EPILOGUE

History’s Judgment

 

 

William McFarland was the man assigned the task of preparing the resolutions of the Confederate Congress that would honor John Tyler. “Any announcement of the decease of the Hon. John Tyler is imperfect and inadequate,” he declared, “[or it] fails of giving utterance to the nation’s lamentation, if it do not present him as a statesman and patriot in whom his countrymen delighted to repose their confidence, and who failed not to derive fresh incentives to honor and revere him from the faithfulness and ability with which he administered every trust.” Tyler’s fame was “indissolubly blended with the history of his times, and shall survive the most enduring memorials of personal affection, or of public esteem.” McFarland continued with a sketch of Tyler’s tenure as president and praised him for being “ever intrepid in avowing his opinions, and resolute in defending them.” Tyler, he stated, “will be gratefully remembered,” and “admiring memories will fondly revert to, and recall him.”1

History has largely proven McFarland wrong in his assessment of how people remembered Tyler. While flags throughout the Confederacy flew at half-mast in solemn recognition of the contributions he had made over a long career in public life, the other half of the country for whom he had served as president refused to acknowledge his passing. President Lincoln did not order the lowering of flags. No church bells tolled in Washington or in cities throughout the North. Most northern newspapers did not even take note of his death; where they did, it was only in the most perfunctory fashion.

Northern silence reflected what amounted to a disavowal of the life and political career of John Tyler. And it continued long after January 1862. Tyler’s reputation suffered a great deal in the years following the Civil War. The northern public remembered him as the very embodiment of the states’ rights ideology and system of slavery the war had succeeded in toppling. He represented an anachronism not worth calling to mind. Southerners, too, seemingly preferred to forget the man and banish him from their collective memory, not wanting reminders of what had really brought on the Civil War, choosing instead the comfort of the Lost Cause mythology.

The only American president to have been read out of his own party is also the only chief executive of this country to have repudiated his oath of office and turned his back on the nation he once led. In effect, he renounced his American citizenship, which many people regarded—correctly—as traitorous. And that action, much more than anything he did as a young politician, US senator, or any course he pursued as president, has shaped the way Americans view him today.

Thomas Bragg, a North Carolinian who served as his state’s governor and later as senator and who became Jefferson Davis’s first attorney general, appreciated the fact that Tyler had served in the US government for so many years, then pledged his allegiance to a country at war with that government. Bragg had done the same thing, albeit on a smaller scale, since he had never been president of the United States. Watching Tyler’s funeral from a pew in St. Paul’s Church, he entertained a thought that might serve as the most appropriate way to frame the tenth president’s life and career. Bragg believed that “time alone can shew [sic] whether [Tyler] died too soon or too late.”2

In terms of his private family life, Tyler had died too soon. He was not there to help Julia raise their seven children. He was not there to help her pass through the trauma of war. In large measure this reflects his age—and hers. But the fact remains that she faced the twenty-seven years she had left on earth without her husband. Her children grew to adulthood without their father’s guidance. Little Pearl hardly remembered him at all.

In terms of his historical reputation, Tyler died too late. Had he passed away before Lincoln’s election to the presidency—indeed, he was at death’s door at least once during the 1850s—he never would have been able to give his sanction to secession and would not have had the opportunity to join the Confederate government. Tyler would have been remembered as a traitor to the Whig Party but not viewed as a traitor to his country. And over the remainder of his lifetime, his fellow Americans had grown to appreciate the principles for which Tyler stood in his fight with Henry Clay, so he likely would have been judged more charitably on that score.

Tyler’s overweening commitment to stand on principle led him to embrace secession. His inveterate inability to sit out political battles led him to seek a seat in the Confederate Congress. Both actions came at tremendous cost. His role in helping Virginia out of the Union ruined his national reputation. His decision to then actively join the government of the Confederacy showed an indefensible lack of concern for the future of his wife and children. Tyler’s choices no doubt emboldened Union troops to loot Sherwood Forest when they came upon the house during the war. They saw no reason to respect the home of the ex-president because, in joining the Confederacy, he had shown disrespect for the Union for which they now fought. Tyler’s association with the Confederacy also made Julia’s later efforts to win a pension from the US government as a former president’s wife much more difficult. She was punished for her husband’s sins. Newspapers delighted in calling attention to her marriage to the traitor president.

Ultimately, Tyler’s decision to join the Confederate government is best understood as the product of what may properly be described as his tragic flaw: an all-consuming ambition and a desire for political fame. An obsessive concern for his standing among his contemporaries, as well as his pursuit of a legacy of historical significance, drove him. As a result, his finances, his health, and most of all his relationships with the people he loved all suffered. Yet he could see no alternative to the life he seemed almost destined to pursue, a life he had inherited from the father he revered.

There is an anecdote from a later president—John F. Kennedy—that captures the mindset of ambitious politicians such as Tyler. In the run up to Kennedy’s reelection campaign for 1964, New York governor Nelson Rockefeller wavered in his pursuit of the Republican nomination and seemed willing to forego the opportunity to square off against the Democratic incumbent. Amid controversy, the governor had recently married his much-younger second wife, and it seemed at times that he would rather devote his attention to her rather than pursue the highest office in the land. In fact, the highly publicized divorce he engineered so that he could be with the woman he loved all but destroyed his presidential prospects. Rockefeller’s behavior baffled Kennedy. “No man would ever love love more than politics,” he declared.

John Tyler would have agreed.