John Tyler

Greenway was a working plantation on the James River, and John Tyler was born at the top of Virginia. His father was a judge, later a governor, and had roomed with Thomas Jefferson at William and Mary. His mother died of a stroke when he was seven. He entered the same college at 12, graduated at 17, took the bar at 19, and won a seat in the House of Delegates at 21. Everything afterward ran on one idea: the states had made the federal government and could hold it to the bargain. In February 1836 the Virginia legislature instructed him, as its senator, to vote to expunge the censure of Andrew Jackson. He gave up the seat instead.

He took the office by accident and held it by assertion, then governed four years without a party after the Whigs expelled him in September 1841. Two vetoes of their bank bills, a cabinet that walked out on him, the first impeachment resolutions ever aimed at a president, a treaty settling the Maine border with Britain, the first American treaty with China, and a joint resolution annexing Texas signed three days before he left. All of that is laid out on BriefHistory. This page picks up where the record of the administration stops.

Tyler fathered 15 children by two wives, more than any other president. Letitia Christian, who married him on his 23rd birthday in 1813, suffered a stroke in 1839 and spent the White House years in an upstairs room, coming down once for a daughter's wedding. She died there on September 10, 1842, the first wife of a sitting president to die in the mansion. Twenty-one months later he married Julia Gardiner, 30 years his junior, whose father had been killed in front of her when a naval gun burst aboard the USS Princeton. His last child was born in 1860, when he was 70. He enslaved people at Greenway and at Sherwood Forest his entire adult life and never once treated the contradiction as one.

He voted for secession in April 1861, won a seat in the Confederate House, and died in Richmond on January 18, 1862, before it met. Jefferson Davis gave him a state funeral and a Confederate flag over the coffin. Washington said nothing — the only president whose death the United States government declined to mark. A monument finally went up over his grave in Hollywood Cemetery in 1915. The renaming has since run the other way: John Tyler Community College became Brightpoint, Tyler Hall at William and Mary became Chancellors' Hall, and a Washington elementary school named for him now carries Shirley Chisholm's. His grandson Harrison Ruffin Tyler died on May 25, 2025, 235 years after the president was born.

John Tyler's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Tyler Precedent other
  His claim to the office itself, not merely its duties — it held for 125 years and was written into the 25th Amendment in 1967 1841
• Webster-Ashburton Treaty law
  Settled the Maine border with British North America 1842
• Treaty of Wanghia law
  The first treaty between the United States and China 1844
• Joint Resolution for the Annexation of Texas law
  Signed March 1, three days before he handed over the office 1845
• Virginia Peace Conference other
  He convened and chaired it in February 1861. It failed inside three weeks. 1861

• March 29, 1790 aged 0 Born at Greenway plantation in Charles City County, Virginia
• 1807 aged ~17 Graduates from the College of William and Mary at 17 He was admitted to the bar two years later.
• March 29, 1813 aged 23 Marries Letitia Christian on his 23rd birthday
• February 29, 1836 aged 45 Resigns his Senate seat rather than obey Virginia's instruction The legislature ordered him to help expunge the censure of Andrew Jackson.
• April 4, 1841 aged 51 William Henry Harrison dies 31 days into the term Tyler took the oath on April 6 and refused to be called acting president.
• September 10, 1842 aged 52 Letitia dies in the White House The first wife of a sitting president to die in the mansion.
• June 26, 1844 aged 54 Marries Julia Gardiner in New York, the first president to wed in office Her father had died four months earlier in the USS Princeton gun explosion.
• April 17, 1861 aged 71 Votes for secession at the Virginia convention
• January 18, 1862 aged 71 Dies in Richmond before the Confederate Congress convenes He was 71. The United States government issued no notice of it.

• Henry Clay 1777–1852
  Senator and statesman known as the Great Compromiser for his role in preserving the Union. rival
• Daniel Webster 1782–1852
  Senator and orator whose speeches on the Union and Constitution are among the greatest in history. appointed
• John C. Calhoun 1782–1850
  Vice president and theorist of slavery and states’ rights whose doctrines intensified sectional conflict. appointed
• Jefferson Davis 1808–1889
  President of the Confederacy whose defense of slavery and secession made him central to the Civil War and its memory. joined the government of
• Sam Houston 1793–1863
  Commander at San Jacinto who became president of the Republic of Texas and later its governor and senator. annexed the republic of