8

No Rest

Tyler’s transition to private citizen was at times difficult. At fifty-four, he was the youngest ex-president in history, and emulating his heroes Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, he retired in 1845 to his Virginia plantation, Sherwood Forest, along the James River in Charles City County. Located near Greenway, his ancestral home, the plantation spread across twelve hundred acres. Julia planned to remodel the two-and-a-half-story house, adding a sixty-eight-foot ballroom, among other improvements. “I assure you Mama my house outside and in is very elegant and quite becoming ‘a President’s Lady,’” Julia wrote her mother, Juliana. “You will think it is a sweet and lovely spot.”

At first, Tyler worried that the life provided by a gentleman farmer would disappoint Julia after her exciting eight months in the White House. “The President,” as Julia continued to call him, “is puzzling his wits constantly to prevent me from feeling lonely,” she told Juliana. “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!’” In reality, she was weary of the “routine of gaiety” and enjoyed the “repose” she found at Sherwood Forest.

So did her husband. Tyler planted wheat, corn, grain, and fruits and tended them carefully. At harvest time, he spent three to four hours a day riding through the fields “among the slaves, encouraging them by his presence.” He purchased more slaves, bringing the plantation’s number to more than seventy. Often Julia would join him late in the afternoon, as the sun went down. They would sit on the piazza, Tyler in a large, comfortable chair, feet up on the railing, reading, while Julia wrote to her mother or her sister. They watched “the reapers come to their labors in the fields,” she noted, “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, cause[s] us to raise our eyes to see a full chase after a poor little hare.” Unlike Washington’s Mount Vernon, Jefferson’s Monticello, and Madison’s Montpelier, which were difficult to restore when each president left office, Tyler’s plantation flourished, as did its owners. Tyler had saved a good portion of his annual presidential salary of $25,000 and, along with Julia’s sizable inheritance, they lived comfortably. Indeed, they were able to purchase a summer home near the Hampton Roads (named Villa Margaret, after Julia’s sister), which provided a refuge from Virginia’s malaria outbreaks, and vacationed at resorts at White Sulphur Springs and visited Julia’s mother in New York.¹

At times, though, it was a lonely life. Gone were the numerous visitors who had filled the White House, sometimes to overflowing. Nor was Tyler bothered as were Washington and Jefferson and Jackson by hordes of aspiring politicians who sought advice or endorsements. Tyler was still a political pariah, despised by the Whigs, unwelcomed by the Democrats. Most of his nearest neighbors were Whigs, and the local social set shunned them. Charles City County officers tried to embarrass Tyler by appointing the ex-president “overseer” of the road that ran by his property, but next to Henry Clay, this bunch was easy to outfox. As overseer, Tyler required his neighbors to leave their farms and physically repair the road, even at harvest time and during inclement weather. Tyler’s interruptions quickly annoyed them and they demanded that he relinquish his post. This too was child’s play for “Old Veto.” He told them that “offices were hard to obtain in these times, and having no assurance that he would ever get another he could not think, under the circumstances, of resigning.” But eventually the couple made many new friends, who invited them to teas, dances, and dinner parties.²

They settled into a happy life at home. Julia gave birth to seven children between 1846 and 1860. First to arrive was David Gardiner Tyler, called by family friends the “Little President,” who was born at his grandmother’s home in New York. The pleasure of his arrival was temporarily marred by a rumor circulating through New York and Washington that David’s parents were on the brink of divorce. Nothing could have been further from the truth: despite the thirty years that separated them, Julia continued to be “her husband’s devoted admirer and a contented and happy wife,” said one who knew them well. (In fact, it was John Tyler Jr.’s continuing marital woes that had caught the attention of gossip mongers, and the story became garbled as it made the rounds.) Julia and Tyler’s second child, John Alexander, was delivered in 1848, followed by Julia in 1849, Lachlan in 1851, Lyon in 1853, Robert Fitzwalter in 1856, and finally Pearl, born in 1860, when Tyler was almost seventy. To his friend Henry Wise, who had questioned whether Tyler should marry such a young woman, he said, “You see 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.” All told, Tyler and his two wives produced fifteen children, a presidential record. Tyler, born the year after George Washington was inaugurated, produced a family that survived until 1947, when Harry Truman was president.³

 

 

Tyler was undoubtedly happy being a gentleman farmer and new father. “My old age,” he told a friend, “is enlivened by the scenes of my youth—and these precious buds and blossoms almost persuade me that the springtime of life is still surrounding me.” But, like many one-term presidents, he had a chronic case of Potomac fever. Even as he settled at Sherwood Forest in 1845, Tyler kept in touch with political allies in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. In the Keystone State, his son Robert helped secure a pro-Tyler newspaper, the Spirit of the Time, and reported that his father had more than three thousand supporters.⁴

But Tyler’s chances of winning the Democratic nomination in 1848 were significantly weakened by an emboldened President Polk. Although he had pledged to serve only one term, Polk did not want Tyler back in the White House. Soon after taking office, Polk purged hundreds of Tyler appointees from government service. Tyler, believing that he was responsible for Polk’s election, was disappointed and angry. “If Polk had played his game wisely,” he wrote Robert, “he would have reconsolidated the old Republican Party … . Such was my policy; but he destroyed, I fear, all that I built up, by the proscription of my friends.” For her part, Julia was thrilled to learn that the new First Lady, Sarah Polk, was a complete failure. Mrs. Polk, a devout Methodist, forbade dancing, drinking, and card playing at the White House, so Julia’s presence, if not her husband’s, was greatly missed in Washington.⁵

The unlikelihood of another term in the presidency made Tyler more determined to protect the reputation of the one term he had. In May 1846, he returned to Washington to testify before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which had accused Daniel Webster of bribery and corruption during the 1842 propaganda campaign in Maine. Tyler ably defended his former “premier,” and the charges against Webster were dropped. A year later, he confronted another challenge to his legacy. John C. Calhoun suddenly claimed that he himself was chiefly responsible for annexing Texas—“a measure which has so much extended the domains of the Union.” Tyler was both piqued and worried by Calhoun’s action. “Was there ever anything to surpass in selfishness the assumption of Mr. Calhoun?” he wrote Alexander Gardiner. “He assumes everything to himself, overlooks his associates in the Cabinet, and takes the reins of government into his own hands … . He is the great ‘I am’ and myself and the Cabinet have no voice in the matter.” A response was necessary and, at first, Tyler considered writing a memoir or a book about his foreign policy, but then chose to write letters to the Richmond Enquirer, which his allies would distribute throughout the country. Tyler could not allow his presidency to be reduced to “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.” That seemed to silence the “impudent” Calhoun.⁶

No sooner did Tyler respond to Calhoun’s outrageous statements than the Whig press reopened its attacks on the former president. This time, the Whig Intelligencer accused Tyler of being the tool of land and stock speculators who would greatly profit from an American Texas. Tyler shot back, claiming that he represented no local, sectional, or private interest but “the glory of the whole country.” Actually, the Intelligencer was not entirely wrong. While Tyler himself had no economic interests to further (“I never owned a foot of Texas land or a dollar of Texas stock in my life,” he insisted), many of his closest associates did, including Secretary of the Navy Thomas Gilmer, who had been killed on the Princeton, Attorney General John Y. Mason, secret agent Duff Green, and William and Mary’s Beverley Tucker, Tyler’s legal advisor on drafting the treaty. Stung by these various accusations, Tyler announced in 1848 that he would not be a candidate for reelection.⁷

These minor squabbles were soon overshadowed by the outbreak of war between the United States and Mexico, a conflict for which Tyler was partly responsible. Two days after Tyler signed the annexation resolution, and while he was still the incumbent president, the Mexican minister asked for his passport and left Washington. On his arrival, Polk was determined both to end the joint British-American occupation of Oregon and to carry America to the Pacific, no matter the cost. The acquisition of the Oregon territory occurred peacefully, but the Mexicans chose to fight. The war began in May 1846 and sixteen months later General Winfield Scott marched triumphantly into Mexico City. “The United States will conquer Mexico,” Ralph Waldo Emerson predicted, “but it will be as the man who swallows the arsenic which brings him down. Mexico will poison us.” The five hundred thousand square miles of territory taken from Mexico in settlement included the future states of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and much of New Mexico, and deepened the sectional crisis that led to civil war.

Tyler watched these developments with grim foreboding. Not long after the Mexican War began, Pennsylvania congressman David Wilmot introduced a resolution to prohibit slavery in any territory won from Mexico. Southerners, Tyler among them, were outraged by the Wilmot Proviso. In an anonymous letter to the Portsmouth, Virginia, Pilot, Tyler called the measure “nothing less than a gratuitous insult on the slave states.” Southern boys were fighting and dying in Mexico, yet Representative Wilmot wanted to deny them the spoils of victory. “You may toil and bleed and pay,” Tyler wrote, “and yet your toil, and blood and money shall only be expended to increase [the North’s]; you and [the South’s] property being forever excluded from the enjoyment of the territory you may conquer.” The House passed the resolution but it died in the Senate. Nevertheless, what Tyler termed the “contest between the sections for the balance of power” was unfolding.⁸

In 1850, the fruits of the Mexican War again contested the balance of power. California—even richer because of the recent discovery of gold and its growing population—wished to enter the Union as a free state, and New Mexico and the Oregon territory, similarly inclined, waited in the wings. For Southerners, these were ominous developments alongside the creation in 1848 of the Free Soil Party, dedicated to “free soil, free men, and free labor.” The party had chosen as its nominee former president Martin Van Buren, who had siphoned votes from Democrat Lewis Cass to give the election to Whig general Zachary Taylor. “As things now stand,” said John C. Calhoun in February 1850, the South “cannot with safety remain in the Union.” A dwindling group of Southern moderates looked to the one man who had prevented civil war thirty years earlier—Henry Clay.⁹

With the help of Daniel Webster and Illinois Democrat Stephen A. Douglas, Clay, now seventy-three years old and at the end of his career, cobbled together a congressional package to manage the sensitive sectional issues: California was admitted as a free state; the citizens of the New Mexico and Utah territories were permitted to choose their future status on the basis of popular sovereignty; the slave trade in the District of Columbia was abolished; and a new, strict Fugitive Slave Law gave the federal government the power to pursue and return runaway slaves to their owners. Clay spoke for hours at a time with an eloquence that still dazzled his audience. He asked his countrymen on both sides of the great sectional divide “to pause—solemnly to pause—at the edge of the precipice before the fearful and disastrous leap is taken into the yawning abyss below.” Webster added his own great voice: “I speak today for the preservation of the Union. Hear me for my cause.”¹⁰

Southern diehards were opposed. Calhoun, too ill from the tuberculosis that would shortly kill him, was unable to speak; his protest was read to the Senate by Virginia’s James M. Mason. In a move that surprised some of his friends, Tyler supported Clay and the “compromise” he offered the nation. In a letter that received wide readership throughout America, the former president endorsed Clay’s work. The legislation passed. “There is rejoicing over the land,” Philip Hone observed. “The bone is removed; disunion, fanaticism, violence, insurrection are defeated.” For once, Tyler and Hone were in hopeful agreement.¹¹

 

 

The Compromise of 1850 only delayed what seemed to all inevitable—the breakup of the Union. Sectional violence was unstoppable. In 1854, Senator Stephen A. Douglas put forward the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which permitted new territories to choose to be free or slave states. It won Tyler’s support, but violence soon flared between free soilers and slavers who poured into Kansas from Missouri. In May 1856, the town of Lawrence, Kansas—considered “a hotbed of abolitionism”—was attacked by pro-slavery sympathizers, and in revenge John Brown, the abolitionist who wanted to purge “the crimes of this guilty land … with Blood,” let his Liberty Guards loose on the town of Pottawatomie. They murdered five citizens believed to favor slavery. Eventually, two hundred lost their lives in “Bloody Kansas.”¹²

It was Brown who pushed John Tyler toward favoring secession when, in October 1859, he and his Liberty Guards seized the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Brown planned to arm the many slaves he expected would join them in rebellion. Instead of a host of grateful slaves, federal troops arrived, commanded by Colonel Robert E. Lee. They captured Brown, who was later tried and convicted of treason against the Commonwealth of Virginia, then hanged. Brown wanted to die a martyr, and at that he succeeded. He was called “an angel of light” by Henry David Thoreau; fellow abolitionist Wendell Phillips proclaimed that the “lesson of the hour is insurrection.”¹³

Brown’s desperate act, and the support he won from the abolitionists, terrified Virginians, Tyler among them. Blacks outnumbered whites more than two to one in Tyler’s Charles City County, and the prospect of his own slaves murdering him and his family in the dead of night seemed no mere phantom. Virginia’s governor called out the state militia. Armed patrols were organized. Tyler joined the “Silver Greys,” men too old to take to the field but who could still protect themselves and their neighbors. “Virginia is arming to the teeth,” Tyler wrote his son Robert two months after Brown’s assault. “More than fifty thousand stand of arms [are] already distributed, and the demand for more daily increasing … . But one sentiment pervades the country: security in the Union, or separation.” Although the feared slave uprisings never occurred, life at Sherwood Forest never regained its old serenity. Tyler still believed that “after all, good may come out of evil,” but, if the past was any guide, this was a vain hope.¹⁴

As the nation slid toward civil war in 1860, Tyler watched helplessly. National politics had become completely polarized—torn, it seemed, between the “slave power” and its Northern enemy, the Republican Party. It took the newly seated Thirty-sixth Congress two months to elect a speaker; talk of secession was in the air and legislators, feeling the need for protection, came armed to the House and Senate. Their skittishness was not irrational: in 1856, South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks beat Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner senseless with his gold-tipped gutta-percha cane; Sumner survived but was unable to return to the Senate for three years. In April 1860, the Democratic Party met in Charleston to select its presidential nominee but the result was bedlam. After losing a fight over a platform position that would have bound the federal government to protect slavery in the territories, angry Southern delegates stormed out. South Carolina’s William Preston cried: “Slavery is our King; slavery is our Truth; slavery is our Divine Right.” The Southerners cheered. When those who remained failed to produce a winner after fifty-seven ballots, the party decided to try again six weeks later in Baltimore. That convention managed to nominate Stephen Douglas, but again Southerners defected. They held their own convention and selected Kentucky’s John C. Breckinridge, the vice president under President James Buchanan, to lead them. His platform called for the continued expansion of slavery in the territories and the acquisition of Cuba, where a new generation of slaves would flourish.¹⁵

Tyler thought the Southern walkout stupid and self-defeating. In unity there was strength; he believed they should have instead remained to throw their support behind a Northerner with Southern sympathies. (The South, in Tyler’s opinion, would never again have one of its own in the White House. “I am the last of the Virginia Presidents,” he said mournfully, in 1858.) Nevertheless, Tyler backed Breckinridge’s candidacy, the South, and slavery. Adding to the electoral confusion was the Constitutional Union Party, consisting of old Whigs with vague principles, whose nominee, Tennessee’s John Bell, called “for the Union, the Constitution, and the enforcement of the laws,” whatever that meant. Tyler hoped that with all these contestants none would receive a majority and the outcome would be decided in the House, where the South might have a better chance to defeat Abraham Lincoln, the “Black Republican.” That was not to be. The election results revealed “a nation breaking in two.” Lincoln won the election with the Northern states plus Oregon and California, rich in electoral votes, while Breckinridge took the cotton states, Douglas secured the moderate Democrats in the Midwest and elsewhere, and Bell garnered the pro-Union Southerners in Kentucky, Tennessee, western Virginia, North Carolina, and Maryland.¹⁶

 

 

“We have fallen on evil times,” Tyler noted after Lincoln’s victory. “Madness rules the hour, and statesmanship … gives place to a miserable demagogism which leads to inevitable destruction.” While the Republicans had rejected their more anti-Southern front-runner, New York governor William H. Seward, in favor of the moderate Lincoln, the president-elect would not permit slavery to grow beyond where it existed, and that, for Tyler, was the gravest danger. Virginia, Tyler wrote a friend, “will never consent to have her blacks cribbed and confined within proscribed and specified limits—and thus be involved in the consequences of a war of the races in some 20 or 30 years. She must have expansion, and if she cannot obtain for herself and her 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.” While fearing for the South’s future—he told his neighbors to sell their slaves or take them into the deep South—Tyler was not yet ready to abandon the Union.¹⁷

Others were. South Carolina radicals led the way in December 1860, and by early 1861, six more Southern states—Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Tyler’s beloved Texas—prepared to secede and join South Carolina in the Confederate States of America. It would be “a civilization that has never been equaled or surpassed,” said South Carolina’s Robert Barnwell Rhett, “a civilization teeming with orators, poets, philosophers, statesmen and historians equal to those of Greece and Rome.”

At Sherwood Forest, Tyler searched desperately for a way to prevent the dissolution of the Union. He called for a peace conference to be held in Washington, D.C. At first, he proposed a group representing a dozen border states, half slave, half free. “They are the most interested in keeping the peace, and if they cannot come to an understanding, then the political union is gone,” he noted in December 1860. If secession did occur, he hoped the South would be allowed to leave peacefully. They could revise the old Constitution to give the South the security it required and then invite the other states “to enter our Union with the old flag flying over one and all.” The other alternative—war—was “too horrible and revolting” to contemplate.¹⁸

The Virginia legislature endorsed Tyler’s plan for a peace convention but asked all the states, not simply the ones on the Missouri Compromise border, to send commissioners to the capital. The legislature also appointed Tyler as one of the state’s commissioners—formally instructed to make “every effort in his power to effect a reconciliation”—while at the same time asking him to meet with President Buchanan to see if peace was still possible.

Physically, Tyler was not up to these tasks. He was seventy years old and suffering from a host of ailments—chronic bronchitis, especially in the winter months, frequent dysentery in summer, and his usual, but now more debilitating, intestinal problems, for which he took “heavy doses” of mercury laced with chalk. He had a low opinion of physicians and preferred to treat himself with quinine, “spiked with a jigger of whisky,” and calomel, which probably worsened his conditions. Yet, despite these ills, he was determined to go to Washington. Like Lincoln, Tyler was afflicted by an ambition “that knew no rest.” Preventing civil war would certainly earn him a place among the Virginia dynasty of presidents, perhaps making him the greatest of all. In this, Julia encouraged him. “The seceding States on hearing that he is conferring with Mr. Buchanan will stay … their proceedings out of respect for him,” Julia confidently believed. “If the Northern States will only follow up this measure in a conceding Union, peace will be insured.” She too would go to Washington; the nation might be on the brink of civil war, but it was also the social season.¹⁹

Tyler arrived on January 23, 1861, to find the city beset by rumors. “A widespread and powerful conspiracy” was afoot to seize the Capitol, many believed, while others expected Southern troops to appear at any moment. Reality was equally troubling: in South Carolina, state militias seized the federal arsenal in the capital and troops occupied Fort Moultrie and Castle Pinckney; when President Buchanan sent the Star of the West with troops and supplies to Fort Sumter, South Carolina’s guns fired at it and the ship fled. If another attempt was made to relieve the fort, it was expected that armed conflict and civil war would result. Little time remained to prevent cataclysm, so, after taking a suite at Brown’s Hotel, Tyler immediately contacted Buchanan, who agreed to meet with the former president the next morning at ten o’clock.²⁰

Tyler had known the president for two decades and had earlier offered to appoint him to the Supreme Court. The nation would have been better served if Buchanan had taken that post, since it likely would have prevented him from becoming president, a job for which he was totally unsuited. Although their ninety-minute meeting was “warm and cordial,” it was clear to Tyler that Buchanan was merely biding his time until he could leave the White House. “His policy,” Tyler noted, “is obviously to throw all responsibility off of his shoulders.” Buchanan complained that “the South had not treated him properly,” seizing arsenals and forts, which he called “acts of useless bravado.” Tyler urged the president to remain calm; such actions were only irritants, which would be forgotten once unity was restored. Buchanan agreed to ask Congress to avoid hostilities but told Tyler that “the entire … subject of war or peace” was up to that body. Tyler reminded Buchanan that he, as commander in chief, must do everything possible to avoid provoking the South and offered to help draft the president’s message to Congress. Tyler left feeling that for the time being war was not imminent.²¹

His confidence was badly shaken the next day when, after approving Buchanan’s message to Congress, Tyler learned that the steamship Brooklyn, with troops aboard, had set sail for Charleston. A “startled” Tyler searched the government for an explanation. Attorney General Edwin M. Stanton knew nothing of such a mission, while Secretary of State Jeremiah S. Black thought the Brooklyn was on the high seas, but had no idea where it was headed. Tyler scrawled a note to Buchanan and asked the attorney general to deliver it promptly. Stanton went directly to the White House but was unable to see the president, so left Tyler’s message with a Buchanan “servant.” At eleven fifteen that night, Tyler was awakened by a messenger carrying the president’s reply: the Brooklyn “had gone on an errand of ‘mercy and relief’” to Florida and “was not destined for South Carolina.” Tyler slept easy that night and the following morning sent the good news to his colleagues in Charleston.²²

Buchanan kept his promise. On Monday, January 28, he sent a special message to Congress asking it “to abstain from hostile measures.” Tyler listened as it was read aloud and was pleased with the role he had played in its creation. But he was disappointed when both the Senate and the House treated Virginia’s resolutions “with brutal indifference,” refusing to refer them to committee or even have them printed, an “ordinary courtesy.” And as Tyler was about to leave the capital, another disturbing event occurred—a newspaper story reported that the federal fort in Virginia had pointed its cannons inland at the commonwealth’s citizens. Tyler dashed off another note to the president. “When Virginia is making every possible effort to redeem and save the Union,” he said, “it is seemingly ungenerous to have cannon leveled at her bosom.” Buchanan replied just as quickly, expressing ignorance of the fort’s situation but pledging to look into it. Tyler’s first mission to Washington had been mostly successful—he had helped stamp out rumors that might have led to serious violence and felt that Buchanan would do nothing to upset the status quo—but Congress’s rejection of Virginia’s plea for peace was deeply disturbing and suggested that the legislators would also ignore the peace convention, which was scheduled to open in less than one week.²³

 

 

When Tyler returned to Washington on February 3, the crisis had worsened. South Carolina was demanding the surrender of Fort Sumter and Buchanan appeared unwilling or unable to act. General Winfield Scott urged the president to send warships to protect the fort and Buchanan agreed, then changed his mind, afraid of the consequences. He later informed South Carolina that without a congressional authorization he had no power to evacuate the fort, a response that the firebrands in Charleston called “highly insulting.” Tyler suddenly became “the great center of attraction,” Julia noted, mobbed by frantic people who expected him “to save the Union.” However, some delegates were distinctly “unsympathetic,” calling him a “traitor” and a “tottering ashen ruin,” more hated than any man “who ever occupied the presidential chair.” As in the old days, Tyler was poised between an earthquake and a tornado.²⁴

When the peace convention met on February 5, he was quickly and unanimously elected its president. If they could achieve “the great work of reconciliation,” Tyler told them, their names would be “enrolled in the Capitol, to be repeated by future generations with grateful applause … . You have to snatch from ruin a great and glorious Confederation; to preserve the Government and to renew and invigorate the Constitution. I confess myself ambitious of sharing in the glory of accomplishing this grand and magnificent result.” Greeted by thunderous applause, his extemporaneous address was “one of the most affecting and eloquent efforts ever spoken in this country,” wrote the Evening Star. Some reporters were surprised to find Tyler so “keen and well preserved” and were impressed by his vigorous delivery. “Who would have thought that the old man has so much blood in him,” mused the editor of the Examiner. Tyler, gazing on the crowd, must have recalled his tragic and tumultuous past; among the 132 delegates was Charles Wickliffe, his postmaster general and one of the few friends to attend his wedding to Julia; Francis Granger and Thomas Ewing, members of his inherited cabinet who resigned in protest that memorable Saturday twenty years before; Robert Stockton, the captain of the USS Princeton who had since been elected a U.S. senator from New Jersey. In all, it was one of the most distinguished groups of public servants ever collected in one place. Tyler compared it to “our godlike [founding] fathers”: besides a former U.S. president, there were ex-governors, senators, congressmen, ambassadors, Supreme Court justices, and cabinet secretaries. But too many were old and infirm—one died during the proceedings—and of the twenty-one states represented, only seven were in the South.²⁵

The delegates’ task was to draft a proposed constitutional amendment that would be acceptable to this divided body, Congress, and the four-fifths of the states needed for ratification—an improbable and difficult goal. While the resolutions committee set to work, President Buchanan called Tyler to the White House to again discuss the crisis in South Carolina. Tyler urged the president to evacuate Fort Sumter: it was indefensible and not worth a civil war. Buchanan refused. Instead he asked Tyler to send a message to the Palmetto State’s angry governor, Francis Pickens, assuring him of the government’s peaceful intentions. He did, and a few days later he learned that the governor, an old suitor of Julia’s, had “calmed” down. Buchanan was so grateful that he honored Tyler by visiting him at Brown’s Hotel, thanking him for his service to the country. “It is the first visit he has paid since being the nation’s chief,” the societally conscious Julia wrote her mother.²⁶

The peace convention, however, was not progressing well. On February 9, six more Deep South states seceded. The convention’s delegates could not reach a solution acceptable to Tyler and his fellow Southerners, let alone to Congress and the states. Tempers grew short and delegates exchanged threats. On at least one occasion, men almost came to blows. Tyler interceded. “Order,” he yelled. “Shame upon the delegate who would dishonor this conference with violence.”²⁷

When Tyler realized that the final version of the proposed amendment would not allow slavery to grow in Latin America and the West Indies, he joined the seceding radicals. He now simply hoped to persuade the border states “and perhaps New Jersey” to become part of the new confederacy and thereby create a strong enough military force to deter incoming President Lincoln’s government from choosing war—what biographer Robert Seager called “peace-through-secession-and-balance-of-power.” On February 26, however, Tyler was persuaded that Lincoln did, in fact, want war. During a heated meeting, Lincoln insisted that soon he would take the oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. “The Constitution will not be preserved and defended until it is enforced and obeyed in every part of every one of the United States,” he told peace commissioners. “It must be so respected, obeyed, enforced and defended.” That was too much for some of the assembled Southerners, who quickly left the room. Tyler remained long enough to hear Lincoln remark, “In a choice of evils, war may not always be the worst.”²⁸

Three days later, Tyler joined the most radical Southerners to vote against the peace convention’s amendment. It was approved by a majority of delegates and delivered to Congress, which ignored it. On February 28, he was back in Richmond, where, from the steps of the Exchange Hotel, he attacked the “Old Gentlemen’s Conference” and forcefully urged Virginia to secede from the Union. But Tyler’s words did not move the Old Dominion into the Confederacy. A swift series of events later that spring caused that misfortune: President Lincoln’s inauguration on March 4; South Carolina’s takeover of Fort Sumter on April 12; and Lincoln’s call for seventy-five thousand volunteers to put down the insurrection on April 16. On the eve of Virginia’s vote, Tyler wrote Julia: “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 … they will break upon the South with an immense 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 … . These are dark times, dearest, and I think only of you and our little ones … . I shall vote secession.”

On the afternoon of April 17, John Tyler joined eighty-seven other delegates to the Virginia state convention to approve an ordinance of secession and, in so doing, became the first president to betray the country he spent his life serving. Later that afternoon, Tyler and his friend Henry Wise celebrated Virginia’s decision at Richmond’s Metropolitan Hall. To the crowd of happy rebels there assembled, Tyler spoke of America’s first revolution and prayed that “Divine Providence would again crown our efforts with similar success.”²⁹

 

 

Although too old to join the fight, Tyler vigorously supported the South. He helped Virginia win admission to the Confederate States of America, oversaw the transfer of the Confederacy’s capital from Montgomery, Alabama, to Richmond, and served in its provisional congress. Nor did his age and status prevent him from feeling the conflict’s terrible impact. The war tore apart the Tyler-Gardiner family. Juliana Gardiner became a Copperhead—a staunch New York supporter of the Confederacy—but her son David remained a devoted Unionist, which enraged both her and Julia. “I think D. has been bitten by the rabid tone of those around him and the press,” she wrote her mother in May. “I am utterly ashamed of the state in which I was born, and its people. All soul and magnanimity have departed from them.” David Gardiner received a cool reception whenever he and his wife visited his mother. Robert Tyler, a struggling lawyer in Philadelphia when the war came, narrowly escaped lynching because of his Confederate sympathies; he, like his father before him, was burned in effigy. Eventually, Robert and Priscilla made their way safely to Richmond, where Robert found a job with the Confederate Treasury. John Jr. was commissioned a major in the Confederate army and Tazewell served as a surgeon. Three Tyler grandsons fought for the Confederacy, and young William Griffin Waller, the son of Elizabeth Tyler and William Waller, whose song saved John Tyler’s life aboard the Princeton, was killed in action.³⁰

In the fall of 1861, Tyler again sought elective office, running and decisively defeating “two of the ablest and most popular men in … Richmond” to win a seat in the Confederate House of Representatives. After the Christmas holidays, he packed his bags and rode to Richmond to begin his second career in Southern politics. Julia was scheduled to join him after visiting friends nearby, but she canceled these plans after a terrible nightmare awakened her on the night of January 9. She dreamed that her husband was seriously ill and, gathering her infant daughter Pearl, she rushed to the Exchange Hotel, arriving late the following evening to find Congressman-elect Tyler alive and well and amused to hear of Julia’s tale of his premature demise. ³¹

But on Sunday morning, Tyler awoke feeling ill. He became nauseous, felt dizzy, and vomited. Since such symptoms were not unusual given his intestinal problems, Tyler ignored them and, telling Julia that he had a “chill,” he went downstairs for a cup of tea. That seemed to help, but as he rose to leave, he collapsed and lost consciousness for a few minutes. When he came to, he found himself lying on a couch in the hotel parlor surrounded by concerned employees. Again dismissing the episode, he got to his feet and managed to return to his room. Julia, alarmed by his appearance, called for a doctor. After examining his patient, Dr. William Peachy concluded that he was suffering from “a bilious attack, united with bronchitis.”³²

During the next week, Tyler rested in his room and, despite frequent headaches and a bad cough, he met with friends and fellow politicians to discuss the formation of the new Confederate Congress. Dr. Peachy gave him morphine, which helped him to sleep, and Robert decided to stay with his father until he was better. As the weekend approached, Peachy “insisted” that the Tylers return to Sherwood Forest so that the busy legislator could “have perfect quiet for a few days.” But late Friday night, January 17, he awoke “suddenly with a feeling of suffocation,” and his gasping alarmed his wife and son. Robert ran for the doctor, baby Pearl began to cry, and Julia tried to care for both her husband and her daughter. “Poor little thing,” Tyler said, “how I disturb her.” A Dr. Brown appeared and urged Tyler to sip some brandy and then tried to apply mustard plasters to his chest, which Tyler resisted, saying: “Doctor, I think you are mistaken.” It was almost 12:15 a.m. on January 18 when Dr. Peachy arrived. Tyler was slowly losing consciousness but remarked, “Doctor, I am going.”

“I hope not, Sir,” Peachy replied.

“Perhaps it is best.” Then, as Julia later recalled, “he looked forward with a radiant expression, as if he saw something to surprise and please, and then, as if falling asleep, was gone.” The fainting spell, the headaches, and the breathing problems suggest that the cause of his death was a stroke. “The bed on which he died was exactly like the one I saw him upon in my dream and unlike any of our own,” Julia observed.³³

There was no White House funeral for John Tyler; no flags flew at half-staff at the Capitol or anywhere in the Northern states; no eulogies were lavished in the House or Senate, where he once served. The Lincoln government took no formal notice of his death, and there were few public obituaries. The New York Times noted that Tyler “added a new term to our political vocabulary … [the] infamous appellation of traitor.” He died “amid the ruins of his native state,” the Times concluded. “He himself was one of the architects of its ruin; and beneath that melancholy wreck his name will be buried.”³⁴

The former president of the United States received a Southern farewell a few days after his death. Tyler’s open coffin, draped by the Confederate flag, lay in state in Richmond’s Hall of Congress from Sunday until Tuesday, January 21. Thousands, “wearing badges of mourning,” entered the hall for one “last look at his well-known features.” At noon on Tuesday, the coffin was carried to the waiting hearse, which was driven to St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. There, sixteen pallbearers—including some from the new Confederate states, but not Texas—carried the coffin into a church filled to overflowing. Joining the Tyler family were a host of dignitaries: Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America, accompanied by his vice president and cabinet, and the governor of Virginia. Members of the Confederate Congress and both houses of the Virginia state legislature attended. A choir sang. Then the Right Reverend Bishop Johns delivered the funeral service. Tyler, Bishop Johns said, “had left behind him a rich and pure legacy, worthy to adorn the history of his country and to guide others by example.”

Later, as a gentle rain fell, a procession of 150 carriages, stretching over a quarter of a mile, followed the hearse bearing John Tyler’s body through streets “filled with spectators” to Richmond’s Hollywood Cemetery. Buried there were two other famous sons of the Old Dominion, the eccentric John Randolph, who dueled with Henry Clay, and James Monroe, the last president of the revolutionary generation. Tyler’s final resting place, near Monroe’s, is on a knoll overlooking his beloved James River, whose waters nurtured his family for a century.

Honored by the South, condemned by the North, in death as in life Tyler remained a controversial figure.³⁵