Chapter 18
YOU CAN TAKE THE MAN OUT OF POLITICS . . .
Early on Monday, March 3, 1845, John and Julia Tyler awoke for their last morning in the White House. They concluded their packing and sent their belongings to nearby Fuller’s Hotel, where they would spend the next two nights. Shortly after noon, the president opened the doors of the mansion, and he and Julia welcomed a steady stream of well-wishers who had come to say goodbye. General John Peter Van Ness, one-time mayor of Washington, delivered a brief speech in the Blue Room praising Tyler, saying that he was sure he spoke for everyone there when he expressed his regret that the Tylers were leaving. Humbled by Van Ness’s words, the president gave an impromptu speech of his own. “His voice was more musical than ever,” Julia proudly told her mother by letter, “it rose, and fell, and trembled, and rose again. The effect was irresistible, and the deep admiration and respect it elicited was told truly in the sobs and exclamations of all around.” The Tylers would be missed.
That night a throng of people descended on Fuller’s to pay their respects to the outgoing president and First Lady. The revelry lasted well into the night. The next morning, March 4, amid cheers and a steady rain, Tyler walked out of the hotel and climbed into an open carriage. He was on his way to pick up President-elect Polk at Coleman’s Hotel. The two men would drive together to the Capitol at the head of a large procession, and Tyler would watch Chief Justice Taney administer the oath of office to inaugurate his successor as the nation’s eleventh president. Tyler’s term was now over.
The Tylers did not attend the inauguration ball that night. Tired and knowing they had a long journey ahead of them the next day, they went to bed early. The couple hurried to a wharf on the Potomac at nine o’clock the following morning for their trip to their home in Virginia. To their dismay, they found that the boat had departed without them. They were forced to return to Fuller’s until nine o’clock in the evening, when they finally departed Washington. After stopping off in Richmond the next night, at noon on Friday, March 7, they reached Sherwood Forest.1
Tyler wrote that with retirement from the presidency, he felt like “the mariner who has reached the haven of repose, after having been for years tempest tossed on angry seas.” Now, instead of fighting Clay and the Whigs, he tackled a new challenge: becoming a full-time farmer. How would he handle the transition? How would he fare in this new phase of his life?2
It certainly helped that his new estate offered promises of success. Located roughly two miles north of the James River, with a clear view of the water from its perch above a sloping hill, Sherwood Forest consisted of sixteen hundred acres of land, with several hundred acres cleared and suitable for farming. Tall pine and oak trees shaded much of the property. The house measured ninety feet by forty-two feet, and there was ample room for expansion. Julia saw the potential in her new home immediately. “I found the situation to be a very beautiful one and though now in its partial wilderness very fine in appearance, capable of being made truly magnificent,” she wrote upon seeing the estate for the first time on her honeymoon some eight months earlier. The house was still unfinished when the Tylers arrived for good in March 1845. In fact, work would not conclude until after Christmas. “I do not fear so much the noise of the hammers as the scent of the paint,” Tyler wrote to his daughter Mary, but he resolved to be patient until the house was exactly as he and Julia wanted it. He gave his wife free rein to instruct the workmen and enslaved people as she saw fit and relied on her to decide, for example, whether to wallpaper the sitting room or have it painted. He also left the decorating to her. She told her mother that “in everything the President appeals to me. In the world, as here, wherever he goes and whatever is done it is me in all situations he only seems to consider.”3
Deferring to his capable young wife on household matters showed wisdom that every married man ought to possess. It also allowed Tyler to focus his attention on the farming operations of Sherwood Forest and to consider the best strategy for making the plantation productive. Wheat would be the staple crop, and much of the improved land on the property would be devoted to producing it for market. Tyler chose to grow what was commonly known as winter wheat. Sowed in the fall, the plants typically remain in the dormant stage throughout the winter, germinate and grow during the spring, and are ready for harvest in June. Tyler likely settled on winter wheat because it generally produced a higher yield compared to wheat seeded in the spring. Planting in late fall, moreover, usually helped ward off the dreaded Hessian fly, which could ravage a wheat crop to nearly nothing.4
Tyler would also plant corn at Sherwood Forest, some of which he sold. The corn was planted in April and harvested in the fall. He raised livestock and grew various other fruits and vegetables, such as peaches, figs, peas, and asparagus, that would enable the farm to be self-sufficient as well, providing enough food for the family as well as for the farm’s enslaved labor.5
Between sixty and seventy slaves lived and worked at Sherwood Forest in 1845. That number would fluctuate somewhat over time but would not significantly rise or fall over the remainder of Tyler’s life. By most definitions, then, he was a large “planter,” though not one of the largest in Virginia’s Tidewater. His bonded-labor force was sizeable enough and his estate and surrounding grounds spacious enough that he needed an overseer to supervise the fields. Tyler also relied on some specially appointed slaves to ensure that the household routine stayed on course. Using a political metaphor, he explained that his “whole cabinet council consists of my overseer and a few trusty domestics.” And within the household, Julia took on a crucial role.6
Like all planters who owned a large number of enslaved people, Tyler established strict rules at Sherwood Forest to make the plantation operate smoothly and eliminate potential problems. These rules established a system to maintain order and enhance efficiency, holding everyone—including Tyler himself—accountable on a day-to-day basis. Of course, he occupied the top rung of the estate’s hierarchy and possessed the ultimate authority. He was the one who had to make sure the system worked. If he thought it necessary, Tyler meted out punishment.
Referring to “my negroes” or “my people” and treating them as part of an extended family, Tyler embodied the paternalism of the antebellum South’s slave system and indicated that he took a personal interest in the lives of his slaves. He had done this to some extent during his days as a young planter, though his political career made his total involvement impossible. The stakes were higher now, though, because farming had become his chief means of earning a living and supporting his family. As an older man, he possessed the wisdom of experience and could take comfort in understanding what had worked before and what had not.7
The first responsibility of a slaveholder was to make sure the African Americans who lived and worked on his farm were sufficiently fed, adequately clothed, and properly housed. The historical evidence does not demonstrate with any specificity how well slaves at Sherwood Forest were fed or whether they had passable clothing, clean cabins, and dry roofs over their heads. The manuscript record—admittedly from white, mostly family, sources—does indicate that Tyler took his responsibility to provide for “his people” very seriously and paid close attention to their most basic needs. The health and wellbeing of his labor force remained a constant concern throughout his life as head of Sherwood Forest. More than just a capital investment, his slaves were the most important component of Tyler’s farming operations, and he depended on them to be able to perform their assigned tasks.
Tyler shaped the lives of his slaves in other ways. For example, he sometimes hired them out to neighbors whose wheat-production schedules differed from those at Sherwood Forest; they were allowed to keep the pay they earned. He apparently further allowed them the opportunity to tend to their own small plots of land on which they could grow vegetables and raise chickens for sale, keeping the proceeds of those sales. Tyler also encouraged the spiritual development of his slaves. On Sunday mornings many of them could be found at a small Baptist church some four miles from Sherwood Forest. Notably, a white minister officiated at these services. Since Nat Turner’s Rebellion in 1831, Virginia planters largely forbid slaves from attending churches with black preachers. Turner, a self-proclaimed preacher and prophet, served as a reminder to white Virginians of what might happen without proper vigilance. The lesson lingered long after his demise.
From what we are able to glean from correspondence of the family and visitors to the plantation, it appears that Tyler succeeded in setting up a system that not only maximized efficiency but maintained order as well. Eben Horsford, a Harvard professor and husband of Julia’s cousin Mary Gardiner, visited Sherwood Forest in 1852. As a northerner, he was curious to see the slave system firsthand and spent a few days with the Tylers, paying close attention to how the plantation operated as well as to the interactions between the family and their slaves. Horsford recorded his observations in a letter to his mother. “The slaves are treated like children—punished when they deserve it, rewarded when they should be,” he wrote. “All of them permitted to earn extra pay—cared for when sick, and I should think uniform, cheerful and happy & by no means hard worked.”8
The enslaved of Sherwood Forest might have taken issue with Horsford’s comment that they were not “hard worked.” Their labor was most heavily concentrated during four months of the year—October (planting) and June (harvest) for the wheat, April (planting) and September (harvest) for the corn—but they worked year-round on a variety of tasks. They removed stones from fields, cut trees, hauled wood to sawmills or down to the river to be loaded onto boats, constructed and maintained log and stone fences to keep livestock out of the fields, threshed the wheat grown on the farm, cut the clover that grew in the fields after a wheat harvest, and performed a variety of other tasks essential to Sherwood Forest’s successful operation. Growing wheat and corn may not have been as labor intensive as cultivating tobacco, the crop that dominated the Virginia landscape in an earlier era. Nor did it require the backbreaking labor characteristic of a Mississippi cotton plantation or Louisiana sugar plantation. But it still required extremely arduous work—work that Horsford seemingly failed to appreciate.9
Furthermore, Horsford’s remark that Tyler’s slaves were cheerful and happy denotes the superficial justification of slavery found among southern planters and common to many northerners sympathetic to the institution. His observations also underscore that the central tenet of paternalism was at work on Tyler’s plantation. As historians Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese made clear throughout their long careers studying southern slavery, the master-slave relationship was constructed on an understanding of duties, responsibilities, and certain privileges that were all dictated by the slaveholder. At any time, the slaveholder could become more demanding and revoke privileges. Discipline had to be maintained at all costs. Tyler saw himself—understood himself—as a benevolent master, and comparatively speaking, he may have been. His benevolence, however, was always tempered by firmness and the constant threat, if not necessarily the use, of violence. Worse was the underlying threat that a slave might be sold away from his or her spouse or children at Tyler’s whim. Maximizing profits required this dynamic. Framing the entire arrangement in terms of family and viewing his slaves as part of his extended family allowed Tyler to justify the system of exploitation that undergirded his life as a planter.10
As a busy plantation owner, Tyler concerned himself most of all with what went on at Sherwood Forest. But he also kept one eye on the nation’s political developments. You could take the man out of politics, but you could not take the politics out of the man. Indeed, for all of his proclamations about how much he looked forward to repose and retirement, and for all the happiness he had found in his marriage to Julia, it becomes clear reading his correspondence that he missed being president. He also still had a stake in what was going on in Washington.
The matter that most interested him in the several months following his return to Virginia was the progress of Texas annexation. He eagerly read the Richmond Enquirer for news on this score and waited anxiously for Texas to officially join the Union so his legacy would be secure. Andrew Jackson Donelson, whom Tyler had appointed US chargé d’affaires to Texas, assured him in late May 1845 that the Texans regarded annexation as “a certain calculation.” The news pleased Tyler. “If we had done nothing else than unite Texas with us,” he wrote to Charles Wickliffe, his postmaster general, “we could not be looked upon as wholly unprofitable servants.” Tyler professed confidence in his successor, who had largely allowed events to take the course he had charted with the joint resolution. “Mr. Polk in that matter has faithfully fulfilled his pledges,” he continued, “and I am now delighted with the energy displayed by him in guarding the rights of the U. States.” In Tyler’s view Mexican saber rattling and an apparent willingness to go to war threatened those rights. He worried that Santa Anna would lash out after the Texas government voted to accept the joint resolution and become part of the United States on July 4, 1845. Mexico would still not accept reality and officially recognize Texas independence. “What I have chiefly feared was that in her impotent rage, she might strike a blow at some weak point and obtain an ephemeral triumph,” Tyler confided to John Young Mason, his former navy secretary whom Polk had retained as attorney general. Eerily foreshadowing Polk’s future plans, he further declared, “The truth is that if war is to take place, it should much rather have proceeded from us, since she has continually offered us insult and inflicted upon us injury.” Tyler would ultimately find much to criticize in Polk’s conduct leading up to the Mexican War (1846–48). For the time being, though, he was pleased that the president had taken steps to safeguard the United States from a Mexican attack and “consider[ed] him entitled to the support of the whole country for his course on the Texas question.”11
Tyler may have found much to praise in Polk’s efforts to keep Mexico at bay and put the finishing touches on the annexation of Texas, but he found much to dislike about the way his successor wielded the patronage. When Tyler conceded to the Democratic Party and bowed out of the 1844 presidential canvass, he received assurances that his supporters would be viewed as party members in good standing. He took that as a promise that many of the men he had placed into government jobs during his term would be allowed to remain. Polk had, in effect, broken that promise (in Tyler’s eyes) by turning out nearly all Tylerites in his effort to reshape the federal bureaucracy. “I left some two hundred personal friends in office,” Tyler grumbled, “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 office holders. They have been for the most part removed or superseded. Some half dozen remain.” He bitterly deplored the removals but would not criticize Polk publicly, choosing to forego the political strife that might have ensued.12
At home Tyler worried about a different kind of strife—the potential conflict between his four daughters and their new stepmother. He tried to put one possible source of discord to rest by addressing the matter of money head on. “My affection for you will in no degree be diminished,” he assured his daughters, “nor shall I leave you unprovided for. Before the year [1844] closes I will make arrangements that will be satisfactory to you.” He highlighted the fact that Julia brought her own wealth into the marriage. “Her property will be, I have no doubt, large enough for herself, and mine will remain for my children. It [the marriage] will interfere with no one and cannot seriously affect my arrangements.” Whether these assurances mollified the girls is unknown. These were odd promises for Tyler to make, though, because they indicate he did not expect to have children with Julia. Given the straitened financial circumstances in which he usually found himself, it is also fair to wonder how he could make good on his pledge to provide for his daughters. Finally, if by “making arrangements” Tyler meant he would prepare his will by the end of the year, he failed to fulfill that promise.13
Besides the matter of money, two other potential problems remained. First, all four daughters had been very close to their mother and were taken aback when their father married so soon after her death. Second, Julia’s comparative youth made her an unconventional stepmother. Mary was actually five years older than Julia but accepted her father’s remarriage with grace, suppressing her misgivings with the solace that he was truly happy. Lizzy, just three years younger than Julia, struggled with the change. “For weeks after your marriage,” she wrote to Julia, “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.” Lizzy felt no ill will toward her personally but asserted that no woman could ever replace her mother. She also maintained that because Julia was so close to her in age, she would find loving her like a mother “impossible.” But, she assured her, “I shall endeavour to love you with the affection of a sister and trust it may be reciprocated on your part.” Their relationship flourished, in part, because Lizzy and her husband lived in Williamsburg and could visit often—for brief stays.14
Mary’s and Lizzy’s graciousness when it came to accepting Julia reflected their personalities. It was hard to find anyone who could not get along with either woman. Lizzy, Julia wrote, was “gentle and conciliating in manner.” The other two Tyler daughters—Letitia and Alice—were prone to being headstrong and opinionated and were sometimes difficult. As a result, their relationships with Julia were far more complicated and contentious. Letitia was initially cordial toward her but soon exhibited a frostiness that ultimately developed into deep animosity. Julia eventually returned the favor in spades, with a contempt she could never completely conceal. She called Letitia a “bitter piece” and eventually came to dread the woman’s visits to Sherwood Forest. Their slight difference in age—Julia was only one year older—certainly accounts for some of this. There was more to it, however. Growing up, Letitia always seemed to be competing with Mary and Lizzy for her father’s affections. Perhaps adding still more competition into the mix was too much for her to bear. Perhaps, too, her unhappy marriage to James Semple soured her on her father’s happy marriage and the woman who had brought him that happiness. Alice, seven years younger than Julia, tended to treat her stepmother as a nuisance. Already rebellious, she became more so after her father’s remarriage. For the most part, Tyler put a stop to the bad behavior. “Whenever Alice has been fractious her Father has not failed to show severely his displeasure,” Julia informed her sister, Margaret. Ultimately, Alice and Julia came to a rapprochement, but tension still characterized their relationship.15
The Tyler sons got along well with Julia and supported their father’s remarriage wholeheartedly. Robert had liked Julia upon meeting her in Washington and grew to accept her and love her unconditionally. It helped that she and Priscilla had grown close. Similarly, John Jr. accepted Julia without question. Tazewell, the furthest removed in age from Julia at ten years, was the one sibling who could actually treat her as a stepmother, and that dynamic continued for the duration of his father’s life. “I have no difficulty with him at all and he does not interfere with me in the least,” Julia reported. Tazewell’s residence at a boarding school no doubt helped their relationship most of all.16
Tyler appreciated his sons’ willingness to welcome Julia into the family. But if their relationships with his new wife were far less stressful to him than those of his daughters, he still found a lot to worry about when it came to their prospects. Robert felt pressure from both his father and his wife to establish a law career that would allow him to earn a respectable living. Priscilla recognized that he needed to move out of his father’s shadow to do that and longed for the day when Robert would acquire a “name and subsistence.” That meant leaving Washington. In March 1844 she and Robert packed up their belongings and two small daughters and moved to Philadelphia. This was not without risk, as Robert gave up steady employment in the US Land Office and his family left the comforts of the White House. But he and Priscilla had determined to make it on their own. Soon after moving into their new home, Robert began a rigorous course of self-directed study to prepare for the bar.
To Priscilla’s dismay, however, he hastily returned to Washington—without her and the girls and leaving her seven months pregnant—in late May to aid his father’s campaign for the presidency. Tyler needed the help, and Robert, who found studying the law tedious, jumped at the chance to do something more exciting. Priscilla protested, arguing to no avail that he should stay in Philadelphia and press on with his studies. She felt her twenty-seven-year-old husband was refusing to grow up. John Tyler bore some of the blame for this by enabling his son’s behavior. He finally realized it when Robert allowed him to read a letter Priscilla sent to him shortly after his return to Washington. “My dear husband you must return to Philadelphia,” she wrote, “give up the life of political care and excitement in which you live, find your dearest happiness in your wife and children . . . , and have the pleasure of moulding your own fortunes.” Priscilla exhibited no anger toward her husband but firmly told him what she expected. “Come back soon, determined ‘to do or die’ at the law, and give happiness to your own devoted wife.” Tyler sheepishly wrote a note to Priscilla, telling her that “the advice you give Robert is excellent.” Robert returned to Philadelphia within a month and was on hand for the birth of his son, John Tyler IV, in July.
With Priscilla’s constant encouragement, Robert studied hard for the bar. His work was interrupted in February 1845, when Mary Fairlie became seriously ill. The child died in June and was buried next to her grandmother, Letitia Tyler, in New Kent County, Virginia. Devastated, Robert and Priscilla knew they had to remain strong for their two other children. They rented a small house in Bristol, the town where they had gotten married, determined to pay their bills and pick up the pieces. After he accompanied Priscilla on a trip to Alabama to visit her sister, Robert returned home to make one final push to prepare for the bar. By the fall of 1845, he reported to his father that he was nearly ready. Pleased with the news, Tyler encouraged his son to keep moving forward. It took a while for him to establish himself, but he eventually secured a job as solicitor to the sheriff of Philadelphia. That position, coupled with a modest private practice, finally allowed Robert and Priscilla a steady income. With his wife’s steadfast help, and through his own talents, Robert had made something of his life.17
It remained to be seen whether John Jr. would follow suit. Alcohol had already poisoned his marriage to Mattie and had been a continuing source of tension between John and his father. Late in the last year of his presidency, Tyler relieved his son of his duties as private secretary. The reasons for his dismissal are murky, but it is possible that John had failed to perform his tasks to his father’s satisfaction and that alcohol abuse had been the cause. “He has many talents,” Julia acknowledged, “that is certain—indeed in many respects he is gifted—and is it not a cruel shame he should regard them so improperly?” Twenty-six in the summer of 1845, John at last showed some initiative. He swore off liquor and moved back to Southampton County to work on his marriage and immerse himself in the study of law. He declared that he would “keep out of debt if he ha[d] to dress in Virginia cloth and eat nothing else than corn bread.” John Jr. was trying to turn his life around at the same time his brother Robert pledged to establish himself in the legal profession.18
John’s commitment to clean living appears to have been prompted by two incidents—one that occurred shortly after his father married Julia, and another that took place soon after they left the White House. The first incident could have ended tragically. The Richmond Whig had published a derogatory article about Tyler’s course as president that angered John Jr. He and Hugh Rose Pleasants, the author of the article and brother of the paper’s editor, John Hampden Pleasants, agreed to meet each other on the dueling grounds in Northampton, North Carolina, on July 4, 1844. John arrived at the appointed place with his second at two o’clock in the afternoon, the agreed-upon time, but Pleasants was nowhere to be found. Quickly growing impatient, John waited for at least a half hour for his adversary to show up and was preparing to leave when a messenger rode up on horseback. Pleasants was at the home of a woman some twelve miles away, rip-roaring drunk. His second would stand in his place, the messenger reported, and would arrive shortly. Satisfied that he fulfilled his obligation under the dueling code of honor, John refused to wait and left for Old Point Comfort, where he joined his father and Julia.19
The second incident occurred in Washington in April 1845. John Jr. had stayed in the city after his father left office because he hoped to secure a patronage job from President Polk. No such job was forthcoming, but he did find ample opportunity to drink and carouse with friends. One evening he and two of these friends stumbled out of a tavern and “fell foul of a young Cuban Creole” who was passing by. They beat the man up pretty severely. The New York Herald reported the incident and embarrassed John Jr. and his family. Now the paper’s readers found out what Mattie Tyler already knew: John Jr. became verbally and physically abusive when drunk.20
John and Julia Tyler waited to see if John Jr. had been chastened and could indeed turn his life around. In the meantime, they settled in as a married couple at Sherwood Forest. Tyler worried that his wife would quickly grow bored of life on the James River, a rather provincial and remote area when compared to the New York City or Washington she was used to. He knew she missed her family. He was also sensitive to the fact that she had not gotten over the tragic death of her father. Julia sometimes dreamed of her father, and it was clear that she harbored a deep sense of loss. Tyler did his best to make her happy, showering her with affection and almost undivided attention. He brought her wildflowers from his walks around the plantation. He nursed her when she felt ill. They would sit out on the back piazza of the house many evenings, reading or talking and watching the traffic on the river. “The President is puzzling his wits constantly to prevent my feeling lonely,” Julia wrote Margaret, “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.”21
Tyler’s vigilance betrayed his insecurity and attested to doubts he kept close to the vest that he could keep his much-younger wife happy. He went out of his way to make sure Julia enjoyed her new life in Virginia. He purchased a mare for her—Emily Booker—which she rode sidesaddle around the property. He bought a mate for her beloved canary Johnny Ty. He also indulged her when she sought to outfit the slaves who served as oarsmen on the family’s bright blue boat Pocahontas in uniforms of fancy livery. The couple used the boat often as they made trips downriver to the plantations of neighbors. This was new for Tyler. He had not visited the homes of the prominent families in the area with any regularity while he was married to Letitia; her health or his preoccupation with politics had usually prevented it. In his life as a retired newlywed, however, he found his social card filled quite frequently. He could now allow himself the luxury of making calls and found he enjoyed the added benefit of showing off his beautiful and cultured—and young—wife.22
The couple returned to Old Point Comfort in late June 1845 to celebrate their one-year anniversary. They enjoyed the area, and Julia delighted in her husband’s fondness for splashing around in the ocean. The trip was not all pleasant, however. While they were there, a severe thunderstorm—Julia referred to it as a “hurricane”—ripped off part of the tin roof of their hotel and damaged the piazza. Their room flooded with rain. Thankfully, no one suffered any injuries, but some of the female guests fainted, and there was a mad rush to take cover. Tyler calmly took it upon himself to oversee the evacuation of the guests from the top floor of the hotel.23
More travel followed later in the summer. Toward the end of August, Tyler escorted Julia and Alice to the resort at White Sulphur Springs, in Greenbrier County, Virginia. People from all over the South had been coming here since 1810, when the original proprietor, James Caldwell, saw to the construction of several rows of some sixty cottages. Thousands—Julia called them the “wealthiest and best Southerners”—flocked to the mountain retreat every summer to escape the oppressive humidity and mosquitoes of their plantations, bathe in the soothing mineral waters, and take part in the activities of fashionable society.24
The Tylers found lodgings in a charming cottage in what was known as “Baltimore Row.” The proprietor had initially reserved the “President’s House” for them, but an “immensely fat” lady had arrived from New Orleans shortly before they did and insisted that she be allowed to stay there because it was the closest residence to the dining room, and she “declared she could not occupy any other and go to her meals without a railroad was contrived.” No tracks having been laid from the cottages to the dining room, the woman was allowed to settle in where she wanted. Baltimore Row suited John and Julia just fine. Their cottage was spacious enough to allow Alice some privacy and for William Short and Fanny Hall, two of the ex-president’s enslaved people, to lodge with them. The Tylers stayed for two weeks.25
An embarrassing incident occurred shortly before supper one evening that somewhat marred their stay. The couple had called on a Mr. Singleton and were sitting with him and his wife on the portico of their cottage waiting for the meal to be served. Andrew Stevenson, Tyler’s political opponent from long ago, was also there, and the five of them chatted amiably as dusk settled. All of a sudden, the party heard footsteps and realized someone was coming up the stairs. Because it had gotten dark, no one could tell who this person was until he was on the portico right in front of them. It turned out to be Henry Clay. Clay shook hands with Singleton and turned to greet the others. He stopped instantly when he realized Tyler was sitting there. An awkward silence ensued. Stevenson reported later that the “whole party, including Mr. Clay, were considerably flushed.” After a “short and embarrassing conversation, interrupted by occasional and distressing pauses,” Singleton announced that supper was ready. He led Julia inside while Tyler and Clay stood up. One of them—probably Clay—apologized to Singleton and said he had another engagement. The other—probably Tyler—excused himself by saying he had a letter to write.26
Tyler was put off by having to see his old nemesis. “What has brought him here I leave you to infer,” he all but spat in a letter to John Young Mason. He thought Clay was “much changed” in appearance since he had seen him last. “He is as old as his gait indicates,” Tyler noted with some pleasure, happy that he was the one with the much younger wife. As always when it came to Clay, Tyler believed an ulterior motive was at work. Was the Kentuckian at White Sulphur Springs to press the flesh and kiss babies? “Can it be that he looks to ’48—is the fire of ambition never to be extinguished?” Tyler marveled.27
Former Virginia governor John Rutherfoord, who also made an appearance at the Springs at this time, conceded that perhaps Clay did entertain thoughts of the next presidential election. He wondered about his friend Tyler’s ambition too. Rutherfoord informed Thomas Ritchie by letter that he had heard “many surmises about the motives of the ex-President” and that Tyler might have come to White Sulphur Springs because he wanted to get elected senator again.28
This talk was not merely idle chatter. Rutherfoord had no way of knowing for sure, but the speculation that Tyler might be seeking public office once again had come close to the mark. Perhaps politics beckoned after all. Shortly after Polk’s election, a Tyler supporter from Boston named Holbrook wrote the soon-to-be-ex-president telling him of the “general desire” among some members of the Democratic Party to see him elected to the US Senate, where he “would be able to meet and confront and annihilate” Clay supporters.29
Tyler may or may not have considered running for the Senate again. Likely he did not. Any reply to Holbrook’s letter—if indeed there had actually been one—has been lost to history. The chance to annihilate his enemies, however, no doubt appealed to him. He had sought vindication for his conduct as president ever since the Whigs read him out of their party in September 1841. It also troubled him that he had been vilified by his political opponents in Virginia and that their invective had damaged his standing in the Old Dominion. Perhaps, then, a run for statewide office would enable him to repair his reputation. But the Senate might not be the appropriate venue. Perhaps an alternative existed. “I frankly admit that an election to the governorship would be acceptable in one point only,” Tyler confided to Robert in November 1845, “and that as an offset to the numerous attacks which have been made upon me, and as evidence that my native State still retained its confidence in me.” He would not commit to a concrete plan of action but vowed that “if anything further transpires, I shall take steps accordingly.”30
Eight months removed from the White House and Tyler was again considering a run for office. Apparently, nothing further transpired that would have forced him to make good on his promise to seek the Old Dominion’s governorship, which was probably a good thing. But the fact that he even entertained the idea at all is remarkable—and revealing. Tyler simply could not accept criticism and could not come to terms with the unpopularity of his presidency. He regarded it as a slap in the face and an insult to his long record of public service that a sizeable portion of his fellow Virginians disagreed with him and no longer held him in high regard. Convinced of the correctness of his course of action while president, he could not refrain from self-righteousness. He still seemed to believe that he should be exempt from partisan attacks, when a simple history lesson would have told him that no president of the eight that preceded him (excepting Harrison) left office as popular as they were when they entered the White House. He needed to let go and allow his record to speak for itself. More broadly, toying with the idea of getting back into politics was remarkably similar to the way Tyler had acted when he “retired” from public life twice before. Even after reaching the pinnacle of American politics, he still seemed to be plotting a way to get back in the game. Was his fire of ambition ever going to be truly extinguished?
After leaving White Sulphur Springs in late August 1845, Tyler, Julia, and Alice spent a short time at another resort nearby, the “Sweet Springs.” From there they traveled to New York to spend time with the Gardiners at both the house at 43 Lafayette Place and at East Hampton. It was Tyler’s first visit to Long Island. They left New York in early October because he needed to return to Sherwood Forest to supervise the seeding of the wheat crop. “He is too good a planter to rely entirely on the judgment of the overseer,” Julia remarked to her brother.31
Tyler spent three to four hours every day on horseback out in the fields, exhorting his enslaved laborers to complete their tasks and inspecting their work. Julia was correct in her assessment: he wanted to know what was going on at Sherwood Forest at all times. The overseer and slaves got used to seeing him. And Tyler was easy to spot from far away, having started wearing a large Panama hat, an accoutrement that became his trademark. Julia laughed when she saw him wear it for the first time because the brim was so wide that it swallowed up his face. In fact, Tyler’s whole daily ensemble amused her. “He will never observe that anything is worn out until you tell him of it,” she sighed. Tyler had too much else on his mind to worry about fashion or to concern himself with frayed cuffs and well-worn trousers. Besides, he thought he looked just fine. “I do cut the d . . . dest figure in this hat,” he mischievously told Julia as he strutted in front of a mirror.32
When Tyler returned to Sherwood Forest from New York, he found some disorder in the ranks of his slaves. One small boy had died while he was gone, victim, Tyler supposed, of his habit of eating dirt. He had spoken to the child several times in a futile effort to get him to stop the practice. The youngster’s death is significant. The disease beriberi, caused by a vitamin B-1 deficiency, often stimulates a nearly irresistible urge to eat dirt. Such behavior usually indicates that a person has been chronically malnourished or that they lack variety in their diet. If that was the case here, it raises the disturbing question of whether the enslaved at Sherwood Forest were being given enough to eat. In light of Tyler’s chronic money problems, it is entirely possible he scrimped when it came to providing food for the slaves on his farm. Perhaps his professions that he was attentive to the care of “his people” sometimes did not match his actions. The boy’s death was not the only problem Tyler found when he returned to Virginia. Other slaves were suffering from the ague, a typical summertime affliction in the Tidewater that caused high fevers and shivering. Most commonly associated with malaria, these symptoms could become serious enough to inhibit the normal work routine. Tyler apparently did not summon a physician to Sherwood Forest—his brother Wat Tyler would have been available—suggesting that the illness in the slave quarters was not widespread enough to warrant his alarm.33
The death of one young slave and the illnesses of some of the others did not hinder Tyler’s plans for his first post-presidential wheat crop. Three hundred sixty bushels of winter wheat were seeded at Sherwood Forest in the fall of 1845. Tyler was pleased with how the planting had proceeded. He could not resist a little boasting some six weeks before the harvest. “Tell W[illia]m Waller that if he wants to see a crop of wheat he must come up” to Sherwood Forest in the summertime, Tyler wrote to his daughter Lizzy.34
His focus necessarily remained outside. Julia’s centered on what happened inside the house. While she and Tyler had been in New York, Julia mentioned to her mother that she wanted help finding a young white woman who could help her manage the household at Sherwood Forest. The matter took on more urgency soon after they returned to Virginia when Tyler sent Fanny Hall, the slave woman he called Julia’s “right hand in all that relates to her chamber,” down to Williamsburg to assist Lizzy with her children. Fanny would return, but it appeared she would be gone for at least several weeks, if not longer. Julia repeated her request for a housekeeper by letter to her sister and mother.35
The Gardiners answered her plea in early November when they dispatched a young Irish woman named Catherine Wing to Sherwood Forest. Catherine came highly recommended by Julia’s mother, who presumably conducted an interview with the housekeeper to determine her suitability for a Virginia plantation. Arriving by boat at the landing near the home, Wing quickly readied herself for duty. Well organized and a stickler for detail, particularly when it came to the preparation of meals, she became a highly valued member of the Tyler household. Before long, she was supervising the domestic slaves in their daily routine. Catherine thrived, even when Tyler unexpectedly brought back several hungry men from a fox-hunting outing, all of whom expected a feast.36
Traveling with Catherine Wing from New York was another soon-to-be member of the Tyler family, this one of the four-legged variety. Tyler had purchased an Italian greyhound for Julia directly from Naples. She had owned a dog of this breed before her marriage and was fond of them. Tyler had asked the head of the US legation in Naples, William Boulware, to procure the dog while he and Julia still resided in the White House. Boulware, however, worried that the weather would be too cold to permit the dog’s safe travel—Tyler had made the request in the fall of 1844—so he waited until a more opportune time to put him on a ship crossing the Atlantic. The dog finally arrived in New York in the fall of 1845 and was immediately taken to her mother’s home at Lafayette Place. Julia christened him Le Beau.
She eagerly anticipated the arrival of her new pet, the Italian greyhound with the French name. The Gardiners had kept him for several weeks in an effort to train him before sending him to his new home in Virginia. Apparently, the “training” did not go well. Le Beau ripped up carpets, chewed on furniture, and generally behaved badly. In other words, he acted just like a puppy. At one point an exasperated Margaret resorted to putting him in a dark closet in an effort to punish him, a measure for which she earned a sharp rebuke from Julia. Apparently, no one in the Gardiner family was sorry to see the dog crated and put on the ship for the one-way passage to Sherwood Forest.
Le Beau was cute, despite being a handful. Julia loved him instantly. Tyler, whose fondness for just about every kind of animal matched his wife’s, enjoyed Le Beau as well. In fact, Julia wrote her mother that he “is more attached to it even than I.” Tyler often chuckled at the dog’s antics and was particularly amused that Le Beau commanded the house, a big presence in a small package. He indulged the pet. Julia walked into the parlor one evening and found her husband swaddling Le Beau in blankets on the sofa, trying to keep him warm in a cold house, laughing while he did it. Another time, Tyler placed one of his nightcaps on the dog and wrapped a shawl around his little body, setting him down for a night’s sleep on the sofa, which by this time had become a dog bed. “It has become perfectly cultivated by the attention paid to it,” Julia reported to her mother. Still, she thought it all a bit much. “Did you ever know such nonsense as we practice,” she laughed.37
Her own spirits, however, seemed to change from day to day. But there was a good reason. Julia found out in November 1845 that she was pregnant. Tyler doted on her and did everything he could to make her comfortable. The couple curtailed their social calls along the James River and spent Christmas at home. Tyler happily welcomed daughters Mary and Lizzy and their families to Sherwood Forest for the holidays. He missed his other children. “We should have been rendered still happier by having you and yours,” he wrote to Robert on New Year’s Day.38
Not long after the holidays, the Tylers received some news that upset Julia a great deal. A newspaper in New York City published a story that alleged the couple had separated and that she had returned to her family home at East Hampton. Julia’s brother Alexander had heard a similar rumor while he was in Washington on business. David Gardiner, Julia’s other brother, immediately went to the offices of the paper and demanded an explanation. The editor apologized and told him the story had landed in the paper without his knowledge. David assured the man that the rumor was ludicrous and that his sister was living happily with the ex-president in Virginia. The next day the paper printed a retraction. Apparently, Tyler’s last attorney general, John Nelson, had heard something from a third party about John Jr.’s marital difficulties and assumed the person meant John Tyler, his former boss. “The whole matter I hope will afford the President and yourself as hearty a laugh as it has me,” David wrote to Julia, “although at first I must confess I was somewhat riled.”39
John and Julia Tyler’s marriage was on firm footing. It became even more so on July 12, 1846, when David Gardiner Tyler was born. Tyler had accompanied his wife to East Hampton for the latter stages of her pregnancy; she wanted to be spared the heat and humidity of the Tidewater and also felt more secure knowing that her mother and sister could attend to her. Juliana acquitted herself well as a midwife, and both baby and mother handled the rigors of childbirth with aplomb. Tyler, a father for what was now the ninth time, could not have been more pleased with his new son. There never was any doubt that the baby would be named after Julia’s late father and oldest brother. The family called the child Gardie.
Another reason Julia preferred to give birth in East Hampton was her husband’s busy schedule, which took him away from her for parts of the summer. He spent a few days in Washington testifying before the congressional committees that investigated Secretary of State Webster’s conduct during the Webster-Ashburton negotiations. While in the capital, he shared dinner at the White House with President Polk and the US minister to Mexico, John Slidell, who had been recalled in May 1846 when the Mexican War began. In recounting the details of the evening to Robert, Tyler did not indicate that he and the president discussed the patronage matters that had so angered him right after he left office. Tyler likely thought things were better left unsaid. They did, however, discuss some of what had transpired thus far in the war. Tyler did not quite know what to make of Polk’s course so far. Nor did he have a sense of how long the conflict might last. In any event, he believed “few laurels more will be won.”
Tyler found reason to be personally concerned about the Mexican War because both Robert and John Jr. sought to join the military. Robert organized a company in Philadelphia, which did not go over well with his father, who feared it would derail his budding law career. “I care but little about your entering into it,” Tyler wrote in reference to the war, “as it is so important that your office should be attended to. I almost regret that you have thrown yourself at the head of a company. These people might be well inclined to push your company off to get rid of you.” Tyler indulged John Jr.’s martial spirit, perhaps because he thought the regimentation of military life would be good for him. He wrote directly to President Polk to secure for him a captain’s commission. Robert’s company never got past the planning stages, while John Jr. resigned his commission before his regiment saw action. As a father, Tyler must have breathed a sigh of relief.40
Financial matters, as always, also troubled Tyler at this time. His most pressing concern, of course, was the success of his farm. But in the year or so after he and Julia settled in at Sherwood Forest, he also focused his attention on a 1,400-acre expanse of land he owned in Caseyville, Union County, Kentucky, on the Ohio River in the western portion of the state. He had bought the property in the 1830s but had made no improvements on the land. Traveling west to inspect his purchase in July 1839, he found much more rugged terrain than he had anticipated; a heavy forest also dominated the land. In an effort to make some money from his investment, Tyler leased some 50 acres to two farmers for an annual rent of $100. He tried to sell the parcel in 1839 but attracted no takers.41
When Tyler left the White House, he resolved to sell the land once again. “I have lost a fortune in your State by neglect,” he lamented to his friend, Kentuckian Charles Wickliffe. He just wanted to be rid of the headache and would seemingly take any reasonably fair offer he could get. Two things shortly changed Tyler’s mind, however. First, his brother-in-law Alexander saw value in developing the land. “I have a strong conviction that it might by proper management be made to yield a handsome income,” Alexander told him. Tyler admired the younger man’s shrewd business instincts and took seriously what he had to say. Second, it appeared that Tyler’s land held rich deposits of coal. Excited by this prospect, Tyler agreed to pay $200 for a proper survey of the land. He still preferred to sell it but now entertained the possibility of pursuing a coal mining venture that might end his financial woes forever.42
But, alas, it was not to be. Tyler and Alexander eventually formed a partnership in an effort to get rich in Caseyville, either by mining coal or, later, by harvesting the timber on the property to sell to steamboat companies whose boats plied the Ohio. Neither venture succeeded. Both men lost significant sums of money on the land despite Tyler’s outrageous claim that he “solemnly [thought] that it can be made to yield $20,000 per annum.” Part of the problem was the property’s distance from either Sherwood Forest or New York City. It was difficult to keep abreast of what was happening in Kentucky, and the agents hired to oversee operations proved untrustworthy or incompetent. Tyler and Alexander took one trip out to Caseyville together in November 1847. Alexander made a return trip seven months later and found insurmountable problems. In 1850 Tyler appealed to Wickliffe to ask him to use his influence with members of the Kentucky legislature to stop a subsidiary of the Kentucky Coal Company from using its might to exploit the coal veins near the property, some of which may actually have been on his land. Tyler had clung to hope for as long as possible, but by the spring of 1848, he wanted no more part of owning the property. “I am ready to approve whatsoever you may do in regard to the Kentucky land,” he wrote Alexander in near despair. They finally put the land up for sale. Not until September 1853 did they finally attract a buyer willing to pay the $20,000 asking price. Sadly, Alexander had died in January 1851. His half share of the sale proceeds went to Julia.43
Tyler was keenly disappointed by his failure to reap a windfall from his land in Kentucky. His bad experience served as yet another sobering reminder that he seemed destined to live forever precariously close to financial ruin. This state of affairs had become a recurring theme in his life that he could not shake. Julia had brought money to the marriage, but her brothers largely managed her funds from New York. Tyler found himself short of ready cash all the time. Repeating a pattern from earlier in his life, he borrowed money from multiple banks—usually in Richmond or Norfolk—and struggled to make the payments. It troubled him a great deal. “I so horribly dislike a state of indebtedness,” he confessed to Alexander, disclosing that his money problems “terrified” him.44
Thankfully, the Gardiner brothers thought enough of him—and their sister—to help out whenever possible. In fact, both David and Alexander went above and beyond the call of duty in efforts to keep their brother-in-law solvent. They repeatedly secured loans for him in New York or endorsed loans he had worked out elsewhere, in effect acting as his cosigners. They sometimes made interest payments on loans for him and became his creditors themselves. To read through the correspondence between Tyler and Julia’s brothers, particularly from 1846 to 1851, when he struggled most to sustain his wheat crops, is to come away with the appalling realization that he could not have survived without them. Letter after letter, sometimes one per week, contains details of this note or that bond, all requiring some sort of action from Alexander or David. The amount of money in question ranged from $25 to over $1,000. It is a wonder Tyler could even keep his different accounts straight. Debt and being short of cash were common among planters in the antebellum South. Tyler’s situation, however, represented an extreme that most of these men were able to avoid.45
Tyler was very lucky his brothers-in-law were willing to help him with his bills, but their assistance was a double-edged sword. By involving them in his financial transactions, he made them privy to the most embarrassing component of his life. He was forced to lay bare the circumstances of his finances in order to receive their help. Tyler was mortified on one occasion when one of his New York creditors boldly knocked on the door of the Gardiner family home at Lafayette Place and demanded settlement of an account. Tyler promised David that he would “take care to guard against such annoyance in future,” but with all of the financial juggling he was forced to do, he could not have been absolutely certain such a dreadful episode would never happen again.46
It is also worth considering how much of this Julia knew about. It appears her brothers kept the minute details of their transactions with her husband from her, not because they were necessarily trying to hide something so important, but because they believed these matters were best left between men—this was the mid-nineteenth century, after all. Tyler, too, did not wish to worry his wife. Still, she had a pretty good idea of what was going on, especially since her husband traveled to Richmond and Norfolk several times a year to take care of his banking concerns and told her where and why he was going. Moreover, Juliana had a very good idea of the state of the family’s finances. At one point she wrote to Julia expressing “great uneasiness” about the predicaments her daughter and son-in-law often found themselves in and admitted “on that score I feel great regret.” After Alexander died, and with her brother David in California pursuing business opportunities, Julia asked her mother to be the one who signed the Gardiner name to endorse Tyler’s promissory notes. Juliana no doubt recalled his pledge before marrying Julia that he would provide for her daughter in the manner to which she had grown accustomed.47
In the early 1850s, Tyler began to receive financial assistance from two other men: his former navy secretary and old friend Mason and Norfolk attorney Conway Whittle. Mason’s involvement was not nearly as extensive as the Gardiner brothers’ had been, and he apparently did not loan Tyler money, but he was still asked to endorse drafts drawn on an account at the Farmer’s Bank in Richmond and to renew notes in order to postpone payments. Tyler always seemed to have an excuse for why he needed Mason’s intervention with his creditors. At one point he had a sizeable portion of his wheat crop stolen right out of his barn while he and Julia were away, which, of course, cut into his profit margin. Tazewell graduated from Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia in 1853. The tuition, as well as room and board, Tyler told Mason, “drained my purse.” Their friendship had to have suffered, especially when Tyler had the gall to write, “I am sure no apology is necessary for my continued requisition upon you[,] which subjects you to no loss and to me is a great convenience.” Whittle played much the same role for him that Mason did. Tyler sometimes tempered his requests for Whittle’s endorsements on notes by acknowledging he was imposing on him. Still, he wrote at one point, “I rely on your known friendship to excuse” me.48
That an ex-president of the United States could find himself in so much financial distress and be subjected to economic peril underscores one of the many differences between the individuals who served in the White House in the nineteenth-century and those who came later. In the twenty-first century, former presidents make millions every year on public-speaking fees alone. Indeed, tenure in the Executive Mansion is a virtual guarantee of financial security for the remainder of a chief executive’s life, no matter how much—or how little—personal wealth he may have enjoyed before entering office.
Tyler had no opportunities to cash in on his status as an ex-president. He did occasionally give public addresses, but asked only that his travel expenses be paid; there were usually no honoraria given. He believed strongly that as a former president, he was almost obligated to lecture for the public benefit. Over the course of his retirement, Tyler traveled to Richmond, Baltimore, the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, and to Jamestown, Virginia, to speak before audiences. These venues were never far from Sherwood Forest, but travel being what it was in the 1850s, he did incur some hardship in making these trips, so he was always happy to receive reimbursement.49
Tyler also made regular trips to Williamsburg to perform another “public duty” he believed was important. In the late 1840s he served on the Board of Visitors at the College of William and Mary, a post he had held for a time while he lived in Williamsburg before becoming president of the United States. One year before becoming a board member again, Tyler helped renowned scholar George Frederick Holmes from Richmond College (later the University of Richmond) secure a professorship in history and political economy. “I have had to endorse you strongly, but most cheerfully and confidently,” he wrote Holmes shortly after the decision to appoint him to the faculty had been announced. When the professor left one year later to become president of the University of Mississippi, Tyler used his influence to help Henry Augustine Washington, a descendant of George Washington and son-in-law of Beverley Tucker, become professor and chair of history, political economy, and international law, a position once held by the venerable Thomas Dew. In the 1850s Tyler became rector at the college, a post that gave him oversight over the Board of Visitors and placed him squarely at the forefront of decisions over hiring faculty. In 1860 he was named chancellor of the college, “an honor of which I am quite proud,” he told a friend, “as of any other ever confer’d upon me.” His affection for his alma mater had not dimmed with time. He still believed the school played a vital role in educating young Virginia men, and he wished to do his part to ensure the institution thrived. Populating the faculty with well-known stars was the best way to accomplish that goal.50
To hear Tyler tell it, he himself had thrived in the five years or so since he left the White House. Notwithstanding his chronic indebtedness and constant worry about his wheat crops, he tackled the problems of running Sherwood Forest with fortitude and good spirits, nurturing optimism about the future. He seemed to be adjusting to retirement quite well. “For myself,” he wrote a friend in the winter of 1850, “I am no longer in any way connected with the busy world, but devote all my energies to the improvement of my lands which although originally of good quality had by a course of injudicious husbandry continuing for 200 years, been worn down to a condition of barrenness.” With hard work, however, Tyler claimed that he “already [had] the happiness to see a fresher and a brighter smile enlivening the landscape” of Sherwood Forest.51
Tyler was no longer in any substantive way connected to the busy political world. But he always remained alert to efforts to alter the historical record regarding the annexation of Texas. It absolutely drove him to distraction when anybody tried to minimize the role he had played in bringing Texas into the Union. For the remainder of his life, he jealously guarded his agency in that process as his legacy to the American republic. He might have been deprived of a legitimate chance to win the presidency in his own right in 1844, but he would not let anyone deprive him of his rightful place in history.
Calhoun, his former secretary of state, attempted to do just that in February 1847 amid the Mexican War. Back in the Senate by this time, Calhoun had come under attack from Thomas Hart Benton, who claimed that the South Carolinian had personally brought about the war by pushing the House version of the joint resolution that invited Texas into the Union—that is, he had rejected the Senate version, which Benton had written. Mexican rage had been the result, and the war soon followed.
Calhoun responded to this charge by noting that there had been others willing to take credit for Texas in the twelve months or so after passage of the joint resolution, including President Polk. But now that the Mexican War had become unpopular, it was fashionable to tar him with the responsibility for annexation. That was fine with Calhoun. “I will not put the honor aside,” he declared defiantly on the Senate floor. “I may now rightfully and indisputably claim to be the author of that great event—an event which has so much extended the domains of the Union, which has 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 most exposed frontier.” To hear Calhoun’s answer to Benton, one would think he had been president in March 1845 and that it had been the ink from his pen that signed the joint resolution. Modesty had never been his strong suit.52
Tyler was livid when he read Calhoun’s remarks. He wanted to give his former secretary of state a “severe rebuke” but settled for venting to his brother-in-law Alexander. “Was there ever anything to surpass in selfishness the assumption of Mr. Calhoun?” he railed. “He assumes everything to himself,—overlooks his associates in the cabinet, and takes the reins of the government into his own hands.” Tyler scoffed that Calhoun could not be content with his role as an advisor in the annexation process. That, he sneered, “would be too small game. He is the great ‘I am,’ and myself and cabinet have no voice in the matter.”53
For good measure, Tyler also found fault with his old enemy Senator Benton and the contention that the joint resolution for annexation had brought about the Mexican War. “The man is the most raving political maniac I ever knew,” he wrote.54 But Calhoun had committed the real sin. “The idea that Calhoun had anything to do with originating the measure is as absurd as it is designed to be wicked,” Tyler declared. He thought he might write his memoirs, which would settle the matter once and for all. Nine years later—and six years after Calhoun’s death—what the South Carolinian had said to Benton still rankled Tyler. He spoke of the “fancied connection” to Texas that Calhoun had created to tie himself more closely to annexation. “If Mr. Van Zandt, the Texas minister, had possessed full power to negotiate the treaty at the time of its inception by me,” Tyler groused to one friend, “the work would have been done by Mr. Upshur before Mr. Calhoun, who was then in retirement at Fort Hill, would have ever heard of it.” Calhoun had come to the process after it had been nearly completed. Moreover, he had never tried to tamp down the sectionalism the Pakenham letter brought to annexation. This “chafed” Tyler, who argued that “it substantially converted the executive into a mere Southern agency in place of being what it truly was—the representative of American interests, whether those interests were North, South, East or West; and if ever there was an American question, the Texas was that very question.”55
Tyler later lashed out publicly at Sam Houston, who claimed that his friend Andrew Jackson had played a more substantial role in the annexation of Texas than most people knew. Tyler set the record straight in the Richmond Enquirer. Worse was an article in the Washington Daily National Intelligencer that claimed Tyler had been compelled to pursue the annexation of Texas by members of his cabinet who had speculated in Lone Star land. The editors of the paper had apparently found out that Thomas Walker Gilmer, Mason, and Duff Green stood to profit from annexation. The article also insinuated that perhaps Tyler himself had benefited financially. In response, the former president wrote a letter to the editor of the Enquirer that explicitly denied the charge. “Certain it is,” he made clear, “that I never owned a foot of Texas land or a dollar of Texas stock in my life, nor do I understand the editors of the Intelligencer as intending to intimate such a thing.” Financial considerations had played absolutely no role in the Texas project. “Nor was it until I received authentic information that other nations were exerting all their efforts to induce a course of action on the part of Texas, at war, as I firmly believed, with the permanent interests of the United States,” he declared, “that I gave directions to my lamented friend, Abel P. Upshur . . . to break up and scatter to the winds the web of their intrigues by a direct proposition for annexation.” National security, then, had dictated Tyler’s course of action. There is absolutely no evidence suggesting that Tyler had gained financially by the course he pursued as president.56
The final controversy over the particulars of the annexation process began in the summer of 1848, when Senator Benjamin Tappan of Ohio and Democratic newspaper editor Frank Blair published letters claiming that, as president-elect, Polk had favored the Senate version of the joint resolution—the one championed by Senator Benton—in which negotiations would resume with Texas officials with the goal of producing a treaty acceptable to both republics. Tappan and Blair alleged that Polk had persuaded senators to vote for the House version with the understanding that, after he took the oath of office, he would countermand Tyler’s orders and revoke the joint resolution his predecessor had signed into law.
Tyler called the Tappan and Blair letters “extraordinary.” He was angered by the implication that he had behaved dishonestly and somehow undercut Polk’s wishes by signing the House version of the resolution. He also seemed to think the letters credited Polk with more than he deserved. Tyler was so upset that he immediately fired off letters to Calhoun, Wickliffe, and Mason, asking them to commit to writing their recollections of how the administration had arrived at its decision to pursue the House version. Mason did his best to calm down Tyler, assuring him that he had not acted dishonorably and that Polk had, in fact, concurred with his course of action after having been told by Calhoun that he—Tyler—would sign the House version of the resolution.57
It is almost inexplicable why Tyler got so unhinged by the Tappan and Blair letters, particularly in light of the fact that Polk dismissed them and ascribed political motives to the two men, at least one of whom—Tappan—was attempting to puff up Van Buren’s candidacy for the 1848 presidential campaign by undermining the Polk record. That meant almost by definition that Polk’s course in finishing the Texas annexation process had to be cast in a negative light. The matter did not directly involve Tyler, and nothing much was made publicly about his connection to what Tappan and Blair had written. Therefore, he need not have concerned himself with the controversy over the letters; he was not the one under attack. But he could not help himself. Tyler wanted every little detail of the process verified by the historical record. He wanted people to acknowledge that he had acted with integrity and with the best interests of the country at heart. He had not undermined his successor. Most importantly, he wanted the credit. Any claim that challenged what had really happened was, ultimately, a challenge to him personally and a threat to his standing in history. Perhaps the best evidence that this last point was exactly what motivated Tyler comes from a note he wrote to Alexander Gardiner immediately after learning of the Tappan and Blair letters. “Have you seen Blair and Tappan’s disclosures as to Polk and Texas?” he asked. “Texas was lost but for my prompt action,” he declared.58
Tyler sidestepped the real issue that drove the Calhoun-Benton exchange on the Senate floor and the Tappan and Blair letters: the Mexican War. He never seemed to ask himself if the manner in which he pursued Texas and his prompt action in signing the House version of the joint resolution might have lit the spark that led to the conflict. He got angry with Calhoun for not defending his administration when Senator Benton suggested that very connection. In defending himself, Tyler repeatedly made the point that Texas had augmented the South’s cotton monopoly and strengthened the US economy relative to the rest of the world. He hammered home the idea that he had pursued annexation as a matter of national security.59 In sum, Tyler saw only positives when it came to Texas. He seemed not to notice that the role he had played in the process, which he defended with such zeal, also cast him in the larger drama of sectional tension that was beginning to dominate national politics.