17.
14Priscilla Cooper Tyler to Mary Grace Cooper Raoul, Williamsburg, Oct.
1839, m Coleman, Priscilla Cooper Tyler, 73-75; Langford, Ladies of the White
House, 325-26.
15Abell, Tyler, 59; LTT, I, 266-67, 280-81.
™Ibid., 278-79; Chitwood, Tyler, 29-30; Abell, Tyler, 13.
17 John Tyler to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, Sherwood Forest, June 14,
1855, TPLC; Rufus Stone to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Sioux City, Iowa, June 8, 1869,
TFP.
18 John Tyler to Henry Curtis, Washington, Apr. 13, 1832, in LTT, I, 439.
1B Abell, Tyler, 13-14; Chitwood, Tyler, 34; LTT, I, 296-97; John Tyler to Le-
titia Christian Tyler, Washington, Feb. i, 1817, in ibid., 288.
80 Chitwood, Tyler, 41-44; LTTf I, 316-17, 334.
21 Abell, Tyler, 18-19.
32 John Tyler to Henry Curtis, Washington, Feb. 22, 1830, in LTT, I, 408;
Chitwood, Tyler, 318.
28 John Tyler to Robert McCandlish, Sherwood Forest, Feb. 22, 1851, in LTT,
I, 402-3; John Tyler to Littleton W. Tazewell, Washington, June 23, 1834, in ibid.,
499; Chitwood, Tyler, 254.
84 John Tyler to Henry Curtis, Philadelphia, Dec. 18, 1818; Washington, Jan. 19,
1819, in LTT, I, 303, 305.
25 Abell, Tyler, 34-52.
3(1 Carl Brent Swisher, American Constitutional Development (New York, 1943),
175-76; John Tyler to Littleton W. Tazewell, Washington, June 23, 1834, in LTT,
I, 499«
'* Abell, Tyler, 65-74.
**lbid., 55-62 ; John Tyler to Henry Curtis, Washington, Jan. 19, 1818, in LTT,
I, 305-
»Q Niles' Weekly Register (Aug. 8, 1818), XIV, 399.
31 Claude C, Bowers, John Tyler: An Address at the Unveiling of the Bust of
President Tyler in the State Capitol, Richmond, Va,, June 16, 1931 (Pamphlet;
Richmond, 1932), 8-9; Chitwood, Tyler, 53; LTTf III, 26-27; I, 319-20.
""John Tyler to Henry Curtis, Washington, Feb. 5, 1820, TPLC; LTT, I,
319-20.
83 Abell, Tyler, 64; LTT, II, 540.
ulbid., I, 318-19; Chitwood, Tyler, 49-50; Gordon, John Tyler: Tenth Presi-
dent, 20.
"LTT, I, 329-
*°Ihid., 335-36; Marx, Health of the Presidents, 133-34.
37 John Tyler to Henry Curtis, Charles City, July 20, 1821, TPLC.
CHAPTER 4
1 John Tyler to Henry Curtis, Charles City, June 21, 1822, TPLC,
a Journal of the Virginia House of Delegates, 1823-1824 Session (Richmond,
1824), 55, 74-76, 95; Chitwood, Tyler, 60-61; LTT, I, 341-42.
3 Eugene Roseboom, A History of Presidential Elections (New York, 1959),
82 ; LTT, III, 28-29.
* Roseboom, A History of Presidential Elections, 84; Samuel Flagg Bemis,
John Quincy Adams and the Union (New York, 1956), 11-57; Charles M. Wiltse,
John C. Calhoun: Nationalist, 1782-1828 (Indianapolis, 1944), 304-6; Glyndon
G. Van Deusen, The Life of Henry Clay (Boston, 1937), 219-22.
5 John Tyler to Henry Clay, Charles City, Mar. 27, 1825, in Calvin Colton (ed.),
The Private Correspondence of Henry Clay (Cincinnati, 1856), 119-20.
°Chitwood, Tyler f 64; Abell, Tyler, 78-84; Chitwood, Tyler, 67-69; Abell,
Tyler, 85-86; Chitwood, Tyler, 60, 70; LTT, I, 345; Bowers, Tyler, g.
7H. S. Foote, A Casket of Reminiscences (Washington, 1874), 58; LTT, I, 356.
8 Ibid., 69.
8 The cautiously worded letters between Tyler and the committee of anti-
Randolph legislators urging the Tyler candidacy are reproduced in Abell, Tyler,
87-89; see also Wise, Seven Decades of the Union, 86-87; John Tyler to Henry
Curtis, Greenway, Sept. 4, 1827, TPLC; Chitwood, Tyler, 76; W. C. Bruce, John
Randolph of Roanoke, 2 vols. (New York, 1922), I, 513, 543; Chitwood, Tyler,
74-75, 78-79; LTT, I, 357-62; Chitwood, Tyler, 82.
10 Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Union; 69; Abell, Tyler, 92; Wise,
Seven Decades of the Union, 88-89.
31 The tariff policies of the 18205 and the Jacksonian tariff plot of 1828 are
treated in many standard sources, principally F. W. Taussig, The Tariff History of
the United States (New York, 1909), 70-102; George Dangerfield, The Era of Good
Feelings (New York, 1952), 396-409; and Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the
Union, 87—91.
wjohn Tyler to John Rutherfoord, Washington, Dec. 8, 1827, John Ruther-
foord Papers, Duke University Library ; John Tyler to Henry Curtis, Washington,
Mar. 18; May i, 1828, in LTT, I, 384-85, 387; Apr. 23, 1828, TPLC.
wjohn Tyler to Henry Curtis, Washington, Dec. 16, 1827; Mar. 18, 1828;
Greenway, Sept. 4, 1827, in LTT, I, 379, 386, 375; ibid., 365.
14 John Tyler to John Rutherfoord, Washington, Dec. 8, 1827, John Ruther-
foord Papers, Duke University Library ; John Tyler to Henry Curtis, Washington,
Dec. 16, 1827, in LTT, I, 379.
15 Roseboom, A History of Presidential Elections, 90-91.
10 John Tyler to John B. Ctopton, Washington, Dec. 14, 1828, Tyler Papers,
Duke University Library*
17 Claude C. Bowers, The Party Battles of the Jackson Period (Boston, 1928),
37-
™lbid., 48.
19 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson (Boston, 1946), 67~73> *°4-
20 James D. Richardson (comp.)j A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of
the Presidents (Washington, 1902), II, 448-49; Schlesinger, The Age of Jackson,
46-47.
<ALTT, I, 408-9; John Tyler to John B. Seawell, Washington, Jan. 25, 1832,
TPLC; John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Washington, Feb. 2, 1832, in LTT, I, 426-27.
22 Abell, Tyler, 102, 105-7; LTT, I, 421.
23 John Tyler to John Rutherfoord, Washington, Mar. 14, 1830, John Ruther-
foord Paper$,*Duke University Library.
'*LTT, I, 412; Abell, Tyler, 97-99-
*6 Wiltse, John C. Calhoun: Nationalist, 390-98; Richard M. Hofstadter, "John
C. Calhoun: The Marx of the Master Class," in The American Political Tradition
and the Men Who Made It (New York, 1949), 67-91; Margaret Bayard Smith,
The First Forty Years of Washington Society. Gaillard Hunt, (ed.) (New York,
1906), 252-53; Charles M. Wiltse, John C. Calhoun: Nullifier, 1820-1839 (Indi-
anapolis, 1949), 26-38.
26 John Tyler to Littleton W. Tazewell, Gloucester, May 8, 1831, in LTT, I,
567
422-23; Thomas Hart Benton, Thirty Years' View, 2 vols. (New York, 1889), I,
219, 215; for Tyler's continued distrust of Van Buren see John Tyler to James
Iredell, Jr., Washington, Jan. 10, 1835, James Iredell, Jr., Papers, Duke University
Library. In this letter Tyler characterizes Van Buren as Jackson's "sweetest little
fellow," the "Sejanus of the mighty Tiberius."
27 John Tyler to Mary Tyler, Washington, Apr. 20, 1832, in LTT, I, 429-30.
28 J. S. Bassett, Life of Andrew Jackson (New York, 1928), 599; Schlesinger,
The Age of Jackson, 87.
20 J. C. Fitzpatrick (ed.), Martin Van Buren, Autobiography (American His-
torical Association Annual Report for the Year jpiS), II, 625.
30AbeU, Tyler, 132; LTT, I, 474-75-
31 Nicholas Biddle to Henry Clay, Philadelphia, Aug. i, 1832, in Colton, The
Private Correspondence of Henry Clay, 341 ; Richardson, Messages and Papers of
the Presidents, II, 590; Schlesinger, The Age of Jackson, 91.
82 John Tyler to Henry Curtis, Washington, Apr. 13, 1832, in LTT, I, 439.
^Roseboom, A History of Presidential Elections, 104-5.
^Wiltse, John C. Calhoun: Nullifier, 171-72, 173.
35 Wise, Seven Decades of the Union, 122-23; Henry T. Shanks, The Secession
Movement in Virginia, 1847-1861 (Richmond, 1934), 21.
38 John Tyler to Mary Tyler, Washington, Apr. 26, 1832 ; John Tyler to John B.
Seawell, Washington, June 15, 1832; John Tyler to Henry Curtis, Washington,
Apr. 13, 1832, in LTT, I, 559, 437, 439; Abell, Tyler, 113, 121-23; Congressional
Debates, 1831-1832, VIII (Washington, 1832), 355-67 5 LTT, III, 69.
37 Henry St. George Tucker to Nathaniel B. Tucker, Richmond, Jan. 24, 1833,
in William and Mary College Quarterly Historical Magazine, XII (October 1903),
91—92 ; Shanks, The Secession Movement in Virginia, 21 ; Arthur C. Cole, The Whig
Party in the South (Washington, 1913), 20-21. The quotation is Duff Green's in a
letter to Richard K. Cralte, dated Dec. 15, 1832.
88 John Tyler to John Floyd, Washington, Jan. 16, 1833; John Tyler to Little-
ton W. Tazewell, Washington, Feb. 2, 1833, TPLC.
30 John Tyler to John B. Seawell, Washington, Jan. 25, 1832, TPLC; John H.
Pleasants to John Tyler, Richmond, Jan. i, 1833, in LTT, I, 452 ; John Tyler to
Littleton W, Tazewell, Washington, Feb. 2, 1833; John Tyler to John Floyd, Wash-
ington, Jan. 16, 1833; John Tyler to William F. Pendleton, Washington, Jan. 19,
1833, TPLC; LTT, I, 454 J Abell, Tyler, 135-46.
40 LTT, I, 444, 447, 461 ; II, 143-
41Chitwood, Tyler, 119; LTT, I, 467; John Tyler to John Floyd, Washington,
Jan, 16, 1833, TPLC.
^ John Tyler to Littleton W. Tazewell, Washington, Feb. 2, 1833, TPLC;
Abell, Tyler, 145; John Tyler, Speech at a Banquet Honoring Henry Clay, Rich-
mond, Virginia, April 12, 1860, in LTT, I, 467.
**Ibid., 462; John Tyler to John Floyd, Gloucester, Nov. 21, 1833, TPLC.
44 Schlesinger, The Age of Jackson, 97-105; Benton, Thirty Years' View, I, 374.
^John Tyler to Littleton W. Tazewell, Washington, Dec. 3; 25, 1833; John
Tyler to Thomas W. Gilmer, Washington, Jan. 7, 1834; John Tyler to Littleton W.
Tazewell, Washington, Dec. 25, 1833, TPLC; Schlesinger, The Age of Jackson, 106-
7, 109; Van Deusen, The Life of Henry Clay, 279-81.
w John Tyler to Littleton W. Tazewell, Washington, Jan. 9, 1834, TPLC; LTT,
I, 484; John Tyler to Letitia Christian Tyler, Washington, Feb. 17, 1834, in ibid.,
485; Abell, Tyler, 149-56. Abell produced the entire Tyler speech on the deposits
question as he did most of Tyler's important addresses in Congress and out. Ap-
parently he had access to the original manuscript copies of Tyler's pre-i842 utter-
ances. These documents, it may be assumed, were among those burned in Richmond
in April 1865.
^Ibid.
"Ibid.; LTT, I, 489, 597; Abell, Tyler, 158.
d9 John Tyler to Thomas W. Gilmer, Washington, Jan. 7, 1834; John Tyler to
Littleton W. TazeweU, Senate Chamber, Washington, May 9, 1834, TPLC; LTT, I,
484-85-
50 John Tyler to William Patterson Smith, Washington, Mar. 31, 1834, William
Patterson Smith Papers, Duke University Library; John Tyler to Henry Curtis,
Washington, Mar. 28, 1854; John Tyler to Littleton W. Tazewell, Washington,
June 23, 1834, TPLC.
CHAPTER 5
a John Tyler, "Oh Child of My Love," TPLC.
2 John Tyler to Henry Curtis, Charles City, July 20, 1821; Oct. 9, 1820,
TPLC.
9 Ibid., Washington, May i; 16, 1828, TPLC.
*Ibid.f Greenway, Sept. 4; Oct. 26; Nov. 16, 1827, TPLC.
* John Tyler to John B. Seawell, Washington, Jan. 25, 1832; John Tyler to
Elizabeth Tyler Waller, Washington, Jan. 16, 1843, TPLC; John Tyler to John B.
Seawell, Washington, June 15, 1832; John Tyler to Littleton W. Tazewell, Rich-
mond, May 2, 1826, in LTT, I, 437, 331.
6 Ibid., 575-77-
7 John Tyler to Letitia Christian Tyler, Washington, Feb. i, 1835; John Tyler
to John Tyler, Jr., Washington, Feb. 19, 1834; John Tyler to Mary Tyler, Wash-
ington, June 15, 1832; Dec. 26, 1827; Feb. 8, 1831; Dec. 24, 1830; Jan. 20, 1832;
John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Washington, Feb. 6, 1834; John Tyler to Letitia Chris-
tian Tyler, Washington, Feb. i, 1835, in ibid., 510, 563, 562, 390, 552, 551, 554>
562-63, 510.
8 John Tyler to Henry Curtis, Greenway, Nov. 23, 1827, TPLC; John Tyler
to Mary Tyler, Washington, Apr. 30, 1828; Dec. 24, 1830; Mar. n, 1832, in LTT,
I» 392> 552> 555; Chitwood, Tyler, 18; John Tyler to Mary Tyler, Washington,
Mar. 4; 18; Apr. 28, 1830, in LTT, I, 546, 547, 549; Letitia Tyler to John Tyler,
[Williarnsburg], Jan. 21, 1837, TFP.
°John Tyler to Mary Tyler Jones, Washington, Jan. 20, 1836; John Tyler
to Robert Tyler, Gloucester, Nov. 28, 1836; Dec. n, 1834. John Tyler, Jr., received
similar academic pep talks from his father in Washington. See John Tyler to John
Tyler, Jr., Washington, Feb. 19, 1834; John Tyler to Henry Curtis, Washington,
Mar. 28, 1834; John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Washington, Dec. u, 1834; Jan. 24,
1835, in LTT, I, 531, 564, 514, 5^3, 49*> 5*4, 5^4-
10 Ibid., Gloucester, Nov. 28, 1836, in ibid., 564-65.
11 John Tyler to Mary Tyler, Washington, Dec. 28, 1831; Jan. 20; June 15,
1832; John Tyler to Mary Tyler Jones, Washington, Jan. 20, 1836, in ibid., 428-29,
554, 562, 53i.
32 John Tyler to Mary Tyler, Washington, Dec. 26, 1827; Feb. 16, 1831; Mar.
n, 1832; Mar. 4; May 13, 1830; Feb. 8, 1831. The Jeffersonian anger adage was
also urged upon Robert. See John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Washington, Jan. 16,
1836, in ibid., 390, 553, 555, 547, 550, 553, 530; John Tyler to James Iredell, Jr.,
Gloucester, Nov. 16, 1836, James Iredell, Jr., Papers, Duke University Library;
John Tyler to Mary Tyler Jones, Mar. 25, 1836, TPLC; John Tyler to Robert
Tyler, Washington, Feb. 15, 1836, in LTT, I, 535? Royall, Letters From Alabama,
178.
14 John Tyler to Mary Tyler, Washington, Apr. 30, 1828; John Tyler to Robert
Tyler, Washington, Feb. 2, 1832; Jan. 16; Feb. 15, 1836; John Tyler to Mary
Tyler Jones, Washington, Feb. 18, 1836; John Tyler to Letitia Christian Tyler,
S69
Washington, Feb. i, 1835; John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Washington, Feb. 23, 1835;
Dec. ii, 1834, in LTT, I, 392, 427, 530, 535, 535, 5*o, S"> 5*4; John Tyler to
John B. Seawell, Washington, June 13, 1832, TPLC ; John Tyler to Henry Curtis,
Washington, May i, 1828; John Tyler to Mary Tyler, Washington, Feb. 16, 1831,
in LTT, I, 387, 553; ibid., II, 22; John Tyler to George G. Waggaman, Williams-
burg, Feb. 15, 1838; John Tyler to John H. Waggaman, Williamsburg, Aug. 30,
1839, TPLC.
14 John Tyler, Speech at the Memorial Service for Thomas Jefferson, Richmond,
July ii, 1826, in Chitwood, Tyler, 66; John Tyler to Mary Tyler, Washington,
Dec. 26, 1827; Feb. 24, 1828, in LTT I, 390, 390-91; Jo*1*1 Tyler, Speech to the
Virginia Colonization Society, Richmond, Jan. 10, 1838, in ibid., 567-69.
15 John Tyler to Mary Tyler, Washington, Jan. 20, 1832, in ibid., S54~55; John
Tyler to Henry Curtis, Washington, Jan. 25, 1844, TPLC; John Tyler to Mary
Tyler, Washington, Dec. 28, 1831; June 15, 1832; Mar. 4, 1830, in LTT, I, 429,
561-62, 547.
10 John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Washington, Jan. 16, 1836, in ibid., 530.
17Benton, Thirty Years' View, I, 471; LTT, I, 503-5; Chitwood, Tyler, 129-32;
Benton, Thirty Years' View, I, 481-87. Besides Tyler, the antiadministration mem-
bers of the committee were Senators Daniel Webster, Thomas Ewing of Ohio, and
Willie P. Mangum of North Carolina. The lone pro-Jacksonian was Senator William
Wilkins of Pennsylvania, later Tyler's Secretary of War. He boycotted the com-
mittee and would have nothing to do with its work or its subsequent December
1834 report.
18/6zU, 483, 487.
"John Tyler to Col. Thomas Smith, Washington, Dec. 16, 1835, in LTT, I,
525. The offer was made to Tyler by the Reverend William S. Morgan, member of
Congress from Virginia. Col. Thomas Smith was Gloucester delegate in the Virginia
House of Delegates.
^Benjamin W. Leigh to John Tyler, Richmond, July 5, 1835, in ibid., 523.
21 John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Washington, Jan. 16, iS36, in ibid., 529-30.
Tyler had sounded out his friend William F. Gordon on the idea of appealing to
the people in order to "put our adversaries on the defensive." John Tyler to
William F. Gordon, Washington, Jan. 8, 1836, James Rochelle Papers, Duke Uni-
versity Library.
23 William F. Gordon to John Tyler, Albemarle, Jan. 15, 1836, TPLC; John H.
Pleasants to John Tyler, Richmond, Jan. 13, 1836; James Barbour to John Tyler,
Richmond, Jan. 14, 1836; in LTT, I, 526, 527; see also Robert Allen to John Tyler,
Mt. Jackson, Va., Dec. 22, 1835, TPLC.
23 John Tyler to Mary Tyler Jones, Washington, Jan. 20, 1836, in LTT, I, 531.
21 Col. Thomas Smith to John Tyler, Richmond, Feb. ii, 1836; William Crump
to John Tyler, Powhatan County, Va., Feb. 14, 1836; D. F. Slaughter to John
Tyler, Richmond, Feb. 28, 1836, in ibid., 532, 533-34, 536-37. The key test vote
in the House of Delegates to instruct Tyler and Leigh to vote for the Benton
expunging resolution showed a Jacksonian-Democratic majority of only 14. On
the more general proposition of the right of the legislature to instruct and the duty
of the representative to obey, or resign, the affirmative margin was an over-
whelming 114 to 14. In the Virginia senate the Jacksonian-Democratic working
majority was only 6, yet the right of instruction proposition, which carried 114 to
14 in the House of Delegates, was carried 25 to 5 in the senate. The instructions
issue transcended faction.
25 John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Washington, Feb. 15, 1836, TPLC; John Tyler
to Mary Tyler Jones, Washington, Feb. 18, 1836, in LTT, I, 535. Tyler told Robert
that his decision to resign "seems to be the wish of my friends in Richmond," a
rather strange misreading of the bulk of the advice he seems to have received. John
Tyler to William F. Gordon, Washington, Jan. 8, 1836, James Rochelle Papers,
570
Duke University Library. He was also worried that the Jacksonians would carry
his own Gloucester County in the state elections in April. "It is necessary that you
should put everything in motion at once for the election in April," he wrote William
Patterson Smith at Gloucester Courthouse. "Success always, as you know, depends
on diligence and industry. The Expungers would rather carry Gloucester than any
other County." John Tyler to William Patterson Smith, Washington, Mar. 7, 1836,
William Patterson Smith Papers, Duke University Library.
26 John Tyler to Hugh Blair Grigsby, Sherwood Forest, Jan. 16, 1855? TPLC.
27 John Tyler to the General Assembly of Virginia, Washington, Feb. 29, 1836,
in Abell, Tyler, 166-71.
88 John Tyler to William F. Pendleton, Gloucester, Oct. 27, 1836, TPLC.
» LTT, I, 541-42.
*°The standard work on the emergence of the Whig Party is E. Malcolm
Carroll, Origins of the Whig Party (Durham, N.C., 1925), passim. See also Cole,
The Whig Party in the South, 20, 69 ; Barton H. Wise, The Life of Henry A. Wise
of Virginia, 1806-1876 (New York, 1899), 178. An excellent account of the origin
of the Whig Party in Virginia is found in Henry H. Simms, The Rise of the Whigs
in Virginia, 1824-1840 (Richmond, 1929), passim.
81 Schlesinger, The Age of Jackson, 284. For a detailed history of Anti-Masonry
see Charles McCarthy, The Antimasonic Party, 1827-1840 (Washington, 1903)*
passim; see also the chapter on Anti-Masonry in William B. Hesseltone, The Rise
and Fall of Third Parties, From Anti-Masonry to Wallace (Washington, 1948).
32 John Tyler to William F. Gordon, Gloucester, Nov. 9, 1834, James Rochelk
Papers, Duke University Library; John Tyler to James Iredell, Jr., Washington,
Jan. to, 1835, James Iredell, Jr., Papers, Duke University Library.
38 Freeman Cleaves, Old Tippecanoe: William Henry Harrison and His Times
(New York, 1939)* 202-4, 294-
a* John Tyler to Col. Thomas Smith, Gloucester Place, May 8, 1835, in LTTf
I, 516-17. Throughout 1835 such papers as the Richmond Virginia Free Press, the
Washington Sun, and the Richmond Whig boomed Tyler's Vice-Presidential nomina-
tion. See LTT, II, 517-18.
38 Cleaves, Old Tippecanoe, 45~49> 35*i 240-41, 247-48, 252, 254-55, 263,
266-67, 269, 274-75, 282, 284, 291; Henry Clay to John Bailhache, Ashland,
Sept. 13, 1835, in Colton, The Private Correspondence of Henry Clay, 400;
Nicholas BiddJe to Herman Cope, Philadelphia, Aug. n, 1835, in R. C. McGrane
(ed.), Correspondence of Nicholas Biddle Dealing with National Affairs (Boston,
1919), 255; Cleaves, Old Tippecanoe, 305-8.
86 Robert Allen to John Tyler, Mt. Jackson, Va., Dec. 22, 1835, TPLC; John
Tyler to Mary Tyler Jones, Washington, Jan. 20, 1836, in LTT, I, 531; Chitwood,
Tyler, 149-50; John G. Miller to John Tyler, Columbus, 0., Feb. 23, 1836; see also
Robert Ware to John Tyler, Columbus, Feb. 24, 1836, in LTT, I, 520-22.
87 Chitwood, Tyler, i49~5°-
38 John Tyler to William F. Pendleton, Gloucester, Oct. 27, 1836, TPLC; John
Tyler to James Iredell, Jr., Gloucester, Nov. 16, 1836, James Iredell, Jr., Papers,
Duke University Library. mrr
** John Tyler to William F. Pendleton, Gloucester, Oct. 27, 1836, TPLL;
Chitwood, Tyler, 155-56; John Tyler to Henry A. Wise, Gloucester, Jan, 23, 1837,
in LTT, 111, 70-71- -or/-
*°John Tyler to Thomas Ritchie, Williamsburg, Mar, ar, 1840, TPLL; John
Tyler to Henry A. Wise, Gloucester, Jan. 23, 1837, in LTT, III, 70-71-
4:1 Robert Tyler, Poems (Richmond, 1839)1 passim; Robert Tyler, Ahasuerus.
A Poem (Richmond, 1842), passim; and Robert Tyler, Death; Or, Medonts> Dream
(Richmond, 1843), *««*»; Priscilla Cooper Tyler to Mary Grace Cooper, Wffliams-
burg, Oct. 1839, in Coleman, Priscilla Cooper Tyler, 75; John Tyler to Mrs. Martha
Rochelk, Williamsburg, Oct. 20, 1838; John Tyler to John Tyler, Jr., Williamsburg,
571
Nov. 4, 1838; John Tyler to Mrs. Martha Rochelle, Washington, Sept. 4, 1841 ; Oct.
22, 1843, James Rochelle Papers, Duke University Library. See also Priscilla Cooper
Tyler to Mary Grace Cooper, Williamsburg, Oct. 1839, in Coleman, Priscilla Cooper
Tyler, 75. John, Jr., returned to Jerusalem in early May 1844 to see the new baby
daughter Mattie had given birth to. A son, James Rochelle Tyler, had been born
in 1841. Tyler's letters to Mattie in May 1844 sent "Many kisses to the little
stranger" and apologized for his son's tardy departure from Washington. John
Tyler to Mrs. Mattie Rochelle Tyler, Washington, May i, 1844, TPLC (photostat).
Midshipman James H. Rochelle became Passed Midshipman on Aug. 10, 1847;
Master on Sept. 14, 1855; Lieutenant on Sept. 15, 1855. When the Civil War came
he went with the Confederacy and Navy records list him as "dismissed, 17 April,
1861."
^Coleman, Priscilla Cooper Tyler, 1-6, 8-10, 26-27, 31-37, 38-58. The only
good house they had on the 1837-1838 tour was in Charleston on Dec. 19, 1837.
They played Much Ado About Nothing. Happily, the great Florida Indian Chief
Osceola was in the audience and a curious crowd paid in $1200 to see him react
to the Coopers' presentation of Shakespeare. Ibid., 60.
43 Ibid., 65-66.
**Ibid., 69-73. Mrs. Coleman in her excellent study of Priscilla Cooper Tyler
cites passages from ten of Robert's love letters to Priscilla written during the spring
and summer of 1839. Details of the romance during 1837 and 1838, and the letters
of that period, have apparently not survived.
"Ibid., 78-79, 81-82.
46 Ibid., 79-80, 81, 84-85.
CHAPTER 6
1 John Tyler to Nathaniel B. Tucker, Williamsburg, Sept. 26, 1837; John Tyler
to James Lyons, Williamsburg, Dec, 29, 1838; John Tyler to George G. Waggaman,
Williamsburg, Feb. 15, 1838, TPLC; William C. Preston to John Tyler, Washing-
ton, Dec. 20, 1837, in LTT, I, 587; Cole, The Whig Party in the South, 56; Carter
Beverley to John Tyler, Westmoreland County, Jan. 28, 1839, TPLC; John Tyler
to Henry A. Wise, Williamsburg, Dec. 26, 1838, in LTT, III, 74.
2 Schlesinger, The Age of Jackson, 217-26; Robert Gray Gundcrson, The Log
Cabin Campaign (Lexington, Kentucky, 1957), 13-19; Van Deusen, The Life
of Henry Clay, 301-4; William C, Preston to John Tyler, Washington, Dec, 30^
1837, in LTT, I, 586.
8 LTT, I, 596; Wise, Seven Decades of the Union, 162-63, 167-69. Wise dates
these important interviews and commitments only as occurring "one evening in the
session of 1838-1839." Internal evidence, however, would indicate that the Clay-
White exchanges took place in late January or early February 1839* For further
evidence of Clay's accommodation with the states' rights viewpoint see Henry Clay
to Nathaniel B. Tucker, Ashland, Oct. 10, 1839; William C. Preston to John Tyler,
Washington, Dec. 20, 1837; John Tyler to Henry A. Wise, Williamsburg, Dec. 26,,
1838, in LTT, I, 601-2, 587; III, 73~74.
4 Henry Clay to Francis Brooke, Washington, Dec. 26; 20, 1838, in Colton,
The Private Correspondence of Henry Clay, 435, 432; John Tyler to Henry A.
Wise, Williamsburg, Dec. 26, 1838, in LTT, III, 73 ; John Tyler to James Lyons,,
Williamsburg, Dec. 29, 1838, TPLC,
BChitwood, Tyler, 157-58; LTT, I, 591-93; Wise, Seven Decades of the Union,
158-60.
'Chitwood, Tyler, 160, 162-63, 170-71; LTT, I, 587-93; Cole, The Whig
Party in the South, 56; Simms, The Rise of the Whigs in Virginia, 141.
7 John Tyler to Henry Clay, Williamsburg, Sept. 18, 1839, in LTT, III, 75-77;
John Tyler to John H. Waggaman, Williamsburg, Aug. 30, 1839, TPLC.
8 John Tyler, Speech in the Virginia House of Delegates, Feb. 14, 1839, in LTT,
II, 140-48; ibid., I, 608; John Tyler to the Whigs of Louisville, Ky. [Williams-
burg], July 19, 1839, in ibid., 618.
9 [Lyon G. Tyler], "John Tyler and the Vice Presidency," Tyler's Quarterly,
IX (October 1927), 89-95.
10 Gunderson, Log Cabin Campaign., 45—47, 52 ; T. W. Barnes, Memoirs of
Thurlow Weed, 2 vols. (Boston and New York, 1884), I, 480-82; II, 75-77; Wise,
Seven Decades of the Union, 165-66.
11 Gunderson, Log Cabin Campaign, 57-62; Harriet A. Weed (ed.), Auto-
biography of Thurlow Weed (New York, 1883), 481; LTT, I, 593-94.
12 Horace Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life (New York, 1868), 131; Chit-
wood, Tyler, 166-67; LTT, I, 595. Greeley suggested that the tear-shedding story
actually brought Tyler the Vice-Presidential nomination. Tyler later told Julia
Gardiner Tyler, however, that the story was "the greatest of the falsehoods
propagated" against him.
18 Wise, Seven Decades of the Union, 170-72; LTT, I, 595.
14 Gunderson, Log Cabin Campaign, 62-64; [Lyon G. Tyler], "John Tyler and
the Vice Presidency," loc. cit., 89-95; Chitwood, Tyler, 169-71; LTT, III, 36;
Barnes, Memoirs of Thurlow Weed, II, 76-77; Cleaves, Old Tippecanoe, 318.
**LTT, I, 596, 618; Chitwood, Tyler, 172-73; Appendix B, 472-73. Professor
Chitwood carefully analyzes the charge that Tyler quietly made pro-Bank noises
at Harrisburg to improve the chances of his nomination. He demonstrates that the
evidence for the charge ranges from the weak to the imaginary. Gunderson, Log
Cabin Campaign, 65-66; Allan Nevins (ed.), The Diary of Philip Hone, 2 vols.
(New York, 1927), II, 553; Abraham Lincoln to John T. Stuart, Jan. 20, 1840,
in John G. Nicolay and John Hay, The Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln.
12 vols. (New York, 1905) I, 39-40.
™LTT, II, 1-2; Gunderson, Log Cabin Campaign, 176-77, 239-40; Nathan
Sargent, Public Men and Events. 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1875), II, 115—16; Gunder-
son, Log Cabin Campaign, 25, 114-15, 101-7, 154-55, 133-34, 141, 128.
17 Cleaves, Old Tippecanoe, 303, 312-13, 316, 319; Gunderson, Log Cabin
Campaign, 51, 73-75, 170-71, 225; LTT, I, 620; Abcll, Tyler, 181.
18 John Tyler to James Iredell, Jr., Williamsburg, June 5, 1840, James Iredell,
Jr., Papers, Duke University Library; see also John Tyler to Henry A. Wise,
Williamsburg, Apr. 28, 1840, TPLC.
10 Abcll, Tyler, 181 ; Wise, Seven Decades of the Union, 177-78; LTT, I, 619-20.
30 Chitwood, Tyler, 184-88, 195; Gunderson, Log Cabin Campaign, 195-97;
LTT, I, 620, 621-22; Abell, Tyler, 181; Chitwood, Tyler, 191-92; Appendix C,
475-77. In a speech in the House on Sept. 10, 1841, Rep. John Minor Botts of
Virginia, a bitter enemy of the Tyler administration, quoted an excerpt from the
Wheeling Gazette of August 21, 1840, which declared that Tyler had advocated a
national bank in a Wheeling address. According to the extract Botts cited, Tyler
"pulled from his pocket an empty purse, and, shaking it at the multitude, ridiculed
the idea of a metallic currency, abused the Sub-treasury [i.e., Independent Treas-
ury], and avowed a preference for 'good United States bank notes.' " An attempt
by Professor Chitwood in the 19305 to locate a copy of the Wheeling Gazette for
Aug. 21, 1840, failed, as did an effort by this writer in 1959. The Botts charge is thus
impossible to check one way or the other. It might be pointed out, however, that
the Botts speech of Sept. 10, 1841, was otherwise filled with factual inaccuracies.
^The letter of the Henrico, Virginia, Democrats to Tyler is dated Henrico,
Oct. 3, 1840; Tyler's answer is dated Williamsburg, Oct. 16, 1840. Both letters are
published in Abell, Tyler, 176-80.
* Gunderson, Log Cabin Campaign, 187-91, 198-200; LTT, I, 597~98» 6°9> 6*2»
615-16; II, 60.
573
23 Gunderson, Log Cabin Campaign, 5, 78-83.
^Ibid., 3-4, 6, 219-21, 242-46, 249-51; Roseboom, A History of Presidential
Elections, 122.
^Gunderson, Log Cabin Campaign, 254-58; Roseboom, A History of Presi-
dential Elections, 122-23; LTT, I, 629-32.
^Alexander Gardiner to , New York, Sept. 26, 1840; Alexander Gardiner
to David Gardiner, New York, Jan. 1841, GPY.
27 LTT, I, 600; John Tyler to Henry A. Wise, Williamsburg, Nov. 25; Dec. 20,
1840, in ibid,, III, 84-88. For a similar view see Virginia Governor Thomas W.
Gilmer's open letter to Louisa County, Va., Whigs, in ibid., I, 609-10.
28Cleaves5 Old Tippecanoe, 333-
^Charles F. Adams (ed.), Memoirs of John Quincy Adams. 12 vols. (Phila-
delphia, 1874-1877), X, 372; LTT, II, 9, 95, 127; HI, 52-53J Alexander Gardiner
to David Gardiner, New York, Apr. [9], 1841, GPY; Cleaves, Old Tippecanoe, 331.
30 Ibid., 333; LTT, II, lo-n; Benjamin Perley Poore, Reminiscences, 2 vols.
(New York, 1886), I, 245-46; Wise, Seven Decades of the Union, 179-80; E. F.
Ellet, Court Circles of the Republic (Hartford, 1869), 284; John Tyler to Mr.
Higgins, Sherwood Forest, Feb. 26, 1853, in LTT, II, 163.
31 George R. Poage, Henry Clay and the Whig Party (Chapel Hill, 1936),
18-20 ; LTT, II, Appendix E, 704; III, 89-91; Gunderson, Log Cabin Campaign,
265; Cleaves, Old Tippecanoe, 330-31.
32 John Tyler to Thomas W. Gilmer, WHHamsburg, Jan. 7, 1841, in LTT, II,
14; ibid., Ill, 86-87; Cleaves, Old Tippecanoe, 335.
33 Ellet, Court Circles of the Republic, 286; Gunderson, Log Cabin Campaign,
266; Cleaves, Old Tippecanoe, 336. For text of Tyler's speech see Washington,
Madisonian, Mar. 6, 1841; also Chitwood, Tyler, 200-1.
34 Cleaves, Old Tippecanoe, 229, 336-37; Peter Harvey, Reminiscences and
Anecdotes of Daniel Webster (Boston, 1890), 160-63; Poore, Reminiscences, I, 250;
Richardson, Messages and Papers of the Presidents, IV, 5-21.
86 Cleaves, Old Tippecanoe, 339; LTT, II, u; Gunderson, Log Cabin Cam-
paign, 269.
a<} Poage, Henry Clay and the Whig Party, 30-31.
™ Ibid., 31; Sargent, Public Men and Events, II, 115-16; Henry Clay to-
William Henry Harrison, Washington, Mar. 15, 1841, in Colton, Private Correspond-
ence of Henry Clay, 432; Ellet, Court Circles of the Republic, 287.
38 Cleaves, Old Tippecanoe, 342-43; Gunderson, Log Cabin Campaign, 273;
LTT, II, ii ; Marx, Health of the Presidents, 130-131; Wise, Seven Decades of the
Union, 180.
CHAPTER 7
*LTT, II, 11-12; Chitwood, Tyler, 202. The myths relating to Tyler's tears
and to his attempt to borrow money from lawyer William S. Peachy are found in
Fraser, Democracy in the Making: The Jackson-Tyler Era, 152-57. Where they
originated is anyone's guess.
2 Chitwood, Tyler, 203 ; John Tyler to James Buchanan, Sherwood Forest,
Oct. 16, 1848, in LTT, II, 13.
"Robert J. Morgan, A Whig Embattled: The Presidency under John Tyler
(Lincoln, Neb., 1954), 59-60; Chitwood, Tyler, 270; Abel P, Upshur to Nathaniel
B. Tucker, July 28, 1841, in LTT, II, 115,
* John Tyler to Nathaniel B. Tucker, Washington, July 28, 1841; John Tyler
to William C. Rives, Washington, Apr. 9, 1841, in ibid., 53, 20.
6 Duff Green to Abel P. Upshur, Washington, Dec. 29, 1842, in ibid., 25-26;
John Tyler to [?] Lord, Pittsfield, Mass., Sept. 7, 1849, ia Tyler's Quarterly, VIII
(January 1927), 181.
8 Chitwood, Tyler, 204-5; John Tyler to Nathaniel B. Tucker, Washington,
Apr. 25, 1841; John Tyler to Henry Clay, Washington, Apr. 30, 1841, in LTTf
II, 32 ; III, 93-94-
7 Henry Clay to Nathaniel B. Tucker, Ashland, Apr. 15, 1841, in ibid., II, 30;
Mordecai N. Noah [pseud. "Horace Walpole"], "Reminiscences and Random Recol-
lections of the Tyler Administration," New York Sunday Dispatch, May 10, 1846.
Hereafter cited as Noah, "Reminiscences." Chitwood, Tyler, 212; John Tyler to
William C. Rives, Washington, May 8, 1841, in Tyler's Quarterly, XII (October
1930), 85-86.
8 Daniel Webster, The Writings and Speeches of Daniel Webster (Nat. Ed.),
18 vols. (Boston, 1905), XV, 187.
"Chitwood, Tyler, 210; Thomas W. Gilmer to George Stilknan, Richmond,
Apr. 13, 1841, in Tyler's Quarterly, VII (October 1925), 106; Henry A. Wise to
Nathaniel B. Tucker, Washington, May 29, 1841 ; Abel P. Upshur to Nathaniel B.
Tucker, Washington, Aug. u, 1842, in LTT, II, 34, 178-79.
10 Poage, Henry Clay and the Whig Party, 43; James H. Hopkins, Political
Parties in the United States (New York, 1900), 66; Chitwood, Tyler, 217; R. P.
Letcher to J. J. Crittenden, Frankfort, June 21, 1842, in LTT, II, 5; Morgan,
A Whig Embattled, 39-40.
u Waddy Thompson to John Tyler, Mexico City, Jan. 30, 1843 ; Henry A. Wise
to Leslie Coombs, Washington, Dec. 29, 1842, in LTT, II, 15-17; III, 106.
33 John Tyler to Nathaniel B. Tucker, Washington, July 28, 1841, in ibid,, II,
54; John Tyler to William C. Rives, Washington, May 8, 1841, in Tyler's Quarterly ,
XII (October 1930), 85; John Tyler, Statement Published in the Washington M-adi-
sonian, Apr. 23; 26, 1845, in LTT, II, 68-69, 33-34.
18 Chitwood, Tyler, 221; LTT, II, 33-34; Alexander Gardiner to [David Gardi-
ner], [New York], June 9, 1841, GPY (fragment of draft letter).
14 John Rutherfoord to John Tyler, Richmond, June 21, 1841, John Ruther-
foord Papers, Duke University Library; John Tyler to John Rutherfoord (Con-
fidential), Washington, June 23, 1841, Tyler Papers, Duke University Library.
"Chitwood, Tyler, 223-24; LTT, III, 39.
10 John Tyler to Nathaniel B. Tucker, Washington, July 23, 1841, in ibid., II,
54; George Poindexter to John Tyler, New York, July 16, 1^41, TPLC,
17 Chitwood, Tyler, 225-26; New York Herald, Aug. 5, 1841; Thomas W.
Gilmer to Franklin Minor, Washington, Aug. 7, 1841, in LTT, II, Appendix E,
706-9; Poage, Henry Clay and the Whig Party, 70-72; John B. Christian to
Nathaniel B. Tucker, Washington, Aug. 10, 1841, in [Lyon G. Tyler (ed.)], "Cor-
respondence of Judge N. B. Tucker," William and Mary College Quarterly Historical
Magazine, XII (January 1904), 143-44; A. H. H. Stuart Statement, in LTT, II,
78; John M. Botts to John Tyler, Washington, Aug. 10, 1841, in anon., A Defense
of the President Against the Attacks of Mr, Botts and the Clay Party (Pamphlet;
n.p., n.d. [1842]), 5-6.
™LTT, II, 71-72, 101; Carl Schurz, Life of Henry Clay, 2 vols. (Boston, 1887),
II, 207; Bcnton, Thirty Years' View, II, 328-30; Chitwood, Tyler, 228-29; New
York Herald, Nov. 22, 1841; Amos Kendall to John Tyler [Washington], Aug. 21,
1841; J. Johnson to John Tyler, Philadelphia, Aug. 23, 1841, TPLC. Jackson's
initial opinion of Tyler as President was low — "an imbecile in the Executive
Chair," he designated Tyler. But after the first Bank veto one of Jackson's friends
wrote him that "it will do Old Hickory's heart good when he hears of the veto.
It is said that Tyler got hold of one of Jackson's pens and it wouldn't write any
other way but plain and straightforward." Oscar D. Lambert, Presidential Politics
in the United States, 1841-1844 (Durham, N.C., 1936), 37.
™LTTf II, 92, 166; Congressional Globe, 27 Cong., x Sess., 368-69; Poage,
Henry Clay and the Whig Party, 75-78.
575
20 The Coffee House Letter is printed in LTT, II, 112.
^Professor Chitwood had carefully examined these charges in great detail and
categorically rejected them. See Chitwood, Tyler, 218, 237, 172-73, 191-92; Ap-
pendix B, 472-73; Appendix C, 475-77- Similarly, this writer has found no evidence
of even a circumstantial sort that would lend credence to the Botts allegations.
See also LTT, II, 105-6; and A Defense of the President Against the Attacks of
Mr. Botts and the Clay Party, passim.
22 LTT, III, 39-40, 53; II, 86-87; Chitwood, Tyler, 241-42, 258-59; Poage,
Henry Clay and the Whig Party, 83-84.
23 Henry A. Wise to Nathaniel B. Tucker, Washington, Aug. 29, 1841, in LTT,
II, 91; Lyons is quoted in ibid., 41.
24 Adams, Memoirs, X, 544-45; Poage, Henry Clay and the Whig Party, 88-
89; Chitwood, Tyler, 244.
25 LTT, II, 102, in; Duff Green to Abel P. Upshur, Washington, Dec. 29,
1842, in ibid., 25; John J. Crittenden to [John Tyler], Draft Book of Notes,
Speeches and Letters, n.d., John J. Crittenden Papers, Duke University Library.
£6 Richardson, Messages and Papers of the Presidents, IV, 68-72 ; Chitwood,
Tyler, 244-46; Wise, Seven Decades of the Union, 190; Abell, Tyler, 202; John
Tyler to Daniel Webster, Washington, Oct. n, 1841, in LTT, II, 126.
27 See editorial comments collected in TPLC, Book V, Items 95, 101, 152.
^Chitwood, Tyler, 277; LTT, II, 81, 115-16; III, 41; John Tyler, Jr., to
Lyon G. Tyler, Washington, Jan. 29, 1883, in ibid., 122; Chitwood, Tyler, 274;
LTT, II, 94-95; 110-11; John J. Crittenden, Draft Book of Notes, Speeches and
Letters, John J. Crittenden Papers, Duke University Library; John J. Crittenden to
John Tyler, Washington, Sept. u, 1841; and John J. Crittenden to Chapman Cole-
man, Washington, Sept. 10, 1841, John J. Crittenden Papers, Duke University Li-
brary; John Tyler to J. S. Cunningham, Sherwood Forest, Oct. 26, 1851, TPLC;
John Tyler, Letter to Norfolk [Va.] Democratic Association [Washington], Dec. 2,
1844, in LTT, II, 96 ; John Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, May 6,
1845, TPLC; John Tyler, Statement in Answer to the Report of the House Com-
mittee, in August, 1842, in LTT, II, 100.
20 Diary of Philip R. Fendall, Sept. 23, 1841, PhiUp Richard Fendall Papers,
Duke University Library; Nevins, Diary of Philip Hone, Sept. n, 1841, II, 560.
80 The Andover Husking: A Political Tale, Suited to the Circumstances of the
Present Time, and Dedicated to the Whigs of Mass. (Pamphlet; Boston, 1842),
14-15; Henry A. Wise to Nathaniel B. Tucker, Washington, Aug. 29; Sept. 5, 1841,
in LTT, II, 90, 120; John B. Christian to Nathaniel B. Tucker, Washington,
Aug. 10, 1841, in [Lyon G. Tyler], "Correspondence of Judge N. B. Tucker," loc.
cit., 143; Chitwood, Tyler, 279-80; Daniel Webster to Nicholas Biddle, Washington,
Mar. 2, 1843, in McGrane, The Correspondence of Nicholas Biddle, 345-46.
81 John Tyler to Thomas A. Cooper, Washington, Oct. 8, 1841 ; John Tyler to
Daniel Webster, Washington, Oct. i, 1841; John Tyler to Littleton W. Tazewcll,
Washington, Oct. u, 1841, in LTT, II, 125, 123, 128; John Tyler to Daniel
Webster, Washington, Oct. n, 1841, in Tyler's Quarterly, VIII (July 1926), 18;
John Tyler to John C. Spencer, Washington, Mar. 13, 1843, TPLC; John Tyler to
Littleton W. Tazewell, Washington, Aug. 26, 1842, in LTT, II, 184,
** George T. Curtis, Life of Daniel Webster, 2 vols. (New York, 1870), II,
207-9; tJ- P- Kennedy], Defense of the Whigs (New York, 1844), 122-24; LTTf II,
102—3 ; New York Herald, Apr. 9, 1842.
83 For a sampling of these pamphlets see John, the Traitor; or, the Force of
Accident. A Plain Story by One Who Has Whistled at the Plough (New York,
1843), I-435 Anti-Janius, Who and What is John Tyler (New York, 1843), 1-16;
see also Anon., John Tyler: His History, Character, and Position (New York,
1843), i~4o; John L. Dorsey, Observations on the Political Character and Serv-
ices of President Tyler and His Cabinet. By a native of Maryland (Washington,
1841), 1-13 1 j The Andover Husking, 1-27.
54 John B. Christian to Nathaniel B. Tucker, Washington, Aug. 10, 1841, in
[Lyon G. Tyler], "Correspondence of Judge N. B. Tucker," loc. cit., 143-44; Wash-
ington Seawell to Maria Tyler Seawell, Fort Micanopy, Fla., Sept. 18, 1841, in
Tyler's Quarterly, II (October 1920), in. Major Seawell (1802-1888) was the
brother of John Boswell Seawell, a prominent attorney of Gloucester, Va., who had
married Maria Henry Tyler, the President's sister. LTT, II, 98-102 ; Alexander
Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Dec. 15, 1844; Margaret Gardiner to
Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, July n, 1844, TFP; Alexander Gardiner to Julia
Gardiner Tyler, New York, July 14, 1844, TPLC; New York Herald, May 5, 1843;
Oct. 23, 1844; Margaret Gardiner to Robert Tyler, East Hampton, May [7], 1843,
TFP; Noah, "Reminiscences," New York Sunday Dispatch, Mar. 29, 1846.
85 E. Littell to Daniel Webster, Philadelphia, Sept. 14, 1841; John Tyler to
Daniel Webster, Washington, Oct. n, 1841 ; John Tyler to Littleton W. Tazewell,
Washington, Oct. n, 1841; Williamsburg, Nov. 2, 1841, in LTT, III, 97; II, 126,
127, 129-31.
30 Richardson, Messages and Papers of the Presidents, IV, 84-87; Abell, Tyler,
213-15; LTT, II, 131-34; Abel P. Upshur to Nathaniel B. Tucker, Washington,
Dec. 23, 1841, in ibid., 155.
w John Tyler, Letter to the Philadelphia Fourth of July Committee, Washing-
ton, July 2, 1842, in ibid., 171; see also Dorsey, Observations on the Political
Character and Services of President Tyler, 128-29; John Tyler to Nathaniel B.
Tucker, Washington, June 16, 1842, in LTT, II, 168.
38 John Tyler, Letter to the Philadelphia Fourth of July Committee, Washing-
ton, July 2, 1842; John Tyler to Robert McCandlish, Washington, July 10, 1842;
Abel P. Upshur to Nathaniel B. Tucker, Washington, Mar. 6; 13; 28, 1842 in ibid.,
171, 173, 156-58, 165.
30 David Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Jan. n; 20; Feb. 6,
1843; David Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, Washington [Feb. 13, 1843]. Gar-
diner's political friends in New York had decidedly less sympathetic views of Tyler.
See J. J. Bailey to David Gardiner, New York, Sept. 12, 1842, GPY.
MLTT, II, 150-51-
41 J- J- Crittcnden to Henry Clay, Washington, July 1842, in Anna M. B. Cole-
man (ed.), The Life of John J. Crittenden, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1871), I, 199;
John Tyler to Littleton W. Tazewell, Washington, Aug. 26, 1842, in LTT, II, 184;
Daniel Webster to John Tyler, Washington, Aug. 8, 1842, in Tyler's Quarterly, VIII
(July 1926), 21 ; LTT, II, 174-75; Abel P. Upshur to Nathaniel B. Tucker, Wash-
ington, Aug. u, 1842, in ibid., 179; Chitwood, Tyler, 298-301.
^Ibid., 301-2.
43 The bill passed the House 105 to 102 and the Senate 24 to 23. LTT, II, 182;
see also The Andover Husking, 18-21. There is some speculation that Tyler felt
honor-bound to sign the controversial "Black Tariff" because he had based his
earlier veto of the 1842 tariff measure on the fact that it contained a distribution
clause. The bill he signed at least contained no distribution proviso. There is no
specific evidence for this interpretation of Tyler's motives, although it is not an
improbable one. In any event, the President's acceptance of the high tariff measure
(it went far beyond the revenue needs of the moment) was later a major im-
pediment to his return to the Democratic party.
44 Chitwood, Tyler, 303 ; Henry Clay to J. J. Crittenden, Ashland, July 16,
1842, in Coleman, Crittenden, I, 199, It was Upshur's opinion that the "Clay-men
are afraid to impeach the President. I daresay that Botts will attempt it, but
even his own party will not sustain him." Abel P. Upshur to Nathaniel B. Tucker,
Washington [July] 1842; John Tyler to Robert McCandlish, Washington, July
10, 1842, in LTT, II, 174, 173.
48 Ibid., 189; Chitwood, Tyler, 303; Abell, Tyler, 242; David Gardiner to
Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Jan. n, 1843, GPY.
49 Abel P. Upshur to Nathaniel B. Tucker, Washington, Mar. 28, 1842, in LTT,
577
II, 165; Poore, Reminiscences, I, 271-72; [Alexander Gardiner] to Editor of the
Washington Globe [New York], Nov. 15, 1842; LTT, II, 150-51; Abell, Tyler,
204.
47 John Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, July n, 1846, in LTT,
II, 341; ibid., 188; Abel P. Upshur to Nathaniel B. Tucker, Washington [July]
1842; John Tyler to Mr. Higgins, Sherwood Forest, Feb. 26, 1853, in ibid., 174,
163-64.
48 John Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, July n, 1846; John
Tyler to Daniel Webster, Williamsburg, Oct. u, 1841, in ibid., 341, 254.
*lbid., 374-79, 383-
CHAPTER 8
aLangford, The Ladies of the White House, 330-31; Coleman, Priscilla Cooper
Tyler, 86-88. In the Langford book the details of life in the White House dur-
ing Priscilla's tenure as hostess and much of the surviving information on Letitia
Christian Tyler's illness there are taken from two letters made available to Mrs.
Langford years later by John Tyler, Jr. They are: Letitia Tyler Semple to
John Tyler, Jr., Baltimore, Mar. 27, 1869; and John Tyler, Jr., to Laura Holloway
Langford, n.p., n.d. (late 18703). Both letters, particularly the latter, contain
factual inaccuracies, mistaken recollections, and confused chronology and must be
treated with extreme care.
*Ibid., 89.
8 Langford, The Ladies of the White House, 331-32; Coleman, Priscilla Cooper
Tyler, 87, 99; John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Nov. i, 1850, TPLC.
* Coleman, Priscilla Cooper Tyler, 88-89.
B Ibid., 89-91; Chevalier de Bacourt, Souvenirs of a Diplomat (New York,
1885), 191, 209, 214; Adams, Memoirs, XI, 174; LTT, II, 177.
* Coleman, Priscilla Cooper Tyler, 101.
7 Ibid,, 101-2.
92.
™Ibid., 93-94, 90-91.
11 LTT, II, 311-12; New York Herald, Nov. 12, 1844.
™Ibid., Nov. 27, 1844; John Tyler to Mr. Benson, Washington, Nov. 5, 1842;
John Tyler to Mary Tyler Jones, Washington, Dec. 20, 1843, TPLC.
18 Coleman, Priscilla Cooper Tyler, 84-85, 98.
a* John Tyler to Mary Tyler Jones, Washington, July 6, 1842, in LTT, II, 172;
John Tyler to Elizabeth Tyler Waller, Washington, Jan. 16, 1843, Tyler Papers,
Duke University Library.
IB Coleman, Priscilla Cooper Tyler, 99; Langford, The Ladies of the White
House, 329; H. March to John Tyler, Trades, [Va.], Dec. 25, 1841, Tyler Papers,
Duke University Library.
" Coleman, Priscilla Cooper Tyler, 99; LTT, II, 189; Letitia Tyler Semple to
Norma Doswell, Washington, Mar. 29, 1897, TFP. Letitia Christian Tyler was
buried at Cedar Grove in New Kent County, Va.
17 Priscilla Cooper Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Washington, n.d. [Dec. i842-Jan.
1843], GPY.
"Emmie F. Farrar, Old Virginia Houses Along the James (New York, 1957),
123-25; John Tyler to Mary Tyler Jones, Washington, July 6, 1842, in LTT, II,
172; ibid., Dec. 20, 1843; June 4, 1844, TPLC; Mary Tyler Jones to John Tyler,
Sherwood Forest, n.d. [early 1843], TFP; Julia Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner,
East Hampton, June 4, 1843, GPY.
39 Ibid., Washington, Dec. 13, 1842, GPY.
30 Ibid.; Juliana Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, Washington, Dec. 19-23, 1842,
GPY.
21 Ibid., Juliana Gardiner to [Alexander Gardiner], Washington, Feb. 12, 1843,
GPY.
22 Margaret Gardiner to Alexander and David L. Gardiner, Washington, Dec.
26, 1842 ; Jan. 7, 1843; Julia Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Dec, 27;
29, 1842; David Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, Washington, Dec. 25 [1842], GPY.
^Margaret Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, Washington, Jan. 29, 1843; Juliana
Gardiner to [Alexander Gardiner], Washington, Feb. 12. 1843, GPY.
2* Julia Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Dec. 13, 1842; Margaret
Gardiner to Alexander and David L. Gardiner, Washington, Dec. 26, 1842; Juliana
Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, Washington, Dec. 19-23, 1842, GPY.
a5 Margaret Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, Washington, Jan. 29, 1843; Juliana
Gardiner to Alexander and David L. Gardiner, Washington, Feb. 17, 1843, GPY,
^Ibid., Feb. 12; 15; 17, 1843; Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, East
Hampton, Apr. 7, 1843; Juliana Gardiner to Julia and Margaret Gardiner, New
York, May 28, 1843, GPY.
37 Julia Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Dec. 13, 1842, GPY.
28 Margaret Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, Washington, Dec. 18, 1842; Jan. i;
7; Feb. 5; 14, 1843; Julia Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, Washington, Dec. 29,
1842, GPY.
M Julia Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Jan. 6, 1843; Margaret
Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, Washington, Jan. 29, 1843, GPY. Margaret had
excellent recollect! ve powers. In this letter she quoted with surprising accuracy a
humorous section of McDuffie's speech given four days earlier.
30 Julia Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Dec. 27; 29, 1842;
Margaret Gardiner to David L. Gardiner and Alexander Gardiner, Washington,
Jan. 14, 1843 ; Margaret Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, Washington, Jan. 29, 1843 ;
Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Mar. 7, 1843, GPY.
31 New York Herald, Dec. 18, 1842. Congressmen and senators who regularly
called on the Gardiners at Peyton's included Senators Richard H. Bayard (Del.)
and Nathaniel P. Tallmadge (N.Y.) ; Representatives Caleb Gushing (Mass.),
Edmund W. Hubard (Va.), Ira A. Eastman (N.H.), Francis Marion Ward (N.Y.),
Richard D. Davis (N.Y.), Henry Van Rensselaer (N.Y.), Daniel D. Barnard
(N.Y.), John B. Thompson (Ky.), Augustus A. Sellers (Md.) Francis W. Pickens
(S.C.), and John Thompson Mason (Md.). Julia and Margaret attended the
debates in the House or Senate on Dec. 12, 16, 21, 29, 1842; Jan. i, 3, 6, u,
25; Feb. 7, 15; and on Mar. 3, 1843. See Gardiner Papers, Dec. 13, 1842 to Mar. 7,
1843, Yale University Library, passim. One congressional caller, John T. Mason
of Md., had roomed with David L. Gardiner at Princeton. This gave him an entree
some of the others did not have. But Margaret thought Mason "a common looking
man, and, as you say, not clean." Nor was Julia particularly overwhelmed when
Mason rushed her at dances and sent her valentines. Margaret Gardiner to David
L. and Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Jan. 7; 14; Feb. 15, 1843, GPY.
82 Ibid., Dec. 26, 1842; Jan. i, 1843. David Gardiner chatted with Calhoun from
time to time in December and January 1842-1843, and received from him the
distinct impression that he planned to run in 1844. He hoped to establish a
Northern anchor for his aspirations in New York state, counting on a break
there between Van Buren's Albany Regency machine and that of Tammany Hall in
New York City as an entree for his ambitions. See David Gardiner to David L.
Gardiner, Washington, Dec. 25 [1842], GPY.
83 Julia Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Dec. 13, 1842, GPY.
ulbid.; Margaret Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, Washington, Dec. 18, 1842;
Julia Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Dec. 27, 1842; Jan. 6, 1843;
579
Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Jan. i ; Feb. 5 ; 8, 1843 j
Julia Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, Apr. 23, 1843; Juliana
Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, Washington, Dec. 19-23, 1842, GPY. For the
few sparse facts on the career of Richard R. Waldron see Daniel C. Haskell,
The United States Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842, and Its Publications, 1844-
1874 (New York, 1942), 139; R. R. Waldron to Charles Wilkes, USS Vincennes,
at Sea, Jan. 31, 1840, in Charles Wilkes, Narrative of the United States Explor-
ing Expedition, 5 vols. (Philadelphia, 1844), II, 490. Waldron's Island is found
on a chart in Charles Wilkes, United States Exploring Expedition, Vol. XXIII.
Hydrography (Philadelphia, 1861), opp. p. 7. Waldron died Oct. 20, 1846, causes
unknown, at the age of twenty-seven.
85 Julia Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Dec. 29, 1842; Jan. 6,
1843; Margaret Gardiner to David L. and Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Jan.
7, 1843 5 Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Jan. 10, 1843,
GPY.
38 Julia Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Jan, 6, 1843, GPY.
87 Juliana Gardiner to [Alexander Gardiner], Washington, Feb. 12, 1843;
Margaret Gardiner to David L. and Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Feb. 15; 16,
1843; Juliana Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, Washington, Dec. 19-23, 1842;
Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Mar. 7, 1843, GPY.
38 Ibid.
^Pickens' letter of proposal dated Edgewood, May 8, 1843, has not survived.
The section quoted is taken from Julia Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, East
Hampton, May 21, 1843, GPY. For her reply see Julia Gardiner to Francis W.
Pickens, East Hampton, May 25, 1843. Margaret's view of the matter is found
in Margaret Gardiner to Robert Tyler, East Hampton, Apr. 6, [1843], TFP.
40 Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, Apr. 3; June 12,
1843, GPY; Alexander Gardiner to Juliana Gardiner, New York, Aug. 6, 1843;
Woodhouse Stevens to Julia Gardiner, Devonshire, England, July 16, 1843, TFP;
Francis W. Pickens to David Gardiner, Edgewood, S.C., near Edgeficld, Nov. 20,
1843; Feb. n, 1844, GPY.
41 Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Feb. 5; Mar. 7,
1843; Margaret Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, Washington, Mar. 14, 1843, GPY.
** McLean's first letter to Julia was posted in Cincinnati around Mar. 30,
1843. It was enclosed in a cover letter addressed to Alexander Gardiner at 14
Wall St. with instructions to forward it to Julia in East Hampton. In this way
McLean hoped to keep the correspondence confidential from the gossipy post-
office officials in East Hampton. For the same reason Julia sent her letters to
Tyler, Pickens, and McLean through Alexander in New York and received their
replies to her in like manner. She invariably insisted that Alexander pay the
postage on all her letters to her beaux. As the intermediary in all this, Alexander
financed a rather expensive correspondence — there was a twenty-five-cent charge
on a letter from New York to Cincinnati, for example. Until this arrangement was
worked out, however, there could be no certainty of privacy. Julia Gardiner to
Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, Apr. 3 [1843] ; Alexander Gardiner to Julia
Gardiner, New York [Apr, 1843] » Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, East
Hampton, Apr. 7, 1843; Julia Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton,
Apr. 30, 1843, GPY; John McLean to Julia Gardiner, Cincinnati, Apr. 19, 1843,
TFP.
48 Julia Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, May 21, 1843, GPY.
u Margaret Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, Washington, Jan. 14, 1843 ; Juliana
Gardiner to David L. and Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Feb. 17, 1843, GPY.
^Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Feb. 8, 1843; Mar-
garet Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, Washington, Feb. n; 14; 28, 1843; Margaret
Gardiner to David L. and Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Feb. 15, 1843, GPY.
At the Webster ball on Feb. 13 Julia was squired by Francis P. Granger, Harrison's
Postmaster General, while Margaret was escorted by Arkansas Senator Ambrose
H. Sevier until rescued by Robert Tyler. It was at this function that Henry A.
Wise flirted so openly with Margaret. At General Easton's on Feb. 14 the girls
were waltzed and otherwise rushed by Representative Edward D. White of Loui-
siana, Senator John Sargeant of Pennsylvania (Henry A. Wise's brother-in-law),
Senator James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, and Representative Henry Van Rensselaer
of New York. At the Wickliffe party of Feb. 28, Julia was handed in by John
Tyler, Jr., and Margaret by Robert Tyler. "You have no idea how much atten-
tion this attracted," wrote Margaret. At most of the private functions the Presi-
dent's sons were particularly attentive to the Gardiner ladies.
48 Juliana Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Jan. 27, 1843; Mar-
garet Gardiner to David L. and Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Dec. 26, 1842;
Jan. 7; 14; Mar. u, 1843, GPY.
*7 Margaret Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, Washington, Dec. 18, 1842; Julia
Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Dec. 27; 29, 1842, GPY.
™Ibid., Dec. 27, 1842; Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington,
Jan. i, 1843, GPY.
d° Julia Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Jan. 6, 1843. Juliana's
Jan. 31 opinion of the celebrated Madame Bodisco was a minority one: "...a
healthy fair looking woman well featured and good teeth, but not an interesting
expression. Her manners are plain without any marked elegance or refinement. She
is comely but destitute of the spirit and ate plateful upon plateful until your father
thought Mr. [James I.] Roosevelt must be tired of serving her at supper." Juliana
Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, Washington, Feb. I, 1843, GPY.
G0 David Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Jan. 20, 1843 ; Juliana
Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Jan. 27, 1843; Margaret Gardiner
to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Feb. 5, 1843; Juliana Gardiner to David L.
Gardiner, Washington, Feb. i, 1843, GPY.
Gt Robert Tyler, Death; or, Medorus* Dream; see also Robert Tyler, Ahasuerus.
A Poem, and Robert Tyler, Poems; Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner,
Washington, Feb. $; 8, 1843, GPY.
mlbid., Feb. 8, 1843, GPY.
mlbid.
B* Margaret Gardiner to David L. and Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Feb. 15,
1843; David Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Feb. 6, 1843; Margaret
Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Feb. 10, 1843, GPY.
05 Juliana Gardiner to [Alexander Gardiner], Washington, Feb. 12, 1843, GPY.
60 Margaret Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, Washington, Feb. 14, 1843, GPY.
67 "Interview with Julia Gardiner Tyler," Washington, Winter, 1888-1889, loc.
cit.
58 Margaret Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, Washington, Feb. i$, 1843; Mar-
garet Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Mar. 7, 1843, GPY; J. J.
Bailey to Julia Gardiner [New York], May 12, 1843, TFP; Margaret Gardiner to
David L. Gardiner, Washington, Feb. 14, 1843 ; Alexander Gardiner to [Margaret
Gardiner], New York, Feb. 16, 1843: Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner,
East Hampton, Mar. 30, 1843, GPY/^
50 Constance M. Green, Washington: Village and Capital, 1880-1878 (Princeton,
N.J., 1962), 153; Alexander Gardiner to [Margaret Gardiner], New York, Feb. 16,
1843; Juliana Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, Washington, Feb. 17, 1843; Margaret
Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, Washington, Feb. 26," 28, 1843, GPY.
™Ibid., Feb. 26, 1843, GPY.
01 Margaret Gardiner to David L. and Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Mar. 9,
1843; Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, June 12, 1843;
copy of poem in Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Mar. u,
581
1843 ; Margaret Gardiner to David L. and Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Mar.
9; 14, 1843; Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, Apr. 7, 1843.
The poem concludes:
It speaks in praise of holy shrine;
Of eyes upturned to Him divine,
By whom are sins forgiven.
II
It tells the rose, which blooms so gay
And courts the Zyphers kiss today,
As if t'would never die;
Its leaves, which perfume all around,
Strew'd on the earth shall soon be found;
Unnoticed, there to die.
Unwelcome truth it tells to thee,
Lovely in Beauty's majesty,
The roses fate — is thine:
Unlike in this — thy soul, so pure,
Through endless ages shall endure.
Kneel thou at Holy Shrines !
Margaret, her poetic ear trained by the serious efforts of Robert Tyler, did not
think much of this as poetry. In relaying it to her brothers she made them "promise
you won't laugh." Margaret Gardiner to David L. and Alexander Gardiner, Wash-
ington, Mar. 9, 1843, GPY.
83 Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Mar, 7, 1843; Mar-
garet Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, Washington, Mar. 14, 1843, GPY.
63 Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Mar. 15, 1843, GPY.
(Emphasis added.)
6i Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Old Point Comfort [July 1844],
TFP; Margaret Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, Washington, Mar. 14, 1843, GPY.
** Ibid., Feb. 14, 1843, GPY; Margaret Gardiner to Robert Tyler, East Hamp-
ton, May [6-8], 1843, TFP; Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washing-
ton, Jan. i ; Mar. 7, 1843 ; Margaret Gardiner to David L. and Alexander Gardiner,
Washington, Dec. 26, 1842, GPY.
M Julia Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, Apr. 30, 1844; Mar-
garet Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, May 3, 1843 5 Juliana Gardi-
ner to Julia and Margaret Gardiner, New York, May 28, 1843, GPY.
87 Margaret Gardiner to David L. and Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Mar.
9; 14, 1843; Julia Gardiner to John Tyler [East Hampton, May 1843], quoted in
Julia Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, May 21, 1843; Julia Gardi-
ner to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, May 21, 1843, GPY.
08 Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, May 3, 1843; John
Tyler to Julia Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, May 28, 1843; Washington, Apr. [14],
1843, quoted in Julia Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, June 4, 1843;
Apr. 17, 1843; Julia Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, June 4, 1843,
John Tyler to Julia Gardiner, Washington, GPY,
fl° Ibid., Apr. 3, 1843; J. J. Bailey to Julia Gardiner [New York, Apr. 1843],
quoted in Julia Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, May 21, 1843,
GPY.
™ Ibid., Apr. 30; 23, 1843; Juliana Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, East
Hampton, June 6, 1843; Alexander Gardiner, Draft Tyler Article, Apr. 1843, GPY.
71 David L. Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, May 4, 1843 ;
David Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, May 11, 1843; Margaret
582
Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, June 14, 1843; Julia Gardiner to
Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, May 21, 1843; David L. Gardiner to Alex-
ander Gardiner, East Hampton, May 4; «, 1843; Juliana Gardiner to Julia and
Margaret Gardiner, New York, May 28, 1843, GPY.
72 Juliana Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Troy, N.Y., Aug. 3, 1843; Julia
Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, June 4, 1843- At this time Julia
wore her dresses 43% inches in the front and 47 inches in the back; her height
therefore was around $'3". Her riding hat was 20% inches around the forehead
with a 6-inch crown and a 3 -inch brim. Alexander understandably had trouble
keeping all these data straight. Ibid.; Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner,
East Hampton, Nov. 2; 4, 1843; Julia Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, East
Hampton, Nov. 21, 1843, GPY. The house on Lafayette Place still stands. It is the
current site of a restaurant and seems well beyond the possibility of restoration.
7SIbid., June 4, 1843, GPY.
74 Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Saratoga [Aug. 1843]; East
Hampton, June 12; Oct. 31, 1843; David L. Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, East
Hampton, Aug. 6, 1843 ; Alexander Gardiner to Juliana Gardiner, New York, Aug.
3, 1843 ; Juliana Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Troy, N.Y., Aug. 3, 1843, GPY.
75 John Tyler to Julia Gardiner, Washington, Oct. 25, 1843, quoted in Margaret
Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, Oct. 31, 1843; Julia Gardiner to
Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, Nov. 21, 1843; Leonard Wood, Jr., to David
Gardiner, Steamship Columbia, approaching Halifax, Aug. 17, 1844* GPY. The
mortgages, held by James Van Antwerpt, were for $2500, dated Dec. 27, 1843, and
for $4342, dated Jan. 3, 1844. Both were at 6 per cent, to be paid off in full, principal
and interest, by Jan. 3, 1849. See Assets and Liabilities of David Gardiner (March
1844), TFP.
70 New York Herald, Oct. 27, 1845.
77 See Alfred H. Miles, "The 'Princeton1 Explosion," United States Naval Insti-
tute Proceedings, LII (November 1926), for an excellent study of the Princeton
affair ; also an attractively illustrated condensation of Miles in the Lynchburg (Va.)
Foundry Company, The Iron Worker, XXI (Spring 195 7) > *-«• The account
herein of the Princeton explosion is based primarily upon an extensive recounting
of it set down within a week of the disaster by Alexander Gardiner in a letter to
the Reverend S. R. Ely of East Hampton, dated New York, Mar. 7» 1*44, GPY.
While in general it is similar in broad outline to previously reported accounts of the
tragedy, it differs in the important details of the exact time of the explosion and
in the movements and the sequence of movements of the principals on board the
Princeton at that moment. With Alexander's version have been correlated various
eyewitness and other accounts taken from Miles, "The 'Princeton' Explosion."
Tyler's own recollection of the Princeton disaster did not appear until his "The
Dead of the Cabinet" speech delivered at Petersburg, Va., Apr. 24, 1856, printed in
LIT, II, 390-91. This too has been utilized. See also John Tyler to Mary Tyler
Jones, Washington, Mar. 4, 1844, in ibid., 289.
78 Alexander Gardiner to S. R. Ely, New York, Mar. 7, 1844; Alexander Gardi-
ner to Juliana Gardiner, Philadelphia, Feb. 29, 1844, GPY.
70 Alexander Gardiner to S. R. Ely, New York, Mar. 7, 1844, GPY; John Tyler,
"The Dead of the Cabinet," speech in Petersburg, Va., Apr. 24, 1856, in LTT, II,
390-91. The expenses of the public funeral were paid for by the United States. See
Thomas Hart Benton, Abridgment of the Debates of Congress from 1780 to 1856,
16 vols. (New York, 1857-1861), XV (June 12, 1844), iS*.
80 S. R. Ely to Juliana Gardiner, East Hampton, Mar. 5, 1844, GPY; "Stranger
Friend" to Gardiner Family, Mountains of Virginia, Mar. 3, 1844* TFP; John Tyler
to Mrs. Thomas W. Gilmer, Washington, Mar. 4, 1844, TPLC; John Tyler to
Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Mar. 15, 1844; Alexander Gardiner to John Tyler,
New York, Mar. 30, 1844, GPY.
583
81 David Gardiner was buried in East Hampton during the week of March 25,
1844, probably on Tuesday, March 26. Pallbearers at the funeral were former New
York Governor Silas B. Wright, Charles H. Canott, Silas B. Strong, and Richard
D. Davis — the same "Old Davis" who so recently had pursued Julia. In July 1846
an obelisk monument of polished granite was erected over the grave at a total cost
of $700 for cutting, polishing, hauling, and setting. The lengthy inscription was
worked out by Alexander. The family had some difficulty raising the cash to pay
for it, so tied up in real estate was the Gardiner money. Julia said, however, she
would not "consent to have one of less value erected." At the time of his death,
David Gardiner held title deeds on Juliana's property — Lots 181, 183, 185, 187
on Chatham St., and Lots i, 3, 5, 7 and 9 on Oliver St., New York City. These
formed a solid block of property, since the Chatham St. lots backed onto those
on Oliver St. The assessed value for these properties and for the house and lot in
East Hampton for tax purposes was $30,500. They were worth, of course, much
more (over $100,000), and they began rapidly appreciating again as the 1837-1843
depression wore off. The Gardiner furniture and personal belongings added an ad-
ditional $5000 to the estate. Juliana still held in her own name three lots on
Greenwich St. and one on Harrison St. Gardiner's children inherited the East
Hampton and Greenwich and Oliver Sts. property in equal shares under his will.
They deeded their shares to Juliana on April 18, 1844, for a consideration of $i
until her death. However, they apparently got some income from their portions.
Gardiner's liabilities in the form of mortgages (most of the obligations had already
been paid off) on his various properties came to $21,842. Of this $8000 had been
borrowed in 1826 at 6 per cent and would be fully retired Jan. 3, 1849; $2500 had
been borrowed in Dec. 1843 and $4342 in Jan. 1844 at 6 per cent and would be
fully retired Jan. 3, 1849. For the remaining $7000 at 7 per cent there are no details.
In sum, it was often difficult for the Gardiners to procure hard cash quickly. On
these and related points, see Alexander Gardiner to John Tyler, New York, Mar. 30,
1844; Alexander Gardiner to Hon. Silas Wright, Hon. Charles H. Canott, Hon.
Silas B. Strong, Hon. Richard D. Davis [New York, Mar .-Apr. 1844] ; David L.
Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, Apr. 2, 1846; Lenny Gibson to
David L. Gardiner, New York, June 22, 1846; Alexander Gardiner to Benjamin F.
Thompson, New York, July u, 1846, GPY ; Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner
Tyler, New York [Feb. 1846]; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Norfolk
[Sept.-Oct. 1845]; Gardiner Property Deed, Apr. 18, 1844; Assets and Liabilities
of David Gardiner (March 1844), TFP.
8a Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, East Hampton [Summer 1844];
Julia Gardiner to [David L. Gardiner, New YorkJ, Mar. 27, 1844, TFP; Coleman,
Priscilla Cooper Tyler, log ; John Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Washington, Apr. 20,
1844, GPY; "Interview with Julia Gardiner Tyler," Washington, Winter, 1888-
1889, loc. cit.
88 John Tyler to Mary Tyler [Jones], Washington, Mar. 24, 1844, Pequot
Collection, Yale University Library.
M Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York [Nov. 1844!; Julia
Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Mar. 9; June 12, 1845, TPP;
"Interview with Julia Gardiner Tyler," Washington, Winter, 1888-1889, toe. cit.
^Alexander Gardiner to [Editor ?J, New York, Apr. 27, 1844, GPY; John
Tyler to Mary Tyler Jones, Washington, Mar. 4, 1844, in LTT, II, 289.
CHAPTER 9
*UT, II, 310; Isaac Van Zandt to Anson Jones, Washington, Mar. 15, 1843,
in ibid., Ill, 129. This conversation took place around March xo. It may be doubted
584
the language Van Zandt put in Tyler's mouth was exact. Tyler would never have
split the infinitive . Van Zandt reported to his government in the same letter that
"the President, though much abused, is gaining ground; the Democrats and moder-
ate Whigs are falling into his ranks and coming to his support. Our principal
strength in this country is with the Democrats,"
2 1 bid., II, 273-80; III, 116-22; Chitwood, Tyler, 344-45; John Tyler to
Editor, Richmond Enquirer, New York, Sept. i, 1847; John Tyler to Alexander
Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Dec. 25, 1848, in LTT, II, 428-31, 433.
3 Abell, Tyler, 129; LTT, I, 436. Speech against the Tariff Bill of 1832, Feb. 12,
1832 ; John Tyler, Draft of Speech to Virginia Convention, Sherwood Forest [March
1861], TPLC; John Tyler to John Rutherfoord, Washington, Feb. 4, 1831, John
Rutherfoord Papers, Duke University Library. In his letter to Rutherfoord he
cheered the Polish uprising against Czarist Russia. Abell, Tyler, 127; John Tyler,
"Letter of Withdrawal From the Campaign of 1844," Washington, Aug. 20, 1844; on
the Zollverein Treaty see Henry Wheaton to John Tyler, Berlin, Mar. 27, 1844;
Andrew Jackson to James K. Polk, Hermitage, Sept. 2, 1844, in LTT, II, 347,
326-27; III, 148-49; Minister von Geralt to John Tyler, Washington, Mar. 19,
1845. For Tyler's thoughts on and hopes for a free-trade arrangement with the
Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, see William Boulware to John Tyler, Naples, Oct. 30,
1844, TFP. John Tyler to John S. Cunningham, Sherwood Forest, Nov. 4, 1855,
in LTT, II, 200-1; Julia Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Dec. 13,
1842, GPY; John Tyler to Hugh S. Legar£, Charles City County, May 16, 1843,
in LTTt III, in; John Tyler, Special Message to Congress on Hawaii, Dec. 30,
1842, in Richardson, Messages and Papers of the Presidents, IV, 212 ; Julia Gardiner
Tyler to Margaret Gardiner, Washington, Dec, 5, 1844, in LTT, II, 358; Caleb Cush-
ing to John Tyler, Macao, July 18, 1844; Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner
Tyler, New York, Dec. 8, 1844, TPLC. Cushing's gift to the Tylers on his return
from China, two lovely blue Chinese vases, are still to be seen at Sherwood Forest.
John Tyler to Caleb Gushing, Charles City, Oct. 14, 1845, in LTTf II, 445.
* John Tyler to Robert McCandlish, Washington, July 10, 1842 ; John Tyler
to Daniel Webster, Washington, July 10, 1842, in ibid., 173, 257; Daniel Webster
to Waddy Thompson, Washington, June 27, 1842, in C. H. Van Tyne (ed.), Letters
of Daniel Webster (New York, 1902), 269-70; John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Sher-
wood Forest, Dec. u, 1845; John Tyler to Daniel Webster (two letters), Washing-
ton [Jan. 1843] ; Silas Reed to Lyon G. Tyler, Boston, Apr, 8, 1885, in LTT, II,
448, 261; Appendix D, 696; Chitwood, Tyler, 336-37.
B John Tyler to Littleton W. Tazewell, Washington, Oct. 24, 1842, in LTT, II,
248; ibid., 225-26; Abel P. Upshur to Nathaniel B. Tucker, Washington, Mar. 6;
Aug. n, 1842, in ibid., 157, 179. Tyler and Webster worked as a well-coordinated
team on this treaty. Webster undertook the daily negotiations under Tyler's im-
mediate and detailed supervision. The drafts of all Webster's correspondence with
Ashburton were brought to Tyler for revisions, corrections, and suggestions. Ac-
cording to Julia, these were "always adopted by Mr. Webster word for word."
The President was also responsible for some definite improvements in the finished
document, and the tact and charm with which he handled Ashburton were remarked
upon by many observers. Tyler was a smooth diplomat. Julia claimed in 1846 that
he was "the direct and Webster only the passive agent in every act and every line
of correspondence" relating to the treaty, a view embraced by Robert Tyler — who
was at his father's side during the negotiations. Julia Gardiner Tyler to Margaret
Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Apr. 16, 1846; Robert Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler,
Montgomery, Ala,, Mar. 22 [1866] ; Julia Gardiner Tyler to [Eben N.J Horsford,
Sherwood Forest, n.d. [but probably 1868], TFP. Most of Tyler's correspondence
with Webster on the treaty was consumed in the 1865 Richmond fire. This loss,
said Robert, was "a great national calamity." See also Chitwood, Tyler, 3*4--i5-
9 Isaac Van Zandt to Anson Jones, Washington, Mar. 15, 1843, in LTT, III,
5&S
I29J ibid., 152-53; II, 441; John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Dec. n,
1845, in ibid., 447-
7 Richardson, Messages and Papers of the Presidents, IV, 258, 261-62.
8 The American-Texan diplomatic correspondence of January-February 1844 on
the deployment of 500 American dragoons, 1000 infantry, and an undetermined
force of naval vessels is reproduced in LTT, II, 282-90; as is the correspondence
relating to Texan demands for operational control over these forces and Tyler's
rejection of the request on constitutional grounds.
9 As early as Mar. 7, 1820, Ritchie's Richmond Enquirer had denounced the
Missouri Compromise and instructed the South to keep its eyes "firmly fixed on
Texas. If we are cooped up on the north, we must have elbow room to the west."
Quoted in LTT, I, 325-26; see also Abel P. Upshur to [Nathaniel B. Tucker],
Washington, Nov. 5, 1842 ; Abel P. Upshur to W. S. Murphy, Washington, Jan. 16,
1844; John C. Calhoun to Thomas W. Gilmer, Fort Hill, Dec. 25, 1843; Thomas W.
Gilmer to John C. Calhoun, Washington, Dec. 13, 1843, in ibid., II, 268, 284, 296;
III, 131; Wise, Seven Decades of the Union, 221-22; LTT, III, 116-17; John Tyler
to Robert Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Apr. 17, 1850, in ibid., II, 483; John Tyler,
Message to the Senate of the United States, Washington, Apr. 22, 1844, in Richard-
son, Messages and Papers of the Presidents, IV, 308-9 ; John Tyler to "Mr. Editor"
[Sherwood Forest, Mar. 1847!, TPLC; John Tyler to Hamilton Smith, Sherwood
Forest, Feb. 5, 1849, printed in Richmond Enquirer, Mar. 23, 1849 > John Tyler to
Daniel Webster, Sherwood Forest, Apr. 17, 1850; John Tyler, Draft Speech to
Virginia Convention [Sherwood Forest, March 1861], TPLC. To Robert Tyler he
wrote in 1850: "The monopoly of the cotton plant . . . now secured, places all other
nations at our feet. An embargo of a single year would produce in Europe a greater
amount of suffering than a fifty years' war. I doubt whether Great Britain could
avoid convulsions." John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Sherwood Foest, Apr. 17, 1850, in
LTT, II, 483-
10 John Tyler, Message to the Senate, Washington, Apr. 22, 1844, in Richardson,
Messages and Papers of the Presidents, IV, 310, 312.
11 Wise, Seven Decades of the Union, 221-22; Thomas W. Gilmer to John C.
Calhoun, Washington, Dec. 13, 1843 ; John C. Calhoun to Thomas W. Gilmer, Fort
Hill, Dec. 25, 1843, in LTT, III, 131; II, 296.
12 Wise, Seven Decades of the Union, 223-24.
"Ibid., 224-25; LTT, II, 293-95.
14 Democratic Tyler Meeting at Washington (Pamphlet; n.p., n.d. [April 1844]),
1-24; LTT, II, 285-86, 305-6. Tyler had offered Jackson protege Jarnes K. Polk the
Cabinet post of Secretary of the Navy after Gilmer was killed on the Princeton.
Polk refused it, he being an announced Vice-Presidential hopeful at the time, but
the gesture was not wasted on Old Hickory. James K. Polk to Theophilus Fisk,
Columbia, Tenn., Mar. 20, 1844, in ibid., Ill, 133-34. Polk, a confirmed expansion-
ist, endorsed Calhoun's appointment to the Cabinet, "especially in reference to
the Texas and Oregon questions."
15 John Tyler, Message to the Senate, Washington, Apr. 22, 1844, in Richardson,
Messages and Papers of the Presidents, IV, 311; LTT, II, 298; Roseboom, A History
of Presidential Elections, 128, 127; Glyndon G. Van Deusen, The Jacksonian Era
(New York, 1959), 182-83.
™LTT, II, 324-25, 331; III, 122-23; John Tyler to Henry A. Wise, Sherwood
Forest, Apr. 20, 1852, in ibid., II, 317. This letter was published again in Vol. Ill a
few years later; in this version Lyon G. Tyler rendered the word scheme to read
theme. John Tyler to Henry A. Wise, Sherwood Forest, Apr. 20, 1852, in ibid.,
Ill, 170-71; John Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, July n, 1846, in
ibid., II, 341.
"Abel P. Upshur to Nathaniel B. Tucker, Washington, Oct. 30; Dec. 23, 1841;
586
Mar. 6, 1842, in ibid., 308, 153-54, 156-58; ibid.t 256; III, 116-22; Chitwood,
Tyler, 344-
18 Abel P. Upshur to Nathaniel B. Tucker, Washington, Dec. 23, 1841, in LTT,
II, i53~54; Alexander Hamilton to John Tyler, New York, Apr. 23, 1842, TPLC;
LTT, II, 291-92; Andrew Jackson to John Tyler, Hermitage, Sept. 9, 1842; Amos
Kendall to [John Tyler], Washington, Oct. 20, 1843, TPLC; John Tyler to Andrew
Jackson, Rip Raps, Va., Sept. 20, 1842, in Lyon G. Tyler, "Some Letters of Tyler,
Calhoun, Polk, Murphy, Houston and Donelson," Tyler's Quarterly, VI (April
1925), 225. Tyler's decision to appoint Fremont came in March 1842 on the urging
of Silas Reed. "You have it in your power to touch his [Benton's] heart through
his domestic affections," suggested the then Surveyor-General for Illinois and Mis-
souri. Silas Reed to Lyon G. Tyler, Boston, Apr. 8, 1885, in LTT, II, Appendix D,
697. Tyler's later decision to promote Fremont for his exploits in the West was less
politically motivated. See William Wilkins to John Tyler, War Dept., Washington,
Jan. 1 6, 1844, TPLC. Kendall needed his printing commission badly. "The emolu-
ments of this station," he thanked Tyler, "would be an inexpressible relief to me
under existing circumstances."
10 John Tyler to Littleton W. Tazewell, Oct. 24, 1842, in LTT, II, 248-49.
^Washington Globe, Nov. 29, 1842, quoted in LTT, II, 303-4; ibid.f 249-50;
Noah, "Reminiscences," New York Sunday Dispatch, Dec. 21, 1845; LTT, II, 188,
250; John Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, July u, 1846, in ibid.f 341.
21 William Taggart was Surveyor of the Port of New York; George himself
served variously as Naval Storekeeper at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Military Store-
keeper on Governors Island, and Secret Inspector in the N.Y. Customs House.
Hallet was a clerk of the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Southern New York;
Fowler was a small shop tailor in the Bowery who was vice-president of an
organization called the Tyler State Convention. He aspired to employment in the
Customs House but obtained instead the Surveyorship of the Port. Robert C. Wet-
more served as Navy Agent in Brooklyn until removed by Tyler for corruption. A
former Whig, he had been prominently involved in a vote-fraud case in New York
in 1838. Gunderson, Log Cabin Campaign, 249-51 ; New York Herald, Feb. 9, 1845.
This account of the Tyler party in New York City in 1843-1844 is based largely
on Noah, "Reminiscences," New York Sunday Dispatch, Dec. 21; 28, 1845; Jan. n;
18; 25; Feb. i; 8; 22; Mar. 15; 22; 29; Apr. 5; 12; 26; May 10, 1846. While
Noah's account is biased and must be regarded with care, its main outline may be
substantiated by reference to the New York Herald and the Washington Madison-
ian for the 1842-1844 period and to the Gardiner Papers, 1842—1844, Yale Univer-
sity Library, passim.
22 Noah, "Reminiscences," New York Sunday Dispatch, Mar. 29; Jan. 25, 1846.
Robert Tyler worked through the Washington correspondent of the Herald, N. T.
Parnelle, in his attempt to bring the paper solidly over to Tyler. James Gordon
Bennett, editor of the Herald, would have none of this, although his paper was,
and remained, reasonably friendly to the administration. John I. Mumford later
(Jan. 1845) sought from Tyler an appointment as Surveyor of the Port of New
York, Needless to say, he got nothing. New York Herald, Jan. 25, 1845; Noah,
"Reminiscences," New York Sunday Dispatch, Jan. 25; Mar. 15, 1846. Curtis put
up $500, Graham $200, Taggart $200. Other contributors were Wetmore, Hoffman,
Stilwell, Fisher, Fowler, and some dozen others who held offices in New York City
salaried in the $i5oo-to-$25oo bracket.
^Ibid., Jan. 25, 1846. Noah never blamed Tyler for his disappointment. He
blamed John Lorimer Graham and Robert Tyler.
a*Ibid., Mar. 15, 1846. Noah's suggestion that Webster actually left the Cabinet
because of the Tylerite absorption of the Aurora is not substantiated by any other
evidence.
587
25 New York Sunday Dispatch, Dec. 28, 1845; Jan. n; Mar. 22, 1846.
^LTT, II, 250; Lyon G. Tyler, Parties and Patronage in the United States
(New York, 1891), 82.
23 'LTT, II, 250; John Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, July n,
1846, in ibid., 341; Rep. George H. Proffit quoted in ibid., 225.
28 John Tyler to John C. Spencer, Charles City County, May 12, 1843, TPLC.
^Washington Madisonian, July 21, 1843.
80 Daniel Webster to John Tyler, Boston, Aug. 29, 1843, in Tyler's Quarterly,
VIII (July 1926), 25-26. For a standard Whig scream of anguish over the Tyler
proscription, see the pamphlet John, the Traitor; or, the Force of Accident. A Plain
Story, 30, 36-37, 42.
aAbell, Tyler, 154-55; io7J see also John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Washington,
Feb. 2, 1832, in LTT, I, 427. This delicate feeling about the unrestrained use of the
appointing power persisted in Tyler until June 1841. See ibid., II, 310-11. By
October 1842, however, the President was hard at work building a Tyler group in
Missouri by patronage appointments. Silas Reed to John Tyler, St. Louis, Oct. i,
1842, TPLC; John Minge to John Tyler, Petersburg, Mar. 18, 1844, in LTT, II,
404.
82 Tyler kin appointed to various posts: Thomas A. Cooper was appointed
Military Storekeeper at the Frankford, Pa., Arsenal in 1841. When Congress abol-
ished that job in 1843 (to strike at the President), Tyler nominated him as Sur-
veyor of the Port of Philadelphia (1844). Failing Senate confirmation for that post
in 1845, the President and son Robert got the old actor placed finally by Polk in
the New York Customs House, where he remained until senility overtook him in
1846 and he retired. Coleman, Prisdlla Cooper Tyler, 84-85, 111-12, 120-21; Noah,
"Reminiscences," New York Sunday Dispatch, Feb. i, 1846; New York Herald,
Feb. 9, 1845; Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Feb. 8, 1845,
GPY; ibid., Feb. 14, 1845; Margaret Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York,
May 16, 1845, TFP; Alexander Gardiner to N. M. Miller, Washington, Mar. 13,
1845, GPY.
Robert Tyler was appointed to a clerkship in the Land Office in 1841. He re-
mained in that job until March 1844, resigning to begin a law practice in Phila-
delphia. In May 1844 he abandoned his practice to manage his father's campaign.
From May 1844 to April 1845 Tyler virtually supported Robert and his family.
Robert later unsuccessfully sought office from the Polk, Pierce and Buchanan ad-
ministrations. Coleman, Prisdlla Cooper Tyler, 84-85 ; John Tyler to Robert Tyler,
New York, Dec. 30, 1847, TPLC.
John Tyler, Jr., served as his father's private secretary until 1844 when he was
discharged for inefficiency. His salary was apparently paid from the President's
own pocket, however. Langford, The Ladies of the White House, 330-31; John
Tyler to Martha Rochelle, Washington, Oct. 22, 1843, James Rochelle Papers, Duke
University Library.
James Rochelle, John Tyler, Jr.'s young brother-in-law, received a midship-
man's appointment in the Navy; James A. Semple, the President's son-in-law,
received a purser's berth in the same service. John Tyler to Martha Rochelle,
Washington, Sept. 4, 1841, James Rochelle Papers, Duke University Library ; Lang-
ford, The Ladies of the White House, 331; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Margaret
Gardiner, Washington, Oct. 14, 1844, TFP.
John H. Waggaman and his brother Floyd Waggaman, Tyler's nephews, both
received minor appointments — John in the Treasury Department, and Floyd as a
diplomatic courier. John Tyler to Thomas Ewing, Washington, Mar. 5, 1841, TPLC;
Margaret Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Mar. 7, 1845, TFP.
588
Dr. N. M. Miller of Ohio, the President's brother-in-law, was first appointed
a clerk in the Appointment Office and then Second Assistant Postmaster General.
Polk demoted him to Third Assistant and finally purged him altogether. New York
Herald, Nov. 21, 1844; Mar. 30, 1845.
Alexander Gardiner's appointment to a clerkship in the U.S. Circuit Court for
the Southern District of New York was an appointment the President arranged
through Attorney General John Nelson of Maryland and Chief Justice Samuel
Nelson of the New York Supreme Court. Tyler elevated Samuel Nelson to the
United States Supreme Court just before he left office.
Most of the Corporal's Guardsmen were also appointed to the diplomatic
service or to the Cabinet: Proffit and Wise to Brazil, Gushing to China; Virginia
Cliqueman Gilmer and Upshur of course were brought into the Cabinet. LTT, II,
162-64; New York Herald, Feb. 19; Mar. 5, 1845; John Tyler to [Henry A. Wise],
Clarke County, Va., Sept. 13, 1843, TPLC. Charles Cody of the Palmyra (Mo.)
Courier, on the strong recommendation of Silas Reed, Tylerite patronage chief in
St. Louis, was given a post in St. Louis. This act, said Reed, would "add strength
to our Cause in Missouri. ... It would aid us much in presenting a bold and strong
front to our V[an] B[uren] rivals here, to have the Courier at Palmyra warmly
on our side." George Roberts, editor of the Boston Times, was appointed Naval
Officer of the Port of Boston. "He is a well known friend of President Tyler," said
the New York Herald. Silas Reed to John Tyler, St. Louis, Oct. i, 1842, TPLC;
New York Herald, June 27, 1844; Noah, "Reminiscences," New York Sunday
Dispatch, Mar. 29, 1846; LTT, III, 49. In 1832 Tyler had voted against an attempt
by Jackson to appoint Noah to office because Noah was then editor of the New
York Courier and Enquirer.
33 Abell was first nominated for consul to Marseilles in December 1844. Rejected
by the Senate, he was stubbornly nominated again by Tyler — to the Sandwich
Island post. For this spot he gained Senate approval. New York Herald, Dec. 13,
18445 Jan. 18, 1845.
Hiram Gumming, a Vermont teacher and lawyer, sometime friend of Robert
Tyler and frequent visitor at the White House in 1842-1843, was a high-pressure
(and corrupt) founder of fly-by-night pro-Tyler newspapers in various New Eng-
land villages. These were financed by capital levies on Tylerite officeholders in these
backwater locales. Gumming was, said Noah (praising Tyler for never having
"knowingly appointed a disreputable man to office"), one of the "bunch of charlatans,
vagabonds, leeches, vampires and scoundrels" who attached themselves to the skirts
of the Tyler movement. Noah, "Reminiscences," New York Sunday Dispatch, Jan.
11, 1846; Hiram Gumming, Secret History of the Perfidies, Intrigues, and Cor-
ruptions of the Tyler Dynasty (New York, 1845), passim; Julia Gardiner Tyler
to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Oct. 23, 1845, TFP.
84 John Tyler to [Henry A. Wise], Clarke County, Va., Sept. 13, 1843; Bodie
Peyton to John Tyler, New Orleans, Dec. 17, 1843; John Tyler to John C. Spencer,
Jordans Springs, Va., Sept. 2, 1843, TPLC.
85 LTT, II, 313-14. The Washington correspondent of the New York Herald,
a journalist generally friendly to the Tyler administration, kept a tally of the
Senate rejections of Tyler appointees. The number he reported was 102. New York
Herald, Feb. 19; Mar. 8, 1845. Those rejected for Cabinet posts were Caleb Gushing
as Secretary of the Treasury (three times!), David Henshaw of Massachusetts as
Secretary of the Navy, and James M. Porter of Pennsylvania as Secretary of War.
Henshaw and Porter were Conservative Democrats. Wise, Seven Decades of the
Union, 213-14.
^Priscilla Cooper Tyler to Frederick Raoul, Boston [June 1843] in Coleman,
589
Pristilla Cooper Tyler, 103-4; Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner, New York,
May 28, 1843, GPY. Tyler was also flatteringly received in Princeton, N.J., where
he was the houseguest of Captain Robert P. Stockton, USN. The Grand Marshal
of the New York reception for Tyler was Prosper M. Wetmore whose brother,
Robert C. Wetmore, was a leading figure in the Tyler group in New York City.
37 John Tyler to John B. Jones [Clarke County, Va.], Sept. 13, 1843, in LTT,
III, 113-14.
88 Noah, "Reminiscences," New York Sunday Dispatch, Apr. 12, 1846; LTT,
II, 314-16; Washington Madisonian, June I, 1844; Lambert, Presidential Politics
in the United States, 159-60. Delegations were present from 18 of the 26 states.
Individuals were present from all the states.
38 Roseboom, A History of Presidential Elections, 128—29.
40 John Tyler, Letter of Acceptance, Washington, May 30, 1844, in LTT, II,
319-21.
41 Van Deusen, The Jacksonian Era, 186; LTT, II, 324-25, 331, 334-37-; III,
47, 121-22. There were 28 Whigs in the Senate; 27 voted against the treaty, as did
7 agrarian Democrats, Benton among them, against the expressed wishes of Jack-
son.
42 John Tyler to Mary Tyler Jones, Washington, June 4, 1844, TPLC.
^Priscilla Cooper Tyler to Robert Tyler, Philadelphia, June 4, 1844, in Cole-
man, Priscilla Cooper Tyler, no— u.
** Robert J. Walker to James K. Polk, Washington, July 10, 1844; John Tyler
to Robert Tyler [Sherwood Forest], July 6, 1844, in LTT, III, 139, 141; II, Ap-
pendix G, 710; Jay A. Micheals to John Tyler, New York, Nov. 7, 1844, GPY.
45 Robert J. Walker to James K. Polk, Washington, July 10, 1844, in LTT, III,
I39-4I-
"Ibid.
47 John Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, July u, 1846, in ibid., II,
342; see also ibid., 337—38; III, 49, 56, 124-25. Jackson's letter was published in
Niles* Register, LXVI, 416. See also New York Herald, Jan. 7, 1845, for influence
of the Jackson-Lewis letter on Tyler's decision to withdraw; also Lambert, Presi-
dential Politics in the United States, 204.
48 Alexander Gardiner to [Editor ?], New York, Apr. 27, 1844; Alexander
Gardiner [pseud. "Cyrus Smith"], to [Editor ?], New York, May 19, 1844; John
Lorimer Graham to Alexander Gardiner, New York, Aug. 20, 1844; Alexander
Gardiner, Draft Manuscript Speech on Texas Annexation, [July 1844], GPY. Most
of Alexander's Texas propaganda appeared in the Washington Madisonian, the New
York Herald, and the New York Aurora.
49 Noah, "Reminiscences," New York Sunday Dispatch, Feb. i; 8; 22, 1846.
At this time George was a Secret Inspector in the Customs House, a do-nothing
job paying $3 per day.
50 John Tyler to the St. Patrick's Anniversary Celebration Committee, Wash-
ington, Mar. 15, 1844, TPLC; LTT, II, 645.
51 Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York [Late June-early
July 1844] ; David L. Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, July 29, 1844,
TFP.
52 Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, July 14, 1844, TPLC;
Margaret Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Apr. 14 ; June 5 ; Dec. 10,
1845; Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, n.d. [1845], TFP. In
these letters his mother and sister complained regularly of Alexander's advancement
of money "for political purposes." When Alexander lent Aurora editor Thomas
Dunn English the sum of $50 in June 1845, Margaret was certain that this was but
a "small portion of the [political] demands upon his funds. . . . Duce take the Poli-
tics," she snapped angrily.
63 Alexander Gardiner to [John Tyler], New York, July 21, 1844, in LTT, II,
338.
590
"Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, July 23, 1844, TPLC.
Delazon Smith (1816-1860) was virtually unique in the Tyler party. He was the
editor of a small Ohio newspaper, the Dayton Western Empire, who had attended
the Baltimore convention in May as a Tyler delegate from Ohio. He believed that
Tyler could actually be re-elected and became an enthusiastic Tyler supporter. In
June he had, at his own expense, toured Maryland and Virginia holding Tyler
rallies and drumming up Tyler sentiment. In July he arrived in New York City,
where he launched a series of indifferently attended sidewalk Tyler meetings. His
utterings saw print in both the Aurora and the Madisonian. He asked nothing of
Tyler. Tyler, however, appointed him Commissioner to Ecuador (1842-1845). His
later career carried him to Oregon. From Feb. 14, 1859, te Mar, 3, 1859, he served
as a U.S. senator from Oregon (Democrat), a very short term indeed. See Noah,
"Reminiscences," New York Sunday Dispatch, Apr. 5; 12, 1846. William Shaler
was a more typical Tylerite. His modest contribution to the Tyler cause led to his
nomination as consul to Hong Kong in January 1845. The appointment still pend-
ing before the Senate when Tyler left office, Shaler was renominated by Polk (one
of the few Tylerites so honored), but was finally rejected by the Senate. See New
York Herald, Jan. 18; Mar. 12; 21, 1845. Mike Walsh had the gall to soHcit an
office from Tyler in Dec. 1844. Understandably, Tyler refused. See Margaret Gardi-
ner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Dec. 30, 1844, GPY.
65 Alexander Gardiner, Draft of Memorandum [New York, July 29, 1844],
GPY. The Tyler letter to Alexander from Old Point Comfort has not been found.
Its existence and content can be inferred, however, from the chronology of the
situation, Tyler's known political concerns that week at Old Point Comfort,
and internal evidence in Alexander Gardiner's memorandum. It was probably
written July 26, 1844-
06 Alexander Gardiner to [John Tyler], New York, Aug. 2, 1844; Abraham
Hatfield, Cornelius P. Van Ness, et al. to John Tyler, New York, Aug. 6, 1844;
John Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, July n, 1846; Joel B. Sutherland
to Andrew Jackson, Philadelphia, Aug. 20, 1844; John Tyler to Messrs. Hatfield,
Van Ness, et al., Washington, Aug. 22, 1844, in LTT ', II, 338, 339. 342; III, 147;
II, 339-40 ; John Tyler to Andrew Jackson, Washington, Aug. 18, 1844, in Lyon G.
Tyler (ed.), "Some Letters of Tyler . . . ," loc. cit., 232. The Tylerites who signed the
Carleton House treaty of Aug. 2 were Van Ness, J. Paxton Hallet, George D. Strong,
and John O. Fowler.
67 John Tyler to "Friends Throughout the Union," Washington, Aug. 20, 1844,
in LTT, II, 342-49. "I never saw a person who could write more rapidly," ex-
claimed Julia in amazement at the speed with which Tyler produced his with-
drawal statement. Julia Gardiner Tyler to [Juliana Gardiner] [Washington], Aug.
22, 1844, in ibid., 342, fn.
5b John Lorimer Graham to Alexander Gardiner, New York, Apr. 20; 24, 1844,
GPY; New York Journal of Commerce, Aug. 22, 1844; see also New York Herald,
Aug. '22, 1844; New York Evening Express, Aug. 22, 1844; New York Democrat,
Aug. 22, 1844; New York Daily Plebeian, Aug. 22, 1844. Tyler himself thought
the statement quite bold. "You know," he told a friend, "that I can neither talk nor
write upon any subject without doing so frankly and somewhat boldly." John Tyler
to M. S. Sprigg, Washington, Aug. 20, 1844, TPLC.
50 Andrew Jackson to Joel B. Sutherland, Hermitage, Sept. 2, 1844; Andrew
Jackson to James K. Polk, Hermitage, Sept. 2, 1844; Joel B. Sutherland to Andrew
Jackson, Philadelphia, Aug. 20, 1844; John Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, East
Hampton, July u, 1844, in LTT, II, 341, 342 ; III, 147-48, i5o-$i. Tyler further
cemented his relations with Jackson in early September, appointing Major A. J.
Donelson, Old Hickory's nephew, U.S. Minister to Texas. At the same time_ he
warned Santa Anna that any invasion of Texas would mean war with the United
States. "This is the true, energetic course," Jackson told Polk.
"° John Tyler to Elizabeth Tyler Waller [Washington], Sept. 13, 1844, in ibid.,
591
155; ibid-, Sept. 4, 1844, TPLC; see also New York Herald, June 27, 1844; Alexan-
der Gardiner to John Tyler [New York], Dec. 9, 1844, TPLC; John Tyler to
Thomas Ritchie, Sherwood Forest, Jan. 9, 1851, in Richmond Enquirer, Jan, 17,
1851. Tyler was stunned to learn, however, that William Waller, his son-in-law, was
leaning toward Clay. "I am still abused as the violent wretch by all the newspapers
in his advocacy I hope Mr. Waller will seriously ponder this before he commits
himself for Clay." John Tyler to Elizabeth Tyler Waller, Washington, Sept. 5,
1844, TPLC.
61 Alexander Gardiner to Ju^ia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Sept 3, 1844; R. M.
Price to Alexander Gardiner [New York], Sept. 16, 1844; Samuel Gardiner to
Alexander Gardiner, Shelter Island, N.Y., Aug. 16; Sept. 17, 1844; Vanbrugh
Livingston to Alexander Gardiner, New York, Oct. 3, 1844; John Lorimer Graham
to Alexander Gardiner, New York, Oct. 13, 1844; John Pierce to Nathaniel Gardi-
ner (forwarded to Alexander Gardiner), Brooklyn, Oct. 28, 1844; T. W. Letson to
Alexander Gardiner, Dry Dock Office, Brooklyn, Oct. 29; 30, 1844; Garrit H. Stukes,
Jr., to Alexander Gardiner, New York, Oct. 30, 1844; John E. Ross to Alexander
Gardiner, New York, Nov. 18, 1844, GPY ; Margaret Gardiner to Julia Gardiner
Tyler, New York, Oct. 18, 1844, TFP.
63 Garrit H. Stukes, Jr., to Alexander Gardiner, New York, Oct. 30, 1844, GPY;
Margaret Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler [New York], July 22, 1844; Alexander
Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Oct. 15; 16, 1844, TPLC; Margaret
Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Oct. 18, 1844. On this trip to New
York Robert and Priscilla Tyler were the houseguests of Surveyor Henry C. At-
wood. Priscilla had given birth to her third child, a son, in July. See ibid., July 10 ;
Aug. 5, 1844, TFP; Samuel Osgood to Alexander Gardiner, Tammany Hall, Oct. 5,
1844; Alexander Gardiner to [Samuel Osgood] [New York, Oct. 6, 1844] ; [Alexan-
der Gardiner], Statement of Qualifications [New York, Oct. 1844]; Committee of
Stone Cutters to Alexander Gardiner, New York [Oct. 1844] ; Alexander Gardiner
to Committee of Stone Cutters, New York, Oct. 28, 1844, GPY; Alexander Gardi-
ner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Oct. 15, 1844. For his labors on Alexander's
behalf, Broderick ("an invaluable friend") was later (December) rewarded by Tyler
with an appointment as Secret Inspector in the Customs House, replacing Paul R.
George. See Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Oct. n, 1844, TFP;
Alexander Gardiner to John Tyler, New York, Nov. 23, 1844, TPLC; David H.
Broderick to Alexander Gardiner, New York, Nov. 12, 1844, GPY; Alexander
Gardiner to John Tyler, New York, Dec. 6, 1844, TFP.
63 Fox, The Decline of the Aristocracy in the Politics of New York, 431-35;
Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Oct. u; 16; 14, 1844, TFP;
Alexander Gardiner, Memorandum of a Conversation with Joseph T. Sweet, New
York, Oct. 31, 1844, GPY; Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York,
Oct. 31, 1844, TPLC; Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Oct.
29, 1844, TFP; New York Herald, Oct. 29, 1844; Alexander Gardiner, Notice, New
York Evening Post, New York, Oct. 30, 1844.
e*Roseboom, A History of Presidential Elections, 131-35. Polk: 1,337,243;
Clay: 1,229,062; Birney: 62,300. Electoral votes: Polk, 170; Clay, 105. Clay carried
Ohio, N.C., Tenn. (by 113 votes), Ky., Md., Del., Mass., R.I., Conn., Vt., and NJ.
Polk carried Virginia, the entire Deep South, the West save Ohio, and, most signifi-
cantly, N.Y. and Penna. John Lorimer Graham to Alexander Gardiner, New York,
Dec. 6, 1844, GPY; Unsigned Letter to Editor [James Watson Webb] of New York
Courier and Enquirer, Washington, Dec. 4, 1844; Alexander Gardiner to Julia
Gardiner Tyler, New York, Nov. [9], 1844, TFP. This too was the view of former
New York Senator Nathaniel P. Tallmadge, Tyler's appointee as governor of the
Wisconsin Territory. N. P. Tallmadge to Robert J. Walker, Faycheedah, Wis., Dec.
9, 1844, in LTT, III, 153-54. See also Jay A. Micheals to John Tyler, New York,
Nov. 7, 1844, GPY.
592
^Andrew Jackson to James K. Polk, Hermitage, Sept. 2, 1844, i*1 LTT, III,
150; D. B. Tallmadge to John Tyler, New York, Nov. 14, 1844. This was also the
reasoned view of George F. Thompson. George F. Thompson to Robert Tyler, New
York, Nov. n, 1844, GPY. That many Van Burenites had cut Polk was agreed to
by Alexander Gardiner but he did not carry the implications of this to Tallmadge's
conclusion. Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Nov. [9], 1844,
TFP.
06 John Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, July n, 1846, hi LTT, II,
342; Margaret Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York [Nov. 1844], TFP;
John Tyler to Andrew Jackson, Washington, Aug. 18, 1844, in Lyon G. Tyler (ed.),
"Some Letters of Tyler...," loc. cit., 222, 232; Edward Stanwood, A History of
Presidential Elections (New York, 1892), 158; W. Dean Burnham, Presidential Bal-
lots, 1836-1892 (Baltimore, 1955), 704, 716, 820.
67 See election returns in New York Herald, Nov. 12, 1844. Clarkson Crolius,
running as a straight Whig for the Assembly, polled 947 votes. Compare Alexander
Gardiner's 26,183 votes to Folk's 28,402, Wright's 29,220 and Lt. Gov. Addison
Gardiner's 29,117. Alexander even ran behind Henry Clay, who polled 26,518 in
New York City. Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Nov. 7; [9], 1844,
TFP.
68 New York Herald, Nov. n; 21, 1844; Julia Gardiner Tyler to [Juliana
Gardiner], Washington, Nov. 27; 29, 1844, in LTT, II, 356; Mary Gardiner to
Margaret Gardiner, Shelter Island, Dec. 5, 1844; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Margaret
Gardiner, President's Mansion [ Washington] , Nov. 13, 1844; Juliana Gardiner to
Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Nov. 17; 19, 1844. TFP.
68 New York Herald, Nov. 21, 1844; Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler,
New York, Nov. 19, 1844, TFP.
70 John Tyler to John Jones, Washington [Nov. 1844], TPLC.
CHAPTER 10
1New York Herald, Nov. 21; Oct. 23, 1844; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana
Gardiner, Washington, Nov. 17, 1844, TFP.
2 New York Herald, Nov. 27, 1844; Feb. 20, 1845; Juliana Gardiner to Julia
Gardiner Tyler, New York [Nov. 1844] ; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner,
Washington, Sept. 9, 1844, TFP.
3 William Boulware to John Tyler, Naples, Oct. 30, 1844, TFP; Julia Gardiner
Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Washington, Nov. 25, 1844, GPY; Margaret Gardiner
to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, July 13, 1844, TFP. The consul insisted that
such a dog was "exceedingly delicate and particularly sensitive to cold" and sug-
gested that shipment be delayed until March 1845. Tyler agreed.
4 Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Nov. 21, 1844, TFP;
Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Dec. 28, 1844, GPY; LTTt
I, 390. The wines were shipped from France on the Marietta Burr on December 5.
Tyler feared that the vessel had gone down in one of the heavy gales reported in
the Atlantic that winter. The Marietta Burr happily came through, although far
behind schedule. See David L. Gardiner to Juliana Gardiner, Washington, Dec. 21,
1844, GPY. The furniture included French mirrors, rugs, chandeliers, wallpapers,
occasional tables, etc. They were later transshipped from New York to Sherwood
Forest. Somewhat over $1000 worth of dry goods and furniture was ordered from
New York to be shipped directly to Kennon's Landing, James River, near Sher-
wood Forest. See John Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Dec. 8, 1844, in
LTT, II, 358-59; Farrar, Old Virginia Houses Along the James, 124.
6 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Washington, Nov. 25, 1844. Neither
593
the Thompson painting nor the Tyler engraving based on it has survived. Thomp-
son also executed a portrait of Senator David Gardiner, dunning Alexander for
payment with the artist's age-old observation, "O ! This painting business is bad!"
E. G. Thompson to Alexander Gardiner [New York], n.d., GPY.
6 Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Jan. u, 1845, GPY;
New York Herald, Oct. 31, 1844; Hervey Allen, "Special Biographical Introduc-
tion," in The Works of Edgar Allan Poe (New York, 1927), xvii; Margaret Gardi-
ner to Juliana Gardiner, Washington, Dec. 23, 1844, TFP.
7 New York Herald, Oct. 27, 1844.
8 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Washington, Nov. 25, 1844, GPY;
ibid., Nov. 27, 1844, in LTT, II, 356; Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner,
Washington [Jan. 1845], GPY; Julia Gardiner Tyler, "Reminiscences," in LTT,
III, 199; Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Feb. 12, 1845,
GPY. The Phimb daguerreotype unfortunately has not survived.
* Richardson, Messages and Papers of the Presidents, IV, 341-45-
10 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Margaret Gardiner, Washington, Dec. 5, 1844, in
LTT, II, 358; Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Dec. 8,
1844; Joseph S. Watkins to John Tyler, Birch Pond, Tenn., Dec. 21, 1844, TPLC;
John Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Dec. 8, 1844, in LTT, II, 359.
21 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Dec. 8, 1844;
Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Dec. 7; 15, 1844, TFP. By
this time the behavior of John Tyler, Jr., had become so erratic and his personal
habits so unpredictable that the President replaced him in September 1844 as his
private secretary and gave the duties to a Mr. C. B, Moss. Said the New York
Herald of Moss: "This gentleman ... is decidedly a very civil and worthy young
man — always at his post during office hours, ready and willing to attend to all
business matters coming within the range and scope of his official duty." New York
Herald, Oct. 23, 1844.
12 Julia Gardiner Tyler, "Reminiscences," in LTT, III, 198.
13 Ibid., 197.
14 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Washington, Dec. 6, 1844, in ibid.,
II, 358.
15 The Gardiner Papers, Yale University Library, show much evidence for this
statement on the franking privilege, particularly during the period August 1844 to
March 1845. Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Jan. 2, 1845;
JuKana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler [New York, 1844]. For typical clemency,
etc., requests see Cornelius Dreslane to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Jan. 10,
1845; Mary de John to Mrs. President Tyler [Washington], Jan. 31, 1845; Lucy
Marie Murphy to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Chillicothe [Ohio], Feb. 14, 1845; Calvin
Durphree to John Tyler, East Walpole, Mass., Jan. 13, 1845; L. D. Dewey to Julia
Gardiner Tyler, New York, Sept. 16, 1844; Mary Smith to Julia Gardiner Tyler,
Fort Monroe, Va., July 21, 1844; Esther M. Gibbons to Julia Gardiner Tyler,
Albany, N.Y., July 13, 1844; Tris P. Coffin to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Granville
[Ohio], Jan. 15, 1845, TFP; Mrs. William Lynde to Mrs. John Tyler, New York,
Dec. u, 1844, GPY. For Julia's role in Tyler's pardoning of one "Babe," a New
York seaman under sentence of death for alleged piracy, see N.Y. Herald, Jan. 31,
1845. For "The Julia Waltzes" see Margaret Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New
York, Oct. 31, 1844; Feb. 27, 1845; and Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner,
Washington [Dec. 1844]. "The Julia Waltzes were composed by Lovel Purdy . . .
dedicated to Mrs. Tyler," and published by Firth and Hall at No. i Franklin
Square and 239 Broadway, New York City. Julia heard that they were "so popular"
that the first edition of 1400 copies had been sold out quickly. "I understand they
are very pretty," she told her mother. She instructed Margaret to promote knowl-
edge of the music among friends of the Gardiners in New York. "She must . . . say
to her friends, 'Have you seen the Julia Waltzes which are just out? dedicated to
594
Mrs. Tyler. They are quite beautiful.'" See also Margaret Gardiner to Julia
Gardiner Tyler, New York, May 16, 1845, TFP, wherein Margaret dubs Lovel
Purdy "the last of Pea-Time" and notes his interest in procuring a consulship.
Margaret did not think the "Julia Waltzes" very pretty, nor Purdy much of a
human being.
M Phoebe Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Shelter Island, Dec. 3, 1844, TFP.
Julia was very close to her Uncles Samuel and Nathaniel, her father's younger
brothers. Samuel, a lawyer by profession, lived most of Ms life on Shelter Island,
L.I., and was prominent in N.Y. state politics, having served at various times as
Secretary of the N.Y. State Constitutional Convention (1821), Member of the
N.Y. State Assembly from N.Y.C. (1823-1824), and Deputy Collector of the Port
of New York (1825-1828). Julia was particularly close to his daughters, Mary
(1824-1855), Phoebe (1826-?), and Francis Eliza (1832-?). Julia's Uncle Nathaniel
married Elizabeth Stensin (1793-1842), and by her he had six children. The eldest,
John Bray Gardiner (1821-1881) was Yale 1840 and became a lawyer in N.Y.C.
The next eldest was William Henry Gardiner (1822-1879), NYU 1844, who became
a physician in Brooklyn. Julia liked neither of these cousins and indeed had little
to do with any of Nathaniel's children. The Nathaniel Gardiners lived in Sag
Harbor, L.I., during Julia's childhood. Soon after Julia's Aunt Elizabeth died in
June 1842 her Uncle Nathaniel married a young Miss Ho well, a match which
generally horrified the family. Nothing is known of Miss Howell save the family
opinion that she was a fortune-hunter. For these and other genealogical facts about
the extensive Gardiner family see C. C. Gardiner, Lion Gardiner and His De-
scendants, passim.
"Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Dec. 27, 1844, GPY;
ibid., Jan. 2, 1845, TFP.
18 Ibid., Dec. 30, 1844; Jan. u, 1845, GPY. Dr. Wat Tyler, the President's
brother, was, on the other hand, quite welcome at the White House and he was
graciously entertained there in January 1845. See ibid., Jan. 25, 1845, GPY.
10 Mary Gardiner to Julia Gardiner, Shelter Island, Feb. 6, 1840; Nov. 27,
1839; Margaret Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York [Nov. 1844], TFP.
Alexander Gardiner, a stern judge of women, said of Mary and Phoebe when they
were sixteen and fourteen respectively: "They altogether lack matter of conversa-
tion and hide their talents under a bushel [but] they are somehow interesting."
Alexander Gardiner to Juliana Gardiner [New York, Summer 1840], GPY.
20 Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Jan. i; 8; 22, 1845,
GPY. Horsford was A.M., Union College, 1843; A.M. (Hon.) Harvard College,
1847; and M.D., Castleton Medical College (Vt), 1847. In 1861-1862 he served
as Dean, Lawrence Science School, Harvard University.
21 Samuel Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Shelter Island, June 2, 1843 ; Alex-
an-der Gardiner to Samuel Gardiner, New York, June 5, 1843, GPY.
22 Unidentified newspaper clipping ; Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner,
Washington, Jan. 8, 1845, GPY; Robert Tyler, "Phoebe the Coquette," poem
quoted in Margaret Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Feb. 27, 1845,
TFP.
^Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Jan. 5; 10, 1845,
GPY.
24 Ibid., Jan. 22; Feb. 12; 20, 1845, GPY. In 1847 Douglas married Martha
Martin, daughter of Col. Robert Martin of North Carolina. Her death in 1853 very
nearly broke him psychologically. In 1856 he married Adele Curtis, a Maryland
belle and grandniece of Dolley Madison. Adele Curtis Douglas later became the
undisputed leader of Washington society, especially during the winter of 1857-1858,
when bachelor President James Buchanan was in the White House.
^Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, [Mid- Jan. 1845],
GPY.
595
28 Ibid., Jan. 10, 1845, GPY; New York Herald, Jan. 15, 1845.
27 Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Dec. 29, 1844; Jan.
5; ii ; 22; Feb. 8; Jan. 10; i, 1845, GPY; Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner
Tyler and Margaret Gardiner, New York, Jan. 8, 1845, TFP.
38 Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Jan. 22; 23, 1845;
Margaret Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Feb. 28, 1845, GPY.
28 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Washington [Dec. 1844], TFP;
Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Dec. 29, 1844; Jan. 23,
1845; Juliana Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Feb. 11, 1845, GPY.
30 Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Dec. 27, 1844; Jan. i,
1845, GPY; Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Jan. 8, 1845,
TFP; David L. Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Jan. 9, 1845, GPY.
31 Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Jan. 5, 1845, GPY.
82 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Washington [Dec. 1844]; Juliana
Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Feb. 11, 1845, TFP; Margaret Gardi-
ner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Feb. 12; 20, 1845; Margaret Gardiner and
Juliana Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington [Feb. 12, 1845] ; David L.
Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Feb. 14, 1845, GPY,
33 Juliana Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner (two letters), Washington, Feb. n,
1845, GPY; and ibid., TFP; Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washing-
ton, Jan. n, 1845; see also ibid., Jan. 10; Feb. 12; 20, 1845, for further data on
David Lyon's relations with the Misses Henderson, Wright, and Bayard. For the
Alice Tyler-David L. Gardiner rumor, see ibid., Jan. 22, 1845, GPY.
Z4clbid.} Jan. 23, 1845; Phoebe Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Shelter
Island, Mar. 28, 1845, TFP. (Alice Tyler's proposals came from a Mr. Lawrence of
New York, a Dr. Esselman of Tennessee, and a Judge Irvin of Virginia.) David L.
Gardiner to Juliana Gardiner, Washington, Dec. 21, 1844, GPY; Julia Gardiner
Tyler to Mary Hedges, Washington [Jan. 22, 1845], TFP.
85 Alice Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler [Williamsburg] , Nov. 6, 1844; Juliana
Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler [New York], n.d. [probably mid-Nov. 1844],
TFP.
^Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Jan. 22, 1845; Dec.
29, 1844; Feb. 12, 1845, GPY; Margaret Gardiner to Phoebe Gardiner, New York,
Mar. 27, 1845; Phoebe Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Shelter Island, Mar. 28,
1845, TFP. Gushing had married Caroline Elizabeth Wilde in Newburyport, Mass.,
in November 1824. She was frail, her health was poor, and she was often confined
indoors until her death in August 1832. Her passing left Gushing truly grief-
stricken, Claude M. Fuess, The Life of Caleb Gushing, 2 vols. (New York, 1923), I,
58-59, 129-30. His interest in Alice Tyler seems to have been the first in any other
woman since the death of his wife.
^Juliana Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Feb. 12, 1845; Mar-
garet Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington [mid- Jan. 1845], GPY; Juliana
Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, n.d. [.circa Jan. 25, 1845] ; Julia
Gardiner Tyler to Mary Hedges, Washington [Jan. 22, 1845], TFP.
38 Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Dec. i [1844] ; Juliana
Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, New York, Feb. 25; 28, 1845, TFP; Margaret
Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Feb. 8, 1845, GPY.
»/6itfv Jan. i, 1845, GPY; ibid., Jan. 2, 1845, TFP.
40 New York Herald, Jan. 3, 1845.
*^lbid.t Jan. 12, 1845.
^Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Jan. 8, 1845, GPY.
^Juliana Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Jan. 8, 1845, GPY.
u Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Jan. 10: n, 1845,
GPY.
45 Bess Furman, White House Profile (Indianapolis, 1951), 129.
596
46 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Mary Hedges, Washington [Jan. 22, 1845], TFP;
Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Jan. 22, 1845, GPY.
* Ibid., GPY.
48 Ibid., Jan. n; 24, 1845, GPY.
48 Juliana Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Jan. 8, 1845, GPY.
50 Alexander Gardiner to John Tyler, Post Office, New York, midnight, Jan.
24, 1845, GPY.
51 Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Jan. 22; 25; Feb.
7, 1845, GPY; F. W. Thomas to Julia Gardiner Tyler (two letters), Washington,
n.d. [circa Feb. 10-12, 1845]; O. B. Goldsmith to John Tyler, New York, Jan.
15, 1845, TFP.
52 David L. Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Feb. 14, 1845;
Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Feb. 12, 1845, GPY;
Juliana Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington [Feb. 9, 1845] ; Juliana
Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, May 19, 1845; F. W. Thomas to
Julia Gardiner Tyler, Washington, n.d. [Feb. 10-12, 1845], TFP.
53 Juliana Gardiner and Margaret Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York,
May 19, 1845, TFP.
54 This account of the Feb. 18 ball is based primarily upon Margaret Gardiner
to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Feb. 20, 1845, GPY; and upon Thomas' ac-
count in the New York Herald, Feb. 22, 1845; see also LTT, II, 361.
^Alexander Gardiner, "Mrs. Tyler's Farewell Ball," Washington, Feb. 20,
1845, TFP; David L. Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, New York, Feb. 26, 1845,
GPY.
56 John Tyler to Editors of the US. Journal, James City, Va., Dec. 27, 1845,
in Noah, "Reminiscences," New York Sunday Dispatch, Jan. n, 1846.
CHAPTER II
1 Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Jan. 5; 8; 10; Feb.
ii ; 12, 1845, GPY; Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York [Nov.
1844] ; Dec. i, 1844, TFP; Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington
[Jan. 1845], GPY; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Mary Hedges, Washington [Jan. 22,
1845], TFP; Juliana Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Feb. 12, 1845,
GPY.
2 John Tyler to N. P. Tallmadge, Washington, Nov. 7, 1844, in Lyon G. Tyler
(ed.) , "Some Letters of Tyler . . . ," loc. cit., g ; Margaret Gardiner to Juliana Gardi-
ner, Washington, Dec. 23, 1844, TFP; New York Herald, Mar. 8, 1845.
8 He suggested that the District Attorney, Ogden Hoffman ("The fact is he is a
Webster man") be replaced by R. H. Morris; that Surveyor Jonathan O. Fowler
give way to Charles G. Ferris, a protege of Robert Tyler and onetime Tyler
nominee for the collectorship but rejected by the Senate; and that U.S. Marshal
Stilwell be replaced by William Shaler. He was not convinced, however, that
Shaler would gain Senate approval, and suggested for him the alternate job of
consul at Havana, a post once held by Shaler's father under Jackson. Alexander
Gardiner to John Tyler, New York, Nov. 27, 1844, TFP; ibid., Nov. 23, 1844,
TPLC. Tyler had no use for Hoffman or Stilwell and was quite ready to purge
them. But largely on the advice of Gen. William Gibbs McNeill, a frequent White
House visitor during these months and according to Margaret "not at all afraid
to speak his thoughts," Tyler nominated Henry C. Atwood as Surveyor and
James H. Suydam as Navy Agent. When Suydam was rejected by the Senate,
thanks in large measure to the hostile intervention of James Watson Webb, editor
of the New York Courier and Enquirer, Tyler nominated Prosper M. Wetmore as
597
Navy Agent. Wetmore's brother, Robert C., had earlier been removed from the same
job by Tyler for corruption. He had, however, the strong support of the New
York mercantile community. Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washing-
ton, Jan. 10 ; Feb. 12, 1845; Cornelius P. Van Ness to John Tyler, New York, Jan.
4, 1845, GPY; John Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Dec. i, 1844, in
LTT, II, 357. See also New York Herald, Dec. 13, 1844; Jan. 14; 15; 18; Feb. 9,
1845; New York Courier and Enquirer, Dec. 4, 1844. On the Ely Moore appoint-
ment, see Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Jan. 8, 1845,
TFP.
4 David H. Broderick to Alexander Gardiner, New York, Nov. 12, 1844;
Thomas Dunn English to Alexander Gardiner, New York, Nov. 20, 1844; William
Shannon to Alexander Gardiner, New York, Nov. 20, 1844, GPY; Alexander
Gardiner to John Tyler, New York, Dec. 6; Nov. 28, 1844, TFP; ibid., Nov. 23,
1844, TPLC; David Palmer to Alexander Gardiner, Brooklyn, Nov. 24; Dec. 5,
1844; David Palmer to John Tyler, Brooklyn, n.d.; Alexander Gardiner to David
Palmer [New York, Nov. 26, 1844] ; William Gibbs McNeill to Alexander Gardiner,
Brooklyn, Dec. 13, 1844, GPY.
5 Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Dec. 8, 1844, TPLC;
Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York [Nov. 27, 1844]; Margaret
Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Nov. 27, 1844, TFP; Judge Ogden
Edwards to David L. Gardiner, New York [Nov. 1844], GPY.
"Margaret Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, East Hampton, Aug. 18, 1844;
Julia Gardiner Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Nov. 25, 1844 ; Mrs. Wil-
liam Lynde {.nee M. P. Stimson] to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Dec. n,
1844, GPY.
7 Alexander Gardiner to John Tyler, New York, Nov. 30, 1844; Alexander
Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Jan. 8, 1845 ; Julia Gardiner Tyler
to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Dec. 10, 1844, TFP; John Tyler to Alexander
Gardiner, Washington, Dec. 8, 1844, in LTT, II, 359.
8 Southampton Citizens Petition to Charles A. Wickliffe, Forwarded to Alex-
ander Gardiner, Southampton, N.Y., Dec. n, 1844, GPY ; John Tyler to Alexander
Gardiner, Washington, Dec. i, 1844, in LTT, II, 357; Judge R. J. Church to
Alexander Gardiner, Brooklyn, Dec. 4, 1844; Amos Palmer to the Appriser's [sic]
Office, Forwarded to Alexander Gardiner, New York, Dec. 30, 1844; John Lorimer
Graham to Alexander Gardiner, New York, Dec. 6, 1844, GPY; Alexander Gardiner
to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Dec. 15, 1844, TFP; New York Courier and
Enquirer, Dec. 4, 1844. The criticism from the Conner and Enquirer, sent to
Alexander by John Lorimer Graham, was found carefully preserved among his
papers a century and a quarter later. He apparently got a wry pleasure from it.
Better notoriety than anonymity.
9 Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Dec. 15, 1844, TFP;
Alexander L. Botts to Alexander Gardiner, New York, Dec. 2, 1844; Daniel Day-
ton to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, Feb. 15, 1845. The appointment of
distant cousin Charles Gardiner of Brooklyn to a clerkship in the Brooklyn Navy
Yard was somewhat more smoothly handled. David L. Gardiner to Alexander
Gardiner, Brooklyn, June n, 1844, GPY.
10 John D. Gardiner to John Tyler, Sag Harbor, Dec. 6, 1844, TFP; Mary
L'Hommedieu Gardiner [Mrs. John D. Gardiner], to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Sag
Harbor, Dec. 18, 1844, GPY; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner [Old
Point Comfort], July [5], 1844; Margaret Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, East
Hampton, Aug. 8, 1844, TFP.
11 New York Herald, Apr. 27, 1845; [David L. Gardiner?] to James Gordon
Bennett, Apr. 7, 1845, (draft fragment of a letter), GPY.
u Samuel L. Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, Sag Harbor, Jan. 19, 1845, GPY.
598
13 David L. Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, East Hampton, Sept. 3, 1844,
TFP.
" Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Washington, Sept. 8, 1844; Alex-
ander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, East Hampton, Sept. 3, 1844; New York,
Oct. 14, 1844, TFP.
15 Ibid., Dec. 7, 1844; Jan 8, 1845, TFP; Ezra L'H. Gardiner to Alexander
Gardiner, Sag Harbor, Jan. 2, 1845, GPY '; New York Herald, Feb. u, 1845;
Alexander Gardiner to John Tyler, New York, Nov. 23, 1844, TPLC.
™Ibid., Nov. 28; Dec. 15, 1844, TFP; ibid., Nov. 23, 1844, TPLC.
17 Ibid., Dec. 15, 1844, TFP; Mary L'H. Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Sag
Harbor, Dec. 18, 1844, GPY.
18 Samuel L. Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, Sag Harbor, Jan. 19, 1845;
Alexander Gardiner, Memorandum, n.p., n.d. [New York, circa mid- Jan. 1845],
GPY; Juliana Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Feb. 9, 1845; David
L. Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Jan. 19, 1845, TFP.
19 George D. Strong to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Jan. 4, 1845, GPY;
Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Oct. 14, 1844, TFP; New
York Herald, Feb. u, 1845; John N. Dayton to Alexander Gardiner, Albany, Jan.
19, 1845, GPY.
20 Juliana Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Feb. 9, 1845, TFP;
Alexander Gardiner to Margaret Gardiner [Washington, Feb. 27, 1845], GPY;
Juliana Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner [Washington, circa Jan. 25, 1845], TFP.
21 John N. Dayton to Alexander Gardiner, Albany, Feb. 12; 15, 1845, GPY;
New York Herald, Apr. 27, 1845; Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New
York, Apr. 10, 1845, TFP.
22 Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Dec. 29, 1844, GPY;
Juliana Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Feb. 11, 1845, TFP. Juliana
thought Sarah Polk "looked very well and acted her part well."
^Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Dec. 29, 1844, GPY;
Juliana Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner [Washington, Feb. 9, 1845; mid-Jan.
1845], TFP; David L. Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Jan. 9, 1845,
GPY; New York Herald, Dec. 30, 1844.
24 Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Jan. i, 1845, GPY;
J. George Harris to George Bancroft, Nashville, Sept. 13, 1887, in Lyon G. Tyler,
"Some Letters of Tyler . . . ," loc. cit.t 14-15; Silas Reed to Lyon G. Tyler, Boston,
Apr. 8, 1885; A. V. Brown to James K. Polk, Washington, Jan. 24, 1845, in
LTT, II, Appendix D, 698; III, 157-58; New York Herald, Jan. 15; 16, 1845.
*5 Ibid., Jan. 18; Mar. 12, 1845.
20 Ibid., Jan. 14, 1845; David L. Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington,
Feb. 8; 26, 1845; Juliana Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Feb. n,
1845, GPY; New York Herald, Mar. 6, 1845; Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner
Tyler, New York, Jan. 2, 1845, TPLC.
27 John Lorimer Graham to Alexander Gardiner, New York, Dec. 19; 22; 25,
1844; Jan. 4, 1845; N. T. Eldridge to Alexander Gardiner, New York, Jan. 9,
1845, GPY; New York Herald, Jan. 14, 1845. Tyler's use of profanity was often
commented upon. "The People here make a great fuss about the President's swear-
ing," Margaret wrote Julia soon after the Old Point Comfort honeymoon. "If so,
you must bid him read St. Matthew " Margaret Gardiner to Julia Gardiner
Tyler, New York, n.d. [circa Nov. 1844], TFP.
^Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Dec. 8, 1844, TPLC.
20 New York Herald, Jan. 31; Feb. 2; 6; Jan. 29; Mar. 6; Jan. 2, 1845.
30 Alexander Gardiner, Texas Resolutions and Memorandum, n.p., n.d. [New
York, Jan. 24, 1845] ; Alexander Gardiner to John Tyler, New York, midnight,
Jan. 24, 1845, GPY; LTT, II, 360. An account of Tammany's "Great Texas Meet-
599
ing" and Robert Tyler's speech there is found in the New York Herald, Jan. 25,
1845. Also addressing the rally were Cornelius P. Van Ness, John I. Mumford, and
David H. Broderick.
31 Ibid., Jan. 27; 29, 1845; New York Express, Jan. 28, 1845.
^Alexander Gardiner, Draft Memorandum on Texas Annexation, n.p., n.d.
[New York, Nov. i844-Feb. 1845], GPY '; Margaret Gardiner to Julia Gardiner
Tyler, New York, Dec. 16, 1845, TFP; Interview with Judge J. Randall Creel and
his wife, Alexandra Gardiner Creel, Oyster Bay, Long Island, N.Y., Aug. 28, 1959.
Judge Creel summarized for the author the contents of some dozen Alexander Gar-
diner and Julia Gardiner Tyler letters bearing on the Texas annexation question.
These letters, held apart from those deposited by Mrs. Creel in the Manuscript
Collection of Yale University Library, support the statement on Alexander Gar-
diner's considerable propaganda and pressure activities on behalf of Texas annexa-
tion during the period November 1844 to February 1845. They also point up
Julia's flirtations and social machinations for annexation at various White House
functions in greater detail than do those letters in the Gardiner Papers at Yale.
Unfortunately, these crucial letters became lost, were misplaced in moving, or were
accidentally burned during the winter of 1958-1959.
^Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Dec. 28; Jan. 10;
25, 1845; David L. Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Jan. 9, 1845,
GPY; Juliana Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Feb. u; 28, 1845,
TFP.
34 Julia Gardiner Tyler to [Alexander Gardiner] [Washington], Feb. 23, 1845.
in LTT, II, 361; Alexander Gardiner to Margaret Gardiner [Washington, Feb. 27,
1845], GPY; Margaret Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Mar. 7, 1845,
TFP; LTT, II, 362-65.
85 Julia Gardiner Tyler, "Reminiscences," in ibid., Ill, 200; Julia Gardiner
Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Richmond, Mar. 6, 1845, in ibid., II, 369; Margaret
Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Mar. 7, 1845, TFP; New York
Herald, Mar. 4, 1845 ; Alexander Gardiner to Margaret Gardiner, Washington, Mar.
4, 1845, TPLC; LTT, II, 365-66.
^Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Jan. 2, 1845,
TPLC; Juliana Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, n.d. [mid- Jan. 1845],
TFP.
37 John Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, May n, 1844, GPY.
^Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, East Hampton, Sept. 3, 1844;
Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Washington, Sept. 8, 1844; Julia
Gardiner Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Dec. 8, 1844, TFP.
^Robert Tyler and John Tyler, quoted in Margaret Gardiner to Alexander
Gardiner, Washington, Jan. 23, 1845, GPY ; Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner
Tyler, New York, Dec. 9, 1844, TPLC; ibid., Jan. 8, 1845, TFP.
40 David L. Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Jan. 9; Feb. 9, 1845;
Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Feb. 12, 1845; Juliana
Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Feb. n, 1845; William Gibbs
McNeill to Alexander Gardiner, New York, Feb. 4; 6, 1845; Julia Gardiner Tyler
to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, n.d. [circa Feb. 10-13, 1845], GPY.
41 Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Dec. 8, 1844, TPLC;
Joel B. Sutherland to Andrew Jackson, Philadelphia, Aug. 20, 1844, in LTT,
III, 147; Alexander Gardiner to John Tyler, New York, Nov. 27, 1844, TFP;
David L. Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Feb. 8, 1845, GPY.
^Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Apr. n, 1845, TFP;
Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Jan. 23, 1845, GPY.
a Juliana Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Feb. 9, 1845, TFP;
New York Herald, Feb. 20, 1845; Margaret and Juliana Gardiner to Alexander
600
Gardiner, Washington [Feb. 12, 1845] ; John Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sher-
wood Forest, July 13, 1847, GPY ; Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler,
New York, Apr. i; 15, 1845, TPLC. Judge Samuel Nelson's appointment to the
Supreme Court was strongly urged by author James Fenimore Cooper. Tyler later
(1847) said that Cooper's endorsement of Nelson most influenced his nomination
of Nelson to the Court. Margaret thought Justice Nelson "not very remarkable
in any way — about equal to what one might expect [from] such a village as
Cooperstown." He was, she told Julia, "quite a handsome man but not par-
ticularly neat in his dress." See on Nelson, John Tyler to Alexander Gardiner,
Sherwood Forest, July 13, 1847, GPY; Margaret Gardiner to Julia Gardiner
Tyler, New York, May 16; June 13, 1845, TFP.
44 The financial history of the Gardiner-Tyler family alliance is discussed
and documented further in various following chapters. For details of the Alexander-
Julia loan of April 1845 see Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood
Forest, Feb. 14; 28, 1851, TFP.
^Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Washington, Feb. 13, 1846, in
LTT, II, 451; Alexander Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, New York, July 2, 1847;
Robert Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Philadelphia, July 18, 1847; John Tyler to
Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, July 13, 1847, GPY; Julia Gardiner Tyler
to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, July 13, 1847; Margaret Gardiner to Julia
Gardiner Tyler, New York, Apr. 14, 1845 ; Juliana Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner,
Washington [Feb. 9, 1845], TFP.
CHAPTER 12
1 Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Feb. 20, 1845, GPY.
2 Margaret Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Feb. 28, 1845, GPY;
ibid., Feb. 27, 1845; Juliana Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, New York, Feb.
25, 1845 (Juliana left Washington in such haste that she did not return some
dozen calls she owed. She instructed Alexander to present her apologies to those
she had neglected) ; Phoebe Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Shelter Island, Mar.
28, 1845; Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Feb. 28, 1845,
TFP.
3 John Tyler to Elizabeth Tyler Waller, Washington, Mar. i, 1845, TPLC;
Julia Gardiner Tyler to Mary Gardiner, Washington, n.d. [Mar. 1845] ; Julia
Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Richmond, Mar. 6, 1845; Alexander Gardiner
to Margaret Gardiner, Washington, Mar. 4, 1845, in LTT, II, 365-66, 368-69, 368;
New York Herald, Mar. 4; 5, 1845.
* Tyler's farewell speech in the Blue Room as recorded here is based on a
composite of several published and unpublished eyewitness accounts, principally
those found in Alexander Gardiner, Memorandum, Washington, n.d. [Mar. 5, 1845],
GPY; New York Journal of Commerce, Washington, Mar. 3, 1845, reprinted in
LTT, II, 366-67; New York Herald, Mar. 5, 1845; and on evidence found in
Julia Gardiner Tyler, "Reminiscences," in LTT, III, 200. The author has changed
verb tenses and the person of pronouns to cast it in the present tense.
5 Alexander Gardiner, Memorandum, Washington, n.d. [Mar. 5, 1845], GPY;
ibid., Mar. 4, 1845; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Richmond, Mar. 6,
1845, in LTT, II, 367-68, 368-70.
6 Margaret Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Mar. 9, 1845, TFP;
New York Herald, Mar. 6, 1845.
7 Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Washington, Mar. 73 1845,
601
TPLC; Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, New York [Mar. 3, 1845],
TFP. "Alas!" mourned Margaret, "I can direct no more [letters] under cover to
the President of the United States."
8 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Richmond, Mar. 6, 1845, in LTT,
II, 568-70; Julia Gardiner Tyler, "Reminiscences," in ibid., Ill, 201 ; Julia Gardiner
Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Richmond, Mar. 6, 1845; Julia Gardiner Tyler to
Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Mar. 9, 1845; Edmund Ruffin to Jane M.
Ruffin, Marlbourne, Mar. 21, 1854 (copy), TFP.
9 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Mar. 9, 1845;
Julia Gardiner Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Apr. i, 1845;
Margaret Gardiner to Phoebe Gardiner, New York, Mar. 27, 1845; Julia Gardiner
Tyler to Margaret Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Mar. 18, 1845; Julia Gardiner
Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Apr. 3, 1845, TFP. "Your descriptions
of Broadway and its promenades made me feel indeed like two years ago" she
confessed to her mother. "How I should like to have been with you in your
walk just for the sake of Auld Lang Syne."
10 Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Apr. 30, 1845; Julia
Gardiner Tyler to Margaret Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Apr. 10, 1845; Alex-
ander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Mar. 27, 1845; Julia Gardiner
Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Apr. [16], 1845, TFP; Julia
Gardiner Tyler to Margaret Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Apr. 25, 1845, GPY.
The reclining iron dogs may still be seen at Sherwood Forest, guarding the main
entrance. Family tradition has it that they were procured from the Manor House
on Gardiners Island. Julia's guitar music has not survived. "Collect all my guitar
music that is left at home," Julia instructed Margaret on April 25, "and get me
besides — 'Come Sing That Simple Air Again7 and 'The Origin of the Harp' if it is
set easy to the guitar."
11 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Apr. [16],
1845 ; Margaret Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, n.d. [.circa Apr.— May
1845] ; Julia Gardiner Tyler to David L. Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Apr. 16,
1845. Juliana thought that "liveries in our country are bad taste. I have always
thought so." Her daughter, obviously, did not agree. Juliana Gardiner to Julia
Gardiner Tyler, New York, Nov. 18, 1845, TFP.
12 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Margaret Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, n.d. [June
1845] ; June 10, 1845; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Gen. Benjamin Butler, Staten Island,
N.Y., Nov. 7, 1864, TFP.
13 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Margaret Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, June 10, 1845,
TFP.
"John Tyler to Messrs. Corcoran and Riggs, Sherwood Forest, Oct. 6, 1845,
TPLC; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, July 22,
1845, TFP; John Tyler to Machen Boswell Seawell, Sherwood Forest, Nov. n,
1845, in Tyler's Quarterly, XIII (October 1931), 76-77.
15 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Margaret Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Mar. 18, 1845;
Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, n.d. [circa May 15,
1845] ; Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, May 19, [1845] ;
Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, East Hampton, June 5, 1845, TFP.
16 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, n.d. [mid-May
1845]; Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, May 19; 22, 1845,
TFP; John Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, May 21, 1845, TPLC;
Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, June 17, 1845, TFP.
17 Ibid., Mar. 26, 1845; Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York,
n.d. [May 1845] ; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Margaret Gardiner, Sherwood Forest,
Apr. 10 ; 16, 1845; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest,
June 17, 1845. Margaret had written her sister the latest New York scandal —
a messy adultery case involving members of the prominent Dow and Van
602
Rensselaer families. This probably produced Julia's sharp view of the decline and
fall of New York society. Margaret Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York,
Mar. 22, 1845, TFP.
18 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Margaret Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, June 19, 1845;
Julia Gardiner Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, June 17, 1845,
TFP,
19 For Tyler's farming operations at Sherwood Forest, 1845-1855, see Julia Gar-
diner Tyler to Margaret Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, June 19, 1845, TFP; Julia
Gardiner Tyler to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, Sherwood Forest, June 25, 1852,
TPLC; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, June 6, 1849;
Mar. 24; Apr. 9; June 19, 1851; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sher-
wood Forest, June 17, 1845, TFP; Julia Gardiner Tyler to David L. Gardiner,
Sherwood Forest, Jan. 14; Mar. 19, 1851, GPY ; Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gar-
diner Tyler, New York, Aug. 6, 1845, TPLC; Juliana Gardiner to David L. Gardi-
ner, Sherwood Forest, Mar. 10; 17, 1850; Sept. 27, 1855, GPY; ibid., Aug. 25, 1853,
TFP; David L. Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, East Hampton, Apr. 20, 1847,
GPY; John Tyler to Philip R. Fendall, Sherwood Forest, Apr. 19, 1845, Philip R.
Fendall Papers, Duke University Library; John Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sher-
wood Forest, Nov. 10, 1846, TPLC; ibid., Feb. 21; Apr. 9, 1849, GPY; John Tyler
to H. A. Cocke, Sherwood Forest, June 21, 1848, Tyler Papers, Duke University
Library; John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Apr. 17, 1850, in LTT, II,
482.
30 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Margaret Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, June 19, 1845,
TFP. For further details of Sherwood Forest agriculture prior to 1845, see John
Tyler to Mary Tyler Jones, Washington, Dec. 20, 1843; June 4, 1844, TPLC.
21 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Margaret Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, June 19, 1845,
TFP.
22 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Dec. 16, 1845,
TFP. See Chapter 19.
23 Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Apr. 10; May 27; Oct.
29; Nov. 2; 18, 1845; David L. Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York,
Nov. 10, 1845, TFP. Catherine left Sherwood Forest in the summer of 1847 to be
married. Alexander was sure her husband would "scatter her earnings in a very
brief period," and that she would be back again. But she never returned. Alex-
ander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, June i, 1847, TPLC.
** Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Feb. 17, 1847,
TFP.
23 Tyler Family Papers, 1845-1860, passim.
30 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Apr. 3, 1845;
Elizabeth Tyler Waller to John Tyler, Williamsburg, May 19, 1845; Julia Gardiner
Tyler to Margaret Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Dec. 25; [Dec.] 1845, TFP;
John Tyler to Elizabeth Tyler Waller, Sherwood Forest, Oct. 18, 1845, TPLC.
For data on Julia's relations with Alice Tyler, see Julia Gardiner Tyler to
Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, n.d. [July]; July 8, 1845; Julia Gardiner
Tyler to Margaret Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Mar. 18; Apr. 15; [Summer]
1845; Phoebe Gardiner to Margaret Gardiner, Shelter Island, June 26-28, 1845;
Alice Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Williamsburg, May 29, 1845, TFP.
27 David L. Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Jan. 9, 1845, GPY;
New York Herald, Apr. 7; 30, 1845; Margaret Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler,
New York, Apr. 4; May 2, 1845; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner,
Sherwood Forest, May 8; July 22, 1845, TFP. For the sad career of John Tyler,
Jr., 1845-1855, see Gardiner Papers, 1845-1855, Yale University Library, passim;
and Tyler Family Papers, 1845-1855, passim.
^Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, May 19 [1845]; Julia
Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, May 8, 1845, TFP.
603
29 Ibid., June 2, 1845; Julia Gardiner TyJer to Margaret Gardiner, Sherwood
Forest, May 29; June $; Oct. 9, 1845; Margaret F. Ritchie to Julia Gardiner
Tyler, Brandon, n.d. [June 3, 1845] ; Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler,
East Hampton, June 5, 1845; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sher-
wood Forest, Dec. 9, 1845, TFP; ibid., Richmond, Aug. 3, 1845, GPY. Gushing
at various times on this trip south pursued Miss Ritchie, Miss Harper of Baltimore,
Miss Bromlee of Richmond, and Miss Bruce of Richmond. "Miss Bruce has re-
jected, so they say, the Minister of China," Julia reported. "All his laurels were
not quite enough for her or Miss Harper it seems. Perhaps he will distinguish
himself another time and then try somewhere else again." Julia thought the
Chinese vases were "magninco . . . [though] what they are intended for I do not
know except to look at, and so I have placed them before each mirror."
30 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Old Point Comfort, June 27, 1845;
Julia Gardiner Tyler to Margaret Gardiner, Old Point Comfort, June 29, 1845;
Julia Gardiner Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Dec. 9, 1845,
TFP. The campaign to propitiate the Ritchies paid handsome dividends. By
February 1846 the Richmond Enquirer, now edited by Ritchie's son Robert, was
carrying "flattering notices" of Tyler. Julia Gardiner Tyler to Margaret Gardiner,
Sherwood Forest, Feb. 5, 1846, TFP.
81 Ibid., Old Point Comfort, June 29, 1845, TFP.
32 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, June 12; 23;
Nov. 20, 1845; ibid., Norfolk, n.d. [Fall 1845], TFP; LTT, II, 466. There are
several versions of the "General" epitaph. See also Joseph N. Kane, Facts about
the Presidents (New York, 1959), 125.
33 Juliana Gardiner to Margaret Gardiner, New York, Nov. 2, 1845; Juliana
Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Oct. 29; [Nov. i], 1845; Julia
Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Nov. 20; Dec. 5, 1845, TFP.
**°Ibid., June 23, 1845. For Julia's constant struggle against ticks, fleas, mos-
quitoes, and other insects at Sherwood Forest, see ibid. Needless to say, her com-
passion for God's creatures did not extend to these miserable pests. The insect
problem was a continuing one for families along the James. Constant war raged
between the human and insect kingdoms with honors about even. See also Juliana
Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, n.d. [1846], TFP.
^Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, July 14, 1845; Julia
Gardiner Tyler to Margaret Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, May 29, 1845, TFP;
Julia Gardiner Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Richmond, Aug. 3, 1845, GPY.
36 Alice Tyler and Julia Gardiner Tyler to Margaret Gardiner, White Sulphur
Springs, Va., Aug. 23, 1845, TFP.
37 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Margaret Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Apr. 16, 1845;
Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Newport, R.I., Aug. 20, 1845; Margaret
Gardiner to [Alice Tyler], New York, Aug. 28, 1845, TFP.
38 Margaret Gardiner and Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York,
Aug. 19, 1845, TFP.
30 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, June 17, 1845;
Julia Gardiner Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, June 17, 1845,
TFP; ibid., Richmond, Aug. 3; Sherwood Forest, Oct. 16, 1845; John Tyler to
Alexander Gardiner, Philadelphia, Sept. 15, 1845 ; Robert Tyler to Alexander Gardi-
ner, Philadelphia, Sept. 22, 1845, GPY.
40 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, June 2, 1845;
Julia Gardiner Tyler to Margaret Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Oct. 23, 1845, TFP.
tt Julia Gardiner Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Oct. 16, 1845,
GPY.
42 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Dec. 4, 184$,
TFP.
604
CHAPTER 13
1 Julia Gardiner Tyler to [Margaret Gardiner], Sherwood Forest, n.d. [1846];
Margaret Gardiner to Juliana Gardiner, Washington, July 3, 1844, TFP; John
Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Dec. 8, 1844, in LTT, II, 359; Mar-
garet Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, May 1845; Julia Gardiner
Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, June 2, 1845; Julia Gardiner Tyler
to Margaret Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, June 5, 1845; Julia Gardiner Tyler to
Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, July 24, 1845, TFP,
2 Robert Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Philadelphia, July 25, [1846], GPY;
Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Rockaway, LI., N.Y., Aug. 6, 1845,
TPLC. Among papers which were generally pro-Tyler and were financially aided
and otherwise sustained by Tyler, Robert, and Alexander were Dunn English's
Aristidean in New York, Col. John S. Cunningham's Portsmouth (Va.) New Era,
the Philadelphia Truth-Teller, and the Richmond (Va.) Old Dominion. The Nor-
folk (Va.) Pilot was also in this category. On this point see Julia Gardiner
Tyler to Margaret Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, May 29, 1845, TFP; Julia Gardiner
Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Mar. 17; Apr. 23, 1846; Robert
Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Philadelphia, Mar. 30, 1846, GPY; Alexander Gar-
diner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Apr. 17, 1846, TPLC; LTT, II, 411-12.
8 Margaret Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, May 4, 1845 ; Juliana
Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler [New York], Mar. 22 [1846]; Julia Gardiner
Tyler to Margaret Gardiner, June 29, 1845; J. Holbrook to John Tyler, Boston,
Nov. 9, 1844, TFP; New York Herald, Jan. 7, 1845; Robert Tyler to John Tyler,
Philadelphia, Sept. 22 [1846], TFP; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Alexander Gardiner,
Sherwood Forest, Apr. 23, 1845, GPY ; John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Sherwood
Forest, June 14, 1848, in LTT, II, 460; John Tyler to John Tyler, Jr., Sherwood
Forest, Jan. 23, 1848, Tyler Papers, Duke University Library.
4 Susan [?] to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Washington, Mar. 27, 1845, TFP; N. M.
Miller to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Mar. 31; 20, 1845; Alexander Gardiner
to N. M. Miller, New York, Mar. 13, 1845, GPY; Margaret Gardiner to Julia
Gardiner Tyler, New York, May 15, 1845, TFP.
5 Alexander Gardiner to [James K. Polk], New York, n.d. [circa Mar .-May
1845] (two draft letters), GPY.
6 Margaret Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, May 9, 1845; Alex-
ander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Apr. n, 1845, TFP; ibid.,
Apr. 15, 1845, TPLC; Coleman, Priscilla Cooper Tyler, 111-12; 120-21. Tom
Cooper retired from his inspectorship in the summer of 1846. He was then 71 and
had become quite senile.
7 Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, May 9, 1845; Julia
Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner [Sherwood Forest], n.d. {circa May 1845],
TFP; Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler [New York, Apr. i, 1845],
TPLC; Margaret Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, May 6, 1845, TFP;
George D. Strong to Alexander Gardiner, New York, Mar. 13, 1845, GPY; Alex-
ander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, East Hampton, June 5, 1845; Margaret
Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, June 23, 1845, TFP. On the ques-
tion of Graham's honesty in office see the printed brochure of his December
1848 correspondence with Matthew St. Clair Clarke, former Auditor of the Post
Office Department in GPY. The evidence is inconclusive.
8 John Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, May 21, 1845; N. P.
Tallmadge to Robert J. Walker, Faycheedah, Wisconsin Territory, Apr. 15, 1845*
in LTT, II, 445; III, 159; New York Herald, Apr. 14, 1845; Lyon G. Tyler,
"The Annexation of Texas," Tyler's Quarterly, VI (October 1924), 88, 92-93-
605
*N. M. MiHer to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Mar. 20, 1845, GPY ;
Margaret Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Mar. 27, 1845; Alexander
Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Mar. 27, 1845; Julia Gardiner Tyler
to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Apr. 10, 1845, TFP ; New York Herald,
Mar. 22; 30, 1845; William Tyler to John Tyler, Washington, June 2, 1845;
Robert Tyler to [Robert J.] Walker, Philadelphia, Oct. 17 [1845], TPLC.
10 William Tyler to John Tyler, Washington, June 2, 1845, TPLC; John Tyler
to William Collins, New York, Sept. 17, 1845, in Lyon G. Tyler, "Some Letters of
Tyler . . . ," loc. cit., 10-11.
11 John Tyler to Robert Tyler, n.p., n.d. [Sherwood Forest, Summer 1848], in
LTT, II, 461-62 ; Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, East Hampton,
June 5, 1845, TFP; Lyon G. Tyler, "The Annexation of Texas," loc. cit., 92-93.
12 Margaret Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, June 5; 12; Dec. 16,
1845; Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, n.d. [May 1845; 1846],
TFP; John Lorimer Graham to Alexander Gardiner, New York, July 14, 1845;
June 30, 1846; A. B. Conger to Alexander Gardiner, Sept. 20, 1846; N. M. Miller
to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, June 5, 1846, GPY.
13Coleman, Priscilla Cooper Tyler, 113, 116-17, 122-23; James Buchanan to
Robert Tyler, Washington, Dec. 13, 1847, TPLC. In May 1846 Priscilla's daughter
Grace was born. When he began his Philadelphia law practice in 1845 Robert
lived in Bristol, Pa., and commuted by train to his office every morning at six
o'clock. His commuter's fare was $10 per year. He rented a small house in
Bristol for $60 per year. With some justification for the view, Julia thought
that he tended to live beyond his means. See Julia Gardiner Tyler to Alexander
Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, July 22, 1845; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana
Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, n.d. [May 1845], TFP. Robert made extra money
lecturing on such topics as "The Conflict Between Monarchial and Republican
Principles" and "The Oregon Dispute/' Alexander helped him engage halls for this
activity in New York. See Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New
York, Feb. 22, 1846, TPLC; Alexander Gardiner to Robert Tyler, New York,
Feb. 27, 1846, GPY. For concern for the plight of Robert and Priscilla felt within
the family as a whole, see Julia Gardiner Tyler to Margaret Gardiner, Washing-
ton, Dec. 9, 1844; Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Apr. 30,
1845; Priscilla Cooper Tyler to Margaret Gardiner, Fire Island, N.Y., Aug. 29,
[1845]; Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, July 10, 1844;
Margaret Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, May 6, 1845; Mar. 26,
1846; Priscilla Cooper Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Philadelphia, Dec. 7 [1849].
Shortly after the death of Mary Fairlee in 1845, Priscilla's sense of sorrow and
her feeling of economic privation caused her to explode in a jealous rage one day
while visiting at 43 Lafayette Place. This unfortunate but human outburst against
the Gardiners introduced some tension in her later relations with Julia and
Margaret Julia accused the distraught Priscilla of having an unrealistic amount of
pride. See Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, n.d. [circa
June-July 1845], TFP; Coleman, Priscilla Cooper Tyler, 114, 122-23. For a brief
biography of Robert Tyler, see LTT, II, 645-46, 684-87. Priscilla's children and
their birthdates were: Mary Fairlee (Dec. i84o-June 1845) ; Letitia Christian
(Spring, 1842); John IV (July i844-July 1846); Grace (May 1846); Thomas
Cooper (Summer i848-July 1849) ; Priscilla Cooper (Oct. 1849) ; Elizabeth (Jan.
1852) ; Julia Campbell (Dec. 1854) ; Robert, Jr. (Dec. 1857).
"Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Washington, Feb. 13, 1846, in
ibid., 451-53,' Furman, White House Profile, 136; New York Herald, Mar. 16,
1845; Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Jan. 25, 1846; Julia
Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, May 8, 1845, TFP; Alex-
ander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Washington, May 7, 1845, TPLC; Julia
Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, May 8, 1845; Juliana
606
Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, n.d. [May 1845] ; Margaret Gardiner
to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, May 2 ; 9, 1845, TFP.
15 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, n.d. [June
1845] ; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Margaret Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, June 19,
1845; Juliana Gardiner to Margaret Gardiner, New York, July 7, 1845; Julia
Gardiner Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Oct. 17, 1845; Alexander
Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, July 9, 1845, TFP; Andrew Jackson
to James K. Polk, Hermitage, Dec. 13, 1844, in LTT, III, 155; Julia Gardiner
Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, June 23, 1845, TFP.
16 Margaret Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler [New York], July 18, 1845;
Julia Gardiner Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, July 22, 1845, TFP;
ibid., Richmond, Aug. 3, 1845, GPY; ibid., Sherwood Forest, Oct. 23, 1845;
Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Apr. 14, 1846;
Margaret Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, May 4, 1845; Julia
Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, n.d. [May 1845], TFP;
Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Rockaway, L.I., N.Y. Aug. 6, 1845,
TPLC; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, July 8, 1845,
TFP.
17 John Tyler to John Jones, Charles City, Sept. n, 1845, TPLC; Julia Gar-
diner Tyler to Margaret Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Apr. 16, 1846, TFP; Julia
Gardiner Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Apr. 4; Jan. 27, 1846,
GPY.
18 John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Mar. 12, 1848, in LTT, II,
107-
w Julia Gardiner Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Mar. 17;
Apr. 23, 1846; Robert Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Philadelphia, Mar. 30, 1846,
GPY; Margaret Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Mar. 25, 1846, TFP;
Julia Gardiner Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Apr. 7, 1846, GPY.
30 Sarah A. Wharton to John Tyler, Brazoria County, Texas, July 22, 1845;
John Tyler to Sarah A. Wharton, Sherwood Forest, Jan. i, 1846, in Richmond
Enquirer, Jan. 29, 1846. The pitcher, manufactured by Ball, Tompkins and Black
of New York (formerly Marquand and Co.), was badly burned and blackened
in the Richmond fire of April 1865. The inscription today can barely be read:
"Presented by the Ladies of Brazoria County, Texas, to Ex-President Tyler as a
small token of their gratitude for the benefits conferred upon their Country by pro-
curing its Annexation to the U. States." Margaret Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler,
New York, Jan. 6; 9, 1846, TFP.
** Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Apr. 22, 1846,
TFP; Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Apr. 17, 1846;
May 4, 1847, TPLC; Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Apr. 12,
1846; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Margaret Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Apr. 16, 1846,
TFP.
32 John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Washington, June i, 1846; Sherwood For-
est, Apr. 21, 1846. For additional details on the Ingersoll hearings and Tyler's
role, see John Tyler to Daniel Webster, Sherwood Forest, Mar. 12; Apr. 21, 1846;
John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Washington, May 30, 1846. When the Maine Boundary
bribery charges were aired again in 1857 Tyler was forced to repeat his denials.
Ibid., Sherwood Forest, Sept. 17, 1857, in LTT, II, 457; 455; 228-29; 456; III,
172-73-
23 John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Washington, May 30, 1846, in ibid., II, 456;
N. M. Miller to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, June 5, 1846,- John L. Graham
to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, June 30, 1846, GPY.
-4Calhoun's speech of Feb. 24, 1847, quoted in LTT, II, 417.
25 Alexander Gardiner to John Tyler, New York, Mar. 4, 1847, GPY; Alexander
Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Mar. u, 1847, TPLC; John Tyler to
607
Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Mar. n; June 17? 1847; John Tyler to
Robert Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Mar. n, 1847, in LTT, II, 420-22. The Enquirer
letter of June 5, 1847, was reprinted in the New York Herald, June 7, 1847.
26 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Mar. 4, 1847,
GPY; Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Feb. 27, 1847; n.d.
[circa Mar. 6, 1847] ; Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, n.d.
{.circa June 1847], TFP.
"LTT, II, 427; John Tyler, Letter to the Editor of the Richmond Enquirer,
Sherwood Forest, June 5, 1847; New York, Sept. i, 1847; John Tyler to Alex-
ander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Dec. 25, 1848, in LTT, II, 424-31, 433; New
York Herald, June 7, 1847.
^Alexander Gardiner to John Tyler, New York, Nov. 6, 1848, GPY; John
Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Dec. 25, 1848, TPLC ; Julia Gardi-
ner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Nov. 1848; Julia Gardiner Tyler
to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Jan. 2, 1849, TFP; John Tyler to Robert
Tyler, n.p., n.d. [Sherwood Forest, 1856]; May 9, 1856; John Tyler to John S.
Cunningham, Sherwood Forest, May 8, 1856; John Tyler to Thomas J. Green,
Sherwood Forest, Feb. 28, 1856; Robert Tyler to John Tyler, Philadelphia, Aug.
27, 1858, in LTT, II, 297, 413-15; HI, 171-72; H, 239-40.
29 John Tyler to Robert Tyler, New York, Dec. 30, 1847; Alexander Gardiner
to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, May 4; June i, 1847, TPLC; John Tyler to
Alexander Gardiner, Philadelphia, June 23, 1847, GPY ; Juliana Gardiner to Julia
Gardiner Tyler, New York, Apr. 27 [1847], TFP.
80 John Tyler, Letter to Editor of Richmond Enquirer, Sherwood Forest, June 5,
1847, in LTT, II, 424; Margaret Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York,
Mar. 25, 1846, TFP; Alexander Gardiner, Speech to Tammany Hall Meeting in
Support of the War, Mar. i, 1847, GPY. (Illness prevented Alexander from deliver-
ing this, a rabble-rousing address.) The same position on the origin of the Mexican
War has been taken by the family biographer, Lyon G. Tyler. See LTT, II, 416-17;
see also John Tyler to Caleb Gushing, Sherwood Forest, Oct. 14, 1845, in ibid., 446.
81 John Tyler to Editor of [Richmond Enquirer], n.p., n.d. [Sherwood Forest,
Mar. 1847]; Alexander Gardiner to John Tyler, New York, Mar. 12, 1847, TPLC;
John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Apr. 14, 1846, in LTTt II, 455.
32 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Mar. n, 1847,
GPY; Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Mar. 23, 1847, TFP;
John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Washington, May 30; June i, 1846, in LTT, II,
456-57; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Margaret Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, May 6, 1847,
TFP; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, n.d. [May
1847], in LTT, II, 433. When Purser Semple called at Sherwood Forest after the
war, appearing "quite a Mexican with mustache and large beard," and bearing
war-trophy gifts for Tyler, principally a suit of armor, Julia gave him a friendly
reception. She had little regard or respect for him normally because she could not
tolerate his wife, Letitia Tyler Semple. But in this instance the returning hero
"behaved so well and complimented me so highly . . . that I was not sorry I con-
sented to see him." Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest,
May 2, 1848, TFP.
33 Alexander Gardiner, Speech to Tammany Hall Meeting in Support of the
War, Mar. i, 1847, GPY; Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York,
Feb. 19, 1847, in LTT, II, 457~58; ibid., Jan. 27, 1847, TPLC; John H. Beeckman
to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, New York, July 28, 1848, TFP; Alexander Gardi-
ner to David L, Gardiner, New York, July 27, 1848, GPY; Juliana Gardiner to
Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Mar. i [1847], TFP.
3i Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Feb. 22; Apr. 6,
1846, in LTT, II, 453, 454; Margaret Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York,
Jan. 21 ; Mar. 26, 1846, TFP. Robert lectured on the Oregon question before
608
Roman Catholic Irish groups in New York. Alexander and David Lyon often
shared the platform with him. On one of these occasions, in March 1846, Juliana
and Margaret "had a merry laugh" over David Lyon's account of his entrance
into one of the Irish filled lecture halls "arm in arm with a cathoUc Priest! ...
D[avid] looked most sober."
^Quotation is a composite of John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Sherwood Forest,
Dec. 23, 1845; Jan. i; 26, 1846, in LTT, II, 449-50.
36 Ibid.; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Margaret Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Feb. 26,
1846; Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Mar. 29, 1846;
Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, May 8, 1845, TFP;
Julia Gardiner Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Jan. 27, 1846, GPY.
37 John Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Mar. 2, 1847; [John
Tyler] to Editor of Portsmouth [Va.] Pilot, Sherwood Forest, n.d. [Feb. 1847],
in LTT, II, 479, 478; Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York,
Mar. n, 1847, TPLC; Alexander Gardiner, Draft Ms. on Political Questions, n.d.
[1847] ; Alexander Gardiner, Speech to Tammany Hall Meeting in Support of the
War, Mar. i, 1847, GPY. The Proviso, in stirring up criticism of pro-Wilmot Van
Burenism from the Conservative Democracy in New York, did have the effect of
widening further the gap in that intraparty struggle in the Empire State. This Tyler
regarded as a political benefit. John Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest,
Nov. i, 1847, TPLC.
^Robert Tyler to John C. Calhoun, Philadelphia, Apr. 19, 1845; Alexander
Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Feb. 22, 1846, in LTT, III, 160-61;
II, 453-54; ibid., New York, Apr. 17, 1846, TPLC; Margaret Gardiner to Julia
Gardiner Tyler, New York, Apr. 26, 1845, TFP.
39 Ibid., Mar. 31; May 26, 1845, TFP.
40 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Margaret Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Feb. 5, 1846,
TFP.
CHAPTER 14
1 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Margaret Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Feb. 5, 1846,
TFP.
2 Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, n.d. [February 1846] ;
Margaret Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Jan. 21, 1846, TFP.
3 David L. Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Feb. 22, 1846, TFP;
New York Morning News, Feb. 21; 22, 1846; Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner
Tyler, New York, n.d. [Mar.]; Mar. i; Feb. 21, 1846; Margaret Gardiner to Julia
Gardiner Tyler, New York, Feb. 20; 27; Mar. 6; Apr. 17, 1846; Julia Gardiner
Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Mar. 3, 1846, TFP.
4 Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, July 17, 1846,
GPY; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, East Hampton, Aug. 17, 1846;
Phoebe Gardiner to Margaret Gardiner, Shelter Island, July 1846 ; David L. Gardi-
ner to Alexander Gardiner, New York, Aug. 7, 1846 ; Alexander Gardiner to Juliana
Gardiner, New York, Sept. 20, 1846, TFP. Phoebe called the baby "His Little Ex-
cellency." Everyone else in the family at first called him "The Little President."
5 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, East Hampton, Aug. 17, 1846;
Sherwood Forest, Dec. 28, 1846, TFP; ibid., Mar. n, 1847, GPY; Juliana Gardiner
to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Dec. 18, 1846; Mar. 23, 1847, n.p., n.d. [New
York, Mar. 1847] ; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, East Hampton, Aug.
21, 1846, TFP.
"Ibid., Sherwood Forest, Dec. 10, 1846; Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner
Tyler, Nov. 28, 1846, TFP.
609
7 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Mar. n, 1847,
GPY; John Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Mar. n, 1847, in LTT,
II, 420. For proud references to the excellence of her offspring, see Julia Gardiner
Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Mar. 4, 1846; July 13, 1847, GPY;
Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, June 20, 1848; Julia
Gardiner Tyler to Margaret Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Feb. 2, 1847; Alexander
Gardiner to Juliana Gardiner, Baltimore, Nov. 14, 1847, TFP.
8 Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, n.p., n.d. [New York, 1847] ; May
25, 1847, TFP.
9 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Margaret Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, June 3, 1847;
Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, June 8, 1847, TFP; Julia
Gardiner Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Mar. 4, 1847, GPY.
10 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, Sherwood Forest,
Feb. 27, 1848, TFP.
11 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Dec. 15, 1848,
GPY; Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, May 4, 1847; John
Tyler to Dr. W. A. Patterson, Sherwood Forest, Apr. 9, 1848, TPLC; Julia Gardiner
Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Nov. 24, 1848; Julia Gardiner Tyler
to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, May i, 1848, TFP.
"Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, July 9, 1845; Juliana
Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, Newport, Aug. 28, 1845, TFP; Julia Gardiner Tyler
to David L. Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Jan. 14, 1851; Jan. 29, 1846, GPY; Julia.
Gardiner Tyler to Margaret Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Jan. 15; Apr. 16, 1846;
Margaret Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Jan. 1846; Julia Gardiner
Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Feb. 26, 1851; Feb. 8, 1855; Juliana
Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Jan. 18, 1846, TFP; Robert Tyler to
Alexander Gardiner, Philadelphia, July 18, 1847; Julia Gardiner Tyler to David L.
Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, June 9, 1858, GPY.
13 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Dec. 13, 1850,
TFP; Alexander Gardiner to [John Tyler], New York, Sept. 28, 1849, GPY:,
Alexander Gardiner to Margaret Gardiner, New York, July 12, 1847, TFP; Mar-
garet Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Jan. i, 1843; Alexander Gardi-
ner to Samuel Gardiner, New York, Feb. 19, 1849 ; Alexander Gardiner to David L.
Gardiner [New York], Jan. n, 1851, GPY.
14 Margaret Gardiner Beeckman to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Apr. 10,
1848 ; Phoebe Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, n.p., n.d. [Shelter Island, Summer
1847]; Phoebe Gardiner to Margaret Gardiner, Shelter Island, July 14; 28; Oct. 13,
1847, TFP.
18 Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Nov. n, 1845, TFP.
M Margaret Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Apr. 22, 1845; May
[1846] ; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Margaret Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Apr. 10,
1845; Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Newport, Aug. 20, 1845; New
York [March]; Apr. 27, 1847, TFP.
"Margaret Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, June 3, 1845; Feb. 24,
1846; May 4, 1845; Feb. 27, 1847; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner,
Sherwood Forest, June 12 ; July 8, 1845 ; Priscilla Cooper Tyler to Margaret Gardi-
ner, Fire Island, N.Y., Aug. 29, 1845; Phoebe Gardiner to Margaret Gardiner,
Shelter Island, June 26; 28, 1845; Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New
York, Jan. 18, 1846, TFP.
18 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Margaret Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Dec. 25, 1845 ;
Feb. 26, 1846; Margaret Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Feb. 27;
Mar. 6, 1846; Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Mar. i; 26,
1846, TFP.
™Ibid.} Feb. 27, 1847, TFP; Margaret Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, East
Hampton, June 21, 1842; Margaret Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton,
June 14, 1843, GPY; Margaret Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, n.d.
&IO
[May 1845]; John H. Beeckman to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, New York,
June 23, 1848; Catherine L. Beeckman to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, New York,
n.d. [1848]; David L. Gardiner to Juliana Gardiner, New York, Aug. 17, 1847;
Alexander Gardiner to Margaret Gardiner, New York, Sept. 27, 1847; Margaret
Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, n.d. [1845-1846], TFP.
20 Ibid., Mar. 6, 1847; Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York,
Mar. 23, 1847, TFP.
21 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Philadelphia, Oct. 12, 1845; Sher-
wood Forest, Mar. 24, 1846, TFP.
^Alexander Gardiner to Juliana Gardiner, New York, Aug. 30, 1847; Julia
Gardiner Tyler to Margaret Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, May 6, 1847, TFP.
^Margaret Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Jan. 9, 1847; Julia
Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest [Feb. 9, 1847] ; Juliana
Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, May 15; 18; June 8, 1847; David L.
Gardiner to Juliana Gardiner, New York, Aug. 29, 1847; Phoebe Gardiner to
Margaret Gardiner, Shelter Island, Aug. 27; Oct. 13, 1847, TFP.
24 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Dec. 1847, TFP.
35 Margaret Gardiner Beeckman to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Jan. 26,
1848; Priscilla Cooper Tyler to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, Bristol, Pa., Jan. 8,
1848; Clarissa Dayton to Juliana Gardiner, East Hampton, Jan. 25, 1848; George L.
Huntington to Alexander Gardiner, East Hampton, Jan. 25, 1848, TFP.
26 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Jan. 27, 1848,
TFP; John Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Jan. 27, 1848, TPLC.
27 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Feb. 8; 17, 1848;
Gilbert Beeckman to John H. Beeckman, Washington, Jan. 22, 1848; Margaret
Gardiner Beeckman to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Jan. 20, 1848; Rich-
mond, Feb. 5; Washington, Feb. 8; u, 1848, TFP.
28 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, June 20; May i,
1848; John H. Beeckman to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, New York, May 31;
June 5; 19; July 28; [July] ; Aug. 31; [Sept.-Oct.] 1848, TFP; Alexander Gardiner
to John Tyler, New York, Oct. 21, 1848, GPY.
20 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, May 8, 1848;
Julia Gardiner Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Nov. 12, 1846, TFP;
John Tyler to Elizabeth Tyler Waller, Sherwood Forest, Apr. 21, 1846, Tyler Papers,
Duke University Library ; Juliana Gardiner to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, Sher-
wood Forest, n.d. [Apr. 1848] ; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood
Forest, Nov.; Feb. 10; 18, 1848, TFP.
30 1 bid., Feb. 17, 1848, TFP; Julia Gardiner Tyler to David L. Gardiner,
Sherwood Forest, July 24, 1850, GPY; Margaret Gardiner Beeckman to John H.
Beeckman, Sherwood Forest, Dec. 7, 1849, TFP. Gilbert Beeckman became a small-
store owner in New York City in 1850, investing a small inheritance from his
father, Henry Beeckman, who died in June 1850, in the enterprise. In 1851 his
business was adequate enough to permit his engagement and marriage to Miss
Margaret Foster, a nineteen-year-old whose father was an auctioneer in Fourteenth
St. "We do not believe she will prove an heiress," said Juliana quite correctly. The
wedding was celebrated on June 4, 1851. Margaret Foster Beeckman soon died,
however, just why and when is not known. In 1857 Gilbert married again. The
name of his second wife and details of his life after 1857 are also not known, save
that he continued in the dry goods business in New York during and after the Civil
War. He died in August 1875. See Julia Gardiner Tyler to David L. Gardiner,
Sherwood Forest, July 24, 1850; Juliana Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, New York,
Mar. 10, 1851, GPY; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest,
Mar. 24, 1851; May 7, 1857; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman,
Sherwood Forest, June 4; 22, 1851; David Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler,
Karlsruhe, June 7, 1866, TFP.
31 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Dec. 1848, TFP.
611
32 Ibid., Feb. 18, 1851, TFP; Juliana Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, New York,
Mar. 1851; Julia Gardiner Tyler to David L. Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, July 24,
1850, GPY.
83 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Apr. 2; n; 23,
1851; May 7, 1852, TFP; Juliana Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, Brooklyn, Apr.
26, 1851, GPY; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, Sherwood
Forest, June 15, 1854; Margaret Gardiner Beeckman to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood
Forest, Feb. i, 1855, TFP; John Tyler to James A. Semple, Sherwood Forest, Dec.
29, 1854, TPLC; see also Tyler's Quarterly, XII (January 1931), 194-95, for addi-
tional genealogical material on Tyler's children and in-laws. William M. Denison was
serving as assistant to the Bishop of Kentucky in Louisville when Bessy was born
and Alice died. A row with the vestry of Christ Church, Brooklyn, had caused him
to resign that post a year after he began in it. Following Alice's death in 1854 he
took a parish in Charleston, S.C., where he remained until his own death in 1858.
3* Juliana Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, July 27, 1855, GPY.
85 Julia Gardiner Tyler to David L. Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, June 9, 1858,
GPY; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Dec. 2, 1846 ;
Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Dec. i, 1848; Julia
Gardiner Tyler to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, Sherwood Forest, Jan. 24, 1849;
Margaret Gardiner Beeckman to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Feb. 23, 1853,
TFP; Juliana Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, July 27, 1855, GPY.
36 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Dec. 2, 1846;
Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Feb. 17, 1848; Dec. u,
1854; Dec. 28, 1846, TFP; John Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest,
Dec. 20, 1850, TPLC.
87 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Mar. 29, 1849;
Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Mar. 23, 1847 ; Julia Gardiner
Tyler to Margaret Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Apr. 2, 1846; Dec. 8, 1847, TFP.
88 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, Sherwood Forest, n.d. ;
Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Dec. ir, 1845; Apr. 19,
1851, TFP.
38 Juliana Gardiner to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, Sherwood Forest, June n,
1853 ; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Margaret Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Mar. 5, 1846,
TFP.
^Margaret Gardiner Beeckman to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Feb. 12,
1853, TFP.
^ Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, May 28, 1851;
May 24, 1852, TFP.
^Margaret Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Oct. 12, 1845; Mar. 6;
Nov. 21 ; 27,- Apr. 17, 1846; Alexander Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, New York,
Sept. 15, 1846; Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Dec. 18, 1846;
Jan.; May 18, 1847; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Margaret Gardiner, Sherwood Forest,
Jan. 7 ; Dec. 8, 1847, TFP.
43 Margaret Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Dec. 10, 1845; Juliana
Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Nov. n, 1845; Mar. 23; June 8,
1847; Phoebe Gardiner to Margaret Gardiner, Shelter Island, Apr. 16, 1847; Julia
Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Apr. 20, 1847, TFP.
4*John Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Dec. 20, 1850, TPLC;
Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, May 16, 1851, TFP.
46 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Feb. 27, 1850;
Margaret Gardiner Beeckman to John H. Beeckman, Sherwood Forest, Mar. ; Mar.
8, 1850, TFP.
46 David L. Gardiner to Juliana Gardiner, Saratoga, Sept. 12, 1847; Julia Gardi-
ner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Richmond, Mar. 20, 1849; Julia Gardiner Tyler to
David L. Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, July 24, 1850, TFP; John Tyler, An Address
612
Delivered Before the Literary Societies of the University of Virginia on the Anni-
versary of the Declaration of Independence By the State of Virginia, June 2p, 1850
(Pamphlet; Charlottesville, 1850), passim.
47 John Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Richmond, Mar. 22, 1849; Alexander
Gardiner to John Tyler, New York, Nov. 9, 1849, GPY; Sylvia S. Rogers to Juliana
Gardiner, Saratoga Springs, May n [1850], TFP.
48 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Mar. 29, 1849;
Alexander Gardiner to Juliana Gardiner, New York, Apr. 18, 1849, TFP; John
Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Apr. 9, 1849; May 21, 1850;
Pittsfield, Mass., Sept. 18, 1849; Julia Gardiner Tyler to David L. Gardiner,
Sherwood Forest, Jan. 10, 1849, GPY; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Alexander Gardiner,
Sherwood Forest, Dec. 13, 1850, TFP.
49 Margaret Gardiner Beeckman to [Alexander Gardiner], n.p., n.d. [Sherwood
Forest, Dec. 1849] ; Margaret Gardiner Beeckman to Clarissa [Dayton], n.p., n.d.
[Sherwood Forest, Dec. 1849] ; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sher-
wood Forest, Feb. 27, 1850, TFP; Julia Gardiner Tyler to David L. Gardiner,
Sherwood Forest, July 24, 1850, GPY; Margaret Gardiner Beeckman to Josephine
[Metcalfe], Sherwood Forest, n.d. [Jan. 1850], TFP.
50 John Tyler to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, Sherwood Forest, July 17, 1851,
TPLC; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Apr. 2; June
26; Aug. 5, 1851; Margaret Gardiner Beeckman to Juliana Gardiner, Niagara Falls,
Sept. 21, 1851 ; Juliana Gardiner to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, Sherwood Forest,
Dec. 10, 1851; Mary [Conger] to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Grassy Point, N.Y., Jan.
15, 1852, TFP. The date of Lachlan's birth is given as December 2, 1851, on his
tombstone in Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond, Va. But Juliana's letter to Margaret,
clearly dated Sherwood Forest, December 10, notes that "last night at half-past
eleven" Julia give birth to Lachlan.
51 John Tyler to Henry Curtis, Sherwood Forest, Dec. 17, 1851; John Tyler to
Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, Sherwood Forest, June 25, 1852, TPLC.
52 Ibid., Mar. 18, 1854, TPLC; Edmund Rumn to Jane M. Rumn, Marlbourne,
Mar. 21, 1854, TFP.
53 Phoebe Gardiner to Margaret Gardiner, Shelter Island, May 19, 1847, TFP;
John Tyler to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, Sherwood Forest, Oct. 23, 1856, GPY;
Margaret Gardiner Beeckman to Mrs. [?] Harris, n.p., n.d. [Sherwood Forest, Dec.
1856], TFP. For Tyler's smoking habits see Julia Gardiner Tyler to Alexander
Gardiner in John Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Dec. 20, 1850,
TPLC.
54 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, Sherwood Forest,
May 24, 1853; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, July i,
1853, TFP; Juliana Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Aug. 25,
1853, GPY; John Tyler to Mrs. Henry Waggaman, Sherwood Forest, June 8, 1853,
TPLC.
55 Julia Gardiner Tyler vs. The Bank of Virginia, Legal Deposition, Aug. 3,
1868, TFP; Juliana Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, July 9; 25,
1855, GPY.
CHAPTER 15
xjohn Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Richmond, Mar. 22, 1849; Richard E.
Stilwell to Alexander Gardiner, New York, July 26, 1849, GPY.
2 John Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Richmond, Mar. 22, 1849; Jonn Tyler to
Tilford and Samuels, Lawyers, of Frankfort, Ky., Sherwood Forest, Apr. 14, 1846;
George Stealy, Memorandum on Size and Value of Tyler Land in Union County,
613
Ky., Frankfort, Ky., Aug. 16, 1847; R. G. Samuels to John Tyler, Frankfort, Ky.,
Dec. 24, 1847, GPY; John Tyler to John H. Waggaman, Williamsburg, Aug. 30,
1839, TPLC.
3 John W. RusseU to John Tyler, Frankfort, Ky., Sept. 12, 1845, GPY; John
Tyler to Messrs. Corcoran and Riggs, Sherwood Forest, Oct. 6, 1845, TPLC; Alex-
ander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Nov. 29, 1845, TFP.
*John W. Russell to John Tyler, Frankfort, Ky., Mar. 23; Apr. 27, 1846;
John Tyler to Tilford and Samuels, Sherwood Forest, Apr. 14, 1846; Tilford and
Samuels to John Tyler, Frankfort, Ky., Aug. 6, 1846, GPY.
6 Thomas Wilson, Nicholas Casey, Sanford Conelly, Coal Survey Report to
Tilford and Samuels, Caseyville, Ky., Oct. 9; 14, 1846; Tilford and Samuels to John
Tyler, Frankfort, Ky., Oct. 9, 1846 ; John W. Russell to John Tyler, Frankfort, Ky.,
Oct. 15, 1846, GPY.
6 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Nov. 26, 1846;
Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Nov. 28, 1846, TFP;
N. M. Miller to John Tyler, Louisville, Dec. i, 1846; John W. Russell to John
Tyler, Frankfort, Ky., Dec. 16, 1846, GPY; Alexander Gardiner to Julia Gardiner
Tyler, New York, Dec. 5, 1846, TFP; John Tyler, Memorandum of G. H. Peck
Letter, dated Caseyville, Ky., Jan. 18, 1847. It was estimated at Caseyville in August
1847 that a 5' vein of coal yielded about 42 bu. a foot, or about 200,000 bu. per
acre. Delivered to the river bank from Tyler's mine two miles away at 4^ cost per
bu., the profit in one vein per acre was estimated at $8000, assuming 8tf per bu.
sale price to passing steamboats. For this reason the G. H. Peck offer seemed much
too low to Tyler and his agents advised him to reject it. See George Stealy Memo-
randum, Aug. 16, 1847, GPY.
7 John Tyler to John W. Russell, Sherwood Forest, Oct. 25, 1847; John Tyler
to Tilford, New York, Oct. 4, 1847; Joseph L. Watkins to John Tyler, Memphis,
Oct. 10, 1847, GPY; John Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Nov. i,
1847, TPLC; Articles of Sale of Tyler Land in Union County, Ky., Between Robert
P. Winston and Samuel L. Casey, Dated Sept. 9, 1847, GPY.
8 John Tyler to Messrs. Corcoran and Riggs, Sherwood Forest, Feb. 23, 1848;
Alexander Gardiner to John Tyler, New York, Mar. 7, 1848, GPY.
8 Alexander Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, East Hampton, Aug. 6, 1848;
Richard E. Stilwell to Alexander Gardiner, New York, May 29; June 8; Aug. 25,
1849; Apr. 20; Aug. 9; Aug. 12; Sept. 4, 1850; Juliana Gardiner to David L. Gardi-
ner, East Hampton, July 6, 1848, GPY; Andrew Harris to Alexander Gardiner,
Detroit, Apr. i, 1846; Juliana Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest,
Jan. 14, 1846, TFP; Alexander Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, Washington, Feb. 7,
1846; Juliana Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, Mar. 10, 1851; Alexander Gardiner
to John Tyler, New York, Mar. 4, 1847; Alexander Gardiner to David L. Gardiner,
Newport, Aug. 21, 1847, GPY; ibid., New York, June 1850, TFP; Alexander
Gardiner to Juliana Gardiner, New York, Jan. 30, 1843, GPY.
10 Alexander Gardiner to Juliana Gardiner, Steamboat Hibernia, No. 2, On the
Ohio, Nov. 17, 1847; Louisville, Nov. 21, 1847; Caseyville, Nov. 23, 1847, GPY.
11 George Stealy, Memorandum, Frankfort, Ky., Aug. 16, 1847; Alexander
Gardiner to Samuel L. Casey, Baltimore, Dec. 7, 1847; Alexander Gardiner to John
Tyler, New York, Feb. 19, 1848; Baltimore, Dec. 8, 1847; New York, Feb. n,
1848, GPY; John Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Jan. 27, 1848,
TPLC.
12 Alexander Gardiner, Proposition to Form a Company to Purchase Lands of
Coal Mines and Work the Same Near Caseyville, Union County, Kentucky, n.d.;
T. William Letson to Maj. L. A. Sykes, Baltimore, Dec. 20, 1847; T. William
Letson to Alexander Gardiner, Baltimore, Dec. 12, 1847; Jan. 22, 1848; Maj. L. A.
Sykes to Gen. William G. McNeill, New York, Dec. 27, 1847; Alexander Gardiner
to John Tyler, New York, Jan. 15, 1848, GPY.
614
13 John Tyler to Corcoran and Riggs, Sherwood Forest, Feb. 23, 1848 ; Corcoran
and Riggs to John Tyler, Washington, Mar. 10, 1848; Alexander Gardiner to John
Tyler, New York, May 30, 1848; John Tyler to Alexander Gardiner [Sherwood
Forest], Nov. 14, 1848, quoted in Alexander Gardiner to John Tyler, New York,
June 2, 1849 (draft letter heavily struck over) ; Alexander Gardiner to John Tyler,
New York, June 2, 1849, GPY.
"Agreement Between Alexander Gardiner and Andrew J. Fenton, May 22,
1848; Alexander Gardiner to John Tyler, New York, May 20, 1848; Alexander
Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, Caseyville, June 10, 1848, GPY; Alexander Gardi-
ner to David L. Gardiner, Pittsburgh, June i, 1848, TFP.
15 Ibid., Caseyville, June 21, 1848; Andrew J. Fenton to Alexander Gardiner,
Baltimore, July 8, 1848; Alexander Gardiner to Andrew J. Fenton, Telegram, New
York, July 10, 1848; Alexander Gardiner to John Tyler, New York, July n, 1848;
Alexander Gardiner to Andrew J. Fenton, New York, July 12, 1848, GPY.
18 Andrew J. Fenton to Alexander Gardiner, Caseyville, July 18; 28, 1848;
Alexander Gardiner to Andrew J. Fenton, New York, Aug. 2, 1848; Andrew J.
Fenton to Alexander Gardiner, Caseyville, Aug. 10; 24; Sept. 2, 1848, GPY.
"Alexander Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, New York, Sept. i, 1848; Alexan-
der Gardiner to Andrew J. Fenton, New York, Sept. 4; n; 18; Oct. 4, 1848; An-
drew J. Fenton to Alexander Gardiner, Caseyville, Sept. 12; Oct. 21, 1848;
Alexander Gardiner to John Tyler, New York, Oct. 21, 1848, GPY.
18 Ibid., New York, Nov. 6, 1848; Andrew J. Fenton to Alexander Gardiner,
Gardiner's Point, Ky., Nov. 10; 22; 25; Dec. 15, 1848; Louisville, Dec. 22, 1848;
Alexander Gardiner to Andrew J. Fenton, New York, Nov. 20; 28; Dec. 2; 5; 28,
1848; Alexander Gardiner to Samuel L. Casey, New York, Nov. 30, 1848, GPY.
18 John Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Feb. 2; 21, 1849;
Alexander Gardiner to Andrew J. Fenton, New York, Feb. 23, 1849; Alexander
Gardiner to John Tyler, New York, Feb. 26, 1849, GPY.
20 John Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Apr. 9; May 10, 1849;
Alexander Gardiner to John Tyler, New York, June 2, 1849, GPY ; ibid., Sherwood
Forest, Dec. 25, 1848, TPLC.
21 Alexander Gardiner to John Tyler, New York, June 2, 1849, GPY. For the
subsequent history of the Caseyville property, including the crude attempt by land
speculators in the Kentucky legislature in 1850 to seize the property under eminent-
domain legislation, the legal problems involved in Alexander's deathbed assignment
of his share to Julia, the various offers, near-sales, and boundary survey suits and
difficulties, and the growing family concern to secure good title to Julia's share and
to be rid of the Kentucky holdings, etc., see John Tyler to Alexander Gardiner,
Sherwood Forest, May 29, 1850, TPLC; ibid., Saratoga, Sept. 18, 1850; Juliana
Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, New York, Jan. 30, 1851, GPY; John Tyler to
Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Feb. 13, 1851, TPLC; Julia Gardiner Tyler
to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Feb. i, 1851, TFP; Juliana Gardiner to
David. L. Gardiner, New York, Mar. 10, 1851, GPY; Julia Gardiner Tyler to
Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Mar. 7, 1851, TFP; John Tyler to Margaret
Gardiner Beeckman, Sherwood Forest, June 5, 1851; John Tyler to Samuel Page,
Sherwood Forest, June 6, 1851, TPLC; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Margaret Gardiner
Beeckman, Sherwood Forest, July 9, 1851 ; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardi-
ner, Sherwood Forest, Mar. 30, 1852, TFP; ibid., Sherwood Forest, Jan. 14, 1853,
GPY ; Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Jan.
31, 1853; Deed of Sale and Trust Between John Tyler, David L. Gardiner, Julia
Gardiner Tyler and C. H. Mathias, N. J. M. Smith, Wilson Carpenter, For Tyler
Property in Union County, Ky., Dated Oct. 4, 1853; Julia Gardiner Tyler to
Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Dec. 16, 1855, TFP.
^Ibid., Sherwood Forest, Dec. 15, 1848; Margaret Gardiner Beeckman to John
H. Beeckman, Sherwood Forest, n.d. [Jan.-Feb. 1849] ; Julia Gardiner Tyler to
615
Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, Sherwood Forest, Jan. 24, 1849, TFP; Samuel Gardi-
ner to Alexander Gardiner, Shelter Island, Jan. 31, 1849; John Tyler to Alexander
Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Feb. 21; Mar. 9, 1849, GPY.
23 Julia Gardiner Tyler to David L. Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Jan 10, 1849;
July 24, 1850, GPY; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, Sher-
wood Forest, Jan. 24; May 25, 1849, TFP; John Tyler to Alexander Gardiner,
Sherwood Forest, Feb. 2; 21, 1849; Alexander Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, New
York, Aug. 15, 1849; Juliana Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, East Hampton, Dec.
9, 1850; Julia Gardiner Tyler to David L. Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Jan. 14,
1851 ; Jan. 10, 1849, GPY. For details of Egbert Dayton's voyage and death see
Juliana Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, New York, Oct. 21, 1849, GPY; Margaret
Gardiner Beeckman to Clarissa Dayton, n.p., n.d. [Sherwood Forest, Dec. 1849],
TFP; Alexander Gardiner to Dayton Family, New York, Jan. 17, 1850, GPY;
Clarissa Dayton to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, East Hampton, Feb. 13, 1850,
TFP. John Tyler, Jr., actually joined a Richmond company scheduled to depart for
California in February 1849 but when he failed to secure a patronage job in Cali-
fornia he withdrew from the enterprise. For John Jr's. frequent comings and goings
into and out of the Temperance Society see Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardi-
ner, Sherwood Forest, Oct. 18, 1847, TFP; and Tyler Family Papers, 1845-1860,
passim.
^ Julia Gardiner Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Dec. 15, 1848,
GPY; Alexander Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, New York, June; June 28, 1850,
TFP; Julia Gardiner Tyler to David L. Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Jan. 10, 1849;
John Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Feb. 2, 1849, GPY; John
Tyler to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, Sherwood Forest, May 16, 1851, TPLC.
Tyler later estimated Beeckman's cargo at worth $10,000, but Beeckman's subse-
quent financial history in California would suggest its value at nearer half that.
^Margaret Gardiner Beeckman to John H. Beeckman, Sherwood Forest, n.d.
[early 1849]; Margaret Gardiner Beeckman to Catherine Beeckman, East Hamp-
ton, May 6, 1849, TFP; Alexander Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, New York,
Aug. 15, 1849 ; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Feb.
21, 1849, GPY; Gilbert Beeckman to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, New York,
May 3, 1849; Margaret Gardiner Beeckman to John H. Beeckman, n.p., n.d. [New
York, Mar.— Apr. 1849] ; Henry B. Livingston to John Tyler, Sacramento, Apr. 12,
1851, TFP.
26 John H. Beeckman to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, Sacramento, Sept. 23,
1849, GPY.
27 Margaret Gardiner Beeckman to Juliana Gardiner, n.p., n.d. [Sherwood
Forest, Jan.-Feb. 1850] ; Alexander Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, New York,
June 1850; Alexander Gardiner to Henry B. Livingston, New York, June 13, 1850,
TFP; Margaret Gardiner Beeckman to Alexander Gardiner, Saratoga Springs, Sept.
i, 1850, GPY ; Margaret Gardiner Beeckman to John H. Beeckman, Sherwood
Forest, March 1850; John H. Beeckman to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, Sacra-
mento City, n.d. [Feb. 1850], On Beeckman's disillusion with high water and the
future of merchandising in Sacramento see John H. Beeckman to Catherine Beeck-
man, quoted in Catherine Beeckman to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, New York,
May 13, 1850, TFP.
28 Beeckman's partners in the venture were, in addition to Sutter, Samuel Moss,
Edwin Herrick, Benjamin W. Bean, and Anson V. H. LeRoy. For the details of the
deal see Contract Between John A. Sutter and Samuel Moss, Jr., etal., Sacramento,
Mar. 6, 1850; Edwin Herrick and Samuel Moss to B. W. Bean, San Francisco, Apr.
18, 1850 (copy) ; John H. Beeckman to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, Sacramento,
n.d. [Apr. 10, 1850] ; Catherine Beeckman to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, New
York, May 13, 1850; Henry B. Livingston to John Tyler, Sacramento City, Apr. 12,
1851, TFP.
6x6
39 John H. Beeckman to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, Sacramento City, n.d.
[Apr. 10, 1850], TFP.
30 Henry B. Livingston to Gilbert Beeckman, Fremont, 30 Miles Above Sacra-
mento City, Saturday and Sunday, Apr. 27-28, 1850; Henry B. Livingston to Gilbert
Beeckman, quoted in Gilbert Beeckman to Alexander Gardiner, New York, July 12,
1850; Edwin Herrick to David L. Gardiner, San Francisco, Apr. 30, 1850, TFP.
A version of Beeckman's death by Anson LeRoy, somewhat scrambled in trans-
mission, had the shotgun discharge as Beeckman tossed it into the boat preparatory
to shoving the craft into the stream on the morning of Apr. 26. This version empha-
sized the point that the gun was loaded because Beeckman thought he "might shoot
some ducks possibly" that morning on the river.
31 Alexander Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, New York, June 1850; Julia Gardi-
ner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, June 15, 1850; Alexander Gardiner
to Henry B. Livingston, New York, June 13; July 27, 1850, TFP; Julia Gardi-
ner Tyler to David L. Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, July 24, 1850, GPY; Mar-
garet Gardiner, Poem on the Death of John H. Beeckman, n.p., n.d. Icirca 1855-
1856], TFP. See also sympathy letters to Margaret, viz.: Catherine Beeckman
to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, Sharon (Conn.), Aug. 29, 1850; Newport,
R.L, July 8, 1851; Robert Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Philadelphia, June 9, 1850;
Clarissa Dayton to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, June 9, 1850, TFP; Samuel L.
Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, June 17, 1850, GPY.
32 On the Beeckman estate issue see particularly John Morgan to David L.
Gardiner, Sacramento, Aug. 13, 1850; Alexander Gardiner to Margaret Gardiner
Beeckman, New York, Nov. 22, 1850; Josiah H. Drummond to David L. Gardiner,
Sacramento, Jan. 28, 1851, GPY; David L. Gardiner to Henry B. Livingston, New
York, July 10, 1851 ; Margaret Gardiner Beeckman to Henry B. Livingston, New
York, May 26, 1851 ; Alexander Gardiner to Henry B. Livingston, New York, July
27, 1850, TFP; Margaret Gardiner Beeckman to Alexander Gardiner, Saratoga
Springs, Sept. i, 1850; Alexander Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, New York, Nov.
n, 1850; Juliana Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, East Hampton, Dec. 9, 1850;
New York, Jan. n; 30, 1851, GPY; Henry B. Livingston to Margaret Gardi-
ner Beeckman, Accounting of Beeckman Estate, May 1850 to Sept. 1851 [Sac-
ramento, Sept. 1851] ; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood For-
est, Feb. 8, 1851, TFP; John Tyler to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, Sherwood
Forest, May 16, 1851, TPLC; Henry B. Livingston to John Tyler, Sacramento,
Apr. 12, 1851 ; Charles Smith to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, Sacramento, July
13; Aug. 29, 1852; Mar. 12, 1854; Charles Smith to Juliana Gardiner, Sacra-
mento, July ii, 1852; Juliana Gardiner to Charles Smith, New York, Apr. 15, 1852;
Benjamin W. Bean to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, Sacramento, Jan. 31; Oct. 30,
1853; ibid., Accounting of Beeckman Estate, 1853, Sacramento, n.d. [Jan. 1854];
Margaret Gardiner Beeckman to Benjamin W. Bean, Staten Island, Nov. 3, 1853,
TFP; John Tyler to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, Sherwood Forest, June 5, 1851,
TPLC; Henry B. Livingston to David L. Gardiner, Oregon Bar, North Fork, Amer-
ican River, Oct. 20, 1852 ; Deed of Sale of John H. Beeckman Property, Lot. No. 3,
J. Street, Sacramento, Jan. 6, 1853, TFP.
33 John Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Feb. 21; Mar. 9, 1849,
GPY; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Jan. 26, 1849,
TFP; John Tyler to General Persifer F. Smith, Sherwood Forest, Mar. 5, 18495
Robert J. Walker to General Persifer F. Smith, Washington, Jan. 15, 1849, enclosed
in Robert J. Walker to Alexander Gardiner, Washington, Jan. 15, 1849, GPY;
Alexander Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, New York, June 28, 1850, TFP; Julia
Gardiner Tyler to David L. Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Jan. 10, 1849. For details
of Richard E. Stilwell's engagement and duties see Richard E. Stilwell to Alexander
Gardiner, New York, May 25; 26; 29; 31, 1849, GPY.
** [David L. Gardiner], "Extract of a Letter Dated San Francisco, June 15,
617
i849>" New York Journal of Commerce, Aug. 14, 1849; John Tyler to Alexander
Gardiner, Pittsfield, Mass., Sept. 18, 1849; Alexander Gardiner to David L. Gardiner,
New York, Aug. 15, 1849, GPY; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sher-
wood Forest, Mar. 29; Apr. 3, 1849; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Alexander Gardiner,
Sherwood Forest, Nov. 10, 1849; John EL Beeckman to Margaret Gardiner Beeck-
man, Sept. 23, 1849, TFP; Juliana Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood
Forest, Feb. 15, 1850; New York, Jan. n, 1851; East Hampton, Oct. 22; Nov.
12, 1849; Dec. 9, 1850; Juliana Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Pittsfield, Mass.,
Sept. 15; 27, 1849, GPY; Margaret Gardiner Beeckman to Alexander Gardiner,
Sherwood Forest, n.d. [Jan. 1850], TFP.
35 John Tyler, quoted in Juliana Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Pittsfield,
Mass., Sept. 15, 1849; J°nn Morgan to David L. Gardiner, Sacramento, Aug. 13,
1850; Benjamin W. Bean to David L. Gardiner, New York, Nov. u, 1850; Juliana
Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Feb. 15, 1850; Margaret Gardiner
Beeckman to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Feb. 13, 1850, GPY.
36 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Feb. 8; 21, 1851;
John Tyler to John H. Beeckman, Sherwood Forest, n.d. [circa Feb. 1850], TFP;
Alexander Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Apr. 21, 1850; Juliana
Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Mar. 20, 1850; Juliana Gardiner
to David L. Gardiner, New York, Mar. 10, 1851, GPY; Julia Gardiner Tyler to
Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, Sherwood Forest, n.d. [circa mid-i8$i], TFP.
87 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, Sherwood Forest, Jan.
24, 1849, TFP; Alexander Gardiner to John Tyler, New York, Feb. 26, 1849; Alex-
ander Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, New York, Mar. 13; Aug. 15, 1849 (2 let-
ters); Sept. 26, 1850, GPY; ibid., June 28, 1850; Alexander Gardiner to Edwin
Herrick, New York, June 13, 1850; Michael Mullone to Juliana Gardiner, Jersey
City, N.J., May 7, 1851, TFP; John R. Sleeker to Alexander Gardiner, San Diego,
Jan. 2, 1851; Alexander Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, New York, Jan. n, 1851,
GPY.
38 John R. Bleeker to David L. Gardiner, San Diego, Feb. 25; Mar. 2; 14; 20,
1851. For the subsequent history of the Spring Street lot and the Gardmer-Bleeker
reaction to the growth of modern San Diego occasioned by the coming of the rail-
road, see John R. Bleeker to David L. Gardiner, New York, Apr. 19; May 26;
June 18, 1873; Dec. 4, 1878; Apr. n; May 2, 1883; Jan. 2; Apr. 29; May 5; 15;
Oct. 6; Nov. 18; Dec. 24, 1886; Jan. 8; Apr. 15, 1887; E. W. Morse to John R.
Bleeker, San Diego, Dec. 17, 1885; Apr. 19, 1886, GPY. See also David L. Gardiner
and John R. Bleeker to Charles A. Wetmore, Deed of Sale [Photostat], New York,
Dec. 21, 1887. Wetmore, in turn, deeded a right of way to the California Central
Railway Company on Sept. 27, 1888. Lewis B. Lesley, "A Southern Transcontinental
Railroad Into California: Texas and Pacific versus Southern Pacific, 1865-1885,"
Pacific Historical Review (March 1936), 52-60. The Santa Fe Railroad Station
now stands on the Gardmer-Bleeker property. Details of the Garra Rebellion and
its impact on San Diego may be found in Joseph J. Hill, The History of Warner's
Ranch and Its Environs (Los Angeles, 1927), 135-42; James Mills, "San Diego —
Where California Began," San Diego Historical Society Quarterly, VI (January
1960), Special Edition, 1-34.
80 Alexander Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, New York, June 28, 1850, TFP;
Julia Gardiner Tyler to David L. Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, July 24, 1850; Jan.
14, 1851, GPY.
*°John Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Dec. 20, 1850, TPLC;
Julia Gardiner Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Dec. 13, 1850, TFP;
William McK. Gwin to John Tyler, Washington, Dec. 13, 1850; Juliana Gardiner
to David L. Gardiner, East Hampton, Dec. 9, 1850; New York, Mar. 26, 1851;
Alexander Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, New York, Dec. 28, 1850; Jan. u, 1851;
John R. Bleeker to David L. Gardiner, San Diego, Feb. 25, 1851, GPY.
6l8
41 David L. Gardiner to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, San Francisco, Mar. 15,
1851; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest} June 7, 1851,
TFP; John Tyler to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, Sherwood Forest, June 5, 1851,
TPLC; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, Sherwood Forest,
Apr. 24; May 15; June 22, 1851, TFP; Juliana Gardiner to David L. Gardiner,
Brooklyn, Mar. 10; 12, 1851; Julia Gardiner Tyler to David L. Gardiner, Sherwood
Forest, Mar. 19, 1851, GPY.
42 John R. Bleeker to David L. Gardiner, San Diego, Sept. 3; Oct. 3; 17; Nov.
30; Dec. 15, 1851; Feb. i; 15; Mar. 17; Apr. 17; May 15; 17; 28; June 3; July
16; Aug. 16; Oct. 18, 1852; May 28, 1854, GPY ; John Tyler to David L. Gardiner,
Sherwood Forest, Feb. 26, 1852, TPLC. With the $3000 realized from his Sacra-
mento lot speculation David L. Gardiner bought a property on i4th Street in New
York City. See Office of Receiver of Taxes, New York City Hall, Tax Bill, Nov.
1858; and Julia Gardiner Tyler, Deposition in Gardner vs. Tyler, n.p. (Staten
Island, N.Y.), n.d. [1866], TFP; John R. Bleeker to David L. Gardiner, San Diego,
July 20, 1856, GPY.
CHAPTER 1 6
1 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Jan. 26, 1851,
\
2 Juliana Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, New York, Jan. 30; Mar. 10, 1851;
Margaret Gardiner Beeckman to David L. Gardiner, New York, Jan. 26, 1851,
GPY; Richard Stilwell to John Tyler, quoted in Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana
Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Feb. 14; 21, 1851; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Margaret
Gardiner Beeckman, Sherwood Forest, Apr. 4, 1849, TFP. Typical of the New York
obituaries was that run in the Journal of Commerce, Jan. 23, 1851. John Tyler
himself wrote the obituary that appeared in the Richmond Enquirer. The New
York doctors who attended Alexander were Clark, Bulkly, and Joseph Smith, "all
standing at the head of the profession." A graveside service was held in East
Hampton, the Rev. Mr. Winans reading the appropriate passages from the Book of
Common Prayer. Margaret and her Uncles Nathaniel and Samuel accompanied
Alexander's body to East Hampton for burial.
3 Juliana Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, New York, Jan. 30; Mar.; Mar. 26,
1851 ; Julia Gardiner Tyler to David L. Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Mar. 19, 1851,
GPY; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Jan. 24; 26;
Feb. i; 8, 1851; Feb. 14; 28; Mar. 7; 28; July 4, 1851, TFP.
4 David L. Gardiner to Juliana Gardiner, New York, July 13, 1851, TFP. The
East Hampton house and its thirteen acres sold for $5000. After passing through
the hands of several "strangers" (as Julia called them) the East Hampton property
was purchased by Mrs. Samuel L. Gardiner in 1864. Castleton Hill cost $9500,
$4500 of which was put down in cash, the remaining $5000 being in the form of a
mortgage held by Judge James I. Roosevelt. David paid $13,250 for his farm, $5000
in cash and $8250 in the form of a mortgage held by Patrick Houston. The Castle-
ton Hill property rapidly increased in value and in 1864 Juliana turned down an
offer of $20,000 for it. For the details of these financial and real estate arrangements
see Gardiner vs. Tyler in John Tiffany, Comp., Reports of Cases Argued and
Determined in the Court of Appeals of the State of New York. (Albany, 1867),
VIII, "Gardiner vs. Tyler. " Cited as Gardiner vs. Tyler, 35 New York Reports,
563-65; Julia Gardiner Tyler, Deposition in Gardiner vs. Tyler, n.p., n.d. [New
York, 1866], TFP; David L. Gardiner — Patrick Houston Mortgage Agreement,
Mar. 25, 1853; Tax Assessment, School District No. 2, West New Brighton, Staten
Island, N.Y., July 23, 1875, TFP; B. Piesrigg to David L. Gardiner, New York,
619
Nov. 18, 1858; Juliana Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, New York, Mar. 12, 1851;
Old Point Comfort, Va., July 25, 1855; David L. Gardiner to Juliana Gardi-
ner, East Hampton, May 5, 1852, GPY; John Tyler to Margaret Gardiner Beeck-
man, Sherwood Forest, June 25, 1852, TPLC; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana
Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Mar. 20, 1852, TFP; S. R. Ely to David L. Gardiner,
Roslyn, L.I., N.Y., Mar. 25, 1864, GPY; Richard E. StilweU to Juliana Gardiner,
New York, July 31, 1850; Juliana Gardiner to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, Sher-
wood Forest, Dec. 31, 1851; Jan. 29, 1852, TFP.
5 David L. Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, New York, Aug. 9, 1847, TFP;
LTT, II, 465; John Tyler to Robert Tyler, New York, Dec. 30, 1847, TPLC;
Alexander Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, East Hampton, Aug. 6, 1848, GPY ;
John Tyler to the Editor, New York Journal of Commerce, New York, Jan. 8,
1848, reprinted in New York Herald, Jan. 12, 1848; John Tyler to Alexander
Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Jan. 27, 1848, TPLC,
6 John Tyler to John Tyler, Jr., Sherwood Forest, Jan. 23, 1848, Tyler Papers,
Duke University Library; Juliana Gardiner to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, Phila-
delphia, Mar. 1848; Margaret Gardiner Beeckman to Juliana Gardiner, New York,
Mar. 10, 1848, TFP; Alexander Gardiner to John Tyler, New York, Feb. 19; Nov.
6, 1848; Alexander Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, New York, Sept. 10, 1848, GPY;
John Tyler to M. Boswell Seawell, Sherwood Forest, Nov. 13, 1848, in Tyler's Quar-
terly, XIII (October 1931), 78; Juliana Gardiner to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman,
Sherwood Forest, Jan. 14, 1849, TFP; John Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood
Forest, Nov. 14, 1848, LTT, II, 462. For Robert Tyler's relationship to the
Buchanan candidacy see Philip G. Auchampaugh, Robert Tyler: Southern Rights
Champion, 1847-1866 (Duluth, Minn., 1934), 13-16; Stanwood, A History of
Presidential Elections, 161-76; Roseboom, A History of Presidential Elections,
7 John Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Mar. 21; 9, 1849;
Alexander Gardiner to John Tyler, New York, Feb. 26, 1849; John Lorimer
Graham to Alexander Gardiner, New York, May 2$, 1849; Alexander Gardiner to
Jacob Collamer, New York, Mar. 14, 1849, GPY; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana
Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Mar. 20, 1849; George L. Huntington to John Tyler,
East Hampton, Mar. i, 1849, TFP; Alexander Gardiner to - , Pittsfield, Mass.,
June 25, 1849, GPY.
8 John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Mar. 12, 1850, in LTT, II, 481.
8 John Tyler to Daniel Webster, Sherwood Forest, Apr. 17, 1850, TPLC; John
Tyler to Robert Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Apr. 17, 1850, in LTT, II, 483.
10 John Tyler to Henry S. Foote, Sherwood Forest, May 21, 1850; John Tyler
to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, May 29, 1850, in LTT, II, 485-89, 484;
John Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, May 21, 1850, GPY. See also
Margaret Gardiner Beeckman to Josephine Metcalfe, Sherwood Forest, n.d. [.circa
May 1850], TFP.
njohn Tyler to John S. Cunningham, Sherwood Forest, Feb. 5, 1851;
John Tyler to Henry S. Foote, Sherwood Forest, May 21, 1850, in LTT, II, 412,
489-
12 John Tyler to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Dec. 5, 1850, in LTT,
II, 490; John Tyler, Jr., to Henry A. Wise, Philadelphia, Nov. 18, 1850, in
Auchampaugh, Robert Tyler, 20-21; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Alexander Gardiner,
Sherwood Forest, Dec. 13, 1850; Samuel Gardiner to John Tyler, Shelter Island,
Jan. i, 1851, TFP; John Tyler, Letter to the Editor of the Portsmouth Pilot,
Sherwood Forest, n.d. [Dec. 10, 1850], TPLC.
"Alexander had engaged Hall as his deputy in November 1850 largely on the
strength of a strong recommendation from Samuel J. Tilden. See Charles M. Hall
to "Evidence," New York Herald Office, New York, Oct. 23, 1850; Alexander
620
Gardiner to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, New York, Nov. 22, 1850, GPY. Hall
was 29 years old and came from Chatham, Columbia County, N.Y. Alexander
Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, New York, Dec. 28, 1850; Jan. u, 1851, GPY.
Details and testimony in the Hamlet case may be found in the pamphlet, The
Fugitive Slave Bill: Its History and Unconstitutionally: With an Account of the
Seizure and Enslavement of James Hamlet and His Subsequent Restoration to
Liberty (New York, American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 1850), 1-5, and
passim. See also the New York Journal of Commerce, Dec. 30, 1850; and Jan. 7,
1851; and Louis Filler, The Crusade Against Slavery } 1830-1860 (New York, 1960),
202.
15 "Justice" to Alexander Gardiner, Rockton, 111., Oct. 21, 1850, GPY; [Alex-
ander Gardiner], "The Question of the Day," New York Herald, Nov. 10, 1850.
See also Judge Samuel E. Johnson to Alexander Gardiner, Brooklyn, Oct. 26, 1850,
TFP.
18 John Lorimer Graham to John Tyler, New York, Feb. 14, 1851 ; Julia Gardi-
ner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Feb. i; 21, 1851, TFP; John S.
Cunningham to John Tyler, Portsmouth, Jan. 27, 1851, in LTT, II, 412 ; John Tyler
to John S. Cunningham, Sherwood Forest, Feb. 5, 1851, in ibid.,. 413.
17 John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Saratoga, Sept. n, 1850, TPLC; Alexander
Gardiner to J. W. Footh, New York, Sept. 12, 1850, GPY; John Tyler to Robert
Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Mar. 17, 1851, in LTT, II, 494; John Tyler, Jr., to Henry
A. Wise, Philadelphia, Apr. 16, 1852, in Auchampaugh, Robert Tyler, 38-39.
18 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Mar. 17; Apr. 3;
May 24, 1852, TFP; John Tyler to M. B. Seawell, Sherwood Forest, Mar. 29, 1852,
in Tyler's Quarterly, XIII (October 1931), 79; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana
Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Apr. 17, 1852, TFP; John Tyler, Jr., to Conway
Whittle, Philadelphia, Apr. 8, 1852; John Tyler to Henry A. Wise, Sherwood
Forest, Apr. 20, 1852; John Tyler to John S. Cunningham, Sherwood Forest,
Apr. 20, 1852, TPLC. Attacks on the Tyler administration from outside Virginia
were still carefully monitored and challenged by Robert Tyler. See Robert Tyler
to John W. Forney, Philadelphia, July 20, 1852, in Auchampaugh, Robert Tyler,
45-47-
10 Philip G. Auchampaugh, "John W. Forney, Robert Tyler and James Bu-
chanan," Tyler's Quarterly, XV (October 1933), 76; John Tyler to John S. Cun-
ningham, Sherwood Forest, June 10, 1852, in LTT, II, 497-98; ibid., Apr. 20,
1852, TPLC; James Buchanan to Robert Tyler, Wheatland, Penna., June 8, 1852,
in LTT, II, 498; Auchampaugh, Robert Tyler, 43-45; Coleman, Priscilla Cooper
Tyler, 129.
20Roseboom, A History of Presidential Elections, 144-48; Stanwood, A History
of Presidential Elections, 178-91.
21 John Tyler to Caleb Cushing, Sherwood Forest, Mar. 17, 1853, in LTT, II,
5o5-6; John Tyler to Mrs. John Waggaman, Sherwood Forest, June 8, 1853, TPLC;
Henry Wise to John Tyler, Onancock, Va., Apr. 5, 1853, in LTT, II, 505; Robert
Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Washington, May 18, 1853, in ibid., 505 Coleman,
Priscilla Cooper Tyler 129; Julia Gardiner Tyler to [Juliana Gardiner], White Sul-
phur Springs [Aug. 1853], in LTT, II, 505; Roy Franklin Nichols, Franklin Pierce
(Philadelphia, 1958), 421; John Tyler to William Tyler, Sherwood Forest, May 22,
1854, in LTT, II, 509-10; ibid,, 506.
22 Margaret Gardiner Beeckman to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Jan. 25,
1853, TFP.
23 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Dec. 16, 1845,
TFP; Juliana Gardiner to Alexander Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Mar. 6, 1850;
Margaret Gardiner Beeckman to Alexander Gardiner, Pittsneld, Mass., July 7> 1849,
GPY; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, July 2, 1851,
TFP; John Tyler to John S. Cunningham, Sherwood Forest, Dec. 15, 1852;
621
Robert Tyler to John Tyler, Philadelphia, June 13, 1856, in LTT, II, 500, 527;
Margaret Gardiner Beeckman to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Feb. 15, 1855,
TPLC.
2* Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, June 18, 1852,
TFP.
25 Ibid., Jan. 23, 1856, TFP.
26 Julia Gardiner Tyler, "To the Duchess of Sutherland and the Ladies of
England," Southern Literary Messenger, XIX (Richmond, Feb. 1853), 120-26.
Article originally written at Sherwood Forest, Jan. 24, 1853, and published in the
Richmond Enquirer, Jan. 28, 1853.
*Ibid.
^Margaret Gardiner Beeckman to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Feb.
5; 12; 19; 23, 1853; Josephine Metcalfe to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, Chicago,
Aug. 12, 1853, TFP; John Tyler to William Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Mar. 29, 1853,
in LTT, II, 507; John Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Sept. 19, 1853,
TPLC.
29 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Jan. 17, 1855,
TFP; John Tyler to William Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Oct. 29, 1854, TPLC; ibid.,
Sherwood Forest, May 22, 1854; John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Sherwood Forest,
Jan. 20; Nov. 19, 1855; John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Jan. 8,
1855, in LTT, II, 510, 522, 517, 515. For Tyler's view of the Hungarian Revolu-
tion see John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Sherwood Forest, July 16, 1849, in ibid.,
491 ; Sanka Knox, "A Tyler Letter," New York Times, Dec. 7, 1958.
30 John Tyler to David L. Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Feb. 2, 1854; John
Tyler to William Tyler, Sherwood Forest, May 22, 1854, in LTT, II, 509, 510; Mar-
garet Gardiner Beeckman to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Nov. 13, 1854;
Julia Gardiner Tyler to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, Sherwood Forest, June 5,
1854, TFP.
31 John Tyler to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, Sherwood Forest, Mar. 23,
1854, TPLC.
32 John Tyler to Robert Tyler, New York, Dec. 30, 1847; Saratoga, Aug. n,
1854; Gov. William Bigler to Robert Tyler, Harrisburg, July 6, 1854, TPLC;
John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Sherwood Forest, July 17, 1854; James Buchanan
to Robert Tyler, London, Jan. 18, 1855; John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Sherwood
Forest, May 19; June 10, 1856; Robert Tyler to John Tyler, Philadelphia, Dec.
23, 1855, in LTT, II, 513, 516-17, 416, 527, 523.
33 John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Jan. 20, 1855, in ibid., 517-
18; Wise, Seven Decades of the Union, 244-45; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Margaret
Gardiner Beeckman, Sherwood Forest, May 12, 1855, TFP; John Tyler to Robert
Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Nov. 19, 1855, in LTT, II, 522.
a*John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Sherwood Forest, May 19; June 10, 1856, in
ibid., 416, 527.
85 John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Sherwood Forest, May 19, 1856, in ibid., 416.
36 For Robert Tyler's crucial liaison role in the political relations between
Buchanan, Wise, and John Tyler see the Wise-Buchanan, Buchanan-Robert Tyler,
and Wise-Robert Tyler correspondence in LTT, II, 518-26; and in Auchampaugh,
Robert Tyler, 74-75, 77, 80-82, 86-88, 109, 113, 115, 117, 119. See also John
Tyler to John S. Cunningham, Sherwood Forest, Apr. 28, 1856, TPLC; Robert
Tyler to Henry A. Wise, Philadelphia, Mar. 17, 1856, TFP.
87 Robert Tyler to John Tyler, Philadelphia, June 13, 1856, in LTT, II, 527;
Robert Tyler to Henry A. Wise, Philadelphia, June 9, 1856, in Auchampaugh,
Robert Tyler, 103; Robert Tyler to John Tyler, Philadelphia, June 13, 1856,
TPLC; James Buchanan to Robert Tyler, Wheatland, May 23, 1856, in LTT, II,
526; Margaret Gardiner Beeckman to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, May
12, 1856, TFP.
622
38 John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Sherwood Forest, June 10, 1856; John Tyler to
John S. Cunningham, Sherwood Forest, July 14, 1856, in LTT, II, 527, 530.
39 The details of the conventions and nominations are drawn from Roseboom,
A History of Presidential Elections, 157-64; and Stanwood, A History of Presi-
dential Elections, 192-213. John Tyler to David L. Gardiner, Sherwood Forest,
July 21, 1856, in LTT, II, 532.
40 John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Sherwood Forest, July 25, 1856, ibid., 531;
Auchampaugh, Robert Tyler, 127-29; Henry A. Wise to Robert Tyler, Richmond,
Aug. 15, 1856; John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Sept. 27, 1856, in
LTT, II, 531-32.
41 Henry A. Wise to Robert Tyler, Richmond, July 6, 1856; John Tyler to
Robert Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Oct. 22, 1856, hi ibid., 530, 534; Auchampaugh,
Robert Tyler, 130; John Tyler to Letitia Tyler Semple, Sherwood Forest, Oct. 29,
1856, TPLC.
*2Coleman, Priscilla Cooper Tyler, 131-32; Auchampaugh, Robert Tyler, 143-
44, 165-66, 237; John Tyler, Jr., to Henry A. Wise [Philadelphia, Nov. 1856], in
Auchampaugh, "John W. Forney, Robert Tyler and James Buchanan," loc. cit., 76 ;
LTT, II, 645-46; John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Sherwood Forest, June 3, 1858,
TPLC; ibid., Nov. 23; Dec. 6, 1859; July 22, 1860, in LTT, II, 554-55, 559~6o.
CHAPTER 17
1 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, May 21; Dec.
16, 1855, TFP.
2 John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Sherwood Forest, July 17, 1854; John Tyler
to , Sherwood Forest, Apr. 21, 1857, in LTT, II, 513, 537.
8 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, Sherwood Forest,
May 1854; Margaret Gardiner Beeckman to Juliana Gardiner, Saratoga, Aug. 1854,
TFP; John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Saratoga, Aug. n, 1854; John Tyler to Julia
Gardiner Tyler, Saratoga, Aug. 15, 1854, TPLC; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana
Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Oct. 1854, TFP; Margaret Gardiner Beeckman to
David L. Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, July 17, 1855; Juliana Gardiner to David
L. Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, July 27, 1855, GPY; Julia Gardiner Tyler to
Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Aug. 5, 1855, TFP,
4 Margaret Gardiner Beeckman to David L. Gardiner, Alum Springs, Aug. 2;
12; 14; 25, 1856, GPY.
5 Margaret Gardiner Beeckman to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Nov.
30, 1854, TFP.
6 Ibid., Jan. 5; Mar. 2, 1855; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner,
Sherwood Forest, Feb. 8, 1855; Mar. i, 1856, TFP; John Tyler to Margaret
Gardiner Beeckman, Sherwood Forest, Apr. 27, 1855, TPLC.
7 Daniel M. Lord to John Tyler, Shelter Island, Nov. 25, 1855, TFP. Mary
L'Hommedieu Gardiner Horsford (1824-1855) gave birth to four daughters:
Lillian (1848), Mary Catherine (1850), Gertrude (1852), and Mary Gardiner
(1855). Her sister, Phoebe Gardiner, married her widower, Eben N. Horsford, in
1860 and had one child, Cornelia, by him in 1861. Denison's death left his daughter
Bessie an orphan. She was brought up by her aunt, Letitia Tyler Semple. Denison
left her an estate of $10,000, and some lots in Kansas City and Wilkes-Barre. A
few slaves were also in the inheritance. Although an Episcopal clergyman and a
Pennsylvanian by birth, Denison was a strong supporter of the slavery system.
He wrote Tyler in September 1858 that he had just been aboard a slaver brought
into Charleston harbor and "for the first time saw naked savages in their primi-
tive condition. It was a sad spectacle. Slavery would elevate them many degrees."
623
W. M. Denison to John Tyler, Charleston, Sept. i, 1858, TPLC ; Juliana Gardiner
to David L. Gardiner, Hampton, Va., Oct. 1858, GPY '; James A. Semple to John
Tyler, New York, Mar. 3, 1859; Feb. 28, 1860, TFP. For details of the death of
Margaret Gardiner Beeckman (1822-1857) see Margaret Gardiner Beeckman to
Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, May 28, 1857; Phoebe Gardiner to Juliana
Gardiner, Cambridge, Mass., June 7, 1857; John A. Belvin (Funeral Director) to
John Tyler, Richmond, Oct. 21, 1857, TFP; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Eliza Gardiner
Brumley, Sherwood Forest, July 5, 1857, Gardiner Papers, Long Island Collection,
East Hampton Free Library. The funeral bill of $174.25 had not been paid by Octo-
ber 21. A family tradition is that Margaret died of tuberculosis. She probably had
the disease, but it is doubtful that it Mlled her in 1857. Interview with J. Alfred
Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Jan. 27, 1960.
8 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Eliza Gardiner Brumley, Sherwood Forest, July
5, 1857, Gardiner Papers, Long Island Collection, East Hampton Free Library.
9 John Tyler to Henry A. Wise, Sherwood Forest, Mar. [8-10] ; 17, 1856,
TPLC; Juliana Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Mar. 27,
1856, GPY. Robert Fitzwalter Tyler spent his entire life farming in New Kent
County. He married a Fannie Glinn and died in Richmond on Dec. 30, 1927.
10 John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Oct. 22, 1856, in LTT, II,
534; John Tyler to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, Sherwood Forest, Oct. 21; 24,
1856, TPLC. For the health, growth, and education of the Tyler children, par-
ticularly Gardie and Alex, during this period, see John Tyler to Margaret Gar-
diner Beeckman, Sherwood Forest, July 3, 1856, in LTT, II, 529 ("I . . . reached home,
finding Julia well and the children wLh the chicken-pox; and so ends my cate-
chism") ; David Gardiner Tyler to David L. Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Apr.
15, 1857, GPY ("I go regularly to school studying Dictionary, Latin, Geography,
English grammer [sic], and Arithmetic besides reading") ; Julia Gardiner Tyler
to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, Sherwood Forest, May 12, 1855, TFP; John
Tyler to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, Sherwood Forest, June 14, 1855 ; TPLC ;
Julia Gardiner Tyler to David L. Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, June 9, 1858;
Juliana Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, Hampton, Oct. 19; 26, 1858, GPY.
11 John Tyler to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, Sherwood Forest, Dec. 25, 1855;
John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Jan. 6, 1855, in LTT, II, 523-24;
5I4-I5.
12 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Nov. 17, 1854;
Margaret Gardiner Beeckman to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Nov. 22, 1854,
TFP; John Tyler to Henry Curtis, Sherwood Forest, Feb. 14, 1855; John Tyler
to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, Sherwood Forest, June 23, 1855; Feb. 17; 20;
24, 1856, TPLC; John Tyler to John Tyler, Jr., Sherwood Forest, Jan. 5, 1857,
in LTT, II, 109. For Tazewell Tyler's medical education and practice in Wil-
Hamsburg and in New Kent County see John Tyler to Margaret Gardiner Beeck-
man, Sherwood Forest, Jan. 8, 1853; John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Sherwood
Forest, Nov. 6, 1854; John Tyler to Letitia Tyler Semple, Sherwood Forest,
Dec. 8, 1857, TPLC; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest,
July i, 1853, TFP.
13 John Tyler to John Tyler, Jr., Sherwood Forest, Jan. 5, 1857, in LTT,
II, 109.
14 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, Philadelphia, Oct. 18,
1856; Margaret Gardiner Beeckman to David L. Gardiner, Alum Springs, Aug. 2,
1856, TFP; Julia Gardiner Tyler to David L. Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, June 9,
1858; Hampton, Oct. 26, 1858, GPY; John Tyler to Silas Reed, Sherwood
Forest, Apr. 7, 1858, in LTT, II, 541 ; John Tyler to David L. Gardiner, Sherwood
Forest, Mar. 29, 1858, TPLC; Will of John Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Oct. 10, 1859
(photostat), entered for probate in Charles City County Court (by Julia) on
Jan. 15, 1863, TFP.
624
15 John Tyler to Margaret Gardiner Beeckman, Sherwood Forest, June 14,
1855; Henry A. Wise to John Tyler, Onancock, Va., Aug. 7, 1855; William Green
to John Tyler, Culpepper, Va., Aug. 13, 1855, TPLC; Julia Gardiner Tyler to
Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, July 6, 1854, TFP; Juliana Gardiner to David
L. Gardiner, Hampton, July 12, 1860, GPY; John Tyler to Professor Ewell, Sher-
wood Forest, Feb. n, 1859; John Tyler to , Sherwood Forest, Oct. 22, 1860,
TPLC; John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Oct. 19, 1859, in LTT,
II, 547; John Tyler, "Early Times of Virginia — William and Mary College,"
De Bow's Review, XXVIII (August 1859), 136-49.
13 John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Oct. 6, 1859, in LTT, II, 553.
17 Margaret Gardiner Beeckman to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Mar. 2,
1856; Mar. 26, 1855, TFP; Henry M. Denison to John Tyler, Louisville, July 2,
1855, TPLC; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Baltimore, Mar. 22, 1855;
Sherwood Forest, Mar. 7, 1855, TFP.
18 Thomas Ritchie to John Tyler, Richmond, Mar. 14, 1856; John Tyler to
John S. Cunningham, Sherwood Forest, Apr. 28, 1856, TPLC. The speech is re-
printed in LTT, II, 384—99, and in the Southern Literary Messenger for August,
1856.
19 LTT, II, 537-38; John Tyler to David L. Gardiner, Sherwood Forest,
Apr. 6, 1857, TPLC; David Gardiner Tyler to David L. Gardiner, Sherwood
Forest, Apr. 15, 1857, GPY; Ralph H. Rives, "The Jamestown Celebration of
1857," The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, LXVI (June 1958),
259-71.
20 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Mar. 31, 1855,
TFP.
21 Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Hampton, Aug. 10; 24; Sept. 24,
1859, GPY; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Nov. 14,
1859, TFP; John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Nov. 23, 1859, m
LTT, II, 554-
22 Quotation reconstructed from a detailed paraphrase found in Julia Gardiner
Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Nov. 10, 1859, TFP.
23 Ibid., Nov. 14; Dec. I, 1859; J. Alexander Tyler to Harry Beeckman, Sher-
wood Forest, Dec. I, 1859, TFP; John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Sherwood Forest,
Dec. 6, 1859, in LTT, II, 555. The 1850 census showed Charles City County with
1664 whites, 772 Negro freedmen, and 2764 Negro slaves.
24 Auchampaugh, Robert Tyler, 275-76, 363; John Tyler to Robert Tyler,
Sherwood Forest, Dec. 23, 1859, TPLC.
"5 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Dec. i, 1859,
TFP; John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Dec. 6, 1859, in LTTf II,
555-
28 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Dec. 8; 14; 19;
1859, TFP.
227 David Gardiner Tyler to Harry Beeckman, Sherwood Forest, Jan. 7, 1860;
Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Nov. 28; Dec. 28,
1859; Samuel Gardiner to John Tyler, Shelter Island, Nov. 29, 1858, TFP; W.
Farley Grey to John Tyler, New York, Dec. 22, 1859, in LTT, II, 556; Julia
Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Feb. 8, 1860; Nov. 10,
1859, TFP; John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Oct. 19, 1859, in LTT,
H> 547; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Nov. 8,
1859, TFP.
28 Ibid., Feb. 14, 1860, TFP.
20 Ibid., Mar. 13, 1860. At the same time, the Tylers made a special effort to
entertain Judge Richard Parker when he visited in the county in February 1860.
See ibid., Feb. 29, 1860, TFP.
80 LTT, II, 549; 236-39; John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Sept.
625
6, i857, TPLC; ibid., Villa Margaret, Aug. 28, 1858; John Tyler to John Tyler,
Jr., Sherwood Forest, Sept. 7, 1858 ; John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Sherwood Forest,
July 14, 1858, in LTT, II, 241-42, 242-43, 544-
31 Ibid., May 26, 1859, TPLC.
32 Robert Tyler to John Tyler, Philadelphia, July 13, 1859, TPLC; John
Tyler to Robert Tyler, Villa Margaret, July 16; Aug. i, 1859; Sherwood Forest,
Oct. 6; 19, 1859, in LTT, II, 551, 552, 547, 553-
33 Ibid., Oct. 6, 1859, in ibid., 553; ibid., Dec. 23, 1859, TPLC; ibid., Jan. 19,
1860, in LTT, I, 596; II, 557; John Tyler, Jr. [pseud. "Python"], "The History
of Party, and the Political Status of John Tyler," De Bow's Review, XXVI (March
1859), 300-9; John Tyler, Jr. [pseud. "Tau"], "The Relative Status of the North
and the South," De Bow's Review, XXVII (July 1859), I~29-
34 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Dec. 28; Nov. 8;
10, 1859; Feb. 8; Jan. 3, 1860, TFP; Mar. 20, 1860, in LTT, II, 546-47-
35 Ibid., I, 467; John Tyler to H. B. Grigsby, Sherwood Forest, Apr. 16, 1860, in
Tyler's Quarterly, XI (April 1930), 236-37.
36 Ibid.; Mary Conger to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Waldberg, July 24, 1869;
Sarah Thompson Gardiner to Juliana Gardiner, Staten Island, June 1860, TFP;
Tyler vs. Gardiner, 35 New York Reports, VIII, 600-1 ; Receipts from Tiffany and
Co. to David L. Gardiner, New York, Apr. 23; 25, 1860, GPY ; Julia Gardiner
Tyler to David L. Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Apr. 12, 1860, TFP; Juliana
Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, Hampton, June 13; 14; 16; 23; July 12; 26,
1860, GPY; David L. Gardiner to Juliana Gardiner, Staten Island, Aug. 6, 1860,
TFP; Sarah Thompson Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, Pomfret, Conn., Aug. 25,
1886, GPY. Three children were born to David Lyon and Sarah Thompson
Gardiner: David in April 1861, Sarah Diodati in July 1862, and Robert Alexander
in 1864. Robert married Norah Loftus in 1908. Their children were Alexandra
Diodati Gardiner (Mrs. J. R. Creel) (1910- ) ; and Robert David Lion Gar-
diner (1911- ). Sarah Diodati Gardiner died unmarried in 1953, as did David
in 1927. Robert Alexander died in 1919. See John Tyler to Juliana Gardiner,
Richmond, May 2, 1861, in LTT, II, 664; Juliana Gardiner to L. F. Cooper, New
York, Aug. 2, 1862, TFP; Interview with Judge J. Randall Creel and Alexandra
Gardiner Creel, Oyster Bay, L.I., N.Y. Aug. 28, 1959; East Hampton Cemetery
Records, East Hampton Free Library.
37 John Tyler to John S. Cunningham, Sherwood Forest, May 30, 1860; John
Tyler to Robert Tyler, Villa Margaret, July 22, 1860, in LTT, II, 558, 559.
38 Ibid.; Roseboom, A History of Presidential Elections, 173-80.
38 John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Villa Margaret, Aug. 14, 1860; Sherwood
Forest, Aug. 27, 1860; John Tyler to David L. Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Oct.
27, 1860, in LTT, II, 559, 560, 561, 563-
"John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Villa Margaret, July 22; Aug. 14, 1860; Sher-
wood Forest, Aug. 27, 1860, in ibid., 559, 560, 561-62.
^ John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Aug. 27, 1860; Villa Margaret,
Sept. 14, 1860; John Tyler to H. S. Foote, Sherwood Forest, Aug. 26, 1860, in
ibid., 562, 561.
42 Phoebe Gardiner Horsford to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Cambridge, Mass., n.d.
[Sept.-Oct. 1860], TFP: Juliana Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, Villa Margaret,
June 9, 1858; June 23, 1860, GPY; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner,
Sherwood Forest, Jan.; Feb. 23; 29; May 15, 1860, TFP.
^Juliana Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, Hampton, June 13; 14; 23; July
12; 26, 1860, GPY; Fanny Gardiner to Juliana Gardiner, Staten Island, July 17,
1860, TFP; Juliana Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, Hampton, Oct. [20-26!, 1858,
GPY; Society of the "Old Boys" of Hampton Academy to John Tyler, Hampton,
Jan. 3, 1860, TPLC.
626
44 Juliana Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, Villa Margaret, Aug. 15, 1860; Sarah
Thompson Gardiner to Juliana Gardiner, Staten Island, June 29, 1860, TFP.
45 John Tyler to William G. Waller, Sherwood Forest, Nov. 5, 1860, TPLC.
^John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Nov. 10, 1860, in LTT, II,
563; John Tyler to Silas Reed, Sherwood Forest, Nov. 16, 1860, TPLC. Compare
with the version printed in LTT, II, 574-75.
* J. Selden to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Baltimore, Dec. 26, 1874, TFP.
48 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Dec. 14, 1860,
TFP; John Tyler to , Sherwood Forest, Dec. 3, 1860, TPLC; John Tyler
to Caleb Gushing, Sherwood Forest, Dec. 14, 1860, in LTT, II, 577,
CHAPTER 1 8
*LTT, II, 576.
2 John Tyler to David L. Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Jan. i, 1861, in ibid.,
578-
3 Ibid., 580-81; Robert Gray Gunderson, Old Gentlemen's Convention: The
Washington Peace Conference of 1861 (Madison, Wis., 1961), 24-25.
* Richmond Enquirer, Jan. 17, 1861; John Tyler to , n.p., n.d. [Sher-
wood Forest, Jan. 10-17, 1861], TPLC.
5 Richmond Enquirer, Jan. 17, 1861; LTT, II, 580, Philadelphia Pennsylvanian,
Jan. 26, 1861, quoted in Auchampaugh, JRobert Tyler, 320-21.
ejohn Tyler to Robert Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Jan. 18, 1861, in ibid., 578-
79; ibid., 581.
7 Ibid.; John Tyler to Robert Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Jan. 18, 1861, in ibid.,
579; Gunderson, Old Gentlemen's Convention, 25-26. Gunderson links Tyler to
the extremist Seddon viewpoint at this time. While Tyler later did identify him-
self with Seddon at the Peace Conference, he was clearly no secessionist in mid-
January 1861. Nevertheless, the Gunderson study is by far the best on this
subject.
8 LTT, II, 581 ; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Jan.
22, 1861, TFP.
"Ibid.; LTT, II, 619-20.
™Ibid., 589-90.
n John Tyler to Wyndham Robertson, Washington, Jan. 26, 1861; John Tyler
to James Buchanan, Washington, Jan. 28, 1861, in ibid., 590-91, 592.
™Ibid,, 610; James D. Halyburton to John Tyler, Richmond, Jan. 25, 1861 ;
Robert Winthrop to John Tyler, Boston, Feb. 12, 1861; Robert Dale Owen to John
Tyler, Indianapolis, Feb. 14, 1861, TPLC; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner,
Washington, Feb. 3, 1861, in LTT, II, 596-97.
13 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Washington, Feb. 4; 13, 1861, in
ibid., 597-98, 612-13; Gunderson, Old Gentlemen's Convention, 55, 58.
" Ibid., lo-n, 105-6; Alexander W. Doniphan to James Guthrie, Washington,
Feb. 14, 1861, Tyler Peace Collection, Alderman Library, University of Virginia.
15 Unidentified Newspaper Clipping, Feb. 6, 1861, Tyler Peace Collection,
Alderman Library, University of Virginia.
1QLTT, II, 610-12; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Washington,
Feb. 13, 1861, in ibid., 613.
17 Gunderson, Old Gentlemen's Convention, 49, 63-64, 70, 50-60, and passim.
18 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Washington, Feb. 13, 1861, in
LTT, II, 613.
18 Gunderson, Old Gentlemen's Convention, 62-64, 107-9, 14* J Speech of John
627
Tyler, Delivered March 13, 1861, in the Virginia State Convention (Pamphlet;
Richmond, 1861). For the wording of the radical Seddon proposal see LTT, II,
606. The question and degree of Tyler's complicity in drafting the Seddon proposal
rests on an interpretation of a semantically obscure, undated [February 1861], John
Tyler to James A. Seddon note in the Tyler Peace Collection, Alderman Library,
University of Virginia. It reads: "Here is my suggestion thrown into form. I cannot
but regard it as important. It avoids propagandism and secures us in our territories.
The distribution clause appropriately follows — so it seems to me. If you concur
present it at the proper time. If you incline against it [this phrase struck through
but legible] I cannot but consider it as well calculated to heal discontents both
North and South." If indeed the wording of this informal note refers to the most
extreme section of Seddon's proposal (most of it ran along Crittenden compromise
lines), then a knowledge of its date would have great significance in detailing
Tyler's shift to the radical secessionist position. Given Tyler's changing frame of
mind on February 13-15, 1861, it is quite conceivable that he actually helped Sed-
don draw up the proposal in the hope that its very extremism would bring the con-
vention to grief and a speedy adjournment. If so, one might hazard Feb. 14 as the
date of the letter.
20 James Buchanan to John Tyler, Washington, Feb. 21, 1861, TPLC; LTT,
II, 613-14; Gunderson, Old Gentlemen's Convention, 68.
21 Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, 4 vols. (New York, 1939),
I, 87-90.
^LTT, II, 615-16, 633; Gunderson, Old Gentlemen's Convention, 86-94, 107;
John Tyler to Talbot Sweeney, Richmond, Nov. 30, 1861, TPLC.
235 Gunderson, Old Gentlemen's Convention, 95-97; LTT, II, 616, 620, 622,
629; Coleman, Priscilla Cooper Tyler, 135—36; Sandburg, Lincoln, I,, 125—37.
^Speech of John Tyler, Delivered March 13, 1861, in the Virginia State Con-
vention, 1-32; LTT, 621-28; Richmond Enquirer, Mar. 30, 1861.
25 John Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Richmond, Mar. 24, 1861, TPLC; ibid.;
Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Mar. 19, 1861, in
LTT, II, 629, 627; John Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Richmond, Mar. 19-20,
1861, TPLC; John Tyler to David L. Gardiner, Richmond, Apr. 5, 1861, in LTT,
II, 630; John Tyler, "To the People of the Northern States," Richmond, n.d.
[Mar. 13-25, 1861], TPLC; Sandburg, Lincoln, I, 222; LTT, II, 630.
28 John Tyler to [Benjamin Patton], Sherwood Forest, May 7, 1861, TPLC;
John Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Richmond, Apr. 16, 1861, in LTT, II, 640.
27 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Apr. 18, 1861, in
ibid,, 646-47.
28 John Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Richmond, Apr. 18, 1861, in ibid., 641-
42.
20 Ibid., 642-43, 647, 658-59-
80 Coleman, Priscilla Cooper Tyler, 136-40; Deran Green, Old Houses on
Radcliff Street (Bristol, Pa., 1938), 151; Aucharnpaugh, Robert Tyler, 342; 306-
13; 336-39; Priscilla Cooper Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, New York, Apr. 27, 1861,
TFP; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Apr. 25; May
7; ii, 1861, in LTT, II, 648, 649, 650-51. For Robert Tyler's escape from Phila-
delphia and the subsequent confiscation of his Bristol, Pa., property in September
1861, see New York Tribune, Apr. 16, 1861, and Philadelphia Inquirer, Sept. 14,
1861, reprinted in Frank Moore (ed.), The Rebellion Record. A Diary of Ameri-
can Events, 3 vols. (New York, 1862), I, 26; III, 28. Priscilla's sister, Julia Cooper
Campbell, was the wife of Allan Campbell, president of the New York and Harlem
Railroad. They lived at 44 E. 39th St., in 1861. Still at home with Priscilla at
the time of her flight were these of her children: Grace Raoul, 15; Priscilla, called
"Tousie," ii ; Elizabeth, 9; Julia Campbell, 5; and Robert, called "Robbie," 3.
Daughter Letitia Christian, the Confederate flag- raiser, was then with her aunt,
628
Priscilla's sister, Mary Grace Cooper Raoul, in Montgomery. She was 19. Three
other of Priscilla's children died young, vis.: Mary Fairlee (1840-1845) ; John IV
(1842-1846) ; and Thomas Cooper (1848-1849). When she fled Philadelphia Priscilla
left her daughter Elizabeth with her sister Julia Cooper Campbell.
31 Coleman, Priscilla Cooper Tyler, 142-43 ; L. F. Campbell to Juliana Gardiner,
Albany, N.Y., Sept. 9, 1863. TFP; LTT, II, 684-85; Langford, Ladies of the White
House, 327-29; Sarah D. Gardiner, Memories of Gar diners Island, 97; Julia
Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, May n; 7, 1861, in LTT,
II, 651, 650. William G. Waller survived the war and later served as assistant
editor of the Savannah News and managing editor of the Richmond Times. His
first wife was Jenny Howell, his second was Bessie Austin. See Richmond Dispatch,
July n, 1889.
32 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, May 7, 1861, in
LTT, II, 649-50.
33 John Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Richmond, May 2, 1861, in ibid., 643.
84 Julia Gardiner Tyler to John Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Apr. 27, 1861, TPLC;
Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Apr. 25; May 2; 4;
7, 1861, in LTT, II, 644, 647-48, 649, 650; ibid., 659; Juliana Gardiner to Julia
Gardiner Tyler, Staten Island, June 10, 1861 ; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana
Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Jan. n, 1860, TFP. The Villa Margaret flag incident
of June 3, 1861, is recounted in the New York Commercial Advertiser, June 4,
1861, reprinted in Moore, Rebellion Record, I, 91.
85 Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Staten Island, June 10, 1861, TFP;
Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, May 4; June 16;
July 2, 1861, in LTT, II, 649, 653; 651-52. The champagne celebration of Manassas
story is found in Moore, Rebellion Record, III, n.
36 Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Staten Island, June 10, 1861;
Juliana Gardiner to Cooper, Staten Island, Aug. 9, 1861, TFP.
87 LTT, II, 658-65; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood For-
est, Nov. 4, 1861, TFP.
88 This account of John Tyler's death is Julia's. It is very likely a recollection
from the distance of the late 18703 or early i88os when her son, Lyon G. Tyler,
was working on The Letters and Times of the Tylers. It is found in LTT, II,
670—72. Wise, Seven Decades of the Union, 283; LTT, II, 667. For a medical in-
terpretation of the cause of his death see Marx, Health of the Presidents, 136-37.
38 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Judge Fitzhugh, Sherwood Forest, n.d. [Summer
1865]; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Tazewell Tyler, Staten Island, n.d. [May 1865],
TFP.
*°LTT, II, 673-84; Will of John Tyler (photostat), Sherwood Forest, Oct.
10, 1859, TFP; Richmond Whig, Jan. 21; 22, 1862, cited in LTT, 674-76, 681-84.
41 Wise, Seven Decades of the Union, 283.
CHAPTER IQ
1 Juliana Gardiner to L. F. Campbell, Staten Island, Jan. 31, 1862; Julia
Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Apr. i, 1862; Louise
Ludlow to Juliana Gardiner, Baltimore, Mar. 23; 28, 1862, TFP.
2 Phoebe Gardiner Horsford to Juliana Gardiner, Shelter Island, Aug. 21,
1863; Cambridge, Mass., Jan. 27; Sept. 9, 1862; Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner
Tyler, Staten Island, May 18, 1862, TFP.
" Coleman, Priscilla Cooper Tyler , 143 ; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gar-
diner, Sherwood Forest, Apr. 28, 1862; Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler,
Staten Island, May 18, 1862 ; Juliana Gardiner to L. F. Campbell, Staten Island,
Apr. 21, 1862, TFP.
629
* Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Apr. i, 1862;
Juliana Gardiner to L. F. Campbell, Staten Island, May 18, 1862, TFP.
5 Coleman, Priscilla Cooper Tyler, 143-45 ; Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner
Tyler, Staten Island, May 18, 1862, TFP.
6 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Commanding Officer, U.S. Forces at Jamestown and
Williamsburg, Sherwood Forest, May 30, 1862, GPY.
7 Juliana Gardiner to L. F. Campbell, New York, Aug. 2; n.d. [Aug.]; July
13, 1862; L. F. Campbell to Juliana Gardiner, New Rochelle, N.Y., July 22; Aug.
20, 1862 ; Phoebe Gardiner Horsford to Juliana Gardiner, Cambridge, Sept. 9, 1862,
TFP.
8 See n. 20, below, for references to the tensions emerging during this visit
to Staten Island.
9 Julia Gardiner Tyler to , n.p., n.d. [Staten Island, early 1863]; Julia
Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Old Point Comfort, Jan. 8, 1863; Sherwood
Forest, Jan. 12, 1863, TFP.
10 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Richmond, Feb. 17, 1863; Juliana
Gardiner to Louisa Cooper, Staten Island, Mar. 8, 1863; Julia Gardiner Tyler
to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, May 12, 1863 ; William H. Clopton to
Julia Gardiner Tyler, Charles City, Oct. 18, 1863; David Gardiner Tyler to
Julia Gardiner Tyler, Lexington, Oct. 2, 1863 ; Dec. 24, 1863, TFP.
11 Chitwood, Tyler, 255-56 ; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Judge Fitzhugh, Sherwood
Forest, n.d. [Oct. 1862]; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Tazewell Tayler, Sherwood
Forest, Sept. 21, 1863; L. C. Crump to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Winslow, New
Kent County, Va., Sept. 24, 1863; Julia Gardiner Tyler to L. C. Crump, Sher-
wood Forest, Sept. 4, 1863, TFP. The deposit slip for $5048.25 is dated Mar.
19, 1863, and is found in TFP. James A. Semple to Julia Gardiner Tyler,
Drewry's Bluff, Va., Oct. 31, 1863; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner,
Sherwood Forest, Apr. 8, 1863, TFP. The two white laborers Julia was "lucky"
to hire were named Harod and Oakley. Harod, a mason by trade, was to run the
plantation mill for which he was paid $150 annually plus board. He took the
job in order to feed his family and hold it together. Oakley, an "old man,"
had been the last overseer at nearby Weyanoke plantation and wanted to remain
in the area. His services were purchased for $144 and board annually. Both
men lived in "tenements on the place," probably abandoned slave quarters.
12 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Apr. 8; May 12,
1863, TFP.
"Gilbert Beeckman to Harry Beeckman, New York, May 20, 1863; May 23,
1863; Juliana Gardiner to Louisa Cooper, Staten Island, Aug. 13, 1863; Phoebe
Gardiner Horsford to Juliana Gardiner, Cambridge, Mass., Dec. 26, 1863 ; John B.
Gardiner to Juliana Gardiner, Brooklyn, Apr. 8, 1863; Juliana Gardiner to Julia
Gardiner Tyler, Staten Island, July 19; Aug. 19, 1863; Harry G. Beeckman to
Juliana Gardiner, Gardiners Island, Aug. 27, 1864; David Gardiner Tyler to Julia
Gardiner Tyler, Richmond, Sept. 6, 1864; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gar-
diner, Sherwood Forest, Apr. 8; May 12, 1863; Julia Gardiner Tyler, Deposition,
in Gardiner vs. Tyler, n.p., n.d. [Staten Island, 1865] ; Juliana Gardiner to Mrs.
Crane, Staten Island, Apr. 14 [1863], TFP.
"Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Aug. 19; July 19; 20,
1863; J. Meta L. to Juliana Gardiner, Staten Island, May 22; Sept. 9, 1863;
Juliana Gardiner to Mrs. Crane, Staten Island, Apr. 14 [1863], TFP.
15 Louisa Cooper to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Montgomery, n.d. [May 13, 1863],
quoted in Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, May 12,
1863, TFP; Coleman, Priscilla Cooper Tyler, 147-48; Langford, The Ladies of the
White House, 329; James A. Semple to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Drewry's Bluff, Nov.
9, 1863 ; Juliana Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, July 20, 1863 ; Julia
Gardiner Tyler to Gen. John A. Dix, Sherwood Forest, July 20, 1863, TFP.
16 Major Thomas L. Bayne to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Ordnance Bureau, Rich-
630
mond, Aug. 10, 1863; James A. Semple to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Drewry's Bluff,
Sept. 23; Oct. 31, 1863; H. J. Miller to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Bank, Va., Oct.
8, 1863 ; David Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Lexington, Nov. 14, 1863 ;
L. Heyligery to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Nassau, Dec. 29, 1863; Jan. 16, 1864; Norman
J. Walker to Julia Gardiner Tyler, St. George, Bermuda, Oct. 19, 1863; J. M. Seixas
to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Wilmington, July 10, 1864. For Julia's claims against
the War Department for the horse and oats, prosecuted in the main by Semple,
see James A. Semple to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Drewry's Bluff, Nov. 9, 1863; Feb.
10 ; Apr. 3, 1864, TFP. Brig. Gen. A. R. Lawton, CSA, handled the claim for the
government. There is no evidence that it was ever paid. The R. E. Lee was a long,
narrow, fast, Clyde-built iron steamer operated by the Confederate Ordnance De-
partment; Wilkinson, a former U.S. naval officer and native of Norfolk, was
one of the Department's most skillful and successful skippers; he was paid as a
naval officer hi the grade of lieutenant. He was not, in this sense, a free-enterpris-
ing blockade runner, but an officer in the Confederate States Navy. This too was
the status of Captain R. H. Gayle of the Cornubia.
17 David Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Lexington, Nov. 14, 1863;
Mrs. Norman J. Walker to Julia Gardiner Tyler, St. George, Bermuda, n.d. [early
January 1864] ; Jan. 10, 1864, TFP. Gayle was taken on Nov. 7, 1863. See
R. H. Gayle to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Fort Warren, Boston, Aug. 7, 1864, TFP.
Gayle's exact age is not known. He was appointed midshipman hi the U.S. Navy
in 1848 (resigned in 1853), which would probably put his year of birth around
1830-1831.
18 Professor Nelson served as Captain of the Washington College Company
with Professor Campbell as First Lieutenant. The Washington College Company
paused or bivouacked at Millerstown, Jordan's Furnace, Rockbridge Alum, Cali-
fornia Furnace, and Shirkey's during the three-day march which took them to
within eight miles of Covington. David Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler,
Lexington, Nov. 14, 1863. Several weeks later the Washington College Company
marched off on another "Quixotic expedition . . . but we did not succeed in com-
ing to blows with the enemy. I had a good deal of fun in camp, as my company
was a jolly one." David Gardiner Tyler to Harry Beeckman, Lexington, Feb. 4,
1864, TFP.
19 Mrs. Norman J. Walker to Julia Gardiner Tyler, St. George, Bermuda, Feb.
18, 1864; n.d. [early Jan. 1864]. Major Norman J. Walker, CSA, was a purchasing
agent for the Confederate government. He had helped Julia with her cotton
transaction. Norman J. Walker to Julia Gardiner Ty>er, St. George, Bermuda,
Oct. 19, 1863, TFP.
20 The residents of the Castleton Hill house, and their ages as of Christmas
1863 were: Juliana (64); Julia (43); Alex (15); Julie (14); Lachlan (12);
Lyon G. (10) ; Robert Fitzwalter (7); Pearl (3); Harry Beeckman (15); David
Lyon Gardiner (47) ; Sarah Thompson Gardiner (34) ; and their two children:
David (2) and Sarah Diodati (i) ; (their third child, Robert Alexander, was not
born until 1864), Julia's maid Celia, of course, was a freed Negro. Details of
these difficult months, Dec. 1863 to Feb. 1864, in the Gardiner household and
during Julia's earlier visit in Nov.-Dec. 1862 may be found in Gardiner vs. Tyler,
35 New York Reports, VIII, 561-65; and passim, 559-616; and also in various
draft depositions relating to this case, in the handwriting of Julia Gardiner Tyler,
found in TFP. Sarah Thompson Gardiner to Juliana Gardiner, note, n.d. [Jan.-
Feb. 1864]; Julia Tyler, Draft Deposition in Gardiner vs. Tyler, New York, Apr.
1867; Nurse [name unknown] to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Statement in a Deposition
in Gardiner vs. Tyler, New York, n.d. [Spring 1867] ; Julia Gardiner Tyler, Draft
Depositions in Gardiner vs. Tyler, New York, n.d. [Spring 1867], TFP. Juliana
Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, Staten Island, Feb. 10, 1864, in Gardiner vs. Tyler,
35 New York Reports, 569.
^ R. H. Gayle to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Fort Warren, Boston, Mar. 10; 26;
631
Apr. 12; May 3; 14; 19; June 4; 9; Aug. 7; 18; 22; 28; Sept. 30, 18647
City Point, Va., Oct. 18, 1864; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Gen. John A. Dix, Staten.
Island, Mar. 23, 1864; Dr. W. Tucker to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Brooklyn, Feb. 18,
1864; Mrs. Norman J. Walker to Julia Gardiner Tyler, St. George, Bermuda, Feb.
18; Apr. 17, 1864; Major Norman J. Walker to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Halifax, N.S.,
Aug. 15, 1864, TFP.
22 James A. Semple to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Richmond, Dec. 18, 1864; R. H.
Gayle to Julia Gardiner Tyler, St. George, Bermuda, Jan. i, 1865; Mrs. Norman.
J. Walker to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Halifax, N.S., Jan. n, 1865; R. H. Gayle to
Julia Gardiner Tyler, Fort Warren, Boston, Feb. 10; 17; Mar. 24; Apr. 10, 1865^
TFP.
23 David Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Lexington, Mar. 29, 1864;
Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana Gardiner, Staten Island, Sept. i, 1864; L. C. Clark
to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Dec. 21, 1864; Anna M. Atwood to Julia
Gardiner Tyler, Pittsburgh, Feb. 21, 1865; Lucy Trowbridge to Harriet Francis,
New York, Jan. 15, 1865; J. Meta L. to Juliana Gardiner, Staten Island, Sept. 9,
1863; M. F. Vaiden to Julia Gardiner Tyler, U.S. Prison, Point Lookout, Md.,
July 28, 1864; Thomas Douthat to Julia Gardiner Tyler, U.S. Prison, Point Look-
out, Md., May 31, 1864; William H. Clopton to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Roseland,.
Va., June 20, 1864; Mrs. D. E. L. Carter to Capt. Blake, Philade'phia, July 21,
1864 ; Lt. T. J. King to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Military Prison, Fort Delaware, Del.,
Mar. 30, 1865 ; William P. Ballard to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Prisoners' Camp Hospi-
tal, Apr. 26, 1864, TFP. Coleman. Priscitta Cooper Tyler, 146.
24 Mrs. Norman J. Walker to Julia Gardiner Tyler, St. George, Bermuda, Feb.
18; Jan. 10,* Mar. 18; Apr. 17, 1864,- C. A, L. to Julia Gardiner Tyler, n.p., n.d.
[Spring 1864] ; R. H. Gayle to Julia Gardiner Tyler, St. George, Bermuda, Jan. i,
1865; Anna M. Atwood to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Haywind Springs, Pa., July 22,
1864; N. Ilewish to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Clarksville, Tenn., June 30, 1864; Jane
Selden to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Reswick, Va., May 4, 1864; James A. Semple to
Julia Gardiner Tyler, Richmond, Feb. 10, 1864, TFP.
25 Maria Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Charles City, Jan. 2, 1864; John C.
Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Feb.; Feb. 27, 1864; David
Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Lexington, Mar. 29, 1864; Thomas Douthat
to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Point Lookout, May 31, 1864, TFP.
26 David Gardiner Tyler to J. Alexander Tyler, Lexington, Feb. 24, 1864 J David
Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Lexington, Feb. 3; Mar. 29, 1864; David
Gardiner Tyler to Harry Beeckman, Lexington, Feb. 4, 1864, TFP.
27 Maria Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Apr. 10, 1864; David
Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Lexington, May 22, 1864; William H.
Clopton to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Bermuda Hundred, May 17; 24, 1864; Rose-
land, Charles City County, June 20, 1864 (Clopton reported in this letter that
"Wild and his horde" had been removed from Kennon's Landing, but he was mis-
taken.) ; John C. Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Fort Hamilton near Fortress
Monroe, May 20, 1864, TFP.
28 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Gen. Benjamin F. Butler, Staten Island, May 21;
June 2, 1864; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Abraham Lincoln, Staten Island, May 21,
1864, TFP.
20 John G. Nicolay to Mrs. Ex-President Tyler, Washington, Aug. 19, 1864;
Julia Gardiner Tyler to Col. Joseph Holt, Staten Island, June 8, 1864 (Holt was a
close friend of the Charles A. Wickliffe family and Julia did not hesitate to mention
their mutual connection in her demand for the "attention to which under any
circumstance I should certainly conceive myself to be entitled") ; David Gardiner
Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Richmond, July 19, 1864; Capt. John Cornell, Office
of the Provost Marshal, Fortress Monroe, Va., July 16; Aug. 2, 1864; James A.
Semple to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Richmond, July 30, 1864; William H. Clopton to
632
Julia Gardiner Tyler, Selwood, Charles City County, Aug. 2, 1864; Roseland,
June 30, 1864; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Gen. Benjamin F. Butler, Staten Island,
Aug. 23, 1864, TFP.
so Julia Gardiner Tyler to Abraham Lincoln, Staten Island, Aug. 15, 1864; Julia
Gardiner Tyler to Gen. Benjamin F. Butler, Staten Island, Aug. 23, 1864; John G.
Nicolay to Mrs. Ex-President Tyler, Washington, Aug. 19, 1864; [Gen. Edward A.
Wild] to Headquarters District, Army of the James, Wilson's Landing, Va., Sept. n,
1864, TFP. Julia's Aug. 23 letter to Butler was referred to Wild on Sept. 8 ; returned
by Wild with the quoted notation on it to HQ on Sept. n, it was endorsed by
Gilman Marston by order of Gen. Benjamin F. Butler on Sept. 21, 1864; and
returned to Julia on Sept. 23.
31 William H. Clopton to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Roseland, Charles City County,
July i, 1864, TFP.
32 Ibid., Office of the Provost Marshal, Fortress Monroe, Va., Nov. 12, 1864,
TFP.
33 Maria Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Selwood, June 20; July 9, 1864; Julia
Gardiner Tyler to William H. Clopton, Staten Island, July 2, 1864; Julia Gardiner
Tyler to William Cullen Bryant, Editor, New York Evening Post, Staten Island,
June 27, 1864; Brig. Gen. Edward A. Wild, to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Wilson's
Wharf, Va., June 16, 1864; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Brig. Gen. Edward A. Wild,
Staten Island, n.d. [late June 1864], TFP.
34 William H. Clopton to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Selwood, Charles City County,
Aug. 2, 1864; Capt. Hale Clarke to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Headquarters, Dept. of Va.
and N.C., In the Field, Aug. 3, 1864 (Pass to Wilson's Wharf but not valid "be-
yond the Federal pickets") ; Gen. Benjamin F. Butler, Headquarters, Dept. of Va.
and N.C., In the Field, Va., to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Aug. 6, 1864; Julia Gardiner
Tyler to Gen. Benjamin F. Butler, Staten Island, n.d. [Aug. 1864], TFP.
35 New York Herald, Aug. 12, 1864; Julia Gardiner Tyler to the Editor, New
York Herald, Staten Island, Aug. 12, 1864; James A. Semple to Julia Gardiner
Tyler, Richmond, Sept. 7; 10, 1864; David Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler,
Richmond, Sept. 6, 1864, TFP.
mlbid., Lexington, May 22, 1864, TFP.
87 Ibid., Lexington, May 22; June 29, 1864; Richmond, July 24, 1864, TFP.
Accounts of the Valley Campaigns of Sigel and Hunter in May— June 1864, par-
ticularly the battles at New Market and Piedmont, may be found in Charles H.
Porter, "The Operations of Generals Sigel and Hunter in the Shenandoah Valley,
May and June, 1864," in Papers of the Military Historical Society of Massachusetts.
The Shenandoah Campaigns of 1862 and 1864; and the Appomattox Campaign of
1865 (Boston, 1907), 61-82; George E. Pond, The Shenandoah Valley in 1864
(New York, 1883), 9-45. The destruction of Washington College is found in Walter
Creigh Preston, Lee: West Point and Lexington (Yellow Springs, Ohio, 1934),
48-49.
38 David Gardiner Tyler to Harry Bseckman, Richmond, Sept. 2, 1864, TFP.
39 Bruce Catton, This Hallowed Ground (New York, 1956), 328-29.
40 David Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Richmond, July 24; Aug. 29;
Sept. 2; 16; Oct. 24; Nov. 28, 1864; James A. Semple to Julia Gardiner Tyler,
Richmond, Sept. 7, 1864, TFP.
41 J. Alexander Tyler to David Gardiner Tyler, Staten Island, Apr. 10, 1864;
J. Alexander Tyler to Harry Beeckman, Baltimore, Apr. 17, 1864; Andrew Reid to
Julia Gardiner Tyler, Baltimore, May 5, 1864; Julia Gardiner Tyler to ,
n.p., n.d. [Staten Island, July 1864] ; Julia Gardiner Tyler to [William H. Clopton],
Staten Island, July 17, 1864; James A. Semple to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Richmond,
Sept. 7, 1864; J. Alexander Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, St. George, Bermuda,
July 31, 1864; Major Norman J. Walker to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Halifax, N.S.,
Aug. 15, 1864, TFP,
633
42 J. Alexander Tyler to , Richmond, Sept. 2, 1864; David Gardiner Tyler
to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Richmond, Aug. 29; Oct. 24; Dec. 13, 1864; J. Alexander
Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Richmond, Aug. 27; Dec. 14, 1864; James A. Semple
to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Richmond, Sept. 7; 10; Dec. 18, 1864, TFP.
43 James A. Semple to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Richmond, Apr. 3; May 27; July
5; 30; Dec. 18, 1864, TFP; J. B. Jones, A Rebel War Clerk's Diary (Philadelphia,
1866), 294, 229; David Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Richmond, Oct. 24;
Dec. 13, 1864; J. Alexander Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Richmond, Dec. 14,
1864, TFP. Tazewell Tyler married Nannie Bridges in 1857. A son was born to them
in Richmond in December 1864. Priscilla and her children fled Richmond during
Grant's approach to the capital in May-June 1864 and took refuge with Priscilla's
sister Mary Grace Cooper Raoul at Longwood plantation at Mt. Meigs, Alabama.
She returned for Christmas during this crisis. Robert again took up arms and
marched out with the "Treasury Battalion" to defend the city. At no time did he
surrender hope that the South would win the war and he spent considerable time
and energy combating defeatism and defeatist criticisms of the Davis administration
in Richmond. Coleman, Priscilla Cooper Tyler, 150-52.
** The record of the case, Tyler vs. Gardiner, is found in 35 New York Reports,
559-616. William Watson represented David Lyon; William M. Evarts and James I.
Roosevelt represented Julia. Voting to overturn the will were Court of Appeals
Justices Porter, who wrote the majority opinion, Chief Justice Davies, and Justices
Wright, Leonard, and Morgan. Voting to sustain the will were Justices Peckham,
who wrote the minority opinion, and Justices Hunt and Smith. A reading of the
precedent cases cited by both sides leads this writer, not a lawyer, to con-
clude that the definition of "undue influence" had historically been both vague and
variable and that precedent alone served one side as well as the other. At the time
of the court fight David Lyon was a member of the Board of Supervisors of Rich-
mond County, N.Y., and a Trustee of the Staten Island Savings Bank. See S. Clift
to David L. Gardiner, New York, Aug. 16, 1864, GPY ; L. C. Clarke to Julia
Gardiner Tyler, New York, Dec. 21, 1864. In April 1864 Juliana Gardiner had had
herself appointed Harry's legal guardian. See H. B. Metcalfe, Surrogate, to Juliana
Gardiner, Richmond, N.Y., April 8, 1864, TFP. For opinions, family reactions and
legal details of the Surrogate phase of the case in mid-i865 see A. W. W. H. to Julia
Gardiner Tyler, n.p., n.d.; James I. Roosevelt to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Bill for
Professional Services Covering Period April 1864 to April 1865 (bill was for $245) ;
James A, Semple to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Augusta, Ga., Nov. 14, 1865 (expressing
Mrs. Jefferson Davis' support of Julia's legal fight) ; Edward B. Merville to Julia
Gardiner Tyler, New York, July 19, 1865; L. C. Clarke to Julia Gardiner Tyler,
New York, July 31, 1865. For similar data on the Supreme Court reversal of the
Surrogate in May 1866 see James A. Semple to Julia Gardiner Tyler, n.p., May 27,
1866; Julia Gardiner Tyler to David G. and J. Alexander Tyler, New York, May
16; Apr. 6, 1866; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Julia Tyler, Staten Island, June 4, 1866
("I have won my suit in one Court — but they are taking it to another Court I
believe I am still busy with the law and oh ! I shall so rejoice when it is all off
my hands") ; David Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Karlsruhe, Germany,
June 15, 1866; J. Alexander Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Karlsruhe, June 18,
1866; July 9, 1866; Charles B. Mallory to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Hampton, Va.,
July 24, 1866, TFP. The New York Supreme Court by a 4 to o decision ordered
the will admitted to probate on May 18, 1866. Judges William W. Scrugham,
Joseph F. Barnard, John A. Lott, and Jasper W. Gilbert all held that the Sur-
rogate's decision was "erroneous, illegal and improper." Copy of order found in
TFP. When the Court of Appeals reversed the Supreme Court in January 1867 Julia
and her friends interpreted it as punishment for her Copperhead views during the
Civil War. Armed with this decision, and as Court-appointed administrator of
Juliana's personal belongings, David Lyon put up the Castleton Hill furniture at
634
public auction in February 1867, forcing his sister to buy back the items she
needed. On these points see A. S. Johnston to William H. Evarts, Albany, Jan. 4,
1867; Tazewell Taylor to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Norfolk, May 6, 1867; Julia
Gardiner Tyler to David G. and J. Alexander Tyler, New York, Mar. 29, 1867, TFP.
Julia was forced out of Castleton Hill as a result of the Court of Appeals decision
and took temporary residence at 170 Broadway. Throughout the fight and after,
both sides worked to build suitable public-relations "images" for themselves. For
this and for various newspaper references, including "inspired" letters to editors,
see "A Subscriber" [Julia Gardiner Tyler] to Horace Greeley, Editor, New York
Tribune, n.p., n.d. [New York, Apr. 2, 1868], TFP; New York Tribune, Apr. 4,
1868; John A. Taylor to David L. Gardiner, Brooklyn, June 19; Oct. 19, 1868;
David L. Gardiner to John A. Taylor, New York, June, 1868, GPY. Taylor was a
Wall Street lawyer who worked with David Lyon on a project designed to acquaint
the newspaper-reading public with a proper view of the Tyler vs. Gardiner will
case. "I am quite disposed to do what I may to keeping the channels of public
opinion running in the right direction," Taylor told David Lyon. For the details
of the compromise settlement of Oct. 3, 1868, see various documents and financial
statements and personal letters relating to it, including copies of the settlement
itself, in GPY and in TFP. Additional Tyler vs. Gardiner legal actions, dealing with
court costs, etc., and the action leading to the compromise agreement may be found
in "Gardiner vs. Tyler and Beeckman," in Benjamin V. Abbott and Austin Abbott,
(comps.), Abbotts Practice Reports, New Series, Vol. IV of Reports of Practice
Cases Determined in the Courts of the State of New York (New York, 1869), 463—
69; and "Gardiner vs. Tyler," New York Common Pleas, General Term, January,
1868, in ibid., V, 33-39. When Harry Beeckman reached his majority in 1869 he
drew up a will, dated Nov. 20, naming his Aunt Julia his sole beneficiary. See Will
of Henry G. Beeckman (copy) > Nov. 20, 1869, entered in Surrogate's Court, County
of New York, GPY. For Gardie's lament over his grandmother's death, see David
Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, In Camp Near Richmond, Nov. 28, 1864,
TFP.
45 Julia Gardiner Tyler to David L. Gardiner, n.p., n.d. [New York, Oct. 1864] ;
Julia Gardiner Tyler to Judge Michael Laugh ten, n.p., n.d. [New York, Nov. 1864] ;
Judge Michael Laughten to Julia Gardiner Tyler, n.p., n.d. [New York, Nov. 1864] ;
James A. Semple to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Richmond, Sept 10, 1864; David Gardiner
Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Richmond, Sept. 6; Nov. 28, 1864; Celia Johnson to
Julia Gardiner Tyler, Charles City, Nov. 16, 1864; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Gen.
Benjamin F. Butler, Staten Island, Nov. 7, 1864; J. Alexander Tyler to Julia
Gardiner Tyler, Richmond, Dec. 14, 1864; Col. John E. Mulford to Julia Gardiner
Tyler, Lowell, Mass., Feb. 8, 1865 ; J. Alexander Tyler to Julia Tyler, Richmond,
Feb. 24, 1865, TFP.
46 James A. Semple to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Richmond, Feb. 24; Mar. 25, 1865;
J. Alexander Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Richmond, Jan. 10, 1865; n.p., n.d.
[Richmond, Apr. 1865] ; William H. MacFarland to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Rich-
mond, July 3, 1865, TFP; Coleman, Priscilla Cooper Tyler, 156.
47 J. Alexander Tyler to Ralph Dayton, n.p., n.d. [Richmond, Apr. 19, 1865] ;
J. Alexander Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, n.p., n.d. [Richmond, Apr. 1865];
Sherwood Forest, May 5, 1865, TFP; Coleman, Priscilla Cooper Tyler, 156.
48 Staten Islander, "Incident on Staten Island," New York Herald, Apr. 17,
1865; New York World, Apr. 17, 1865; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Editor, New York
World, Apr. 19, 1865; Henry A. Curtis to Editor, New York Tribune, June 2,
1865; Julia Gardiner Tyler to , Staten Island, n.d. [Apr. 16, 1865] (draft
letter), Julia Gardiner Tyler to Major Wilson Barstow, Staten Island, n.d. [Apr.
1865]; Julia Gardiner Tyler to General John A. Dix, Staten Island, n.d. [Apr.
1865]; John Dean to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Staten Island, Apr. 16, 1865; Julia
Gardiner Tyler to , Staten Island, n.d. [Apr. 1865] (draft letter), TFP.
635
48 R. H. Gayle to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Fort Warren, Boston, Apr. 28; June i,
1865; David Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Lexington, June 26, 1865;
J. Alexander Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Richmond, Apr. 29, 1865, TFP.
50 David Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Lexington, June 26, 1865,
TFP.
CHAPTER 20
1E. G. Points to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Richmond, Oct. 19, 1865; Catherine P.
Speed to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Lynchburg, July 21, 1865; G. Christian to Julia
Gardiner Tyler, Charles City, June 20, 1865; Lt. T. J. King, 42nd Batt, Va.
Cavalry, to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Ft. Delaware, Del., Mar. 30, 1865; S. F. Bunch,
Company C, ist S.C. Regiment, isth Div. to Mrs. John Tyler, Fort Delaware, Del.,
May 12, 1865, TFP; Coleman, Priscitta Cooper Tyler, 147-48 ; Varina H. Davis to
Julia Gardiner Tyler, Savannah, Ga., July 24, 1865, in Tyler's Quarterly, XVII
(July 1935), 24; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Varina H. Davis, n.p., n.d. [Staten
Island, August 1865], TFP.
2 R. H. Gayle to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Fort Warren, Boston, May 12 ; June i ;
Apr. 10, 1865; David Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Lexington, June 5;
July 12, 1865; David Gardiner Tyler to Harry Beeckman, Lexington, July 30, 1865;
Staten Island, Aug. 22, 1865; David Gardiner Tyler to J. Alexander Tyler, Lexing-
ton, July 28, 1865, TFP.
3 David Gardiner Tyler to Harry Beeckman, Lexington, July 30, 1865 ; Staten
Island, Aug. 22, 1865; Harry Beeckman to Julia Gardiner Tyler, East Hamp-
ton, Aug. 7, 1865; David Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, SS Hansa, At Sea,
Sept. 17, 1865; J. Alexander Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Karlsruhe, Feb. 27, 1866
(Fulton had thirteen students living in his home in Feb. 1866) ; David Gardiner
Tyler, "Yes, We'll Fight 'Em Again," n.p., n.d. [Lexington, July 1865], TFP.
4 Sievert von Oertzen to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Sept. 23, 1865;
John C. Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Sherwood Forest, July 10, 1865; J. Alexan-
der Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Sherwood Forest, July 4, 1865, TFP.
5 Ibid.; John C. Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Sherwood Forest, July 10;
Sept. 28, 1865; John H. Lewis, Ships Chandler, to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York,
June 26, 1865; A. E. Godeffroy to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Nov. 28, 1865;
Sievert von Oertzen to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Sept. 3, 1865; David
Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Karlsruhe, Dec. 26, 1865, TFP.
6 Sievert von Oertzen to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Sept. 23, 1865;
Julia Gardiner Tyler to David Gardiner Tyler, Staten Island, Apr. 6, 1866; J.
Buchanan Henry to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Receipt for Professional Services in von
Oertzen vs. Tyler, n.p., n.d. [1866], TFP.
7 The Bank of Virginia vs. Julia Gardiner Tyler, 1868, turned on prewar Tyler
notes amounting to $2155.07 held by the bank. Tazewell Taylor of Norfolk at first
represented Julia in this action. But in the middle of the case he abandoned her
cause and became counsel for the bank. Julia was indignant at Taylor's "treachery"
and told him so in no uncertain language. James Lyons of Richmond, brother-in-
law to Henry A. Wise, then became Julia's attorney in the case, which Julia,
eventually lost, the courts not substantiating her contention that the statute of
limitations negated the notes. The bank attempted to attach Villa Margaret to
satisfy the debt. Lyons' argument was that the property was Julia's, purchased
with her own money, and could not be seized to satisfy a claim against Tyler's
estate. So hard-pressed for cash did Julia become in 1866-1867 that she again in-
vestigated the possibility of selling Sherwood in April 1867. Under the second
codicil of Tyler's will, dated Oct. 29, 1860, this could only be done with approval
from Robert Tyler and David Lyon Gardiner. Robert opposed the idea. For these
636
and other problems relating to various suits and claims, large and small, against
Tyler's estate, see Tazewell Taylor to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Baltimore, Oct. 25;
Dec. 22, 1865; Norfolk, May 7, 1866; Mar. 8, 1867; Apr. 22, 1868; Dr. J. McCaw
to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Richmond, Sept. 12, 1865; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Taze-
well Taylor, n.p., n.d. [Staten Island, 1867] ; James Lyons, Deposition in Bank of
Virginia vs. Julia Gardiner Tyler, Richmond, Aug. 3, 1868 ; Julia Gardiner Tyler to
William M. Evarts, n.p., n.d. [Staten Island, 1868] ; Charles B. Mallory to Julia
Gardiner Tyler, Hampton, July 24, 1866; John P. Pierce to Julia Gardiner Tyler,
New Kent C.H., Va.} Apr. 15, 1867; Richard M. Graves to Julia Gardiner Tyler,
Charles City, Nov. 22, 1865; David Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Staten
Island, Sept. 2, 1869. Julia allowed 160 acres of land in Sioux County, Iowa, in
what is now Sioux City (Section 36, Block 94, Range 48), to pass out of her hands
for back taxes in 1869, although these taxes amounted to little more than $8 to $12
per year. Tyler had acquired the land granted him as a veteran of the War of 1812.
See Thomas J. Stone to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Sioux City, Iowa, Jan. 25; Apr.
18, 1866; Apr. 5, 1869; Rufus Stone, Treasurer of Sioux County, Iowa, to
Julia Gardiner Tyler, Sioux City, June 8, 1869; J. Alexander Tyler to Julia
Gardiner Tyler, Karlsruhe, June 18, 1866, TFP. In 1866 she rejected advice to
purchase real estate at rock-bottom prices in what is now downtown Galveston,
Texas, Apr. 15, 1866, TFP.
8 Julia Gardiner Tyler to Andrew Johnson, n.p., n.d. [Staten Island, Summer
1865] , TFP.
9 David Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Karlsruhe, Apr. 30, 1866 ; Jan.
24, 1867; Richmond, June 6, 1872; Charles B. Mallory to Julia Gardiner Tyler,
Hampton, Aug. 2, 1866; G. William Semple to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Richmond,
Nov. 5, 1866; T. P. McElrath to Wilson Barstow, Office of the Post Quarter-
master, Fortress Monroe, Feb. 18, 1867; Tazewell Taylor to Julia Gardiner Tyler,
Norfolk, Apr. 17, 1867; May 7, 1866; May 22, 1867; G. M. Peek to Julia Gardiner
Tyler, Hampton, July 12, 1869; Julia Gardiner Tyler to President U.S. Grant,
n.p., n.d. [1874] ; Thomas Tabb to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Hampton, Sept. 23, 1874,
TFP.
10 James A. Semple to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Albany, N.Y., Nov. 27, 1866;
Robert Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Montgomery, Oct. 3, 1866, TFP; James
Buchanan to Robert Tyler, Wheatland, Aug. 3, 1865, in LTT, II, 68$; Robert
Tyler to James Buchanan, Richmond, Aug. 14, 1865, in ibid., 686; Coleman,
Priscilla Cooper Tyler, 162-69. Robert served as editor of the Advertiser in 1867-
1874 and editor of the Montgomery News, 1874-1877. He was Chairman of the
State Democratic Executive Committee in 1872-1874, and worked for the White
Man's Party in 1874. During these financially thin Reconstruction years in Ala-
bama Robert's daughter Letitia taught school in Montgomery; daughter Priscilla
("Tousie") went to Baltimore in 1867 and taught in Letitia Tyler Semple's private
school, The Eclectic Institute; daughter Julia Campbell was maintained by Allan
and Julia Cooper Campbell in New York City. After Robert's death, Priscilla
remained in Montgomery and was supported by the prosperous Campbells until her
own death on Dec. 29, 1889, at the age of 73. Campbell employed her youngest
child, Robbie, as his secretary. See Coleman, Priscilla Cooper Tyler } 171-75.
11 James A. Semple to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Augusta, Ga., Nov. 14, 1865;
Montreal, Canada, Jan. 3, 1866; Savannah, June 17, 1866; New York, Aug. 3,
1866; Montreal, Aug. 13, 1866; New York, Sept. 6, 1866; V. B. Rittenhouse to
James A. Semple, Panama, Oct. i, 1866 ; James A. Semple to Julia Gardiner Tyler,
Albany, Nov. 27, 1866, TFP.
12 James A. Semple to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Mar. 28; Aug. 3; Sept.
6; Nov. 7; Oct. 19; Nov. 24; 27, 1866; Jan. 12, 1867; New Orleans, Feb. 5;
15; 25, 1867; New York, Aug. i; 12, 1868; James A. Semple to Letitia Tyler
Semple, New York, July 27, 1867; J. Alexander Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler,
637
Karlsruhe, Feb. 13, 1867; Lachlan Tyler to David Gardiner Tyler, New York, Feb.
22, 1867; Letitia Tyler Semple to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Baltimore, July n, 1867;
Julia Gardiner Tyler to Letitia Tyler Semple, Staten Island, July 18, 1867; Julia
Gardiner Tyler to James A. Semple, n.p. [Sherwood Forest], July 1868; [Mar.
1866], TFP. In March 1866 Semple gave Julia control of his financial affairs, fear-
ing that one of his attacks of "brain fever" (as it was called) would carry him
suddenly to his grave. In December 1866 he made out a will leaving some acreage
he owned in Texas to little Pearlie Tyler, whom he called "Birdie." James A.
Semple, Last Will and Testament, New York, Dec. 20, 1866, TFP. The portraits at
stake hi 1867-1868 were those of John Tyler's mother and father and of Mary
Tyler Jones and Alice Tyler Denison. Semple's career after his break with Letitia
is obscure. In 1870 he was working for the York Railroad Company at Turnstalls
Station in New Kent County, Va. — in what capacity is not known. In 1875 he was
apparently engaged in farming in New Kent County. In April 1881 he visited Julia
in Richmond and was reported "looking so well." The date of his death is not
known. Letitia Tyler Semple died in Baltimore on Dec. 28, 1907, at 86. She had
raised Elizabeth Russel Denison (1852-1928), orphan daughter of Alice Tyler and
Henry M. Denison, to womanhood and had seen her married to William Gaston
Allen (1849-1891) and then widowed. See James A. Semple to Julia Gardiner
Tyler, New Kent Co., Va., Sept. 24, 1875; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Pearl Tyler,
Sherwood Forest, Apr. 27, 1881, TFP; Richmond Dispatch, July n, 1889.
13Langford, The Ladies of the White House, 323; John Tyler, Jr., to Rep. John
Critchen of Va., Tallahassee, Fla., Nov. 28, 1872 ; John Tyler, Jr., to Sen John W.
Johnston, Tallahassee, Nov. 28, 1872, Tyler Papers, Duke University Library; Julia
Gardiner Tyler to Lyon G. Tyler, Georgetown, Jan, 18, 1873; James A. Semple to
Julia Gardiner Tyler, Norfolk, Jan. i; Nov. 30, 1873; John Tyler, Jr., to David
Gardiner Tyler, Washington, Apr. 7, 1877; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Tazewell Tyler,,
n.p., n.d. [Staten Island, late 1865] ; David Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler,
Sherwood Forest, Apr. 24, 1873, TFP.
14 Julia Tyler to Etta , Staten Island, Sept. 26 [1865]; Marcia C. Roose-
velt to Julia Tyler, n.p., n.d. [New York, Nov. 2, 1865] ; Julia Gardiner Tyler to
Juliana Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, Apr. 8, 1863, TFP. Julia's high opinion of
Roman Catholic schools was in part derived from prewar conversations with artist
G. P. A. Healy, official portraitist of so many nineteenth-century Presidents. A.
brochure of the Convent of the Sacred Heart at Halifax found in TFP listed tui-
tion, room, and board at £30 quarterly (or $120 American in 1866). Private singing-
lessons were £10. Needlework, map drawing, and French lessons were free. Each
girl brought her own bedclothes, veils, and tableware. A uniform was required only
for Sunday wear. Regular clothes were worn at other times. The school had been,
founded by a Mother Barat who had died in 1865 at the age of 85.
15 Julia Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Halifax, Apr. 5, 1866; Julia Gardiner-
Tyler to Julia Tyler, New York, Apr. 18, 1866; Julia Gardiner Tyler to David
Gardiner Tyler, Staten Island, Apr. 6, 1866; James A. Semple to Julia Gardiner
Tyler, Halifax, Apr. 6, 1866; David Gardiner Tyler to Julia Tyler, Karlsruhe, June-
12, 1867, TFP.
"Julia Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Sacre Coeur, Halifax, Apr. 29, 1866;
James A. Semple to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Halifax, May 2, 1866; Julia Gardiner-
Tyler to David G. and J. Alexander Tyler, New York, May 16, 1866; David
Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Karlsruhe, June 15, 1866; George L. Sin-
clair to Julia Tyler, Halifax, July 1866; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Julia Tyler, New-
port, R.I., Aug. 10, 1866 ; Burton H. Harrison to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York,,
Jan. 8, 1869; Sally Ruddel to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Dec. 31, 1866, TFP.
17 J. Alexander Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Karlsruhe, Sept. 27, 1865; John
Fulton to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Karlsruhe, Oct. 9, 1865; J. Alexander Tyler to>
638
Julia Tyler, Karlsruhe, Feb. 27, 1866; David Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner
Tyler, Karlsruhe, Apr. 5; Spring; June 6; Oct. 31, 1866, TFP.
18 John Fulton to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Karlsruhe, Oct. 9, 1865; J. Alexander
Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Karlsruhe, Sept. 27, 1865; May 24; Aug. 28; Sept. 6,
1866; J. Alexander Tyler to James A. Semple, Karlsruhe, June i, 1866; David
Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Karlsruhe, June 7; Oct. 31, 1866, TFP.
Alex calculated that he could stay on in Germany and complete his education for
$450 to $600 per year gold, including the cost of German-language tutors. Gardie
reckoned it at $600 if one wanted to "live like a gentleman"; $200 to $300 if one
lived like an "Italian artist or German student dragging out a miserable existence."
™ J. Alexander Tyler to Julia Tyler, Karlsruhe, Dec. 20, 1865; Feb. 27, 1866;
David Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Karlsruhe, Nov. 28; Dec. 14, 1865;
June 6; Sept. 17; June 7, 1866; Harry Beeckman to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Karls-
ruhe, Oct. 2, 1865; Jan. 24; 28; Feb. 25, 1866; Julia Gardiner Tyler to David
Gardiner and J. Alexander Tyler, New York, May 16, 1866; Julia Gardiner Tyler
to David Gardiner Tyler, Staten Island, Apr. 6, 1866; Bill from Mme. Gigon-
Russell to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, July 1866 (Julia customarily spent from.
$150 to $200 for a dress) ; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Julia Tyler, Willow Cottage,
Newport, R.I., Aug. 10, 1866, TFP.
20 David Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Karlsruhe, Nov. 21, 1865
(Gardie estimated that their total expenses in Karlsruhe came to about $100 gold
per month); June 25; Dec. 20, 1866; Harry Beeckman to Julia Tyler, Karlsruhe,
Dec. 13, 1865; Harry Beeckman to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Karlsruhe, June 2; July
21, 1866; John Fulton to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Karlsruhe, June 18, 1866; J.
Alexander Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Karlsruhe, Sept. 6, 1866. While Fulton was
conducting Harry to Bremen, Gardie and Alex moved into the home of Frau
Steinbach at No. 2 Stephanienstrasse, Karlsruhe. She charged them $300 gold each
for a year's room and board. The board was more than ample: "What would you
homefolks think of having two or three courses nearly every day at dinner," Gardie
asked. "Roast-beef, fish, veal; then fruits of different varieties, and often pies,
cakes and dough-nuts? I can just see the children's eyes open in mute wonderment,
as you read this to them Just think and ponder on that, ye eaters of salt-
codfish and cold potatoes!" J. Alexander Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Karlsruhe,
Sept. 6, 1866; David Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Karlsruhe, July n,
1867, TFP.
21 J. Alexander Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Karlsruhe, Sept. 27, 1865; David
Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Karlsruhe, Oct. 25, 1865; Oct. 31, 1866;
David Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner, Karlsruhe, Sept. 12, 1866, TFP.
23 For really quite pertinent comments on the Austro-Prussian, or Seven Weeks'
War of 1866, see David Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Karlsruhe, Apr.
20; June 7; 15; 18; 25; July 14, 1866; J. Alexander Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler,
Karlsruhe, June 13; July 9, 1866; Harry Beeckman to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Karls-
ruhe, July 21, 1866. "These Germans are a queer set," said Gardie in bewilderment
"Sunday is to them as any other day. They go to Church in the morning and to
the Theater at night. That is a mixing of Godliness and worldliness which I have
no great admiration for." David Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Karlsruhe,
n.d., TFP.
23 David Gardiner Tyler to Julia Tyler, Karlsruhe, June 12, 1867; David Gardi-
ner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Karlsruhe, Oct. 7; 19; Dec. 20, 1866; Harry
Beeckman to Julia Tyler, Karlsruhe, Oct. 19; Dec. 21, 1865; David Gardiner Tyler
to Julia Tyler, Karlsruhe, Nov. 22, 1865; J. Alexander Tyler to Julia Gardiner
Tyler, Karlsruhe, Sept. 6; Nov. 14, 1866, TFP.
24 Harry Beeckman to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Karlsruhe, Feb. 25, 1866; David
Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Karlsruhe, Apr. 5; June 15; 18, 1866; J.
639
Alexander Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Karlsruhe, Nov. 14, 1866. Among the
Confederate Americans in Karlsruhe in 1865-1866 were Bryan, Pickett, and Mac-
Creary, all sons of former Confederate Army officers. See Henry Beeckman to
Julia Gardiner Tyler, Karlsruhe, Dec. 6, 1865; David Gardiner Tyler to Julia
Gardiner Tyler, Karlsruhe, Sept. n, 1866, TFP.
25 David Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Karlsruhe, Oct. 25, 1865;
Apr. 4, 1867. For similar remarks, and others happily cheering their mother's 4-to-o
victory in the New York Supreme Court, see David Gardiner Tyler to Julia
Gardiner Tyler, Karlsruhe, Apr. 5, 1865; Jan. 10, 1866; Jan. 30; May 8, 1867; n.d.
[1866]; J. Alexander Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Karlsruhe, Dec. 20, 1865; J.
Alexander Tyler to James A. Semple, Karlsruhe, June i, 1866; Harry Beeckman
to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Karlsruhe, June 2, 1866, TFP.
28 David Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Karlsruhe, Dec. 26, 1865;
Feb. 14; n.d. [Feb.]; Apr. 30; June 15; July 14; Dec. 17, 1866; Jan. 17; Apr. 4,
1867; J. Alexander Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Karlsruhe, Dec. 20, 1865; July 9,
1866, TFP. The Negro school was sacked on March 22, 1867. President Lee promptly
expelled the student ringleader and placed his cohorts on disciplinary probation.
The story of the Yankee garrison's being turned out of Lexington was false. See
Preston, Lee: West Point and Lexington, 82-83.
27 David Gardiner Tyler to Julia Tyler, Karlsruhe, Feb. 27; July 18, 1866;
David Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Karlsruhe, Oct. 31, 1866; May 8;
July n, 1867; J. Alexander Tyler to James A. Semple, Karlsruhe, June i, 1866;
J. Alexander Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Karlsruhe, Oct. 2, 1867, TFP.
28 David Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Mar. 23,
1873; Julia Gardiner Tyler to , n.p., n.d. [Georgetown, D.C., Mar. 1873];
J. Alexander Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Karlsruhe, Feb. 24, 1869; Beau-
vais, France, Feb. 27, 1871; A. Baudman to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York,
Apr. 6, 1874; A. J. Mathewson to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Feb. 8, 1874;
David Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Apr. 9, 1874;
Alfred Schmidt, Consul General of Baden in New York, to Gen. Wilcox Barshaw,
New York, Nov. 17, 1868; David Gardiner Tyler to Julia Tyler, Lexington, Jan. 26,
1869; David Gardiner Tyler to Lachlan Tyler, Lexington, Feb. 5, 1869. While
languishing in a Karlsruhe jail in November 1868 for his debts, Alex would not
demean himself by begging a pardon from the Grand Duke of Baden. The Germans
were naturally embarrassed to have an American citizen in their prison but Alex
would not help them liquidate their problem. So he was released anyway. "I ap-
plaud his obstinacy/' Gardie told Julie, "and admire his pluck. . . . He's a glorious
fellow and worth a thousand of your milk-and-water men." For Alex's Franco-
Prussian War experience see J. Alexander Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Freiburg,
Saxony, Dec. 3, 1870; Beauvais, France, Feb. 27, 1871; Liancourt, France, Mar.
19, 1871; Lachlan Tyler to David Gardiner Tyler, Rochester, N.Y., Feb. 16, 1871;
David Gardiner Tyler to Lyon G. Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Mar. 4, 1871; Julia
Gardiner Tyler to Hon. William W. Belknap, n.p., n.d. [Georgetown, D.C., 1874] ;
Julia Gardiner Tyler to Hon. Hamilton Fish, n.p., n.d. [Georgetown, D.C., 1874].
In these 1874 draft letters to the Secretaries of War and State, in which Julia
was trying to get Alex a government job, Alex's Franco-Prussian War decora-
tion from the Kaiser was variously described as "a medal and ribbon for faith-
ful service" (to Fish) and as "a ribbon — a medal for gallantry" (to Belknap).
Since Alex apparently saw no combat, the "gallantry" award is highly unlikely.
Julia was constantly dunned for his German debts. In May 1872, when she had
little cash to spare, she learned that Alex had one debt for 346 florins, or about
$142, two years old, most of it for cigars alone. "How many a dollar here ends
in smoke," Gardie gasped in shock. See Veit and Nelson, Importers, to Julia Gardi-
ner Tyler, New York, May 20, 1872, TFP.
640
29 David Gardiner Tyler to J. Alexander Tyler, Staten Island, Jan. 15, 1868,
TFP. During his brief visit with his mother, Gardie reported to Alex that
"Lachlan has grown to be a big fellow, measuring five feet nine in his boots
Pearlie is going to be the belle of the family from present appearances. Julie is as
pretty as ever, and smashes the hearts of her admirers all to flinders." Actually
Julie was far from pretty. She had protruding eyes, a somewhat concave or "dish-
pan" face, and large, protruding ears. Her hair, a reddish brown, was, however,
quite beautiful.
30 David Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Lexington, Feb. 10, 1868. The
college faculty of twenty included Colonel William Preston Johnson, professor of
history and English literature, son of "that bravest of the brave," General Albert
Sidney Johnson. Ibid., Jan. 7, 1869; June 8; Oct. i, 1868; May 30; Feb. 20, 1869;
David Gardiner Tyler to Lyon G. Tyler, Lexington, Jan. 2, 1869; Washington Col-
lege, Grade Report for David Gardiner Tyler, Lexington, May 30, 1868, TFP.
Gardie estimated his college expenses at about $600 annually. Lee's tenure as Presi-
dent (1865-1870) and his status with the students is adequately discussed in
Preston, Lee: West Point and Lexington, 50—93.
31 David Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Sept. 1868;
Lexington, Mar. 4, 1869, TFP.
32 Ibid., June 27, 1868, TFP.
33 Ibid., Karlsruhe, Apr. 30; June 18, 1866; J. Alexander Tyler to Julia Gardi-
ner Tyler, Karlsruhe, May 24; June 18, 1866; James A. Semple to Julia Gardiner
Tyler, Albany, N.Y., Nov. 27, 1866; David Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler,
Richmond, Oct. 1869; Sherwood Forest, Dec. 2, 1870; Julia Gardiner Tyler to
Julia Tyler Spencer, Richmond, May 15, 1870; Harry Beeckman to Julia Gardi-
ner Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Feb. 16, 1870; Julia Gardiner Tyler to David Gardiner.
Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Feb. 25, 1870, TFP.
34 To put in 20 acres of wheat hi 1870, Gardie calculated the costs as follows:
25 bu. of seed wheat @ $1.50 bu., or $37.50; Negro farm laborers, $35.00; 2 tons
of guano, $148.00 cash. Total — $220.00. David Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner
Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Sept. 16; 19; n.d. [Sept.] ; Dec. 19, 1870. A good mule sold
for $175 in Charles City in 1870. In addition to these problems, one Sam Brown, a
local Negro minister, demanded, and got, $50 for some seed wheat he had sold
John C. Tyler in 1864 when John C. was managing the estate. Fearing another
suit against the plantation, Gardie paid the debt promptly. Lyon entered the Uni-
versity in February 1870. "Study hard and be a great man like Papa was and you
will astonish the world," Julia assured him. See Julia Gardiner Tyler to Lyon
[Lionel] Tyler, Tuscarora, N.Y., Apr. i, 1870, TFP.
85 David Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Mar. 8,
1871; Mar. 22; Dec. 9; 28, 1872. For legal action relative to the threatened forced
sale of Sherwood Forest in 1872 and the general financial plight of the family in
1870-1872, see Julia Gardiner Tyler to David Gardiner Tyler, Staten Island, Dec.
16, 1869; James A. Semple to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Tunstalls Station, New Kent
Co., Va., June 19, 1870; David Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Richmond,
Nov. 3, 1870; Sherwood Forest, May 6, 1872; Richmond, June 6, 1872; George
L. Christian, Clerk's Office, Supreme Court of Appeals, to David Gardiner Tyler,
Richmond, Jan. 30, 1872, TFP.
30 David Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Richmond, June 22; 12, 1870;
Sherwood Forest, Sept. 19, 1870; Richmond, Nov. 3, 1870; Sherwood Forest, Nov.
ii ; Dec. 19, 1870; James A. Semple to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New Kent Co., Va.,
Nov. 5, 1870, TFP. For the larger background of Reconstruction politics in Vir-
ginia, 1869-1870, see Hamilton J. Eckenrode, The Political History of Virginia
During the Reconstruction (Baltimore, 1904), 116—28.
37 Julia Gardiner Tyler to David Gardiner Tyler, Staten Island, Nov. 6, 1870;
641
New York, Nov. 15, 1871; Staten Island, Dec. 4, 1871; Rep. Henry A. Reeves
to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Washington, Apr. 7; 10, 1869; David Gardiner Tyler
to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Nov. 17, 1871, TFP.
38 Ibid., Nov. 17; Sept. 5, 1871; May 6; June 23; Nov. 7; 17, 1872; Julia
Gardiner Tyler to Lyon G. Tyler, Georgetown, Jan. 18, 1873, TFP; Roseboom,
A History of Presidential Elections, 222—34.
39 James Lyons to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Richmond, May i, 1873; David
Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Richmond, June 8, 1870, TFP; Frank
Leslie's Magazine, "Washington Items," Apr. 6, 1872 ; David Gardiner Tyler to
Julia Gardiner Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Mar. 3, 1872 ; Laura C. Holloway to Julia
Gardiner Tyler, Brooklyn, May 17, 1870; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Messrs. Samuel
Walker and Co., n.p., n.d. [1870]. (When Laura C. Holloway Langford's book ap-
peared in 1881 only two pages were devoted to Julia and these were studded with
factual errors. Julia made Holloway privy to an extensive autobiographical ac-
count of her life, detailed and correct, but the author could scarcely have employed
it in constructing her account of Julia.) Julia Gardiner Tyler to Gen. Michler, n.p.,
n.d. [Richmond, Aug. 1874] ; James Dailey, Office of Public Buildings and Grounds,
Washington, Aug. 29, 1874. On the Wise memoir of Tyler, to which Julia con-
tributed her own recollections, see Julia Gardiner Tyler to David Gardiner Tyler,
Staten Island, Oct. 30, 1869; Henry A. Wise to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Richmond,
Mar. 6, 1872; David Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Sherwood Forest,
Mar. 22, 1872, TFP. "In some way or other," Gardie confided to his mother, "his
book — entre nous strictly — grated. But on second thought I think we owe him
thanks for his vindication of Father. If there is brusqueness and a vein of egotism
running through it, we must remember that the style is but a true reflex of the
writer — and the truth and strength of the book redeems its faults." The Tylers were
particularly proud of Wise's unreconstructed postwar stand. He steadfastly refused
to take the amnesty oath and in so doing he forfeited his political and civil rights.
His third wife, Mary Elizabeth Lyons, was sister to Julia's good friend and legal
counselor James Lyons. Wise died in Richmond in 1876, age 70, still unrecon-
structed; still cursing the "damn Yankees." "They [Congress] have never been able
to bend or break his spirit," said Julia in admiration in October 1869. "He stands
like a rock."
40 William R. Cummings to Julia Gardiner Tyler, U.S. Internal Revenue, Long
Island City, N.Y., Jan. 21, 1870; Julia Gardiner Tyler to David Gardiner Tyler,
Staten Island, Dec. u, 1869; Nov. 16, 1870; Geneseo, N.Y., Sept. 20, 1870;
Julia Gardiner Tyler to Harry Beeckman, Staten Island, Nov. 28, 1871 ; ibid., I.O.U.
for $1000, Jan. 31, 1873; William Evarts to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Mar.
17, 1871; David Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Sherwood Forest, July 12;
Nov. 17, 1871. In 1872 Harry had an unrequited courtship with the niece of Abel P.
Upshur. See James A. Semple to David Gardiner Tyler, Waterloo [N.Y.], Aug. 13,
1872; Harry Beeckman to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Farmer's Rest [N.Y.], May 13;
Sept. 19, 1873, TFP.
tt David Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Lexington, Mar. 4, 1869;
William H. Spencer to Julia Tyler, n.p., n.d. [early June 1869] ; Mrs. John Tyler,
Wedding Invitation to Marriage of Julia Tyler to William H. Spencer, New York,
June 26, 1869; Card: Mr. and Mrs. William H. Spencer, At Home, Tuscarora,
[N.Y.], July 5, 1869; Julia Tyler Spencer to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Tuscarora, N.Y.,
Jan. 27, 1871; Phoebe Gardiner Horsford to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Cambridge,
Mass., May 10, 1871; Belle B. Chalmers to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, n.d.
[May 1871]. See Lachlan Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Mar. 15; Apr.
3, 1872; Feb. 8; 10, 1875; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Lyon G. Tyler, Staten Island,
May 13, 1872. For the subsequent unprofitable (for Julia) financial relations be-
tween Julia and the wandering Will Spencer, see Fimmer and Weill, Pawnbrokers,
to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Feb. 14, 1873 (Spencer had pawned Julie's
642
jewelry to these people) ; William Evarts to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Jan.
24, 1874; S. M. Barton and Co. to Julia Gardiner Tyler, San Francisco, July ig}
1875 (Spencer had used Julia's name as surety on personal notes for $200 without
her authorization) ; William H. Spencer to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Lone Pine Ranch,
Colorado, Feb. 12, 1875; Fort Collins, Colo., Aug. n, 1875, TFP ; John A.
Taylor, Lawyer, to David L. Gardiner, New York, Jan. 28, 1870, GPY. Julia
Tyler Spencer later married George Fleurot.
42 James L Roosevelt to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Mar. 16, 1872;
Lachlan Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Staten Island, Apr. 3, 1872 ; West New
Brighton, L.I., N.Y. School District No. 2 to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Tax Bill for
1871; Georgetown College to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Washington, Nov. 25, 1872;
Georgetown Academy of the Visitation to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Bill for First
Semester, 1872-1873 ; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Louise , Georgetown, D.C.,
Feb. 16, 1872, TFP. Pearlie's room, board, tuition, and books cost but $116 per
semester; Fitz's charges amounted to but $170 per semester.
43 James Lyons to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Richmond, May i, 1873; Julia Gardiner
Tyler to Lyon G. Tyler, Georgetown, Jan. 18, 1873; David Gardiner Tyler to Julia
Gardiner Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Jan. 19, 1873, TFP.
44 J. Selden to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Baltimore, Mar. 21, 1872; Lachlan Tyler
to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Georgetown, Mar. 30, 1872 ; David Gardiner Tyler to Julia
Gardiner Tyler, Sherwood Forest, May 12, 1872; Pearl Tyler to Julia Gardiner
Tyler, Georgetown, Mar. 14; Nov. 7, 1875; D. Anna Cook to Julia Gardiner Tyler,
Baltimore, Apr. 8; Nov. 27, 1872; Belle B. Chalmers to Julia Gardiner Tyler, n.p.,
n.d. [Nyack, N.Y., Apr. 1872]; May 10, 1872; Sister Loretto to Julia Gardiner
Tyler, Georgetown, Aug. 9, 1872; P. F. Healy to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Boston,
July 24; Aug. 8, 1872 ; John P. to JuHa Gardiner Tyler, New York, June 19,
1872; P. F. Healy to the Rev. Father Daubresse, Georgetown, May 20, 1872;
Mother Superior of the Convent of the Visitation to Julia Gardiner Tyler, George-
town, July 4, 1872 ; Betty B. WalthaU to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Tarboro, N.C., Jan.
15, 1874; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Lyon G. Tyler, Staten Island, May 13, 1872, TFP.
45 P. F. Healy to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Boston, Aug. 8, 1872; Phoebe Gardiner
Horsford to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Cambridge, Mass., Sept. i, 1872 ; Belle C.
Chalmers to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Nyack, N.Y., May 10; Nov. 12; Dec. 15, 1872;
David Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Dec. 9; May 12,
1872. For something of Julia's flirtation with spiritualism in 1871-1872, see Belle
B, Chalmers to Julia Gardiner Tyler, n.p., n.d. [Nyack, N.Y., 1871 or 1872]. A
clipping of William J. Venable's spiritualist poem, "Spirit Visitants," is found
carefully preserved in Julia's papers in TFP. Pearl Tyler Ellis (1860-1947) was a
"very mild" Roman Catholic. Julia Tyler Wilson to Robert Seager, Charlottesville,
Va., Aug. i, 1962.
M A. J. Mathewson and Son to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Apr. 3, 1872;
Dec. 19; July 19; Sept. 16, 1873; Mar. 24, 1877; Lachlan Tyler to Julia Gardiner
Tyler, New York, Sept. 24; Nov. 3; Dec. 10, 1873; David Gardiner Tyler to Julia
Gardiner Tyler, Sherwood Forest, June 13; Sept. 20; 21; Oct. 9, 1873; Thomas J.
Evans, Lawyer, to Julia Gardiner Tyler, July 15, 1873. A groceries and sundries bill
for $82.97 from W. D. Blair and Co., Richmond, could not be met at Sherwood
Forest in October 1873; similarly, a coal bill for $65.12 from C. W. Hunt and Co.,
Staten Island, could not be met at Castleton Hill in October 1873. These and ad-
ditional evidences of financial difficulty in 1873-1875 may be found in TFP, 1873-
1880, passim.
* Julia Gardiner Tyler to the Hon. William W. Belknap, n.p., n.d. [George-
town, 1874]; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Hamilton Fish, n.p., n.d. [Georgetown,
1874]; Julia Gardiner Tyler to , n.p., n.d. [Georgetown, Mar .-Apr. 1873];
William M. Evarts to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Apr. 5, 1873; Lachlan Tyler
to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Dec. 10, 1873; Staten Island, May 4;
643
Oct. 6, 1874; J. Alexander Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Staten Island, June 10;
Aug. 17, 1874, TFP.
48 Lachlan Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Sept. 29; 30; Oct. i; 6,
1874, TFP.
49 William M. Evarts to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Apr. 5; June 21 ; Dec.
26, 1873; Lachlan Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Oct. 8; Nov. 3, 1873;
Staten Island, May 4, 1874; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Hon. Peter Cooper, n.p.,
n.d. [1873]; Leonard Caryl to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, July 31, 1874;
Julia Gardiner Tyler to Leonard Caryl, Sherwood Forest, Aug. 10, 1874; David
Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Mar. 20; Apr. 14;
17; May 7; Oct. 9, 1874; Abbott and Sill to Mortimer Seaver, Geneseo, N.Y.,
Apr. 18, 1874; Harry Beeckman to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Farmer's Rest, N.Y.,
May 8, 1874; P. F. Healy to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Boston, May i, 1874; J.
Alexander Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Staten Island, June 10, 1874, TFP.
50 David Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Sept. 21,
1873; Apr. 6, 1876; Feb. 27, 1877; Mar. 21; Apr. 8, 1878; Lachlan Tyler to
Julia Gardiner Tyler, Jersey City, N.J., Jan. 6, [1877] ; Annie Baker Tyler to
Julia Gardiner Tyler, Memphis, Mar. 13, 1881; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Virginia
Parker, Sherwood Forest, Aug. 28, 1878, TFP. "I wish to give my little girl who
is only seven years suitable companionship and propose to take four or five other
little scholars into my family between the ages of six and ten," Julia told Miss
Parker, a friend of Priscilla in Bristol, Penna.
51 James A. Semple to David Gardiner Tyler, Waterloo, N.Y., Aug. 13, 1872;
David Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Sherwood Forest, June 13, 1873;
Apr. 3; 29; Oct. 9, 1874; Lachlan Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York,
Sept. 30, 1874; Madeleine Beeckman to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Cornwall, [N.Y.],
Aug. ii, 1875; Phoebe Gardiner Horsford to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Shelter Island,
Sept. 5, 1875; William M. Evarts to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Windsor, Vt, Aug. 28,
1875; William Cruikshank to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, Oct. 6, 1875; M. D.
Rockwell to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Elizabeth, N.J., Oct. 25, 1875, TFP; Interview
with J. Alfred Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Jan. 27, 1960; Will of Henry Gardiner
Beeckman, Nov. 20, 1869, GPY. Gilbert Beeckman's death also occurred in 1875.
52 Samuel Buell Gardiner (1815-1882) was the youngest of three sons (there
were also two daughters) of John Lyon Gardiner (1770-1816), seventh proprietor.
His oldest brother, David Johnson Gardiner (1804-1829) had served as eighth
proprietor. David Johnson Gardiner's death in 1829 brought in the second brother,
John Griswold Gardiner (1812-1861), the colorful and erratic ninth proprietor
mentioned in these pages. John's death by dissipation in 1861 brought Samuel
Buell Gardiner in as the tenth proprietor of Gardiners Island. He married (1837)
Mary Gardiner Thompson, his brother-in-law's sister. Their children were five,
Sarah Griswold Gardiner (1848—192-7) being the youngest. Sarah's blood rela-
tionship to her husband, Alex Tyler, was actually that of third cousin, Senator
David Gardiner, Julia's father, and Samuel Buell Gardiner having been first cousins.
For the courtship and marriage of J. Alexander Tyler and Sarah Griswold Gar-
diner, see Invitation to the Wedding of Sarah Griswold Gardiner to J. Alexander
Tyler, East Hampton, L.I., N.Y., August 5, 1875; David Gardiner Tyler to J. Alex-
ander Tyler, Staten Island, Jan. 15, 1868 ; Phoebe Gardiner Horsford to Julia Gar-
diner Tyler, Cambridge, Mass., Jan. 31, 1875; Shelter Island, Sept. 5, 1875; J.
Alexander Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, New York, June 7; 8, 1875; Sarah
Griswold Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, The Ebbitt, Washington, Aug.
13, 1875; Madeleine Beeckman to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Cornwall [N.Y.], Aug. n,
1875; Pearl Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Georgetown, Nov. 7, 1875; Samuel
Buell Gardiner to Sarah Griswold Gardiner Tyler, Albany, Feb. 13, 1876. Ironically,
when Sally was born on May 24, 1848, Julia had written Juliana: "To think of
Sam's wife having another, and a daughter. Suppose Sam should ever be a widower,
644
he would not be in much demand, would he?" Julia Gardiner Tyler to Juliana
Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, June n, 1848, TFP.
^Coralie Gardiner to Sarah Griswold Gardiner Tyler, East Hampton, June
23, 1876 ; E. G. Martston to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Providence, R.I., Feb. 23, 1879,
TFP; East Hampton Cemetery Records, East Hampton Free Library; Julia Tyler
Wilson to Robert Seager, Charlottesville, Va., Aug. i, 1962.
54 David Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Nov. 28,
1877; J. Alexander Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Feb. 27, 1878;
New York, Nov. 21, 1878; East Hampton, Jan. 20; Feb. 24, 1879; New York,
May 5, 1879; Rosebud Agency, Dakota Territory, Oct. 23; Nov. 6, 1879; Daniel
G. Major to J. Alexander Tyler, San Francisco, Mar. 22, 1878; Daniel G. Major
to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Utica, N.Y., May 13, 1879; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Daniel
G. Major, n.p., n.d. [Sherwood Forest, May 1879], TFP.
65 J. Alexander Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Durango, Colo., Oct. 3, 1881;
David Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Dec. 20, 1881;
Julia Gardiner Tyler to David Gardiner Tyler, Richmond, Apr. 18 [1884], TFP;
East Hampton Cemetery Records, East Hampton Free Library. See also dates and
inscriptions on the gravestones of J. Alexander Tyler (1848-1883), Sarah Griswold
Gardiner Tyler (1848-1927), Gardiner Tyler (1878-1892), and Lillian Gardiner
Horsford Tyler [Margraf] (1879-1918). Details of J. Alexander Tyler's death and
supporting documents are found in Margaret Gardiner Tyler Costello to Robert
Seager, Sahuarita, Ariz., Oct. 9, 1962.
^Lachlan Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Jersey City, N.J., June 9, 1877;
Sherwood Forest, Feb. 24; Mar. i, 1878; Washington, Oct. 15; Aug. 5,
1879; Julia Gardiner Tyler to William M. Evarts, n.p., n.d. [Sherwood Forest,
Feb.-Mar. 1878] ; P. F. Healy to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Georgetown College, Wash-
ington, Oct. 27, 1878, TFP.
5T James A. Semple to Julia Gardiner Tyler, York R.R., Feb. 15, 1879 ("I have
seen Mrs. Lincoln's application for means to live as befitting the widow of a Presi-
dent ; the woman is insane or a miser. ... I have known her for years and always
thought her very common and low in all her tastes and actions ") ; Julia Gar-
diner Tyler to William M. Evarts, n.p., n.d. [Sherwood Forest, Feb.-Mar. 1879;
Dec. i879-Jan. 1880] ; A. F. Posey to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Greenville, Ala.,
Apr. 13, 1878; Julia Gardiner Tyler to Rep. John Goode, n.p., n.d. [Sherwood
Forest, Jan.; Apr. 7, 1880]; Julia Gardiner Tyler to A. H. Stevens, n.p., n.d.
[Sherwood Forest, Jan.-Mar. 1880], TFP.
58 Julia Gardiner Tyler to James Lyons, n.p., n.d. [Sherwood Forest, Apr. 1880] ;
Julia Gardiner Tyler to Sen. Robert E. Withers, Sherwood Forest, Jan. 31, 1880;
Sen. Robert E. Withers to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Washington, Feb. 7, 1880 (copy
in Julia's handwriting) ; Rep. John Goode to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Washington,
Apr. 15 [1880], TFP.
58 Julia Gardiner Tyler, A Petition to the Senate and House of Representatives,
n.p., n.d. [Sherwood Forest, 1879], TFP.
80 "A Lady Subscriber" [Julia Gardiner Tyler] to the Editor, Washington Post,
n.p., n.d. [Sherwood Forest, Oct. 1881]; Lachlan Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler,
Washington, Apr. 27; 29, 1882; M. D. R. to Julia Gardiner Tyler, % E. G. Hart-
shorn, Newport, R.I., n.p., June 5, 1882, TFP; Kane, Facts About the Presidents,
398-99; Julia Tyler Wilson to Robert Seager, Charlottesville, Aug. i, 1962.
61 David Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Oct. 2; 8,
1873; Oct. 3, 1875; Samuel Buell Gardiner to Julia Gardiner Tyler, East Hampton,
Dec. $, 1875, TFP.
^Roseboom, A History of Presidential Elections, 243-49.
63 David Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Sherwood Forest, Feb. n; 22 ;
27; Mar. 7; 21, 1877, TFP.
04 David Gardiner Tyler to Pearl Tyler, Sherwood Forest, May 15, 1880; David
645
Gardiner Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Sherwood Forest, July 28, 1881; Lach-
lan Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, Washington, Mar. 7, 1880; Julia Gardiner
Tyler to Annie Ellis, Shawsville, Montgomery Co., Va., July 27, 1886, TFP.
Lonie returned to Virginia in 1881 from Memphis, determined to abandon teaching
and study law. This he did in 1882-1883, combining it with work on the Tyler
biography. He practiced law in Richmond for several years, but in 1886 he
drifted back into teaching at William and Mary although his mother reported
Mm at the time as having "an intense distaste for teaching in any form."
65 Ibid.
66Lyon G. Tyler to David L. Gardiner, Sherwood Forest, July 25, 1882;
Richmond, Jan. 16; Aug. 13, 1883, TFP. The papers David Lyon controlled
in 1882 were given to Yale University Library by his grandniece, Alexandria Gar-
diner Creel, in 1959. Lyon G. Tyler saw only a handful of them when he was pre-
paring his study.
67 Sarah D. Thompson to Sarah Thompson Gardiner, New York, Mar. 9, 1877;
William Cruikshank to David L. Gardiner, New York, July 30; Aug. 8, 1883;
Feb. 9, 1881; May 29, 1882; Oct. 8; 22; Dec. i, 1883; Jan. 31, 1884; Oct. 13,
1885; Nov. 9, 1886; Frederick Thompson to David L. Gardiner, New York,
Mar. 15, 1884; Francis H. Lee to David L. Gardiner, Petersham, Mass., July
14, 1885; John R. Bleeker to David L. Gardiner, New York, Dec. 4, 1878;
Dec. 2, 1884; Jan. 2; Oct. 6, Nov. 18; Dec. 24, 1886; Jan. 8, 1887; Jonathan T.
Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, East Hampton, Oct. 4, 1888, GPY.
68 David L. Gardiner to Curtiss C. Gardiner, New Haven, Conn., Jan. 16,
1885; Curtiss C. Gardiner to David L. Gardiner, St. Louis, Mo., Jan. 19, 1885;
Martha J. Lamb to David Lyon Gardiner, New York, Jan. 3; Mar. 15, 1885, GPY.
In his later years David Lyon changed the Lyon to "Lion," and this spelling ap-
pears on his ostentatious tomb at East Hampton with the inscription: Beati mundo
corde quoniam ipsi deum mdebunt.
60 Julia Tyler Wilson to Robert Seager, Charlottesville, Va., Aug. i, 1962. For
details of Julia's death, funeral, and burial, see Richmond Dispatch, July n;
12; 13, 1889; Richmond State, July u; 12, 1889.
646
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A. Manuscript Sources
Henry Clay Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
John Clopton Papers, Duke University Library, Durham, N.C.
John J. Crittenden Papers, Duke University Library, Durham, N.C.
East Hampton Cemetery Records, East Hampton Free Library, East Hampton,
N.Y.
Philip Richard Fendall Papers, Duke University Library, Durham, N.C.
Gardiner Family Papers, Yale University Library, New Haven, Conn.
Gardiner Papers, Long Island Collection, East Hampton Free Library, East
Hampton, N.Y.
James Iredell (Sr. and Jr.) Papers, Duke University Library, Durham, N.C.
Pequot Collection, Yale University Library, New Haven, Conn.
James Henry Rochelle Papers, Duke University Library, Durham, N.C.
John Rutherfoord Papers, Duke University Library, Durham, N.C.
William Patterson Smith Papers, Duke University Library, Durham, N.C.
John Tyler Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
John Tyler Papers, Duke University Library, Durham, N.C.
Tyler Collection, Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Va.
Tyler Collection, William and Mary College Library, Williamsburg, Va.
Tyler Family Papers, scattered; copies in possession of Author.
B. Tyler-Gardiner Primary Sources
i. BOOKS
Abbott, Benjamin V. and Abbott, Austin (comps.), Abbott's Practice Re-
ports, New Series, Vol. IV and Vol. V of Reports of Practice Cases Deter-
mined in the state of New York. Albany, N.Y., 1869. (Briefs and deposi-
tions in Tyler vs. Gardiner).
Congressional Debates, Vol. VIII, 1831-1832. Washington, 1832.
Gardiner, Alexander, Princeton Diary, 1834-1838. Gardiner Papers, Yale Uni-
versity.
Gardiner, Curtiss C. (ed.), The Papers and Biography of Lion Gardiner.
St. Louis, 1883.
Gardiner, Sarah D. (ed.), Margaret Gardiner, Leaves from a Young Girl's
Diary, 1840-1841. Privately published, 1926.
Journal of the Senate of the State of New York, 1824-1827. Albany, N.Y.,
1825-1828.
Journal of the Virginia House of Delegates, 1823-1824. Richmond, Va.,
1825.
Richardson, James D. (comp.), A Compilation of the Messages and Papers
of the Presidents. Vol. IV, 1841-1849. Washington, 1902.
Tiffany, John (comp.), Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Court
of Appeals of the State of New York. Vol. VIII. Albany, N.Y., 1867.
(Briefs and depositions in Tyler vs. Gardiner).
Tyler, Lyon Gardiner, Letters and Times of the Tylers. 3 vols. Richmond,
Va., 1884; 1894.
Tyler, Robert, Poems. Richmond, Va., 1839.
, Ahasuerus. A Poem. Richmond, Va., 1842.
, Death; or Medorus' Dream. Richmond, Va., 1843.
647
2. ARTICLES AND PAMPHLETS
Anon., "Interview with Julia Gardiner Tyler," Washington, n.d. [Winter
1888-1889], Philadelphia Press, July u, 1889; reprinted in Richmond
Dispatch, July 12, 1889.
Gardiner, David Lyon, "Extract of a Letter Dated San Francisco, June 15,
1849," New York Journal of Commerce, Aug. 14, 1849.
Gotlieb, Howard and Grimes, Gail, "President Tyler and the Gardiners: A
New Portrait," Yale University Library Gazette, XXXIV (July 1959).
Knox, Sanka, "A Tyler Letter, New York Times, Dec. 7, 1958.
Noah, Mordecai M. [pseud. "Horace Walpole"], "Reminiscences and Random
Recollections of the Tyler Administration," New York Sunday Dispatch,
Dec. 1845 to May 1846.
Tyler, John, "Early Times of Virginia — William and Mary College," De Bow's
Review, XXVHI (August 1859).
, An Address Delivered Before the Literary Societies of the Univer-
sity of Virginia on the Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence
by the State of Virginia, June 20, 1850. Charlottesville, Va., 1850.
, Lecture Delivered Before the Maryland Institute . . . Baltimore, Md.,
March 20, 1855. Richmond, 1855.
, Miscellaneous Tyler Letters. Tyler's Quarterly Historical and Genealogi-
cal Magazine, II (October 1920) ; VII (October 1925) ; VIII (July 1926) ;
VIII (January 1927) ; XI (April 1930) ; XII (October 1930) ; XII (Janu-
ary 1931) ; XIII (October 1931) ; William and Mary College Quarterly
Historical Magazine, XII (October 1903) ; XVII (July 1935)-
-, Speech Delivered March 13, 1861, in the Virginia State Convention.
Richmond, 1861.
Tyler, John, Jr. [pseud. "Python"!, "The History of the Party, and the Po-
litical Status of John Tyler," De Bow's Review, XXVI (March 1859).
, [pseud. "Tau"], "The Relative Status of the North and the South,"
De Bow's Review, XXVII (July 1859).
Tyler, Julia Gardiner, "To the Duchess of Sutherland and the Ladies of
England," Southern Literary Messenger, XIX (February 1853).
, "Reminiscences," Cincinnati Graphic News, June 25, 1887; reprinted
in Richmond Dispatch, July 21, 1889.
Tyler, Lyon G. (ed.), "Correspondence of Judge N. B. Tucker," William and
Mary College Quarterly Historical Magazine, XII (January 1904).
(ed.), "Will and Inventory of Hon. John Tyler," William and Mary
College Quarterly Historical Magazine, XVII (April 1909).
(ed.), "Some Letters of Tyler, Calhoun, Polk, Murphy, Houston and
Donelson," Tyler's Quarterly Historical and Genealogical Magazine, VI
(April 1925); VII (July 1925).
, John Tyler and Abraham Lincoln. Richmond, 1927.
, "John Tyler and the Vice Presidency," Tyler's Quarterly Historical
and Genealogical Magazine, IX (October 1927).
(ed.), "Letters from Tyler Trunks, Sherwood Forest, Virginia. Political
Letters, 1832-1834," Tyler's Quarterly Historical and Genealogical Maga-
zine, XVII (January 1936).
Tyler, Robert, A Reply to the Democratic Review. New York, April 1845.
C. Newspapers
New York American
New York Aurora
New York Courier and Enquirer
648
New York Daily Plebeian
New York Democrat
New York Evening Express
New York Herald
New York Journal of Commerce
New York Morning News
New York Post
New York Sunday Dispatch
New York Tribune
New York World
Niks' Weekly Register
Philadelphia Pennsylvanian
Philadelphia Truth-Teller
Richmond, Va. Dispatch
Richmond, Va. Enquirer
Richmond, Va. Times
Washington Globe
Washington Madisonian
Washington Union
D. Tyler-Gardiner Secondary Sources
i. BOOKS
Abell, A. G., Life of John Tyler. New York, 1844.
Auchampaugh, Philip G., Robert Tyler: Southern Rights Champion f 1847-
1866. Duluth, Minn., 1934.
Chitwood, Oliver P., John Tyler: Champion of the Old South. New York,
1939-
Coleman, Elizabeth Tyler, Priscilla Cooper Tyler and the American Scene f
1816-1889. University, Ala., 1955.
Cronin, John W., A Bibliography of John Tyler. New York, 1935.
Gumming, Hiram, The Secret History of the Perfidies, Intrigues, and Corrup-
tions of the Tyler Dynasty. New York, 1845.
EEett, Katherine Tyler, Young John Tyler. Richmond, 1957.
Gardiner, Curtiss C., Lion Gardiner and His Descendants. St. Louis, 1890.
Gardiner, David, Chronicle of the Town of East Hampton, County of Suffolk,
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Gardiner, John Lion, The Gardiners of Gardiners Island. East Hampton,
N.Y., 1927.
Gardiner, Lion, Relation of the Pequot Wars. East Hampton, N.Y., 1660.
Gardiner, Sarah D., Early Memories of Gardiners Island. East Hampton,
N.Y., 1947.
Ireland, Joseph N., A Memoir of the Professional Life of Thomas Abthorpe
Cooper. New York, 1888.
Lambert, Oscar D., Presidential Politics in the United States, 1841—1844.
Durham, N.C., 1936.
Marx, Rudolph, The Health of the Presidents. New York, 1960.
Morgan, Robert J., A Whig Embattled: The Presidency under John Tyler.
Lincoln, Neb., 1954.
Payne, Pierre S. R., The Island. New York, 1958.
Perling, J. J., The President Takes A Wife. Middleburg, Va., 1959. (Fiction)
Reeves, Jesse S., American Diplomacy under Tyler and Polk. Baltimore, 1907.
Tyler, Lyon G., Letters and Times of the Tylers. 3 vols. Richmond, 1884; 1894.
649
-, Parties and Patronage in the United States. New York, 1891.
Wise, Henry A., Seven Decades of the Union. Illustrated by a Memoir of
John Tyler. Philadelphia, 1881.
ARTICLES AND PAMPHLETS
Anon., A Defense oj the President Against the Attacks of Mr. Botts and the
Clay Party. N.p., n.d. [Washington, 1842].
, Brief Sketch of the Life of John Tyler. N.p., n.d. [1842].
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The Andouer Husking: A Political Tale Suited to the Circumstances
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Anti-Jtmius [pseud.], Who and What Is John Tyler? New York, 1843.
Auchampaugh, Philip G., "John W. Forney, Robert Tyler and James Bu-
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(October 1933).
Bowers, Claude C., John Tyler: An Address at the Unveiling of the Bust of
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Bradshaw, Herbert C., "A President's Bride of 'Sherwood Forest,7 " Virginia
Cavalcade, VII (Spring, 1958).
Dorsey, John L., Observations on the Political Character and Services of
President Tyler and His Cabinet. Washington, 1841.
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Gardiner, Sarah D., The Gardiner Manor. Baltimore, 1916.
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Address at the Dedication of the Monument Erected by Congress in
Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond, Va., in Memory of President Tyler, Oct.
12, i pi 5. Richmond, 1915.
Kennedy, J. P., Defense of the Whigs. New York, 1844.
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1961-62).
Rives, Ralph H., "The Jamestown Celebration of "1857," The Virginia maga-
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Genealogical Magazine, VI (October 1924).
JE. General Studies and Related Monographic Works
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New York, 1906.
650
Alexander, Holmes, The American Talleyrand. New York, 1935.
Allen, Hervey, "Special Biographical Introduction," in The Works of Edgar
Allan Poe. New York, 1927.
Ambler, Charles EL, Thomas Ritchie: A Study in Virginia Politics. Richmond,
1913.
American and Foreign Anti-Slave Society, The Fugitive Slave Bill: Its History
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Auchampaugh, Philip G., James Buchanan and His Cabinet on the Eve of
Secession. Lancaster, Pa., 1926.
Bacourt, Chevalier de, Souvenirs of a Diplomat. New York, 1885.
Ballagh, James C., A History of Slavery in Virginia. Baltimore, 1902.
Barnes, Gilbert H., The Antislavery Impulse, 1830-1844. New York, 1933.
Barnes, T. W., Memoirs of Thurlow Weed. 2 vols. Boston, 1884.
Bassett, J. S., Life of Andrew Jackson. New York, 1928.
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, John Quincy Adams and the Union. New York, 1956.
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, Thirty Years View. 2 vols. New York, 1889.
Billington, Ray, The Protestant Crusade, 1800—1860. New York, 1938.
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1916.
Bowers, Claude C., The Party Battles of the Jackson Period. Boston, 1928.
Bradsher, Earl L., Matthew Carey, Editor, Author, Publisher. New York, 1912.
Brown, W. Burlie, The People's Choice; The Presidential Image in the Campaign
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Bruce, W. C., John Randolph of Roanoke. 2 vols. New York, 1922.
Burnam, W. Dean, Presidential Ballots, 1836—1802. Baltimore, 1955.
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1932.
Capers, Gerald M., Stephen A. Douglas. Boston, 1959.
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1871.
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Curtis, George T., Life of Daniel Webster. 2 vols. New York, 1870.
651
Dangerfield, George, The Era of Good Feelings. New York, 1952.
Davis, Varina, Jefferson Davis, A Memoir. New York, 1890.
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Ann Arbor, 1939.
, The Secession Movement, 1860-1861. New York, 1931.
Eckenrode, Hamilton J., The Political History of Virginia During the Recon-
struction. Baltimore, 1904.
Ellet, E. F.} Court Circles of the Republic. Hartford, 1869.
Elliott, Charles W., Winfield Scott. New York, 1937.
Farrar, Emmie F., Old Virginia Houses Along the James. New York, 1957.
Filler, Louis, The Crusade Against Slavery, 1830-1860. New York, 1960.
Fitzpatrick, J. C. (ed.)5 Martin Van Buren, Autobiography. Washington,
1920.
Fleming, Walter L., Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama. Cleveland, 1911.
Foote, H. S., A Casket of Reminiscences. Washington, 1874.
Fox, Dixon R., The Decline of the Aristocracy in the Politics of New York. New
York, 1919.
Fraser, Hugh R., Democracy in the Making: The Jackson-Tyler Era. In-
dianapolis, 1938.
Fuess, Claude M., The Life of Caleb Gushing. 2 vols. New York, 1923.
Furman, Bess, White House Profile. Indianapolis, 1951.
Garraty, John A., Silas Wright. New York, 1949.
Glover, Gilbert C., Immediate Pre-Civil War Compromise Efforts. Nashville,
1934-
Goebel, Dorothy B., William Henry Harrison. Indianapolis, 1926.
Going, David B., David Wilmot, Free-Softer. New York, 1924.
Go van, Thomas P., Nicholas Biddle. Chicago, 1959.
Graebner, Norman A., Empire on the Pacific. New York, 1955.
Gray, Wood, The Hidden Civil War: The Story of the Copperheads. New York,
1942.
Greeley, Horace, Recollections of a Busy Life. New York, 1868.
Green, Constance M., Washington: Village and Capital, 1800-1873. Princeton,
N.J., 1962.
Green, Deran, Old Houses on Radcliff Street. Bristol, Pa., 1938.
, A History of Bristol Borough. Bristol, Pa., 1911.
Gunderson, Robert G., Old Gentlemen's Convention: The Washington Peace
Conference of 1861. Madison, Wis., 1961.
, The Log Cabin Campaign. Lexington, Ky., 1957.
Hamilton, Holman, Zachary Taylor, Soldier in the White House. Indianapolis,
1951-
Hammand, Jabez D., Life and Times of Silas Wright. Syracuse, N.Y., 1848.
Hammond, Bray, Banks and Politics in America. Princeton, N.J., 1957.
Harvey, Peter, Reminiscences and Anecdotes of Daniel Webster. Boston, 1890.
Haskell, Daniel C., The United States Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842, and Its
Publications, 1844-1874. New York, 1942.
Hesseltine, William B., The Rise and Fall of Third Parties. Washington, 1948.
Hill, Joseph J., The History of Warner's Ranch and Its Environs. Los Angeles,
1927.
Hofstadter, Richard M., The American Political Tradition and the Men Who
Made It. New York, 1949.
Hopkins, James H., Political Parties in the United States. New York, 1900.
652
Houston, David F., A Critical Study of Nullification in South Carolina. Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1896.
James, Marquis, Andrew Jackson, Portrait of a President. Indianapolis, 1937.
Jones, John B., A Rebel War Clerk's Diary. Philadelphia, 1866.
Kane, Joseph N., Facts about the Presidents. New York, 1959.
Kennedy, John F., Profiles in Courage. New York, 1956.
Klein, Philip S., President James Buchanan. University Park, Pa., 1962.
Langford, Laura Hollo way, The Ladies of the White House. Philadelphia, 1881.
Levin, Peter R., Seven By Chance: The Accidental Presidents. New York, 1948.
Lynch, Jeremiah, Life of David C. Broderick. New York, 1911.
McCarthy, Charles, The Antimasonic Party, 1827-1840. Washington, 1903.
McCormac, Eugene I., James K. Polk. Berkeley, 1922.
McGrane, R. C. (ed.), Correspondence of Nicholas Biddle Dealing with National
Affairs. Boston, 1919.
Meyer, L. W., Life and Times of Col. Richard M. Johnson, New York, 1932.
Moore, Frank (ed.), The Rebellion Record: A Diary of American Events. 3 vols.
New York, 1862.
Morris, Richard B. (ed.), Alexander Hamilton and the Founding of the Nation.
New York, 1957.
Myers, Gustavus, History of Tammany HalL New York, 1901.
Nevins, Allan, Ordeal of the Union. 2 vols. New York, 1947.
- (ed.), The Diary of Philip Hone. 2 vols. New York, 1927.
- and Thomas, Milton H. (eds.), The Diary of George Templeton Strong.
3 vols. New York, 1952.
Nichols, Alice, Bleeding Kansas. New York, 1954.
Nichols, Roy F., Franklin Pierce. Philadelphia, 1958.
- , The Disruption of American Democracy. New York, 1948.
- , The Stakes of Power, 1845-1877. New York, 1961.
Nicolay, John G. and Hay, John, (eds.), The Complete Works of Abraham Lin-
coln. 12 vols. New York, 1905.
Overdyke, W. D., The Know-Nothing Party in the South. Baton Rouge, La.,
1950.
Paul, James C. N., Rift in the Democracy. Philadelphia, 1951.
Pelletreau, William S., History of East Hampton Town. New York, 1882.
Phillips, Mary E., Edgar Allan Poe — the Man. 2 vols. Philadelphia, 1926.
Poage, George R., Henry Clay and the Whig Party. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1936.
Pond, George E., The Shenandoah Valley in 1864. New York, 1883.
Poore, Benjamin Perley, Reminiscences. 2 vols. New York, 1886.
Porter, Charles H., "The Operations of Generals Sigel and Hunter in the
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Rayback, Robert J., Millard Fillmore. Buffalo, N.Y., 1959.
Remini, Robert V., Martin Van Buren and the Making of the Democratic Party.
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Sargent, Nathan, Public Men and Events. 2 vols. Philadelphia, 1875.
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654
INDEX
Abell, A. G., 226; Life of John Tyler,
226; patronage appointment, 589
Abolitionists, 104-105, 302 ; in Dem-
ocratic Party, 394; reaction to
Fugitive Slave Act, 396; James
Hamlet case and, 398-400; English,
404; John Brown's trial, 428-430;
1860 election, 439—441
Adams, John Quincy, 25, 74, 142, 167,
170; nationalism, 79; "Corrupt Bar-
gain" charge, 82; renomination, 82
Adams-Onis Treaty with Spain, 214
African Colonization Society, 109
African slave trade, 433—434
Agrarianism vs. capitalism, 66
Aiken, Gen. H. K., 485
Alabama, 446, 448
Albany Regency, 227-228, 266, 278
Allen, William Gaston, 637-638»
Ambrister, Robert C., 67-68
American and Foreign Anti-Slavery
Society, 398, 400
American Missionary Society, 516
American Party, 410, 413
American Colonization Society, 404
American System, 62-63, no; national
economic self-sufficiency and, 63;
Tyler's opposition, 65-66, 71, So, 85;
Adams and, 74-75
Anderson, Major Robert, 455
Animals, Tyler's fondness for, 305-306,
357, 593«, 6o4rc
Annapolis (Md.) Convention, 51
Anti-Masons, 109, 117
Appointment power of Presidents, 83-
85
Appomattox (Va.) battle, 507-508
Arbuthnot, Alexander, 67
Arbuthnot, British Admiral Marriot, 22
Arkansas, 451
Articles of Confederation, 51
Ashburton, Lord, 175, 322-323
Assembly balls in Washington, 191-192
Astor family, 354, 366
Atwood, Henry C.; entertains Tyler,
592, 597-598
Bacourt, Chevalier de, 175
Badger, George E., 143
Bailey, J. J., 14, 197
Baldwin, Judge Henry, 189, 198
Baldwin, John B., 462
Baltimore, Md., Convention of 1835,
118; depression of 1837, 129; nominat-
ing conventions, 218-219; 1844 Demo-
cratic Convention, 228-229; Demo-
cratic Convention of 1848, 392; 1852
Democratic Convention, 401 ; Demo-
cratic Convention of 1860, 438
Bancroft, George, 305, 317
Bank crisis of 1841, 151-156
Bank of the United States, 425; first,
54-55; chartered by Congress, 55;
second, 63-64, 65, 88; charter re-
newal in 1832, 88-89 > investigations
of, 88, in; Jackson's veto message,
89; government deposits removed
by Jackson, 97-101; Tyler disliked,
88, 97-98; campaign of 1840, 137-
139
Bankruptcy Act of 1842, 169-170,
i§3
Banks, N. P., 411
Banks, Sir Thomas, 18
Banks and banking; Fiscal Corporation
Bill, I57-IS9
(See also Bank of the United States;
National Bank question)
Barnard, Daniel D., 579
Barnum, P. T., 354
Barston, Capt. Wilson, 477-478
Bayard, Caroline, 255
Bayard, James A., 438-439
Bayard, Richard H., 579
Bayley, Thomas H., 323
Beach, Moses Y., 45
Bean, Major Benjamin W., 376-377,
380, 382, 6i6w
Beauregard, General P. G. T., 462, 497
Bedell, Dr. Gregory Thurston, i, 4, 242,
346, 388
Beeckman, Catherine Livingston, 343-
344
6ss
Beeckman, Gilbert, 343-344, 34&~347>
348-349, 524, 611; desire for patron-
age appointment, 347; letters about
Sacramento, Calif., 375-376
Beeckman, Henry Gardiner ("Harry") ,
348, 418, 421, 428, 442-443> 466,
480, 485, 497, 6nn, 642*1; inheri-
tance from grandmother, 502 ; edu-
cation in Germany, 512, 523-530;
indiscretion hi money matters, 524-
525; decline and death of, 536, 543-
544
Beeckman, John H., 254, 329, 343-348,
420; family background, 344-345;
death, 346, 348, 378, 617**; financial
position, 375, 379-380; California
experiences, 376-380, 6i6n; es-
tate of, 378-380, 389
Beeckman, Margaret Foster, 6n«
Beeckman, Margaret Gardiner; on
Tyler-Julia Gardiner age difference,
14, $$8n; recollective powers, 183,
579«; low opinion of Tyler's poetry,
198, 581*1; marriage, 346; birth of
son, 348 ; return to Lafayette Place
house, 375; death of husband, 379;
death of Alexander, 388-389, 6i9»;
on Julia's health, 403 ; on Buchanan,
412; vacations with the Tylers,
418-419; Julia's attempt at match-
making, 419; death, 420-421, 623*1;
laments loss of franking privilege,
601— 6o2M
(See also Gardiner, Margaret)
Bell, John, 143, 439, 441, 445
Benton, Thomas Hart, 101, no— in,
156, 185, 205, 282
Bermuda during the Civil War, 482-
484, 499
Bertrand, Henri, 175-176
Biddle, Nicholas, 88, 97-98, in
Big Bethel (Va.), battle, 468
Bill of Rights, 52
Bills, passed over Presidential veto,
283
Biographies of Tyler, 226, 320, 536,
589%, 642 n; Secret History of the
Tyler Dynasty (Gumming), 226, 320,
589*1; Tyler's plan for, 424
Birney, James G., 239-240
"Black Republicans," 412, 426, 428, 434,
436
(See also Republican Party)
Blair, Francis P., 83, 191, 220-221, 237,
264, 3i5
656
Bleeker, John, 384-386, 390; political
aspirations, 386
Blockade during Civil War, 482-483,
487
Bodine, Polly, $
Bodisco, Russian Ambassador, Count de,
193
Bodisco, Madame de, 42, 177, 263, 581*8
Bogert and Mecamly, 35
Bolton, Commodore William C., n, 558
Border states, 448—449
Boston, Massachusetts, depression of
1837, 129; Civil War causes and, 430-
43i
Boston (Mass.) Times, 405
Botts, Alexander L., 272
Botts, John Minor, 154-157, 169; at-
tacks Tyler, 138, 573*1
Botts Compromise, 154
Bouck, William C., 220-221, 270
Boycott of Northern textiles, 431
Brazoria (Tex.) pitcher given to Tyler,
322
Breckinridge, John C., 440-441, 445;
Vice-Presidential nomination, 411-
412 ; in command of Confederate
troops, 494, 496, 525
Brent, Richard, 55-56
Brockenbrough, John W., 450, 457
Broderick, David H., 238, 280; patron-
age appointment, 59 2«, 599-600*1
Brooklyn, New York, 271 ; patronage
appointments at Navy Yard, 285-
286; Christ Church, 349; Gardiner
family resides in, 389
Brooklyn, USS, 452
Brooklyn (N.Y.) Daily News, 36
Brooklyn (N.Y.) Eagle, 553
Brooks, James, 385
Brougham, Lord, 321
Brown, B. G., 535
Brown, Gustavus, 398
Brown, John, 428-432; raid at Harpers
Ferry, 417, 428-432
Brown, Mary, 398
Brown, Thompson S., 342
Bruen, James, 342-343
Brumley, Eliza Gardiner, 30, 561-562
Brumley, Reuben, 561-562
Buchan, Sir John, 38, 450
Buchanan, President James, 156, 180,
iSS, 3i8, 355, 452, 455, 458, 465, 580-
58 1«; Baltimore Convention of 1848,
392; quest for Democracy's nomina-
tion in 1852, 400 j Robert Tyler
worked for nomination of, 401 ; Am-
bassador to England, 402, 406 ; ad-
ministration, 410, 414; nomination
in 1856, 411-412; Tyler supported,
411; platform, 411-412; election
of, 413-415 ; patronage appointments,
414-416; Cabinet, 415; sent troops
to Harpers Ferry, 428; renomination
possibility, 436; pacification pro-
posals of 1860, 447 ; role in seces-
sion, 448; aid offered Robert
Tyler, 517
Budget, national, 166
Bull Run (Va.) battles, 469, 477
Bulwer, Sir Henry Lytton and Lady, 352
Bunker Hill monument, 200, 227
Butler, Benjamin F., 37
Butler, Gen. Benjamin, 488-493, 497
Butler, William O., 392
Butteville (Calif.) land speculation,
377-378, 38o
Cabinets, 1841, 164; Tyler's, 393;
resignation of, 160-161, 393 ; Bu-
chanan, 415
Calhoun, John C., 8, 22, 74, 94, 156,
272, 324, 426; Vice-Presidential can-
didate, 75, 82 ; States' rights advo-
cate, 82, 87 ; break with Jackson,
87 ; resignation from Vice-Presidency,
90; on nullification and secession,
92-96; compromise tariff settle-
ment, 95-96; "South Carolina
Exposition and Protest," 96; mem-
ber of Whig coalition, 117; political
talks with Sen. David Gardiner,
184-185, 579w; slavery views,
215; appointed Secretary of State,
217-218 ; Texas treaty vote, 229 ; social
affairs, 246 ; takes credit for Texas an-
nexation, 324-325
Calhoun, Floride, 87
"Calico Balls," 431
California, 521; admittance to Union,
326, 393j 407; annexation plan, 210-
212; gold mining, 381; merchandis-
ing 381, 383; slavery question,
393
California gold rush, 345-346, 373-386;
announced by Polk, 373; gold fever,
373-374; John H. Beeckman, 373-
380 ; David Lyon Gardiner, 381-
386; real estate speculations, 382-
386
Campaigns, Presidential, of 1840,
135-140; of 1844, 237-40, 266, 280,
312; of 1852, 401-402; of 1856, 426
(See also Elections)
Campbell, Allan, 517, 541, 606, 628-
629, 637
Campbell, John L., 483
Campbell, Julia Cooper, 465, 606, 628-
629, 637
Canada, Confederacy efforts conducted
from, 518
Canott, Charles H., 584
Carlisle, Countess of, 403
Carpetbaggers, 530, 535
Carr, Thomas N., 239
Casey, Samuel, 362, 365, 367-368
Caseyville, Kentucky, coal and timber
land, 296, 361-372; attempts to sell,
362-365, 372; mineral survey, 362-
363 ; land purchased by Tyler,
362 ; Tyler- Gardiner partnership
to develop, 363-364; Tilford and Sam-
uels agent for, 363-364; land eval-
uated by N. M. Miller, 364;
Alexander purchased half of Tyler's
interest, 365, 368; trip of Tyler
and Alexander to, 366-367 ; coal
deposits, 367; timber-cutting opera-
tions, 367-368; joint stock company
formed, 368; Alexander's second trip,
369 ; Fenton placed in charge, 369 ;
lumber-cutting project, 369-372;
damage done by floods, 371-372; op-
erating expenses, 371 ; legal problems,
372-3 73, 615^; Alexander left in-
terest to Julia, 388
Cass, Lewis, 37, 38, 117, 193, 222, 228,
39i> 393 J Presidential nomination,
391-392
Castleton Hill, Staten Island, 542, 619-
620«, 63 7»; Tyler children evacu-
ated to, 421, 471-472, 477> 484-
485 ; Delafield incident over Con-
federate flag, 508-510; Semple cared
for, 519
Caucus system of nominating Presiden-
tial candidates, 74
Chagaray Institute for young ladies, 29™
30
Chalmers, Belle, 540
Chancellorsville (Va.) battle, 480
Charles City, Virginia, 336, 431, 445-446,
451, 460, 467, 488; Tyler studied law,
50 ; Tyler elected overseer of roads,
390-391 ; John Brown's trial,
657
428-432?' Union destruction, 489-
490
Charles City County (Va.) Cavalry, 429,
463
Charles City County, Virginia,
48, 293, 626*1; panic following
Lincoln's election, 445 ; John
Brown's trial, 428-432
Charleston, South Carolina, 448,
452 ; 1860 Democratic Conven-
tion, 435-438; Fort Sumter,
462-463
Charlottesville, Virginia, 118
Chase, Salmon P., 394
China, trade treaty with, 211
Christian, Judge John B., 131, 155,
163
Christian, Letitia, 56-57
(See also Tyler, Letitia Christian)
Christian, Robert, 56
Christmas holidays at Sherwood Forest,
250, 422-423
Chronicle of the Town of East Hampton
(Gardiner), 553
Cincinnati, Ohio, Democratic Convention
of 1856, 410—412
Civil War, threat of, 94; Tyler's at-
tempts to stave off, 394, 447-472;
events leading to, 417-446; John
Brown's raid, 427-432; causes, 452;
Fort Sumter, 462-463; participation
by Tyler-Gardiner families, 465—
466; Peninsula campaigns, 475-485;
federal blockade, 481 ; Anglo-
French intervention, 481 ; campaigns
of 1864, 488-500; amnesty oaths after,
512, 518
(See also Confederate States of
America ; Reconstruction)
Clare, Thomas J., 398
Clark, Matthew St. C., 605
Class privilege, 83, 122
Clay, Henry, 12, 62-63, 74, 78, 80, 86,
90, 94, 107, 116, 156, 307, 437; on
the tariff of 1820, 66; appointed
Secretary of State, 75-76; "cor-
rupt bargain" charge, 75-76, 78 ;
Tyler's letter of congratulation
(1825), 76, 81; campaign for
Bank charter renewal, 88-89;
campaign for Presidency, 90,
129-134, 236; compromise tariff
settlement, 95-96; Tyler's personal
feelings for, 97, 152, 426; resolutions
to censure Taney and Jackson,
658
98-101 ; Granger nominated by,
120; Great Compromiser, 130; sup-
ported Rives for Senate seat,
131; attempts to dominate Har-
rison, 142-146; struggle with Tyler
for power, 150-171; Bank plan,
150-156; attempt to seize control of
Whig leadership, 151-152 ; power po-
sition, 152-153; Tyler castigated by,
156-157 ; planned walkout of Tyler's
Cabinet, 160-161; Congress domi-
nated by, 165 ; Distribution Act of
1841, 166-167; nomination of, 218;
"Raleigh letter," 218; defeat, 241-242;
election of 1848, 391; Compromise of
zSso, 394; tribute to, 426
Clayton, John M., 134, 143
Clingman, Thomas J., 253
Clinton, Governor DeWitt, Si
Clinton, Governor George, 344
Clinton Academy, East Hampton, N.Y.,
22, 24, 26
Clopton, John, 432
Clopton, William H., 489-493
Coal and timber speculations, 361-
372
Cody, Charles, 588-589
"Coffee House Letter" written by Botts,
156-157, 159
Commercial agreements signed by Tyler,
211
Compromise of 1850, 394-397, 410-411,
433> 44SJ extremists and, 396-397
Compromise Tariff Bill of 1833, 96, 116,
129, 132, 138, 166-167
Confederate "Committee of Correspond-
ence," 518
Confederate Congress, 469, 488; elec-
tion of Tyler to, 268
Confederate States of America, 450, 458,
461, 464; boycott of Northern tex-
tiles, 431; in 1863, 478—481; inflation,
487-488; defeat of, 489-510; hope for
negotiated peace, 497 ; last days, 507-
510; Julia accused of possessing flag,
508-510; attitudes after end of war,
511-512; adjustments during Recon-
struction, 517
Confederacy (see Confederate States of
America)
Conger, Mary, 46, 357
Congress, first Bank of the United States
chartered by, 55; doctrine of "im-
plied powers," 55, 65; regulation
of slavery, 71 ; stalemate between
Tyler and (1842), 165-166; de-
bates, 182-184; slavery controversy
and, 407
(See also House of Representatives;
and Senate)
Connecticut Company, 2, 18, 19
Conservative Democrats, 46, 219, 279
312-313, 396, 534, 550; Tyler's
rapprochement with, 220; anti-
Van Buren bloc, 221 ; New York,
270
(See also Democratic Party)
Constitution, Tyler's views on, 50,
51-52, 148, 247, 455; checks and
balances, 52; ratification opposed by
Judge Tyler, 52 ; Tyler's speech on,
6 1 ; M'Cttlloch v. Maryland
decision, 65; Jackson's interpreta-
tion, 8 1 ; Tyler as strict construc-
tionist, 148, 247, 455 ; Lincoln
on, 458
Constitutional Amendments, Thirteenth,
528; Fourteenth, 518, 528, 533; Fif-
teenth, 533; on slavery expansion,
447-460
Constitutional history, Texas Resolu-
tion and, 247
Constitutional Union Party, 439, 441,
4So
Conventions, 1835 in Baltimore, 118;
Whig (1839), 132-135; 1844 Demo-
cratic in Baltimore, 228—229; 1848
Democratic, 392; 1852 Democratic,
401; Virginia State Democratic, 401;
1856 Democratic in Cincinnati, 410-
412; 1860 Democratic in Charleston,
435; 1860 Democratic in Baltimore,
438; 1872 Democratic in Baltimore,
535
Cooper, James Fenimore, 600—601
Cooper, Louisa, 487, 502
Cooper, Priscilla, 123-126
(See also Tyler, Priscilla Cooper)
Cooper, Thomas A., 124-126, 162, 178,
I94J I95J patronage appoint-
ment, 226, 315-316, 332, 588w;
retirement, 316, 60571
Copperheads, 431, 463, 481, 487, 502-
503, 509-510
Corcoran and Riggs, bankers, 362, 365;
option on Casey ville land, 362-363 ;
sold land back to Tyler, 368-369
Corn Laws in England, 330-331
Cornubia, CSS, 482-483, 485, 63 in
"Corporal's Guard," 152, 159, 164, 170,
226, 256, 402, 434; patronage ap-
pointments, 588~589n
Corse, Mary, 46, 253, 255
Cotton-monopoly and Texas annexation,
215-216
"Court" ladies, 249-257, 289
Covington (Va.) episode, 483, 488
Crawford, William EL, 74-75, 78
Creel, Alexandra Diodati Gardiner,
62671, 64671
Creel, Judge J. Randall, 62671
Crimean War, 299, 406
Crittenden, John J., 143, 158-159, 167,
447-448
Crittenden amendment, 448, 456-457,
464
Crolius, Clarkson, 5937*
Cruikshank, William, 553
Cumming, Hiram, 226, 320,
58971; Secret History of the Ty-
ler Dynasty, 226, 320, 5897*
Cunningham, John S., 397, 400, 405,
437
Currency question, 164
Curtis, Christiana Tyler, 64
Curtis, Edward, 145, 201, 221, 232-233,
239
Curtis, Dr. Henry, 297, 358,
374; Tyler's letters to, 57, 64, 69,
71-72, Si, 103, 358
Gushing, Caleb, 41, 164, 170, 183-184,
200, 211, 253, 256, 430, 440, 5797*;
gift to Tyler, 211, 58571; marriage,
256, 5967*; romantic endeavors, 304,
60471; visit to Sherwood Forest,
304-305 ; appointed Attorney
General, 402 ; Tyler gives papers to,
424; letters to, 446; rejected for
Cabinet post, 58 gn
Gushing, Caroline Wilde, 59671
Dallas, George M., 264
Dances, 244, 340 ; Assembly balls, Wash-
ington, 191-192
Daubresse, Rev. Father, 539
Davis, Henry, 44
Davis, Jefferson, 54, 367, 394, 402, 458,
464-465, 468, 472, 483, 499, 507-508;
in prison, 511, 518, 535; parole,
528
Davis, Richard D., 41, 184, 186-187,
57973, 5847^
Davis, Varina Ho well, 481, 518, 57871,
634-63 5n; during Reconstruction, 511
Dayton, Daniel, 272
659
Dayton, Egbert, 272, 375, 6i6n
Dayton, Dr. John N., 273—277
Dayton, Ralph, 484, 504, 508
"Dead of the Cabinet, The," speech by
Tyler, 426
Dearing, Marion Antoinette, 259
De Bow, James D. B., 436
Delafield,, Bertram, 508—510
Delancy, Becky, 254
Democratic Empire Club, 280
Democratic Executive Committee, 415-
416, 434
Democratic Party; Conservative Demo-
crats, 46, 117, 129, 161, 163, 3965
Jacksonian Democracy, 46, 53, 81,
100— 101 ; Virginia, 81, 400-401 ; re-
nounced by Tyler, 100; Jeffer-
sonian Democracy, 116; Locofoco-
ism, 117, 128—129, 136; nomination
of Van Buren, 118; radical
element, 129, 394; renomina-
tion of Van Buren, 138-139 ; Southern,
162-163; convention in Baltimore
(1844), 228-229; sectionalism, 314-
315, 400; Van Buren faction, 391;
1848 split, 392; must maintain unity,
394; Tyler urges expulsion of extreme
elements, 394; Union committees,
395; campaign of 1852, 401-402;
election of Pierce, 402 ; effect
of Kansas-Nebraska Bill on,
406; disintegration of, 408, 414; di-
vided on slavery issue, 409;
1856 Convention in Cincinnati, 410—
412; Pennsylvania- Virginia alliance,
410-411, 435; need for unification in
1860, 434-446; 1860 Convention at
Charleston, 435; 1860 split, 436-440;
1860 Baltimore Convention, 440;
corruption in early 18705, 534; de-
feat in 1871, 534-535; election of
1872, 535; election of 1876, 550
(See also Conservative Democrats)
Democratic Republican (Tyler) third
party, 218-219; convention in Balti-
more (1844), 228
Denison, Alice Tyler, 349-350, 6io«,
637-638^; marriage, 349
Denison, Elizabeth ("Bessy"), 350,
6iow, 623-624^, 637-638^
Denison, Rev. Henry M., 349-350, 388,
417, 420, 426
Denison, William M., 610, 623-624, 637-
638
Depressions, 65, 127, 129-130
660
Derby, Countess of, 403
Dering, Henry T., 272-273
Dering, Sarah, 26
De Russy, Col. Gustavus A., 10, 558*1
Dew, Thomas R., 106—107
Dickinson, Daniel S., 308, 385
Dimick, Justin, 443
Dinneen, Rev. Father, 555
Distribution Act of 1841, 166-167, 170
Divorce rumor, 335-336
Dix, Gen. John A., 477-478, 481-482,
486, 509
Doctrine of "implied powers," 55, 6$
Doctrine of Instructions, 110—115, 570^
Dodge, William E., 458
Donahoe, Rev. Father Charles E., 555
Donelson, Andrew J., 83, 89, 320, 591^
Donelson, Emily, 107
Doniphan, Alexander W., 454
Douglas, Stephen A., 252, 255, 394, 433,
437; Kansas-Nebraska Bill, 406;
popular sovereignty doctrine,
406-408; debate with Lincoln, 433;
Freeport Doctrine, 433 ; nomina-
tion, 438, 440; marriages, 5957*
Douthat, Robert, 429, 463, 489
Downing, Andrew J., 294
Dred Scott decision, 433, 439
Dromgoole, George C, 323
"Duchess, The," popular song, 405
Duels, 253
Dychman, Jacob G., 24
Early, Gen. Jubal A., 489, 496, 498
East Hampton, Long Island, New York,
348, 359, 544; residence of Gardiners,
2, 388; news of the wedding, 6; Gar-
diner family, 17-47 J Clinton Academy,
22, 24, 26; reaction to Julia Gardiner's
romance, 200-203; Tyler's visit to,
309, 335J cemetery, 400, 553-554
Eastman, Ira A., 184, 579w
Eaton, John H., 87
Eaton, Peggy O'Neale, 87
Edwards, Judge Ogden, 197, 270, 342
Eldridge, Dr. N. T., 279
Elections, of 1824, 75, 171; of 1828,
82; of 1832, 90; of 1836, 120-121; of
1840, 140; of 1842, 170, 220-221; of
1848, 391-392; of 1852, 401-402; of
1856, 410-416; of 1860, 432-433, 436,
438-441; of 1872, 53B5; of 1876, 550
Electoral College; 75, 441
Elliot, Commodore Jesse D., 249
Ellis, Judge Chesselden, 235
Ellis, Pearl Tyler (Pearlie), 552,
Ellis, Maj. William Mumford, 552
Ely, Rev. Samuel R., 34, 220
Empire Club, 280-281, 291
English, Thomas Dunn, 222-223, 235,
279, sgon
English- American relations, 327-331, 468
(See also Great Britain)
Equal Rights Party, 128-129
Erie Canal, 81
Essex, ferryboat, 5
Evarts, William M., 503, 541, 544-551,
Everett, Edward, 430, 439
Ewing, Thomas, 143, 152, 158, 393, 454
Executive role, 83, 144
Expunging Act, 132
Expunging resolution, 110-115,
Fairlee, Major James, 124
Farmer's Reporter, 298
Farming operations, Sherwood Forest,
298-300
Farnum Iron Works, 364
Federalist principles, 50, 163, 393
Fenton, Andrew J., 369-372
Ferguson, A. EL, 489
Ferris, Charles G., 597-598
Fillmore, Caroline, 547, 549
Fillmore, President Millard, 41-42, 116,
133, 355, 4*o> 413 J administration, 385,
396; Vice-Presidential nomination,,
392; accedes to the Presidency, 395;
patronage appointments, 396; election
of 1856, 412
Finley, John, 225
Fiscal Corporation Bill, 157-159; veto
by Tyler, 159-160
Fisher, Redwood, 221, 224
Fitzwalter, Robert, 18
Fleurot, George, 642-643%
Florida, 448; invasion by Jackson, 67,
87
Floyd, Governor John, 92-94
Floyd, Governor John Buchanan, 353,
355» 400
Foote, Henry S., 367, 394-396, 400
Force Bill of 1833, 91-94, 132, 397, 450;
Tyler's speech against, 93-94
Fordham, Peletiah ("The Duke"), 273-
277
Forrest, Edmund, 124
Fort Fisher (N.C.), 487, 5o7
Fort Sumter (S.C.), 448, 462; South
Carolina demands surrender, 452-
453; surrender of, 455; crisis, 457
Fort Warren Prison, Boston, 483, 485-
486
Fortress Monroe (Va.)» 360, 442, 452,
467, 476, 481, 489, 49i
Fowler, John 0., 221, 224, 269, 58721,
Fox hunting at Sherwood Forest, 347,
35i
France, 50, 481 ; Louisiana territory ac-
quired from, 69-70
Frankford, Pennsylvania, Arsenal, 178,
464
Frankfort, Kentucky, 367
Franking privilege, 249, 601-602?*
Free Soil Party, 392, 394, 402
Free trade, 50, 65-66, 210-211
Freedmen's Bureau, 516
Freemasonry, 117
Freeport Doctrine, 433
Fremont, John C., 220, 411
"Friends of the Union and Constitu-
tion," 431
Fugitive Slave Act, 394, 396, 412; James
Hamlet case, 397-400
Fuller's Hotel, Washington, 291
Fulton, Rev. John, 512-513, 523
Gage, General Thomas, 21
Gardiner, Col. Abraham (1722-1782),
559^
Gardiner, Capt. Abraham (1763-1796),
22, 559n
Gardiner, Abraham (1782-1827), 5597*
Gardiner, Alexander, 4, 6, 25, 206—207,
266-288, 466; makes arrangements for
sister's marriage, 1-2; temperament
and character, 27-28; political in-
terests, 27, 40, 197, 208, 266-288;
education, 28-32; law training,
31-32, 202, 284, 287, 562^;
joined Democratic Party, 46-47;
social life in New York, 32-33 ;
for Whigs in 1840, 140-141 ; on bank
bills, 154 ; forwards Julia's love let-
ters, 190, 580^; account of USS
Princeton explosion, 204-205, 583^;
patronage matters handled by, 226,
266, 269-272, 278, 283-288, 588-589^;
New York City politics, 232-234, 250 ;
Polk campaign, 237-238; try for
elective office, 238-239, 241; pro-
Texas annexation writings, 247-248,
281, 6oo«; relationship with mother,
254; pro-Tyler defenses in news-
661
papers, 264, 320-321; political
analyses, 267; dedication to Ty-
ler, 268-269, 34*5 368, 387,
6ign; saves hostile clipping, 271-272,
$g8n; financial condition, 284,
287; Circuit Court clerkship, 286,
318; loan from Julia, 287-288; visits
to the White House, 289-290; con-
tacts with Polk, 292; shopping com-
missions from Julia, 294, 337;
Tammany Hall politics, 318; Mexi-
can War, 328-330, 6o8w; hears false
rumors of Tyler's marital difficulties,
335; romantic aspirations, 340-341;
directed John Tyler's financial affairs,
341; coal and timber speculations,
361-372; business ability, 365-366;
managed New York properties, 366;
stock and real estate speculations,
366; social life, 370; death of,
372, 385-388, 400, 6i9«; interest in
David Lyon's California busi-
ness, 381, 383; Hamlet fugitive
slave case, 388, 397-400; disposition
of estate, 388; commissioner under
Fugitive Slave Act, 397; views
on slavery, 399 ; letters to the news-
papers, 399; obituaries, 400;
planned to do Tyler's biography,
424; financial relations with Thomas
Dunn English, 590^
Gardiner, Charles, 598
Gardiner, Curtiss C., 344, 553-554
Gardiner, David (1691-1751), 20-21
Gardiner, Senator David (1784-1844),
22-47, 204, 5597*; death of, 1-2,
205-208, 5847* ; marriage, 24; State
Senator, 25-26; political ambitions,
25-27; wealth of, 45, 564^; on
Congressional inactivity, 166; po-
litical talks with Calhoun, 184-
185, 579«; estate, 207, 584^;
Chronicle of the Town of East
Hampton, 553
Gardiner, David (son of David Lyon
Gardiner), 62672,
Gardiner, David Johnson, 24, 644
Gardiner, David Lyon, 4, 25, 202, 206-
207, 480 ; temperament and character,
27-28; education, 31-32, 562; political
interests, 40, 385; visits to White
House, 250; romantic interests, 254—
255, 339-340; marriage, 254, 384, 421,
438, 502 ; financial condition, 284, 381 ;
reaction to false rumors of Tyler's
662
marital difficulties, 335; dancing les-
sons, 340 ; New York property man-
aged by, 381 ; California adventures,
353, 381-390; real estate specula-
tions, 382-386, 6 1 9-6 2 on; agitated for
customs house at San Diego, Calif.,
383, 396; interest in family gen-
ealogy, 384, 553-554; death of
Alexander, 385-386, 388; desired
patronage appointment, 383, 385,
393s 396; home on Staten Island,
390, 505; supported Northern
cause, 431, 451, 466; family quar-
rels, 477-478, 485, 553J litigation
over Juliana's will, 500—507, 634—
635tt; Delafield affair, 509; during
Reconstruction, 553; children,
Gardiner, Elizabeth Stensin, 59$«
Gardiner, John (1661-1738), 21, 559*1
Gardiner, John Bray, 595*1
Gardiner, John D., 272
Gardiner, John Griswold (1812-1861),
43-45, 564", 644^
Gardiner, John Lyon (1770-1816), 21,
22, 466, 5647*, 644«
Gardiner, Julia, marriage to Presi-
dent John Tyler, 1-16; reign-
ing belle, 2 ; courtship of John Ty-
ler and, 2, 192-208; education,
29-31; social debut, 30-31;
poise and sophistication, 30-31;
guitar playing, 34-35; European
tour, 35-41 ; advertising litho-
graph of, 35-36; "Rose of Long Is-
land" incident, 35-36 ; trip to Wash-
ington, 37, 41-43, 172-200; invitation
to White House, 42-43, 192-
200; first meeting with John Ty-
ler, 43; social position, 45-46;
birth, 72, 560; financial assistance,
103 ; romantic triumphs in Wash-
ington, 172-200; political views,
184-185 ; impression created by, 191 ;
Tyler's proposals of marriage,
198-199; gifts and prerogatives, 249
(See also Tyler, Julia Gardiner)
Gardiner, Juliana McLachlan, 186,
242; gives permission for Julia's
marriage, 2-3 ; letters to Julia,
9-11; temperament, 10, 24, 254;
family background, 23-24; rental
properties in New York City, 23,
287, 366, 381, 390, 540-541 ; contest
over will, 23, 27, 485, 500-507; advice
to children, 9-11, 30; impressions of
Washington society, 192-193, 581^;
informed of husband's death, 206;
visits to the White House, 250, 255-
257; marital ambitions for children,
254-255, 339-340; possessiveness to-
ward children, 254 ; desire to return to
New York, 262-263; patronage sug-
gestions, 270; inheritance, 287; on
liveries, 295, 6o2n; medical diagnosis
by mail, 296-297, 306, 336, 338;
Margaret's marriage, 345 ; loaned
Beeckman money for California trip,
375j 379-38o; death of Alexander,
388 ; financial assistance to Tyler,
389; moves to Staten Island, 390;
Tyler's visits to, 418; death of
Margaret, 421; visits with the Ty-
lers, 428, 442; opposition to David
Lyon's marriage, 438 ; interest in
spiritualism, 438; Southern sympa-
thies, 451, 463, 466; during the
Civil War, 473-475; care of Tyler
children, 477, 480; family split, 485;
death of, 500, 595*1 ; relations with
Julia, 503-504; on Sarah Polk, 599^
Gardiner, Lion (1599-1663), 2, 18, 51,
553-554
Gardiner, Margaret, 9-10, 25; brides-
maid, 4 ; accompanied newlyweds, 5 ;
on Julia's marriage, 14 ; temperament,
27-28; European trip, 38-41; presen-
tation at court of Louis Philippe, 38 ;
marriage, 46, 254, 346; Washington
season (1842-1843), 180-200; ro-
mantic attachments, 199-200, 253—254,
308-309, 341-348; life at the White
House, 243-265, 289-292; political ac-
tivity, 269—270; on Major W. H.
Polk, 277; at Saratoga and Newport,
202-203, 307-309, 359) 4i8
(See also Beeckman, Margaret Gar-
diner)
Gardiner, Mary, 249-251, 420; marriage
to Eben N. Horsford, 341
Gardiner, Mary Gardiner Thompson,
644**
Gardiner, Nathaniel, 3 6-3 7 , 45, 388,
559*1, 56471, 595n, 6i9tt
Gardiner, Norah Loftus, 626
Gardiner, Phoebe, 249-252, 289-290, 341,
345
(See also Horsford, Phoebe Gardiner)
Gardiner, Phoebe Dayton, 559n
Gardiner, Robert Alexander, 626
Gardiner, Robert David Lion, 626
Gardiner, Samuel, 34, 45, 237, 249, 262,.
272-277, 373, 559-560?*, 595^, 61971
Gardiner, Samuel Burell, 544, 550, 644^.
Gardiner, Sarah Diodati, 626^
Gardiner, Sarah Griswold, 24, 544, 553,
564?*, 644^
Gardiner, Sarah Thompson, 626
Gardiner, William Bray, 393
Gardiner, Dr. William Henry, 388, 595^
Gardiner family, 17-47; wealth of, 17;.
genealogy of, 18, 26, 384, 553-554,
559?t; New York City property, 23,
287, 366, 381, 390, 540-541; Wash-
ington season, 1842-1843, 180-
200; calls at the White House, 192-
200; in East Hampton (1843),
200-203; lobby for Tyler and Texas,.
267—268; dissatisfaction with Polk
administration, 312-318; background,,
344; service during the Civil War,
466; books about, 553~554
Gardiners Island, 2, 17-18 ; history
and folklore, 20—21; managed by Sen.,
David Gardiner, 24-25
Gardner, J. McLean, 203
Gardner, James B., 84
Garfield, James A., 548, 549
Garfield, James B., 548
Garfield, Lucretia Rudolph, 549
Garra Rebellion, 384
Garrison, William Lloyd, 458
Gayle, Capt. Robert H., 482, 484-487,,
507, 509, 5H-5I2, 63iw
Gentle Julia, The (river boat), 417
George, Paul R., 221, 222, 224, 233,
5S7tt, 590**, 592fl
Georgetown College, 292, 436, 537
Georgetown home of Julia Tyler, 537,,
543
Georgetown Visitation Academy, 537,
539
Georgia, 446, 448
German treaty, 211, 517
Germany, Tyler boys educated in,
512, 523-530; social life, 525-527; mil-
itary successes, 525
Gettysburg (Pa.), 466, 480
Gibbon, James Cardinal, 539
Giles, William B., 55-56
Gilmer, Thomas W., 143, 152, 161, 205,,
215, 217, 219, 417
Gloucester County (Va.) farm, 103
Godwin, William, 124
Goode, John, 547-548
663
Gordon, William F., 92, 570**
Gorgas, Col. and Mrs. Josiah, 482,
485
Graham, John Lorimer, 197, 221, 222,
224, 232-233, 237, 279, 290, 316,
324, 362, 598w, 605^; attends
Tyler wedding, 3-4, 6; request for
patronage, 393
Granger, Francis P., 117, 120, 121, 133,
143, 454, 58o-58i»
Grant, Julia Dent, 536
Grant, Ulysses S., 507; campaigns, 486,
488, 494-500; Julia Tylers pleas to,
516; Julia's opinion of, 520-521;
election of, 534-535; administration,
534-535, 537J "bloody shirt," 535
Great Britain, 468; Tyler's distrust of,
54) 67, 332, 396-397, 404-406; War of
1812, 58-59; diplomatic negotiations,
161 ; activities in Mexico, 210, 212 ;
machinations in Texas, 216; Ore-
gon question, 327-328; interference
in U.S. domestic affairs, 396-397,
404-405 ; letter from English ladies on
slavery, 402-406 ; Crimean War, 406 ;
Webster-Ashburton Treaty
(See Webster-Ashburton Treaty)
Great Eastern (British liner), 443
Greeley, Horace, 520, 535
Green, Duff, 82, 83, 150, 159, 181, 372
Greene, Gen. Moses, 59
Greenway (Tyler family estate), 48, 56,
58, 103
Grey, W. Farley, 431
Guthrie, James, 455-456
Gwin, William McKendree, 385-386
Haines, John, 181
Hall, Charles M., 397-399, 6i9~62o«
Hallet, J. Paxton, 5-6, 221, 286-288,
Hamilton, Alexander, 91; on national
bank question, 55; doctrine of im-
plied powers, 65
Hamilton, Alexander, Jr., 219
Hamiltonian Federalists, 82, 116
Hamlet, James (fugitive slave case),
388; hearing before Alexander Gar-
diner, 397-400
Hampton, Virginia, 421 ; Villa Margaret,
372
(See also Villa Margaret)
Hampton (Va.) Academy, 443
Haolilio, Prince Timoleo, 185, 211
664
Harpers Ferry, Virginia, 367, 428-432,
464
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Whig conven-
tion, 132-135
Harrison, Mrs. George, 295
Harrison, Peyton, 474
Harrison, Mr. and Mrs. William (Bran-
don, Va.), 297-298
Harrison, President William Henry, 40,
116, 118, 132; Presidential nomina-
tion, 114, 119-120, 132-134; legend of
Old Tippecanoe, 119, 140; Tyler and
the election of 1836, 120—122; cam-
paign of 1840, 136-140; Clay's at-
tempt to dominate, 142-146; patron-
age controversies, 142-144; Cabinet,
142-143; health, 142; inauguration,
144; opposes abuse of executive power,
144; death of, 146-148; funeral,
149-150
Harvard College, 251, 341
Harvie, Lewis E., 460
Hate groups, 109 ; Know-Nothing Party,
408-413
Hawaiian Islands, 185, 211, 226
Hayes, President Rutherford B., 546,
548 ; administration, 547-550 ; election
of, 550
Hayes, Lucy Webb, 545
Hayne, Col. I. W., 452-453, 455
Hayne, Robert Y., 90, 117
Healy, G. P. A., 63871
Healy, Rev. Father Patrick F., S.J., 539-
540, 546
Henderson, Lucy, 255
Hendren, Patrick, 362
Henry (Tyler slave), 403-404
Henshaw, David, rejected by Senate for
Cabinet post, 5897*
Herrick, Edwin, 616
Hill, Gen. A. P., 498
HiU, Isaac, 83, 84
Hoffman, Ogden, 221, 269, 597-
Holcombe James P. 462
Holloway, Laura, 536, 642 n
Holt, Mrs. Henry, 493-494
Holt, Col. Joseph, 452, 490, 632-63371
Hone, Philip, 135
Horsford, Cornelia, 623-624
Horsford, Eben N., 251-252, 341, 474,
595n, 623-6247*; attitude toward slav-
ery, 623-62471
Horsford, Gertrude, 623-6247*
Horsford, Lillian, 623-6247*
Horsford, Mary Catherine, 623-624?*
Horsford, Mary L'H. Gardiner (1824-
1855), 249-251, 420, 559-S6ow, 595»,
623-62471
Horsford, Phoebe Gardiner, 442, 540,
544> 559~56ow, 595«, 623-624?*
House of Representatives, 413 ; hostility
to Tyler, 10; Tyler's election (1816),
60-6 1 ; Texas Resolution passed by,
281
Houston, Sam, 210, 213-214, 325
Howard, D. D., 4
Howard, Gen. O. O. 516
Howell, Jenny, 481, 511, 629^
Hubard, Edmund W., 41, 184, 196-197,
579W
Hungarian Revolution, 406
"Hunker" Democracy, 312, 314
Hunt, Harvey, 241
Hunter, Gen. David, 494-496
Hunter, R. M. T., 436-437, 497-498
Impeachment talk, 167-169; Andrew
Johnson, 528, 530
"Implied powers," doctrine of, 55, 65
Independent Treasury plan, 128-130,
132, 164; repeal of, 150-151, 156, 170
Indian land survey, 545
Indian wars, 18-19
Inflation, of 1835-1837, 128; during the
Confederacy, 479—480, 487
Ingersoll, Charles J., 322
Instructions, doctrine of, 110-115, 57o»;
Tyler resigned Senate seat, 110-115
Internal-improvements program, 77 ;
Adams administration, 79 ; veto of
Maysville Road Bill, 85-86 ; govern-
ment-financed, 86
Iredell, James, Jr., 118, 121, 137
Irish Repeal Association, 330, 436
Irish vote, 136, 233, 401, 436
Irving, Washington, 107, 171
Jackson, Andrew, 46, 60-62, 75, 575»;
popular democracy of, 26, 74; re-
moval of the Treasury deposits, 28—
29, 97-101 ; on Constitution, 52 ; in-
vasion of Spanish Florida, 67, 87 ;
feared by Tyler, 67, 74 ; hero of New
Orleans, 68 ; Tyler's motion to cen-
sure, 68 ; vote-catching image, 74 ;
Tariff Bill of 1828, 79-80; Tyler's de-
cision to support, 80-8 1 ; administra-
tion, 82—101 ; election of 1828, 82 ;
CaUioun nominated as Vice-President,
82 ; appointment policy, 83-84; In-
augural Address, 83 ; "Kitchen Cab-
inet," 83 ; social graces, 85 ; vetoed the
Bank Bill in 1832, 87-89 ; break with
Calhoun, 87 ; Proclamation to the
People of So. Carolina, 90-91 ; elec-
tion of 1832, 90; policy of armed co-
ercion (Force Bill), 91-97; Tyler's in-
dictment of, 98-100; Clay's resolution
to censure, 98 ; political patronage, 99 ;
political techniques, 100; Jeffersonian
Democrats dislike of, 116; criticism of,
117; fiscal policies, 127-128; annexa-
tion of Texas, 218, 325; letter concern-
ing Tyler and Polk, 232 ; Tyler's with-
drawal, 236-237; assurance to Tyler
on patronage, 312; death of, 320
Jackson, Rachel, 82
Jackson, Gen. Thomas J. (Stonewall),
480—481
Jacksonian Democracy, 46, 53 ; re-
nounced by Tyler, 100-101; upheaval
of 1828, 25-26
"James, Allan S." (pseud, of Semple
James A.), 518-519
James City, Virginia, 451
James River, 293, 403
Jamestown (Va.) speech of Tyler's, 427
Japan, trade policy, 211
Jay, William, 398-399
Jefferson, Thomas, 51, 107; on national
bank question, 55; political patron-
age, 83-84
Jeffersonian Democrats, 116
Jerusalem, Virginia, 303
Johnson, Gen. Albert S., 641
Johnson, President Andrew, 515; Julia
Tyler writes to, 515; threat of im-
peachment, 528, 530; and Tenure of
Office Act, 530
Johnson, Celia (Negro servant), 482,
492, 506
Johnson, Gen. Joseph E., 507
Johnson, Richard M., 60, 118, 121, 138,
139
Johnson, Col. William Preston, 641
Joinville, Prince de, 175
Jones, Henry Lightfoot, 12, 108, 465-
466
Jones, John, 6, 227
Jones, Mary Morris, 552
Jones, Mary Tyler, 7-8, 12, 108, 125,
172,466
Jones, Brig. Gen. William E., 494—495
665
"Julia— The Rose of Long Island" by
"Romeo Ringdove," 36
"Julia Waltzes," 594*1,
Kansas-Nebraska controversy, 406-409,
433, 445
Karlsruhe, Germany, 522-527 ; social life,
526-527
Kean, Edmund, 124
Keating, James, 180
Kendall, Amos, 83, 84, 89, 220, 587**
Kennedy, President John F., 539
Kennon, Commodore Beverly, 205, 294,
419
Kentucky, coal and timber speculations,
361-362
Kettell, George F., 527
Kick, John, 493
Kidd, Capt. William, 21
King, Charles, 37, 563*1
King, Thomas Butler, 41
"King Numbers" and "King One," Ty-
ler's opinion on as political dangers,
62, 75, 82, 100, 122
"Kitchen Cabinet," 83, 89
Know-Nothing Party, 109, 408-413 ;
1856 Convention in Philadelphia, 410
Kossuth, Louis, 406
Kremer, George, 75-76
Kruder, Baron von, 39, 563**
Labor problems, lumber-cutting opera-
tion, in Caseyville, Ky., 369-372
(See also Slaves and slavery)
Ladies of the White House (Hollo way),
536
Lafayette, Georges W., 56371
Lafayette Place (N.Y.C.) town house of
Gardiners, 1-2, 5, 202-203, 342, 387,
58371; Margaret's return to, 375
Lamar, Mirabeau B., 264
Lamb, Martha J., 554
Lane, Frances ("Fanny") Gardiner,
S59-56o, 595
Lane, Joseph, 439-441
Langford, Laura C. Holloway, 536, 642«
Lawrence, Abbott, 145, 341
Lawton, Brig. Gen. A. R., 631
Lee, Henry, 84
Lee, General Robert E., 468, 476, 488,
494, 496, 507 ; president of Washing-
ton College, 529-530
Lee, Robert E.f CSS, 482, 63in
Legare, Caroline, 4
Legare, Hugh Swinton, 4, 426
666
Leigh, Benjamin W., 101, 110-115, I32»
134-135
LeRoy, Anson V. H., 616-617^
Letcher, Gov. John, 437, 448, 451, 483,
496
Letcher, R. P., 153
Letson, T. William, 368
Letters and Times of the Tylers, The
(Tyler), 552
Lewis, William B., 83
Lexington, Virginia, 478, 494, 496; riots,
528-529
Libby Prison, Richmond, 498-499
Liberia, 404
Life of John Tyler (Abell), 226
Lincoln, Abraham, 93, 135, 448; Tyler's
reaction to election of, 413 ; debate
with Douglas, 433 ; "House Divided"
speech, 439-440, 444; nomination,
439; electoral count, 441; election of,
443-446; Tyler's views on, 457-458;
Inaugural Address, 460—461 ; call for
volunteers, 462; motives for Fort
Sumter, 463; letters from Juliana
Gardiner, 481; pleas from Julia Tyler,
490-491; assassination, 508-509
Lincoln, Mary Todd, pension received
by, 547-549
Lind, Jenny, 354-355
Lion Gardiner and His Descendants
(Gardiner), 344, 553
Livingston, Catherine, 343-344
Livingston, Henry B., 373, 375, 380;
handled John H. Beeckman's estate,
378-379
Livingston, Mary, 32-33, 562
Locofocoism, 117, 128-129, 136
"Log Cabin and Hard Cider," slogan,
135
Lord, Dr. F. W., 273-277
Louis Philippe, 37; Gardiner presenta-
tion at court of, 38, 44
Louisiana, 451
Louisiana Purchase, 69-71, 214
Low, Sarah, 182
Ludlow, Louise, 473
Ludlow, Maj. William H., 473, 476
Lynch, Lt. Dominick, 356
Lynchburg, Virginia, 489, 496-497, 507
Lyons, James, 158, 469, 532, 535, 537,
63 6-63 7 n
McCaw, Dr. J. B., 555
McClellan, Gen. George B., 473-476,
487; campaigns, 475~476
McClellan, Robert, 192
McCormick reapers, 299-300
M'Culloch v. Maryland, 65
McDowell, James, 93
McDuffie, George, 183, 216
Macfarland, William EL, 469
McGuire, Dr. Edward, 555
McGuire, Dr. Hunter, 554~S5S
McKeon, John, 41, 180
McLachlan, Juliana, 23-24 ; marriage,
24
(See also Gardiner, Juliana Mc-
Lachlan)
McLachlan, Michael, 23
McLean, Justice John, 117, 184, 188-191,
248, 257-258; romantic correspond-
ence with Julia Gardiner, 190, 58on
McMullin, Fayette, 252
McMurdo, Mr., Scottish schoolmaster,
49
McNeill, William Gibbs, 285, 316, 368,
372, 507-508, 597-598*1
Macon, Colonel John, 73
Madison, Dolley, 178, 204
Madison, President James, 60
Madisonian, The (Tyler newspaper in
Washington), 6, 225, 227, 237, 242,
292, 313
Magazine of American History, 554
Maine, admission to the Union, 69 ;
boundary question, 161, 212, 322-
323
Major, Daniel G., 545
Majority principle in government, 61-
62, 75, 82, IOO-IOI, 122
Malaria, 370
Mallory, Charles B., 516
Mallory, Francis, 41, 170
Manassas, Virginia, 468
Manchonake (Gardiners) Island, 17, 19
Mangum, Willie P., 116, 135
Manhattan Bank in New York, 26
Manifest Destiny, 210, 214, 315, 425
Mann, A. Dudley, 436
Margraf , Alben N., 544
Marriage of President Tyler to Julia
Gardiner, i— 16; secret arrangements,
1-2, 5-6; ceremony, 4-5; guests, 4, 6;
effect of news of the wedding, 5-6 ;
reaction of Tyler's family, 6-8 ; dif-
ference in ages, 14; gossip concern-
ing, 14; honeymoon, 5-16; White
House reception, 8-9
Marseilles, Alexander's interest in consul-
ship at, 284-285
Marshall, Justice John, 52, 65, 91,
432
Marshall, Thomas F., 184
Mary Celestia, CSS, 499
Maryland Mechanics Institute, Balti-
more, 425-426
Mason, John Thompson, 579»
Mason, John Yv 131, 246, 315, 3i9> 323
Mathewson, A. J., 542
Maury, Matthew Fontaine, 556
Maxcy, Virgil, 205
Maysville (Ky.) Turnpike Road Com-
pany, 85-86
Memminger, Christopher G., 431
Memphis (Tenn.) Navy Yard, 364
"Mere majority principle" in govern-
ment, 62, 101
Merrick, William D., 264
Merrick, William Matthew, 264
Metcalf, Governor Robert, 367
Mexican War of 1846-1848, 299, 314,
323, 327-330,* New York Volunteers,
329
Mexico, annexation of Texas and, 214-
215; Emperor Maximilian, 512
Military career of John Tyler, 58-60
Miller, John G., 120
Miller, Dr. N. M., 313, 3*7, 324; pa-
tronage appointments, 226, 588-58971;
Casey ville land evaluated by, 364
Miller, Sylvanus, 22
Millson, John Singleton, 408
Minge, Collier H., 225
Minge, John, 226
Mississippi, 448
Missouri, admission to the Union, 69
Missouri Compromise, 331, 406-407;
debate, 69-71; Thomas Amendment,
70-71 ; Tyler opposed limitation on
slavery, 407
Monroe, President James, 472, 556
Monroe Doctrine, 211, 281
Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser, 517
Moore, Edwin Ward, 264
Moore, Ely, 270
Morehead, Gov. Charles S., 454
Morgan, William S., 57ow
Morris, R. H., 597-598**
Morris, Richard, 78
Morrison, David, 364
Morse, Samuel F. B., 229
Moss, C. B., 594W
Moss, Samuel, 6i6n
Mott, Robert, 354
Mulford, Burnet, 25
667
Mulford, Brig. Gen. John E., 508
Munford, John I., 222, 58771, 599-600?*
Myers, T. Bailey, 467
Napoleonic Wars, 66; American in-
volvement, 63
Nat Turner slave revolt, 103, 429
National bank question, 54-55, 63 ; ac-
tion of Giles and Brent, 55-56 ; de-
pository for government funds, 55 ;
opposition of Tyler, 63-65 ; Congres-
sional investigation, 64-65 ; constitu-
tional amendment proposed, 99;
Jackson destroyed, 127-128; Tyler
and, 147-171; White Plan for District
Bank, 153-156; Botts compromise,
154-155; branching process, 154; Fis-
cal Corporation Bill, 157-159
National Intelligencer, 217, 325-326
National Republicans, 82, 86, 116, 119
Native American Party, 109, 233, 238,
241, 408
Nebraska, slavery controversy, 406-409
(See also Kansas-Nebraska contro-
versy)
Negroes, Charles City, Va. plantations
taken over by, 491—492; effect of
Emancipation on, 506; during Re-
construction period, 532; elected to
Virginia General Assembly, 533
(See also Slaves and slavery)
Nelson, Alexander, 384
Nelson, Harriet, 302
Nelson, Judge John, 259-260, 270, 287,
335, 588-589
Nelson, Samuel, 287, 588-589; appoint-
ment to Supreme Court, 287, 6oo-6oi«
New Jersey, Tyler faction, 269, 313
New Kent, Virginia, 451
New Market (Va.) battle, 494, 496, 525
New Mexico, Compromise of 1850, 394;
slavery question, 395, 407
New Orleans, Tyler Club, 226-227
New York American, 38
New York Aurora, 222, 279, 316
New York City, social life, 3, 32-33, 45-
46, 297-298, 309-310; machine pol-
itics 117; Locofocoism, 128; patron-
age appointments, 145, 233-235, 237,
266-288; Tyler organization, 219, 223-
224, 232, 234, 237, 267, 271, 313, 391,
43 7 J politics, 224; Tyler political strat-
egy, 227-242 ; popularity of Tyler, 227 ;
Irish vote, 233 ; pro -annexation reso-
lutions, 261-262; visit of Tylers, 307-
668
309; Conservative Democracy, 312-
313; purge of the Tylerites, 315-316,
337; gossip, 354; cultural events, 354;
Gardiner properties, 23, 287, 366, 381,
390, 540-541 ; Union Committee, 395-
396, 400; sectional controversy, 431;
Democratic Party in 1860, 436 ; 1860
election, 440—441 ; Southern sentiment,
468-469; draft riots, 481 ; Boss Tweed,
534; Panic of 1873, 541
New York College of Physicians and
Surgeons, 541
New York Courier and Enquirer, 271
New York Evening Post, 492
New York Express, 431
New York Herald, 4, 5, 155, 160, 184,
203, 222, 238-239, 242, 243, 258, 280,
290, 385, 391, 399, 402, 494, 509
New York Journal of Commerce, 236,
313,391,405
New York Ledger, 335
New York Morning News, 335
New York Plebeian, 264, 279, 316
New York Post, 197
New York Standard, 222
New York State, Albany Regency, 227-
228, 266, 278; Tyler-Polk alignment,
266-267; Van Buren-Silas Wright fac-
tion, 267; 1848 election, 392
New York Union, 220, 227
Newport, Rhode Island, 307—309, 549
Newspapers, pro-administration, 221—
222, 313; appointing editors to federal
jobs, 226; pro-Tyler communications,
320-321; treatment of Tyler after
1848, 392 ; reaction to Julia Tyler's
defense of slavery, 405 ; on Tyler ad-
ministration, 409 ; on sectionalism,
431 ; accounts of litigation over
Juliana's will, 503
Niagara Falls, New York, 54
Noah, Mordecai M., 84, 201, 220—222,
226, 320, 587-58871; conversation with
Tyler, 224
Nomination of Presidential candidates,
74-75, 100
(See also Conventions)
North, Fugitive Slave Act and, 396;
participation of clergy in Kansas-
Nebraska controversy, 408
(See also Civil War)
Northwest Ordinance, 69
Nullification doctrine, 87-96
Oertzen, Sievert von, 513-515
O'Hara, Edward, 348-349
Ohio River, 370-371
Old Point Comfort, Va., 10, 296, 304-305,
359-360, 372, 418, 421, 467; Tyler
honeymoon cottage, 10-13
(See also Villa Margaret)
Onderdonk, Bishop Benjamin Treadwell,
1—2, 4
Oregon, boundary problem, 161, 183,
212-213, 327-331; expedition to, 220;
slavery question and, 331
Ould, Col. Robert, 486
Page, Samuel, 364
Pageot, French Minister and Madame,
245
Pakenham, Richard, 253
Pahnerston, Lord, 330
Palmerston, Viscountess, 403
Panic of 1873, 540-543
Papers, Tyler's public and private, 168,
425, 507 ; destroyed during Civil War,
1 68, 489 ; administrators, 424
Parker, Judge Richard, 625
Parker, Virginia, 644
Partisan attacks on Tyler, 320
Patronage, 83—84, 224-229; purge of fed-
eral officeholders, 224-225; dispensed
by Jackson, 226; friends and relatives
appointed, 226; "Reign of Terror,"
227; Senate approval needed, 227,
271, 285, 287 ; New York City, 233-
234, 266-288 ; Alexander Gardiner and,
226, 266, 269-272, 278, 283-288, 588-
SSgn; Tyler's understanding with
Polk, 312-313; Folk's purge of Tyler
officeholders, 315
Parnelle, N. T., 587
Patterson, General Robert, 465
Payne, John Howard, 171
Peace Conference of 1861, 334, 447-460;
Tyler's proposals for, 447 ; Tyler's
speeches, 454-455, 45 9-460; Tyler's
plan for twelve-state, 449-450; Tyler
elected president, 453-454; member-
ship, 454 ; Guthrie resolution, 457 ;
denounced by Tyler, 460
"Peacemaker," firing of, 204-205
Peachy, Dr. William, 470-471
Peachy, William S., 574*1
Peck, G. H., offers to lease Tyler coal
lands, 6i4»
Peckman, Judge, 505
Pennsylvania, Tyler faction, 240 ;
Robert Tyler's political activities,
313-314, 318, 328-330, 401, 410-411,
415-416, 434, 436; Democratic Execu-
tive Committee, 415-416, 434
Pennsylvania, USS, n
Pennsylvania-Virginia political alliance,
410-411, 435
Pension Act of 1882, 549
Pensions, Julia Tyler's campaign for,
547-549
Pequot Indians, 18-19
Perry, Matthew C., 211
Petersburg, Virginia, 426, 497, 507
Petersburg (Va.) Gazette, 405
Peyster, Captain de, 37-38
Peyton's boardinghouse, Washington,
D.C., 41-42, 179, 181-182
Philadelphia, 128; patronage, 222, Ty-
ler organization, 230, 237; anti-Cath-
olic riots, 233 ; Irish Repeal Associa-
tion, 330, 436; Roman Catholic vote,
401 ; Robert Tyler's political activities,
313-314, 318, 328-330, 401, 410-411,
414, 436; Know-Nothings in, 409-410
(See also Pennsylvania)
Philadelphia Medical College, 423
Philadelphia Pennsylvanian, 405
Pickens, Francis W., 117, 184, 187-189,
259, 319, 33i» 455, 579~5Sow
Piedmont (Va.) battle, 495-496
Pierce, Franklin, 355, 401-402, 410, 412 ;
election of, 401-402; administration,
402 ; patronage, 402
Pirates visit Gardiners Island, 21-22
Pleasants, John H., 160
Pocahontas, small boat, 294-295
Poe, Edgar Allan, 245
Political organizations, 77, 82, 100, 117
(See also Tammany Hall)
Political parties, 82
(See also Democratic Party; Republi-
ran Party ; Third Tyler Party move-
ment)
Polk, President James K., 4, n, 116,
264; on Calhoun's appointment to
Tyler Cabinet, 217-218, 586*1; nomi-
nation for Presidency, 228—229; nego-
tiations with Tyler, 230-232; New
York City followers, 235-236; Tyler's
withdrawal, 236; election of, 239-240;
Tyler- Gardiner interpretation of vic-
tory, 239-242; Tyler's kindness to,
277; Texas victory dinner, 283; inau-
guration ceremony, 289, 292 ; adminis-
tration, 312-333 ; Tyler's dissatisfac-
669
tion with, 312-318 ; patronage appoint-
ments, 312-317, 332, 392; purge of
Tylerite officeholders, 315, 323; Mexi-
can War, 327-330; Annual Message
announcing California gold discovery,
373; blamed for Cass's defeat, 392
Polk, Sarah Childress, 277, 334, 405, 453,
547, 549 ; dull social functions, 319,
332-333
Polk, Maj. William H., 252-253, 255,
277-278, 280; assurances on patron-
age, 312
Pope Gregory XVI, 39
Popular sovereignty concept, 394, 406-
407, 411, 413, 433
Porter, James M., Senate rejects for
Cabinet post, 589**
Portsmouth (Va.) Pilot, 397, 400
Powell, Georgia, 543, 546
Power, Tyrone, 124
Powhatan House, Richmond, 292-293
Preston, William C., 117, 129, 135
Princeton, TJSS disaster, 1-2, 5, 204-206,
419
Princeton University, 26, 28-29
Promt, George H., 158, 164, 170, 224
Protectionism, 66-67, 210-211
Public lands, 129; distribution scheme,
166-167
Purdy, Lovel, 594~595
<Juin, Dr., 297
Radical Republicans, 517, 528; South-
ern resistance to, 530-531
(See also Republican Party)
Railroad, transcontinental, 384, 406, 550
Randolph, Edmund, 50
Randolph, John, 76, 78-79
Raoul, Mary Grace Cooper, 6 2 8-6 29 n,
Reconstruction Act of 1867, 528
Reconstruction period, 506, 511-556;
difficult adjustments for Southerners,
517; amnesty oath, 512, 518; rule of
Radical Republicans, 528
""Red Jackets" political group, 280, 290
Reed, Dr. Silas, 317, 444, 58 jn
Relation of the Pequot War (Gardiner),
19
Religious issues, 140 ; views of Tyler,
108-109
Republican Party, 409, 433 ; organiza-
tion of, 408; 1856 Convention, 411 ;
Fremont nominated in 1856, 412 ;
670
Tyler's views of, 414, 434-446; elec-
tion of 1860, 432-433> 436j 438-439;
platform, 448, 456; Radical Republi-
cans, 517; Liberal movement, 535;
election of 1876, 550
Revolutionary War, 22, 344
Richardson, Holt, 362
Richmond, Virginia, 291, 307, 354-355?
424, 451, 481, 507; War of 1812, 59;
Washington Memorial, 355 ; boycott
of Northern textiles, 43 1 ; sectional
crisis, 431 ; political activities in 1860,
447, 460-462 ; Robert Tyler's flight to,
464-465 ; vote for secession in, 464 ; de-
fense of, 465 ; Civil War period, 469-
470; Peninsula campaigns, 475-485;
attack on, 488-489; life during the
war, 488 ; Tyler family during war,
500; evacuation of, 507; postwar
politics, 534-535; town house leased
by Julia Tyler, 549-550; Hollywood
Cemetery, 555~556
Richmond (Va.) Enquirer, 91, 115, 139,
325: 4°3, 449» 4fo
Richmond (Va.) Whig, 160
"Ringdove, Romeo," 36
Ritchie, Ann Eliza, 304
Ritchie, Thomas, 91, 115, 139, 293, 305,
313-314, 426, 6o4«
Rives, William C., 94, 101, 115, 130-131,
141, 149-150, 448, 450
Robert E. Lee, CSS, 482, 63 in
Roberts, Daniel G., 34
Roberts, George, 588-589?*
Robertson, Judge John, 450-451, 455
Rochelle, James H., 5 7 1-57271, 588-589**
Rochelle, Mattie, 123, 192
Rockbridge (Va.) Alum Springs, 41$-
419, 483
Rockbrige County (Va.) reserves, 495-
496, 498
Roman Catholic Church, Julia Tyler's
conversion, 538-540
Roman Catholic vote, 136, 323, 401, 408,
436
Rome, Italy, 38-39
Roosevelt, James I., 170, 180, 194, 581,
619-620, 634-635
Roosevelt, Mrs. James I., 474-475
"Rose of Long Island" incident, 35-36
Roy all, Anne, 108
Ruffin, Edmund, 62, 293, 298
Rumford (R.I.) Chemical Works,
474
Rush, Richard, 82
Russell, James M., 160
Russell, Capt. John W., 362-363
Russell, Lady John, 403
Russia, 406, 585?*
Rutherfoord, John, 85, 154
Ruthville, Virginia, 302
Ryder, Rev. Father James, S.J., 436
Rynders, Capt. Isaiah, 279-280, 290
Sacramento City, Calif., 376-377, 380;
social life, 375~376
Sacramento (Calif.) Valley, 373-374
Sacred Heart Convent, Halifax, N.S.,
521-522, 537, 648^
Sag Harbor, Long Island, 26, 37, 44; pa-
tronage appointments, 272-277
St. Mary, launching of USS, 245-246
Samson, George, 342
Samuels, R. G., 363, 364
San Diego, Calif., 382-386; attempt to
establish customs house, 383
San Francisco, Calif., 377, 381, 383-384
San Jacinto (Tex.) battle, 211
San Joaquin (Calif.) Valley, 373
Santa Anna, Gen. Antonio Lopez de,
165, 211, 214, 229
Sante Fe Railroad system, 384
Saratoga, New York, 202-203, 307-309,
359, 418; vacation trips to, 355-356;
Alexander's visits to, 370
Sargeant, John, 580-581*1
Say brook, Conn., 18, 19
Schools and colleges, 511-512; Germany,
512, 523-530
(See also William and Mary College)
Scott, Gen. Winfield, 116, 133, 209, 264,
401, 473
Seawell, John B., 87, 108, 577**
Sea well, M. B., 392
Seawell, Maria Henry Tyler, 577*1
Seawell, Maj. Washington, 163, 577*1
Secession, 445-472 ; threat by South
Carolina, 90-96, 431; Compromise of
1850 and, 394, 397 ; Tyler's views,
412-413; threat of, 431; Tyler's deci-
sion on, 459-460; Tyler's speech for,
460-461
Secret History of the Tyler Dynasty
(Cumming), 226, 320, 5897*
Secret Service Fund, 322-323
Sectional-balance-of -power concept, 70
Sectional controversy, 331-332, 384, 417-
446; Tyler's views, 80-8 1; Oregon
question, 331; California's application
for admission and, 393-394; Tyler's
efforts to solve, 427-428, 446; South-
ern line on, 430-431 ; Tidewater Vir-
ginia, 431-432; treatment in press,
431; moderates in 1860, 432-433; Ty-
ler's views, 444-445; secession of
South Carolina, 444
Seddon, James A., 450, 457-458
Seixas, J. M., 482
Selden, Gary, 107
Selden, Dr. James, 446
Semple, Judge James, 50
Semple, James A., 122, 328, 424, 465,
482, 489, 494, 497, 499-500 ; moral
and mental decline, 518-520, 637-
63871; work in underground Confed-
erate cells in Canada, 518; returns
from Mexican War, 6o8n
Semple, Letitia Tyler, 8, 172-173, 291-
292, 352, 500, 519; relations with
Julia Tyler, 302, 52ow, 6o8«, 623-
6247*; Tyler's letters to, 414 ; later life
and death, 500, 519, 637-63872
Senate, United States, Tyler's election
to (1827), 78-79; "advice and con-
sent," 84; Tyler resigned seat over
instruction question, 110-115; on veto
of District Bank Bill, 155-156; ap-
proval of Presidential appointments,
227; approval of patronage appoint-
ments, 271; approval of Texas Res-
olution, 282—84
Senate Journal, 101, no; Expunging
Resolution, 114-115
"Serenade Dedicated to Miss Julia
Gardiner," 13-14
Seven Decades of the Union (Wise) ,
536, 64271
Sevier, Ambrose H., 580-58171
Seward, William H., 117, 132, 140, 234,
393-394, 432, 439, 441-442, 462
Shaler, William, patronage appoint-
ment, 591, 597-59871
Sharecroppers at Sherwood Forest, 514-
515
Sharon Springs, Conn., 418
Shelter Island, New York, 34, 249-251,
25S, 34i
Shenandoah Valley (Va.) campaigns,
489-490, 495-496
Sheridan, packet ship, 37
Sherman, General William Tecumseh,
489, 498, 507
Sherwood Forest, Charles City County,
Virginia, 5, 11-13, 179-180, 201, 558;
slaves, 54, 103-104, 300-302, 403-406,
671
430 ; transition from White House to,
289-311; furnishings, 293-294, 593,
602, 604; boat and oarsmen, 294-295;
social activities, 295-298, 304-305,
347, 350-353, 421-423; remodeling of,
296; Julia's emotional attachment to,
297; farming operations, 298-300, 302,
361, 64111; wheat crop, 298-300, 361,
406; white labor, 301-302, 63173; fam-
ily circle, 302-304, 334-360; visits of
Margaret and Juliana to, 388 ; during
the Civil War, 465, 488 ; potato crop,
469 ; after death of Tyler, 471-472 ;
Julia's desire to sell, 478-479 ; occupa-
tion and damage, 489-490, 495,
502 ; destruction wrought by Negroes,
502; Reconstruction years, 506; dur-
ing Reconstruction period, 512, 531;
Swedish immigrants hired for, 513-
515; restoration of, 532-533, 552-553 J
Panic of 1873, 541-543; financial
problems in 1874, 542-543; property
losses, 548
Sierra Madre (Calif.) mountains, 386
Sigel, General Franz, 489, 494, 497, 525
Sioux City, Iowa land grant, 60, 636-
637«
Sister Loretto, 539
Slamm, Levi D., 239, 279
Slaves and slavery, 12, 20-21; attitude
of Gardiner family, 21 ; Tyler's treat-
ment of, 53-54, 103-104, 300-302,
403-406, 423, 427-428, 430, 444-445>
476; Sherwood Forest, 54, 300-302,
403-406, 430, 506; opposition to con-
tinuation of African slave trade, 53 ;
African colonization scheme, 53 ; Mis-
souri Compromise debate, 69-71;
Congressional regulation, 71 ; aboli-
tionist propaganda, 104-105; leasing,
302; Wilmot Proviso, 331-332, 609^;
at Caseyville, Ky., 372; 1848 cam-
paign, 392 ; "Squatter sovereignty,"
393; Compromise of 1850, 394; James
Hamlet case, 397-400; Julia Tyler's
letter defending slavery, 402-406;
Kansas-Nebraska Bill, 406-409; Ty-
ler's moderation on, 427-428; Tyler's
views in 1860, 433, 444-445
Smith, Adam, 50, 67
Smith, Alfred E., 539
Smith, Delazon, 228, 235; relations with
Tyler Party, $gin
Smith, Col. Thomas, 119, 57ow
Smith, William, 121
672
Smith, Gov. William, 552
Social life of the Tylers, 417; in the
White House, 172-208; Sherwood
Forest, 295-298, 304-305, 347, 350-
353, 421-423 ; Virginia mineral springs,
418-419; Villa Margaret, 442-443
Sellers, Augustus A., 579^
South, reaction to Fugitive Slave Act,
396; plans for secession, 412-413; re-
action in the event Fremont elected,
413 ; Union occupation, 513
(See also Confederate States of Amer-
ica)
South Carolina, 446-447 ; nullification is-
sue, 90-96 ; nullification and secession
acts, 91-96; suspended Ordinance of
Nullification, 95-96 ; threat of seces-
sion, 440, 443 ; secession of, 445, 448;
ultimatum on Fort Sumter, 452-455,
457
Southard, Samuel L., 160
Southern Farmer and Planter, 552
Southern Literary Messenger, 402
Specie Circular, 128
Speeches of John Tyler, 54, 93-96, 138,
425-428, 460; on national bank ques-
tion, 65 ; motion to censure Jackson,
68
Spencer, John C., 224-225, 426
Spencer, Julia Tyler ("Baby"), 537,
542-543, 550-555, 642-643*1
Spencer, William H., 536, 642-643«
Spirit of the Times, 313
"Spoils" System, 83-84
"Squatter sovereignty," 393-394, 407
Stag, CSS, 486-487
Stage travels, 367
Star of the West, steamer, 448
Staten Island, New York, Gardiner
homes on, 390, 471—472
(See also Castleton Hill)
States' rights, 50, 52, 60, 444; position
on national bank question, 65 ; Tyler's
views, 73-101, 136, 148, 425 ; Calhoun
advocate of, 82, 86-87 ; Democrats,
314; 1856 election, 412
Staunton, Va., 489, 495-496
Steinbach, Frau, 527, 639^
Stevens, Thaddeus, 132-133
Stevenson, Andrew, 60, 72
Stevenson, Mrs. J. D., 305
Stewart, Charles, 264
Stilwell, Richard E., 381, 388-389, 597-
598n
Stilwell, Silas M., 5, 192, 221-222, 269
Stock market, 331
Stockton, John Potter, 205
Stockton, Capt. Robert F., 204-205, 367,
454, 589-59°w
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 403, 405
Strong, George D., 5, 591^
Strong, George Templeton, 17
Strong, Silas B., 584*1
Stuart, A. H. H., 155
Suffolk County, New York, 26; patron-
age appointments, 271-277
Summers, George W., 450
Sumter, Thomas Delage, 41—42, 182,
187, 192-193
Supreme Court, to settle territorial slav-
ery disputes, 394, 407, 433; slavery
questions, 433
Sutherland, Duchess, 403-404
Sutherland, Dr. Joel B., 222, 230, 232,
236-237
Sutter, Johann Augustus, 377, 616
Suydam, James H., 285, 597-598
Sweet, Joseph T., 239
Sweet Springs, Virginia, 307
Sykes, L. A., 368
Taggart, William, 221, 587
Taliaferro, John, 160
Talley, John, 534
Tallmadge, Daniel B., 240
Tallmadge, James, 70
Tallmadge, Nathaniel P., 117, 129, 131,
i34» *35, 268, 317, 579», 592*
Tammany Hall, 46-47, 129, 232, 436,
534 ; patronage arrangements, 235,
267; Tyler strategy and, 227-242;
Alexander Gardiner and, 239, 318;
Texas annexation resolutions, 261-262,
280-281; Democratic Empire Club,
280; White Eagle Club, 290
Taney, Robert B., 89, 97-98
Tariff Act of 1828, 79-80, 82, 86, 91
Tariff Act of 1832, 90-91
Tariff Act of 1842, 168-169
Tariff compromise movement, 94—96
"Tariff of Abominations" (1828), So, 82,
86, 91
Tariffs, Tyler's views on, 50, 65-67, 210-
21 1 ; free trade vs. protectionism, 66-
67, 210-211; revenue-raising intent,
166-167
Tasistro, Louis F., 5, 6, 221, 224, 303
Taylor, John A., 634-63 5 n
Taylor, President Zachary, 116, 328, 355;
patronage appointments, 374, 393;
Presidential candidate, 391-392; elec-
tion of 1848, 392 ; death of, 395
TazeweU, Littleton W., 93, 98, 100-101,
105, 122, 142, 163, 220; Presidential
boom, 117—118
Tecumseh, Indian chief, 118
Telegraphy, 171
Tennessee Resolution, 74
Texas and Pacific Railroad, 550, 553
Texas annexation, 5-6, 16, 168, 171, 209-
219; slavery issue and, 209, 215, 321,
395; secret negotiations, 213—214, 218;
economic advantages, 215-216, 219,
324-325, 395, 425; British machina-
tions, 216; Jackson in favor of, 218;
Clay's opposition, 218; treaty signed,
218; treaty defeated in Senate, 229;
Tyler's Annual Message (1844), 246-
247 ; joint resolution instead of treaty,
247, 260-261, 269, 279—283; resolu-
tions passed by Tammany Hall, 261-
262 ; accomplished, 265 ; Alexander
Gardiner's attitude toward, 266-267;
signed by Tyler, 283; national char-
acter of, 324-325; Tyler's role, 324-
326; Calhoun tries to take credit for,
324-325; Tyler's desire to achieve a
cotton monopoly, 395; Tyler's mo-
tives, 395, 425
Texas Republic, recognition of, 214
Texas Resolution, 260-261, 269; passage
through Congress, 279-283
Texas Revolution, 214
Thames (Ont.) battle, 118
Third (Tyler) Party movement (1843-
1844), 170-171, 201, 209, 218; planned
by Tyler, 161, 179; purpose, 210;
Democratic Republicans, 218-219;
platform, 218; following in New York
City, 221—224; anti-Van Buren bloc,
221
Thomas, F. W., 243, 258, 262, 290; press
agent for Julia Tyler, 245
Thomas, Jesse B., 70
Thomas Amendment, Missouri Compro-
mise, 70
Thompson, E. G., 593~594»
Thompson, George, 396
Thompson, George F., 593^
Thompson, John B., 57971
Thompson, John R., 313
Thompson, Jonathan, 560-561^
Thompson, Sarah Gardiner, 254
Thompson, Sarah Griswold, 438
Thompson, Judge Smith, 189
673
Tidewater Virginia, sectional contro-
versy, 431-432 ; after Harpers Ferry,
431 ; after Lincoln's election, 445 ;
plantations plundered, 489—490
(See also Sherwood Forest)
Tilden, Samuel J., 550, 619-620
Tilford, Henry, 363-364
"Tippecanoe and Tyler Too," 40, 135
Tom Thumb exhibit, 354
Trade, Tyler's views on, 50, 65-66, 210-
211
(See also Tariffs)
Travels and traveling, to Kentucky,
366-367; to California, 375, 386
Tucker, Annie Baker, 543
Tucker, Henry St. George, 92
Tucker, Nathaniel Beverley, 125, 150,
155, 161, 165
Tuscarora, New York, 536-537
Tweed, William M. ("Boss"), 534
"Two dollars a day and roast beef,"
128-129, 136
Tyler, Alex (see Tyler, John Alexander)
Tyler, Alice, 172, 246, 249; romantic in-
terests, 253, 255-256, 346-348; rela-
tions with Julia, 302-303 ; marriage
to Henry M. Denison, 349
Tyler, B. O., 245, 593~594»
Tyler, Chancellor Samuel, 50
Tyler, Christiana, 64
Tyler, David Gardiner ("Gardie"), 311,
335-336, 422, 442-4437 45*, 461, 466,
488; birth of, 311, 335; during Civil
War, 475, 483, 496-499, $10; super-
visor of Sherwood Forest, 477, 532 ;
education, 478-479, 508, 529-530;
military service, 483, 496—499, 510; at
Washington College, 478, 483, 495-
497, 5°°, 5°8, 529-530; dedication to
the Confederacy, 512-513, 550-551;
education in Germany, 512, 523—530,
63 9w; postwar problems, 521 ; interest
in sports, 527 ; feelings about David
Lyon Gardiner, 528; law practice,
532; political activity, 532-534, 55o,
Panic of 1873, 543; on Julia Tyler's
pension request, 548; marriage, 551-
552 ; on H. A. Wise memoir of Tyler,
636, 64271
Tyler, Elizabeth, 102, 172-173, 178-179,
60 6nf 6 2 8-6 2 gn
(See also Waller, Elizabeth Tyler)
Tyler, Fannie Glinn, 624«
Tyler, Fitz (see Tyler, Robert Fitzwal-
ter)
674
Tyler, Gardie (see Tyler, David Gardi-
ner)
Tyler, Gardiner (1878-1892), 544
Tyler, Georgia Powell, 543, 546
Tyler, Grace Raoul, 475-476, 6o6», 628-
Tyler, Henry, 51
Tyler, James Rochelle, 571-572
Tyler, Judge John, 48-51 ; father of the
President, 48-49 ; political and social
views of, 50—51 ; elected Governor of
Virginia, 50; Revolutionary career, 51
Tyler, President John, marriage to Julia
Gardiner, 1-16, 57, 189-190, 337, 350,
358, 427, 58o«; campaign for re-
election, 5 ; children of first marriage,
6—7 ; poetic composition, 13—14, 102,
198, 35S-3S9, 58i«; "A Serenade Ded-
icated to Miss Julia Gardiner," 13-14;
children, 16, 57, 71, 102, 105-107, 122-
123, 178-179, 357-358, 427; temper-
ament and character, 43, 62, 74, 147,
472, 599w; philosophy, 40-41, 50-54,
61, 88-89, 108-110, 148, 219-242;
death of Harrison, 40, 49, 147-148 ;
first meeting with Julia Gardiner, 43 ;
childhood, 48-72 ; education, 48-50;
birth, 48; myths concerning, 49, 148;
William and Mary College, 49-50,
106-107, 425, 5657*; love for music,
49, 350-351 J law practice, 50, 54,
114, 122—123; Governor of Virginia
(1825), 50, 57, 76-78; family back-
ground, 51; views on the extension
of slavery, 53™54, 394~395, 427, 433 J
political career, 54-57, 102 ; hatred of
Great Britain, 54, 332, 396, 406; ora-
torical ability, 54, 93-96, 138, 425-
428, 460; marriage to Letitia Chris-
tian, 56—57; Congressional service, 57,
60-61, 65-66, 71-72, 78-79, 93, 110-
115 ; delegate to House of Delegates,
57, 65-66, 71-72, 74, 127; military
career, 59-60; War of 1812, 58-60;
Sioux City, Iowa, land grant, 60, 636-
637«; lacked the "common touch,"
61-62 ; feared the power of the peo-
ple, 61-62 ; efforts to preserve Con-
stitution, 62-63, 71 ; re-elected to the
House in 1819, 65-66 ; on tariff of
1820, 65-66; Jackson distrusted by,
67, 74-75, 108; resignation from
House, 71-72; health, 72, 418, 423-
424, 427, 450, 453-454; dilemmas, 73-
101; states' rights views, 73-101, 136,
148, 425J re-elected to House of Dele-
gates, 74 ; support of Adams- Calhoun
administration, 74—76, 79 ; financial
affairs, 77, 102-103, 112, 115, 177-178,
296, 310, 341, 356, 361 ; political or-
ganization, 77; public school bills, 77;
canal- and road-building program, 77 ;
election to the Senate (1827), 78-79;
congratulatory letter sent Clay, 76, 81 ;
decision to support Andrew Jackson,
80-8 1 ; appointment of Donelson, 83,
89, 320, 59iw; attack on Jackson's ap-
pointment policy, 84-85 ; support of
Jackson, 85-90 ; on Jackson's veto of
Bank Bill in 1832, 87-88; grasp of
banking economics, 88—89; So. Caro-
lina's nullification bill, 91-96;
speeches, 93-96, 138, 425-428, 460 ;
against the Force Bill, 93-96; re-elec-
tion to the Senate (1833), 93; break
with Jackson, 97-100, 108; comes to
support Clay, 97, 591-592^- Whig
sympathies, 97, 122; renounces the
Democratic Party, 97, 100; middle
years, 102-126; political advancement,
102; slaves, 103-104, 300-302, 403-
406, 430; lent money to friends and
relatives, 103; education of children,
105—107, 442—443; member of Board
of Visitors, William and Mary Col-
lege, 106-107 ; social life in Washing-
ton, 107—108 ; use of franking privi-
lege, 1 08 ; nickname of "Honest John,"
108 ; religious toleration, 108-109 ;
political honesty, 108; resigned Senate
seat over the Instruction question,
110-115, 5 70-5 7 in; nominated for
Vice-Presidency by Whigs, 111-115;
letter of resignation, 114-115, 570-
57 in; censure of Giles and Brent,
114; moved family to Williamsburg,
115; Presidential boom for Tazewell,
117-118; endorses nomination of
White, 118-119; Vice-Presidential
nomination, 120-121, 127-146, 57 in;
election of 1836, 120-121 ; multiple
candidates of Whig Party, 120; vote
polled by, 121-122; did not campaign
personally, 121 ; class bias, 122;
election of 1840, 122, 432-433 ; re-
turn to politics in 1838, 127-132;
elected to Virginia House of Delegates
(1838), 127; contest for Senate seat
(1838), 130-132; supported Clay,
130-134; precampaign speeches, 132;
nomination for Vice-Presidency, 134-
135 ; campaign of 1840, I35-I39J tear-
shedding story, 132, 573^; speech at
Columbus, 138 ; on the Whig coali-
tion, 141 ; sworn in as Vice-P resident,
144; notification of Harrison's death,
147-148; administration, 147-171,
331-332, 392-393, 401, 409; struggle
with Clay and the Whigs, 147-171 ;
training in government, 147 ; adher-
ence to principles, 147 ; strict construe-
tionist, 148; Cabinet, 149, 155, 160-
162, 164; oath of office, 149; fiscal
changes, 150-171 ; inaugural address,
150; expulsion from the Whig Party,
151, 162-163 j resignation of Cabinet,
151, 160-161; personal feelings for
Clay, 97, 152, 426; veto of District
Bank Bill, 153-156; bank views, 153-
154 ; signed bill repealing Van Buren's
Independent Treasury, 156 ; burnt in
effigy, 156; castigated by Clay, 156;
Fiscal Corporation Bill vetoed by,
159-160; personal vilification, 160;
foreign policies, 161; Third party
movement, 161, 170-171, 218-242;
Exchequer Plan, 163-165 ; veto of
tariff-distribution bill, 166—167; im-
peachment talk about, 167-169; Whig
attacks, 167-168; public and private
papers, 168, 425, 489, 507; domestic
program, 170; social life in the White
House, 172-208; personal life, 172-
180; nepotism, 178; love letters from
Julia, 189-190, s&on; courtship, 192-
208 ; dedication of Bunker Hill monu-
ment, 200, 227; patronage, 201, 218,
226-227, 385, 588w; use of appoint-
ing power, 201, 218, 226-227, 385,
588w; asks Juliana for Julia's hand,
207; Texas annexation, 209-219, 283,
324, 586n; role in Webster- Ashburton
treaty negotiations, 212, 323, 585 n,
6ofn; appointment of Fremont, 218,
586w; appointment of Kendall, 218,
586w; offers Polk Cabinet post, 218,
586w; conversation with Noah, 223-
224; purge of federal officeholders,
224-225; attacks on, 226; opposes
Noah appointment, 226, 588n; nom-
ination in 1844, 228—229; withdrawal
from 1844 campaign, 229-242, 312;
withdrawal statement, 236-237; in-
terpretation of Polk victory, 239-242;
final Annual Message, 246-247 ; re-
675
lationship with Alexander Gardiner,
268-269, 341, 368, 387, 61971; "avail-
ability" for 1848, 268-269 ; future po-
litical ambitions, 268-269, 293, 307,
313, 322 ; election to Confederate Con-
gress (1861), 268; professional poli-
tician, 268; kindness to President-
elect Polk, 277; annexation measure
signed by, 283 ; on Samuel Nelson's
appointment to Supreme Court, 287,
600-60 1 n; departure from the White
House, 289-292; foreign-policy
achievements, 290; concern for
Julia's comfort at Sherwood Forest,
293—294; proud of Julia, 295-296;
farming operations, 298-300 ; treat-
ment of slaves, 300-302, 403-406, 430,
445—446 ; fondness for animals, 305—
306, 357, S93«, 6047*; conferences in
New York and Philadelphia, 309 ; dis-
enchantment with Polk administra-
tion, 312-333 ; power of appointment,
313 ; political appointments, 320;
partisan attacks on, 320; "President
by accident," slur, 321 ; visit to Wash-
ington (1846), 322-324; appearance
before Congress (1846), 322-323; re-
ceipt of Brazoria pitcher, 322, 60771;
dinner with Polk (1846) , 323 ; credit
for Texas annexation challenged, 324-
326 ; position on the Mexican War,
327-330; on impact of Wilmot Pro-
viso, 332, 6ogn; president of the Peace
Convention, 334 ; life at Sherwood
Forest, 334-360; love for Julia, 337,
350, 358; Margaret's wedding, 346;
fox hunting, 347, 351 ; happiness en-
joyed by, 337, 350, 358; deaths of
three daughters, 350; political repu-
tation, 355, 401, 409, 425, 435, 552;
Caseyville coal and timber speculation,
361—372; enthusiasm for California,
373~374; financial assistance from
Gardiners, 389 ; elected overseer of
roads, 390-391 ; connection with poli-
tics, 390-391 ; on Taylor's candidacy,
391-393 ; political influence in Wash-
ington, 391 ; 1848 political role, 391 ;
blamed Polk for Cass's defeat, 392 ;
patronage requests, 393; letter to
Webster on slavery, 394-395; sup-
ported Compromise of 1850, 394-395,
407 ; views on Fillmore, 396; views
on Fugitive Slave Act, 397, 400;
views on Buchanan, 400-401, 411, 414,
676
416; attack of pneumonia, 400-401 ;
on Pierce, 401-402, 410; administra-
tion endorsed by Virginia Democracy,
401 ; on Czarist Russia, 406, 585?*; on
Kansas-Nebraska Bill, 407-408 ; oppo-
sition to Missouri Compromise limi-
tation on slavery, 407 ; defense of
Roman Catholics, 408-409 ; political
future in 1855, 409-410; support of
Buchanan, 411, 414, 416; on secession,
412-413; reaction to election of Lin-
coln, 413 ; events leading to Civil War,
417-446; will, 424-425, 472, 478;
plans for biography, 424 ; honorary
degree, 425 ; Bank of the United
States, 425; "The Bead of the Cab-
inet" speech, 426; Maryland Institute
address, 426 ; moderation on slavery
issue, 427, 440; Julia's poem on 65th
birthday, 427 ; speech at Jamestown,
427; Virginia history love of, 427;
Presidential "boom" in 1860, 435-437;
on 1860 split of the Democratic Party,
439—441 ; on Lincoln's nomination,
440; views on election of 1860, 445-
446 ; pleas for sectional harmony, 446 ;
attempts to stave off the Civil War,
447-472 ; appointed to Peace Confer-
ence, 450, 453-454 ; complicity in
Seddon amendment, 450, 457, 627-
628^; elected to the Virginia State
Convention, 451 ; elected president of
Peace Conference, 453-454; urges Bu-
chanan to surrender Fort Sumter,
455 ; sought peace through balance of
power, 456-460, 463 ; change to pro-
secessionism, 456—460; interview with
Lincoln, 458 ; forwarded suggested
constitutional amendment to Con-
gress, 459-460; Peace Conference de-
nounced by, 460 ; speech for seces-
sion, 460 ; elected to Provisional Con-
gress of the Confederate States, 464,
469 ; never defeated in a public elec-
tion, 469 ; last illness and death, 470—
472, 548; funeral, 472, 556; claims
against estate of, 515, 532, 63 6-63 7«;
warns Waller on Clay, 591-592^;
warns Santa Anna, 591*1; use of pro-
fanity, 599w
Tyler, John, Jr., 4, 8, u, 71, 106, 123,
160, 163, 303-304, 401, 405, 424* 4^4;
500, 507; escorts Julia Gardiner, 191,
580-581*1; discharged as Presidential
secretary, 226, 588-589^, 59472; news-
paper articles by, 248, 436, 494; and
Yancy-CIingman duel law practice,
303; Mexican War, 328-329; desire
to go to California, 374-375, 6i6»;
personal habits, 374-375, 6i6n; pa-
tronage appointment, 393, 520-521;
worked for Buchanan's election, 416;
service during Civil War, 465 ; post-
Civil War adjustment, 520
Tyler, John Alexander ("Alex"), 338-
339, 442-443, 485, 509-5io; birth of,
338-339 ; desire to join Confederate
Navy, 498-500 ; military service, 508 ;
during Reconstruction, 512 ; educa-
tion in Germany, 512-530, 541-542;
scientific ability, 523 ; fought in
Franco -Prussian War, 529—530, 640?* ;
patronage appointment, 544-545 ;
marriage, 544, 553 ; death, 545
Tyler, John C., 479-480, 488-490
Tyler, John IV, 628-629**
Tyler, Julia Campbell, 6o6«, 628-629,
63 7»
Tyler, Julia Gardiner, marriage to John
Tyler, 1-16, 246, 358; appearance, 4,
1*9, 352, 355-357, 542, 583**, 641**;
reign as First Lady, 8-9, 38, 208, 243-
265, 268, 302, 417; social and political
ability, 12 ; on "Sweet Lady Awake,"
13, 55S«; poem written by, 15, 427 ;
temperament and character, 20, 27,
246, 538; attitude toward slavery, 21;
guitar playing, 34-35, 294, 351, 6o2«;
Bogert and Mecamley advertisement,
35, 563«; romance with Belgian
Count, 39, 563«; court life in Wash-
ington, 243-265, 302 ; clothes, 244,
263-264, 307-308, 352, 356, 542 ; por-
traits, 245, 536; Texas annexation
promoted by, 247-248, 268, 281-283,
6oow; mail received by, 249 ; recep-
tions and levees, 257-265; farewell
ball, 261—265 j patronage matters and,
270-271 ; transition from White House
to Sherwood Forest, 289-311; social
hospitality, 290 ; strained relations
with Tyler's daughters, 291-292, 302-
304, 352, 6o6n; homesickness for New
York City, 294, 6o2w; shopping com-
missions, 294, 337; life at Sherwood
Forest, 297, 334-360; fondness for
animals, 305-306, 357, 593^, 6047*;
economy program, 310; visit to New
York, 308-309, 480; pregnancies, 311,
334-339> 356-359» 421-422, 428, 442;
birth of David Gardiner Tyler, 311,
335 ; attitude toward Polk adminis-
tration, 319-320; sensitive to criti-
cism, 321-322; divorce rumors, 335-
336; happiness with President, 337,
350, 358; children, 337~338, 350, 359*
422 ; birth of John Alexander Tyler,
338-339 ; matchmaking activities,
339-350, 4I9 J Margaret's wedding in
New York, 346; vacations, 353-356,
417-418, 421, 442-443; birth of
daughter, 356-357 ; effect of Alexan-
der's death on, 387 ; letter in defense
of slavery, 402-406; attack on British
interference in domestic affairs, 404—
405 ,* congratulatory letters received,
405 ; song "The Duchess," 405 ; chil-
dren sent to New York during war,
421, 471-472, 477, 480; effect of Mar-
garet's death on, 421 ; poem on Tyler's
6$th birthday, 427 ; return to Wash-
ington, 451, 453, 455 ; social successes,
453-454," Civil War period, 463-469,
475-5*0; death of husband, 470-472 ;
at Sherwood Forest after Tyler's
death, 474 ; sickness of children, 474 ;
return to Staten Island, 480 ; attempt
to secure pass, 481 ; departs on block-
ade runner, 482 ; split with David
Lyon Gardiner, 485, 500-507 ; at-
tempts to secure release of Capt.
Gayle, 485-487 ; pleas to Lincoln,
490-491 ; litigation over mother's
will, 500-507, 524, 634-6357*; rela-
tionship with mother, 503-504 ; attack
by Delafield, 508-510; postwar de-
cisions, 510; Reconstruction period,
511—517; friendship with Varina Da-
vis, 511 ; Swedish immigrants hired
by, 513-515 ; letter to Andrew John-
son, 515; Semple cared for by, 518-
520; marriage and death of Julie,
536-537; visits to Washington, 536;
social life in Washington, 537-538;
conversion to Roman Catholicism,
538-540; during Panic of 1873, 540-
543 ; financial problems, 540-543 ; at-
tempts to get Alex a government ap-
pointment, 544-545; campaign for a
federal pension, 547-549; last days in
Richmond, 551-556 ; death and fu-
neral, 554-555; exact date of birth
uncertain, 560; "The Julia Waltzes,"
Tyler, Julia Gardiner ("Julie"), 356-
677
357, 461, 469; birth of, 356-357 J ed-
ucation at Sacred Heart Convent,
Halifax, 521, 522, 537, 64871; advice
given by mother, 522 ; marriage and
death, 536-537
Tyler, Lachlan, 357* 543, 55*-552, 555»
613**; study of medicine, 541 ; seeks
federal employment, 546-547
Tyler, Letitia, 71, 102, 106, 123, 460;
(See also Semple, Letitia Tyler)
Tyler, Letitia Christian, 7, 43, 77,- death
of, 2, 1 68, 178-179, 578w; children,
7, 57, 102 ; temperament and charac-
ter, 57-58; paralytic stroke, 58, 172-
173
Tyler, Letitia Christian II, 6o6n, 628-
629/2, 63 7«
Tyler, Lillian Horsford, 544
Tyler, Lyon Gardiner ("Lonie"), 51,
168, 359, 444, 537~538, 542-543, 555 J
education, 537, 641?*, 645-64671; The
Letters and Times of the Tylers, 552 ;
president of William and Mary Col-
lege, 552, 554
Tyler, Maria, 442, 447, 488, 490, 492-
494
Tyler, Martha Rochelle, 520, 571-572**
Tyler, Mary, 71, 87, 107-108, 350; mar-
riage to Henry L. Jones, 107, 112
Tyler, Mary Armistead, 48
Tyler, Mary Fairlee, 628-6297*
Tyler, Nannie Bridges, 500, 6347*
Tyler, Patty, 442
Tyler, Pearl ("Pearlie"), 442, 537, 542 ;
conversion to Catholicism, 539 ; mar-
ried to Major Ellis, 552
Tyler, Priscilla Cooper, 43, 58, 148, 163,
192-193, 227, 414-415, 465, 5oo, 517;
marriage, 123-126; White House
hostess, 172-175; children, 318-319,
6o6«; Julia Gardiner Tyler's wedding
cake, 558*1; economic privations, 415,
6o6w; death, 63771
Tyler, Priscilla ("Tousie"), 60671, 628-
629*1, 63771
Tyler, Robert, 8, 42, 44, 58, 71, 106, 148,
163, 173, 175, 178, i_94, 236, 251-252,
311 ; marriage to Priscilla Cooper,
123-126; New York politics, 221-222,
, 270; campaign of 1844, 230; efforts
to promote Texas annexation, 279 ;
departure from the White House, 290;
political activities in Philadelphia,
313-314, 318, 328-330, 401, 410-411,
678
414 > 436,* patronage appointments
and disappointments, 317, 39*~392,
414-416, 588-5897^; family, 318, 628-
6297*, 63772; law practice, 318, 416;
monitoring of the press, 326-327 ;
Mexican War, 328-329; on route of
transcontinental railroad, 384 ; sup-
ported Cass, 391 ; worked for Buchan-
an's election, 401, 411-416; on Julia's
letter in defense of slavery, 405 ; war
against the Know-Nothings, 409 ;
hope for patronage appointment from
Buchanan, 414-416; on Democratic
Executive Committee, 415-416; finan-
cial status, 415, 6o6n; visits by Tylers,
418 ; private papers of President left
to, 424 ; Vice-Presidential possibility,
434-435; service to the Confederacy,
460, 464-465, 500, 508; Bristol, Pa.,
residence, 464-465, 6o6n, 628n; death
of John Tyler, 470-471 ; during Re-
construction, 517, 63773; Buchanan's
offer of aid, 517; editor of Montgom-
ery Advertiser, 517 ; death, 517; es-
corts Margaret Gardiner, 580-58 in;
on Oregon question, 6o6«, 608-60971;
serves in "Treasury Battalion," 634n
Tyler, Robert, Jr. ("Robbie"), 628-
62971, 637»
Tyler, Robert Fitzwalter, 18, 421-422,
537, 542, SSi, 555, 6247*
Tyler, Sally Gardiner, 546-547
Tyler, Sarah Griswold Gardiner
("Sally"), 24, 544, 553, 564«, 64471
Tyler, Tazewell, 8, 49, 102, 105, 351-
352, 423-424, 429, 47o-47*> 5o°> 5*9»
636-637n; education, 374, 624n; sur-
geon in the Confederate Army, 465 ;
marriage, 500, 63471; postwar adjust-
ments, 521
Tyler, Thomas Cooper, 6 2 8-6 2 gn
Tyler, Wat, English revolutionist, 51
Tyler, Dr. Wat Henry, 306, 5957*
Tyler, William, 317
"Tyler and Texas," 208
Tyler Doctrine, 211
Tyler family, 51, 105-107; background,
17 ; anti-Tyler campaign and, 163 ;
service to the Confederacy, 465-466 ;
during Reconstruction period, 517
Tyler- Gardiner family alliance, effect of
Alexander Gardiner's death on, 387;
legal trouble over Juliana's estate,
500-507
Uncle Tom's Cabin (Stowe), 301, 403
Underground Railroad, 301
Underwood Constitution (Va.), 53 r, 533
Union, Tyler's speeches on, 425-426
Union County, Kentucky, 36i-362s 364
Union political parties, 395
United States Circuit Court, 415 ; Alex-
ander Gardiner appointed to clerkship,
286-288, 388
United States Telegraph, 118
Upshur, Abel P., 149, 152, 161, 164, 165,
170, 205, 212-213, 219, 326, 426, 577«;
negotiations with Texas, 210; death,
216
Utah, Compromise of 1850, 394; slav-
ery question, 395, 407
Vacations, Tyler and Gardiner family,
353-356, 417-418, 421, 442-443
(See also Villa Margaret)
Van Antwerpt, James, 583**
Van Buren, Martin, 25, 37, 40, 46, 86-
87, 90, 113, 129, 132, 240; joins with
Jackson, 87 ; leader of New York
Democrats, 87; opposition to, 117;
nomination of, 118; election to Presi-
dency, 12 1 ; administration, 128—129;
Independent Treasury plan, 128-129;
defeat, 140-141 ; opposition to Texas
annexation, 218; Albany Regency,
227—228, 266, 278; loss of renomina-
tion, 228; ran on Free Soil ticket, 392
Van Buren Democrats, 391
Van Buren-Silas Wright faction, 281
Van de Vyvew, Bishop-elect A., 555
Van Ness, Cornelius P., 232-233, 269-
270, 278-279, 316, 591, 599-600
Van Ness, Gen. John P., 42, 180, 245,
290, 354
Van Rensselaer, Henry, 579— 581 «
Van Wyck, Mary Gardiner, 559-560*1
Van Zandt, Isaac, 209, 584-585*1
Vetoes, use of Presidential, 283
Vice-Presidency, 121 ; ascendancy to
Presidency, 148-149; status, 322;
Breckinridge, 411—412
Vicksburg (Miss.) battle, 480
Victoria, Queen, 339
Viele, Gen. Egbert L., 476
Villa Margaret, Hampton, Va., 372,
421, 428, 442, 467-468, 491, 515, 542;
attempts to regain, 515-516; property
losses, 548
Virginia, House of Delegates, 51, 54, 56,
58, 74, no, 113-114, 552; Democrats,
81, 400; Jacksonians, 81 ; General As-
sembly, loo-ioi, 448, 452, 533 ; Con-
vention of 1831-1832, 104; Jackson
Democrats, 110-115; Whigs, 113; con-
test for Senate seat (1838), 130-132 ;
vacation spots, 304-305 ; society, 309-
310; anti-Catholic movement, 409;
Pennsylvania-Virginia alliance, 410-
411, 435; mineral springs, 418, 423;
Tyler's speech on history of, 427 ; sec-
tional crisis, 431-432 ; policy of anti-
abolitionism, 432; election of 1860,
445 ; secession controversy, 450 ; del-
egation to the Peace Convention, 450 ;
secession of, 457, 464; State Conven-
tion, 451, 460; Home Guards, 498;
Radical Republicanism in, 530-533,
550; Underwood Constitution, 531,
533 ; restoration of statehood, 533 ;
Conservative Convention of 1872, 535
Virginia, Bank of, 63 6-63 7 n
Virginia, University of, 356, 529
"Virginia Clique," 152, 159, 161, 219,
226; patronage appointments, 588-
589^
Virginia Military Institute, 483, 494, 496
Wade, Reverend Dr., 432, 474
Waggaman, Floyd, 283, 328
Waggaman, George, 372
Waggaman, Henry, 103
Waggaman, John H., 108, 132 ; patron-
age appointment, 588-589**
Waggaman, William, 402
Waldron, Richard R., 42-43, 180, 184-
186, 192-193, 196, 579-58°**
Walker, Gov. Gilbert C-, 533
Walker, Maj. and Mrs. Norman J., 484,
Walker, Robert J., 215, 230-232, 282,
323,381
Walker, William, 384
Wall Street lobby, 164
Watt Street Reporter, 313
Waller, Bessie Austin, 62 gn
Waller, Elizabeth Tyler, 7-8, 14, 250,
349-350, 466, 578«; strained rela-
tions with Julia, 302
Waller, Jenny Howell, 481, 511, 629*1
Waller, John Tyler, 466
Waller, William Griffin, 443, 466, 481-
482, 578, 629*1
679
Waller, William N., 173, 178-179, 204,
250, 351, 424, 59i-592»
Walsh, Mike, 235, 59 in
War of 1812, 22, 25, 58-60; causes, 58-
59 ; Tyler's participation, 58-60
Ward, Gen. Aaron, 42
Ward, Francis Marion, 184, 579^
Warm Springs, Virginia, 418
Washington, President George, 55, 425
Washington, D.C., living conditions, 57,
60-6 1 ; Mrs. Peyton's boardinghouse,
105, 179, 181-182; social and political
life, 107-108, 172-208, 243-265; police
force, 156; meeting of Tyler's follow-
ers, 218; burning of National Theater,
292 ; Julia Tyler visits to, 334, 536-
537 ; Margaret Beeckman's honey-
moon, 347-348 ; Confederate raids
near, 498
Washington College, 478, 483, 495~497,
500, 508, 529-530; Reserve infantry
unit, 483, 63 1 n; Robert E. Lee presi-
dent of, 529-53o
Washington (D.C.) Globe, 220, 237, 315
Washington (D.C.) Madisonian, 6, 225,
227, 237, 242, 292, 313
Washington Memorial (Richmond, Va.),
laying cornerstone of, 355
Washington (D.C.) "Union, 314
Watkins, Joseph L., 364-365
Watkins, Col. Joseph S., 112
Watson, William, 634-635
Wealth and Pedigree of the Wealthy Cit-
izens of New York City (Beach) , 45
Wealth of Nations (Smith), 50
Webb, James Watson, 597-598
Webster, Daniel, 80, 83, 91, n 6, 132,
134, 139, 143, 145, 158-159, 323, 374,
426; on nullification and secession, 92 ;
Presidential nomination, 119; Bank
crisis of 1841, 152 ; in Tyler's Cab-
inet, 160-162 ; social life, 174-175 ;
proteges, 221; gossip concerning, 222;
Ingersoll charges, 322-323 ; Seventh
of March speech, 394-395
Webster, Mrs. Daniel, 180
Webster, Fletcher, 147-148
Webster- Ashburton Treaty, 161, 212,
220, 325, 327, 434; Tyler's role in ne-
gotiations, 212, 585 n; bribery charges,
323, 6o7n
Weed, Thurlow, 41, 117, 132, 135
Wells, Henry H., 533
West Point, New York (U.S. Military
Academy), 34, 295, 443
680
Wetmore, Prosper M., 437, 589-590,
597-598
Wetmore, Robert C., 221, 587^, 589-
59ow, 597-598^
Wheat, 298-300, 361, 406
Whig Party, 26, 40, 116; Tyler Vice-
Presidential nominee, in ; coalition
(1836), 115-122; Southern, 116, 129-
130, 410, 413; Old Dominion, 118;
campaign strategy, 119; multiple-
candidate approach, 1 20 ; Congres-
sional election, 1838, 129; convention
at Harrisburg (1839), 132-135; cam-
paign of 1840, 135-140, 393 ; National
faction, 141 ; Northern wing, 141 ;
Tyler expelled from, 151, 158, 162-
163; 1842 elections, 170; alliance with
Native American Party, 238, 241 ; at-
tempts to humiliate Tyler, 390; elec-
tions of 1848, 391-392 ; antislavery
Northern, 393; election of 1836, 400;
1852 elections, 401-402; end of, 402;
slavery issue, 409; New York, 410;
endorsed Fillmore in 1856, 412
Whipple, George, 516
White, Edward C., 58o-58i»
White, Edward Douglass, 286, 313
White, Hugh L., 113, 116, 118-119, 129;
Tyler's support of, 122 ; District Bank
plan, 153-156
White Eagle Club, 291
White House, Tyler's honeymoon at,
5-6; condition, 10, 177-178, 243-244;
rebuilding of, 60; social life, 172—208,
243-265; receptions and levees, 173-
177, 244-245, 257-265; furnishings,
177-178, 243-244; New Year's Day
reception, 257-259; Tyler's farewell
ball, 261-265; Texas victory dinner,
283 ; end of Tyler's administration,
289-292; Polk administration, 332-
333 5 Julia Tyler's visits to, 536, 545
White Man's Party (Ala.), 5*7, 534
White Sulphur Springs, Virginia, 37,
296, 307, 359> 402, 418
Wickliffe, Charles A., 4, 42, 143, 203,
315, 454, 632-633
Wickliffe, Nannie, 4, 254-255
Wilcox, Dr. Henry, 419
Wilcox, Lamb, 489
Wild, Brig. Gen. Edward A., 489-490,
492-493, 632«
Wilderness (Va.) battle, 497
Wilemson, Mary, 18, 264
Wilkes Expedition, 180, 185
Wilkins, Charles, 2531 256
Wilkins, William, 246, 263, 369, 5yo«
Wilkinson, Capt. John, 482
Will of John Tyler, 424-425, 472, 478
Willard, Capt. Abijah, 21
William and Mary College, 59, 359 ;
Tyler's academic career, 48-50;
Tyler's service to, 106-107, 425, 56s«;
Robert and John, Jr., attended, 106-
107; Lyon G. Tyler president of, 552,
554
Williams, Edward P., 486
Williams, Capt. Paul, 21
Williamsburg, Virginia, 425, 475, 554;
Tyler educated in, 50; War of 1812,
59-60; Tyler's home, 115, 163
Wilmington-Bermuda blockade run, 486,
507
Wilmot, David, 331, 454
Wilmot Proviso, 314, 331-332, 391-392,
609 n; Tyler on impact of, 332, 609 n
Wilson, J. C., 489
Wilson, Thomas, 363
Wilson, Woodrow, 61
Wing, Catherine, 301-302, 351, 603*1
Winston, Robert, 364-365
Wise, Henry A., 14-15, 91, 122, 130-
131, 139, 146-147, 152, 158, 161, 164,
170, 183, 200, 215-217, 401-402, 410,
413, 460, 472 ; flirts with Margaret
Gardiner, 183, 58o-58iw; letters to,
127, 141 ; Governor of Virginia, 409,
419, 425, 437 ; Presidential aspirations,
410-411, 434-436; mobilization of
Virginia militia, 429-430; John Brown
affair, 432 ; supported by Tyler, 434-
435 ; biographer of Tyler, 536, 642^;
Seven Decades of the Union, 536,
642 n; postwar career, 642 n
Witchcraft, 19
Withers, Col. Robert E., 547-548
Wood, Fernando, 42-43
Wood, Leonard, 563^
Woodbury, Levi P., 180, 182
Woodbury, Ruth, 182
Woodhill, Maxwell, 181
Wool, Gen. John E., 475
Workingmen's Party, 46, 128, 270
Wright, John C., 454
Wright, Mary, 255
Wright, Silas, 42, 129, 240, 281, 584^
Yale University, 22
Yancy, William L., 253
Yellow fever, 420
Yorktown, Virginia, 475
681
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The son of an Episcopal missionary, Robert Seager II was born in Nan-
king, China, in 1924. He graduated from the United States Merchant
Marine Academy in 1944, received his A.B. and M.A. degrees in Ameri-
can history from Rutgers and Columbia Universities and, in 1956, the
Ph.D. in history from Ohio State University. After teaching for several
years at Denison University in Ohio, he joined the civilian faculty of
the United States Naval Academy in 1961, where he is presently an
assistant professor of history. In addition to his teaching responsibilities,
he has served as Consulting Historian to the Ohio Civil War Centennial
Commission and as National Councillor of Phi Alpha Theta, the national
honor society in history. His scholarly historical articles, which have
appeared in the Mississippi Valley Historical Review and the Pacific
Historical Review, won him early recognition, and in 1959 he was the
recipient of the Louis Knott Koontz Prize for historiography, presented
by the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association.
And Tyler Too is Dr. Seager's first book, and with its publication
he proves himself to be a gifted young historian who has the exciting
ability to make obscure characters and times leap vividly and amusingly
to life.
(continued from front flap)
A rigidly honorable man, Tyler believed
in slavery, stated rights, and secession.
Psychologically, he Craved historical rec-
ognition. But he l:"j«i unfortunately, at
a time when such giants as Clay, Calhoun,
Douglas, Jackson, Lincoln, and Webster
were also playing their roles in American
history, and the obscurity that Tyler feared
was almost unavoidable.
His beautiful, determined wife was one
of the great belles of the century, and her
drive and boundless ambition made her one
of the most extraordinary First Ladies in
American history. With her maneuvers to
obtain jobs for members of her family, and
her subtle arrangements of their personal
lives, she could well have been a Jane Aus-
ten heroine. In describing the Gardiner clan
as it descended on the capital for a season,
Mr. Seager provides an amusing picture
of Washington social life a century ago.
But there is also failure, catastrophe,
threats of impeachment, of assassination,
and the unalterable march of history toward
a struggle between North and South. With
his unprecedented access to private papers
and documents, Mr. Seager is able to fol-
low Tyler through momentous years to the
lone, "essentially tragic" figure that he was
to become. With immense narrative skill,
Mr. Seager gives readers an unusual ex-
cursion intb all but forgotten Americana,
re-creating people and times who are vi-
brantly alive once more in And Tyler Too.
122989