Friday is also the day of the week when I pass along a quotation meant to be uplifting or informative. Today's quote is the latter, but not the former, and it comes from the grandson of a former U.S. president.
It was on this date in 1790 that John Tyler, our 10th president, was born. The human footnote to the famous 1840 campaign slogan, "Tippecanoe and Tyler, too!", Tyler assumed the presidency when William Henry Harrison died shortly after taking the oath of office.
For Tyler's troubles, he earned the wrath of Harrison's fellow Whigs, and was derided by critics as "His Accidency." Yet by acting decisively, John Tyler essentially answered the Constitution's ambiguity about succession.
A Virginian by birth and outlook, Tyler was a "states' rights" man. And though he was long gone from the White House by 1861 when the Civil War broke out, Tyler tried to broker a peace deal. When that failed, he followed his state, not his country, and had been elected to serve in the Confederate Congress when he died in 1862. This is not the type of career move a former president's reputation can easily survive -- and Tyler's hasn't.
Yet his tenure in the White House was also a testament to the power of love -- he was the first president to be married while in office -- and his family life serves as a reminder of just how young a country the United States really is: One of John Tyler's grandsons is still alive.
True love was the last thing John Tyler expected to come across his path as president. He had been married on March 29, 1813 -- his 23rd birthday -- to Letitia Christian. She bore eight children, seven of whom survived, but was virtually an invalid by the time Tyler took office.
Letitia Tyler died in September 1842, a year into her husband's tenure as president. Months later, the grieving widower met and was captivated, along with much of official Washington, by a visiting New York debutante named Julia Gardiner. The president was obviously still in mourning, not to mention 30 years Gardiner's senior. But a year later, Tyler invited Julia, her father David, and many other dignitaries to an excursion along the Potomac aboard a Navy ship, the USS Princeton.
Amid the drinking and festivities, the frigate's captain was persuaded to show off the ship's armaments, which included a state-of-the-art cannon called "The Peacemaker." But that day, it brought tragedy: The big gun exploded aboard the ship, killing six people and wounding another 20. Among the dead were two cabinet officers and Julia's father.
"Joy is turned into mourning," noted Tyler who, in less than two years had lost his president, his wife, and two close political allies.
But sadness eventually turned back into joy. Tyler comforted Julia Gardiner, courted her, and married her. She would serve as first lady for the last eight months of his presidency -- and bear him another seven children. One of the couple's sons, Lyon Gardner Tyler, was born in 1853, when his father was 63 years old.
Like his father, Lyon Tyler lost his first wife and remarried a much younger woman. And he sired sons well into his 70s. Two of them, Lyon Gardiner Tyler Jr. (born in 1924), and Harrison Ruffin Tyler (born in 1928), were still alive when I wrote about John Tyler previously, although Lyon Tyler died in September 2020. Lyon Tyler attended William & Mary and then law school at the University of Virginia. He served in World War II, became a successful lawyer in Richmond and later served as Commonwealth Attorney. An appointment to Virginia's Civil War centennial commission rekindled an interest in the past, and Lyon made a mid-career change, returning to college, getting a doctoral degree from Duke, and teaching history at the University of Richmond, VMI, and the Citadel.
His younger brother Harrison also attended William & Mary, obtained a master's degree in engineering from Virginia Tech, and pursued a long career in the private sector. He now lives in a Virginia nursing home. Well into his 90s, Harrison Tyler followed politics closely. He once described Barack Obama as "a charming man," but found the 44th U.S. president's lack of business experience telling. His views on Donald Trump are not known, at least to me, but the nasty tenor of political campaigning has left Harrison Tyler disenchanted. He harbors few illusions, however, that things were all that much different in his grandfather's time.
"Politics has always been like that," he told an interviewer in 2012. "Nothing new."
And that is our quote of the week.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon
