And Tyler Too – Robert Seager II, 1963 ★★★½

Evaluating America's Imperfect 10

Try naming American presidents, and chances are good you stumble on “Tyler.” Was his first name “James” or “John?” Was he president before or after Millard Fillmore? The kids at Springfield Elementary School on “The Simpsons” once did a musical number about “caretaker presidents.” Sure enough, he gets a mention:

There’s Taylor/There’s Tyler/There’s Fillmore and there’s Hayes/There’s William Henry Harrison/‘I died in thirty days.’

Other than being the 10^th American president, John Tyler does have other notable facts to his name. For example, when the aforementioned William Henry Harrison became the first president to die in office, Tyler became the first vice president to fill the vacancy. During the last weeks of his single term, in 1845, he brought Texas into the Union. He had the most children of any president. He was the first president to jump one political party and then get dumped by another.

He stands alone in another way, too: “Rebel John Tyler [was] the only American President who seceded with his state [Virginia] from the very Union he had governed,” Robert Seager II points out in his 1963 biography, And Tyler Too.

There’s one thing people do recall about Tyler, his ancillary place on what remains a landmark campaign slogan: “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.” Ironically, the focus there was on William Henry Harrison, victor of the battle of Tippecanoe against the Shawnees, but Tyler got the name check. Kind of appropriate when you think how the winning slogan wound up benefitting Tyler more than anyone else.

With Seager’s book, the title And Tyler Too has a double meaning, laying out the author’s approach of presenting Tyler as part of a double act. The book’s subtitle, A Biography Of John And Julia Gardiner Tyler, makes this clear. At least as much of it is her as him.

Whether you like Seager’s book depends a lot on how much you enjoy this dual focus. I’ve seen it done before, namely with Doris Kearns Goodwin’s No Ordinary Time. That chronicle of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt shorted him while selling her as feminist pioneer. Seager’s approach is less worshipful, his tone more enjoyably snarky. Seager makes clear he liked the Tylers:

John Tyler may not have been America’s most successful President, but the courtly Virginian was certainly one of America’s most gracious and socially engaging Chief Executives. So polite and courteous was he with strangers, so warm and genuine was he in his greeting and in his concern for the comfort and well-being of his guests, that few who met him escaped his personal magnetism…Surrounded by the inadequate lights, shabby furniture, unpainted walls, and grimy appointments of the President’s Mansion, Tyler gave off a personal charm, dignity and regality that transformed his surroundings.

John Tyler, as painted by George Peter Alexander Healy in 1859, three years before his death. He had the profile of a great President, whatever his actual record. Image from http://www.history.com/topics/us-presidents/john-tyler/pictures/john-tyler/by-george-peter-alexander-healy-7. 

Julia was even more regal if a touch less gracious, a product not of the Virginia Tidewater region like John, but rather New York aristocracy. She was the direct descendant of Lion Gardiner, first white settler of Gardiners Island off Long Island. A oft-remarked beauty of her time, Julia leveraged a bevy of highly successful admirers across the District of Columbia before settling on President Tyler, who had become a lusty widower his second year in office.

“She tripped lightly through her young life leaving behind a trail of broken hearts,” Seager notes, “aged twenty-three to fifty-seven.”

Julia once told a friend: “I excuse all bad poetry where I am the subject.”

Tyler’s marriage to Julia marked the first time an American president married while in office. In his opening chapter, Seager lays out how this was done. Tyler first announced he was taking a “repose” from his “arduous duties,” then married Julia while officially on vacation. Even his daughters weren’t informed until after the event. She was just 24, thirty years Tyler’s junior.

“We rather think that the President’s ‘arduous duties’ are only beginning,” the New York Herald huffed in breaking the news. “‘Repose,’ indeed!”

It was June, 1844. Tyler’s term of office had less than a year to run. To this point, it could hardly have been termed a success. Early on, he had been cast out of his party, the Whigs, ending what had always been a marriage of convenience. They wanted a Southerner on their ticket, while he, a former Democrat who had clashed with Andrew Jackson over states’ rights, found their platform vague enough to suit his conservative, do-little approach to governance. The Whigs dubbed him “His Accidency” and ruminated impeachment proceedings after Tyler began vetoing their bills in Congress.

Key actions during his term of office, up until the summer of 1844, were few and unremarkable. There was the Tariff Bill of 1842, which circumscribed international trade while adding to the nation’s drying coffers. The Webster-Ashburton Treaty of the same year resolved border disputes with British Canada. The Second Seminole War came to an end that year as well.

But all this is prologue in Seager’s account, limned over as we get to the crux of his story, Tyler’s presidency once Julia became First Lady. She decamped on the grimy White House with all the aplomb of a conquering queen, throwing grand parties and buttressing Tyler’s august if cash-poor social position with her lavish family fortune.

Despite its tattered condition, a result of Tyler’s continual standoff with Congress, the White House under Julia’s care became a destination for the high and the mighty among the American aristocracy. Even Edgar Allan Poe was once a guest, Seager notes, though that visit was hardly a success as Poe proceeded to get “dead drunk” before the President.

Seager writes: Whatever “impartial history” would say of John Tyler as President of the United States, it could only say of Julia that as First Lady she would have no real rival for one hundred and sixteen years.

Julia and her politically-active family were also key allies in the signal achievement of his presidency, the formal annexation of Texas as a state.

It was a tricky proposition. Texas had only become independent of Mexico a decade before. Texans were happy to be made American; Mexico had other ideas. “In sum, the Mexicans had numerous legal arguments and few guns, while the Americans had dubious historical arguments and the potential of many guns,” Seager notes.

The matter was not resolved until after Tyler’s presidency, with the Mexican War. For Tyler, the main challenge lay with his countrymen. Texas’s admission as a slave state threatened a precarious, long-standing balance of slave and free states.

Tyler’s own attachment to slavery was deeply ingrained. It went hand-in-hand with his greatest passion, states’ rights, and in time led to his taking final leave of America in 1861, a year before his death, after a failed attempt at brokering a compromise.

John Tyler's home during and after his Presidency, Sherwood Forest in Williamsburg, Virginia. As of 2017, it remains the home of one of his two surviving grandsons. Image from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/261560690828281762/.

Yet Seager makes the point Tyler was, for most of his career, not in love with slavery as an institution. Yes, he did own slaves, but was paternalistic in his treatment of them. He suggested slavery would run its course over time, just how he never quite said. Unlike fire-eating John Calhoun, a former Vice President whom Tyler made his Secretary of State, he was not rigid on the topic and, while President, fought Calhoun to keep Texas’s annexation from being a slave-state power play:

If there was what the Northern abolitionists liked to call an “aggressive slavocracy” operating in Washington in 1844, John Tyler was not part of it. He had no confidence in Calhoun’s view that slavery was a positive moral good. He did not believe that the slave institution must expand or die.

Yet Tyler’s contentment with slavery would help condemn his nation to be divided by it over time, after a series of subpar presidents which Seager agrees included Tyler himself. More than that, he allowed the question to drive a post-presidential wedge between himself and the country he once proudly led.

Seager’s dual focus gives as much attention to Julia’s stand on slavery. As a New Yorker, she didn’t grow up in a slave-owning culture, yet adapted quickly and enthusiastically. During the war, she fretted over the destruction of the South as much as any Scarlett O’Hara while her clutchy mother up north aligned herself with seditious Copperheads.

Seager’s research was circumscribed by the fact much of Tyler’s records were destroyed during the war; perhaps it is for this reason that Julia centers so much of it. She wrote many letters to family and friends, much of it about shopping and friends’ romantic affairs. A major weakness of And Tyler Too is how much more of his book is about this rather than the Tyler presidency. His own children by his first marriage fall away as Julia’s siblings, including a brother with whom she had a messy dispute over her mother’s estate, command center stage.

I enjoyed reading this book overall. Seager’s marshalling of the facts, deep engagement with the times, and a richly mordant tone give what could have been a dry history a gripping readability, breathing life into a host of familiar-sounding if obscure names, most significantly “His Accidency” himself. Even a dimmer light deserves a moment in the sun; Seager’s balanced tome brings out the brightness of Tyler without ever ignoring the shadows.