okay
Julia Gardiner was born on May 4, 1820 on Gardiner’s Island, on Long Island, New York. Family records are not certain regarding the exact day of her birth in 1820. Some indicate it was July 23, and not May 4, but the May date is more generally excepted. Her father was David Gardiner, a lawyer, real estate property management, and state senator. He was killed on February 28, 1844 as a result of the explosion of the naval cannon “The Peacemaker,” during a Potomac River excursion of the naval cutter Princeton (written about in this community recently here). Her mother was Juliana McLachlan Gardiner. Julia was the third of four children. She had two older brothers and one younger sister.
Julia was five feet, three inches tall with brown hair and gray eyes. She was a Presbyterian. She was educated at the Madame N.D. Chagaray Institute for Young Ladies in New York City, a finishing school for the daughters of elite New York families. She learned to sing and play the guitar. Sometime in 1839 she secretly arranged to pose for an engraving which was used for a mass-produced lithograph advertisement for the dry-goods and clothing emporium Bogert & Mecamly, on lower Ninth Avenue in New York City. It depicted her strolling in front of the store, carrying a handbag with the words, “I’ll purchase at Bogert and Mecamly’s, No. 86 Ninth Avenue. Their Goods are Beautiful and Astonishingly Cheap.” This was considered humiliating within the mores of her parents’ social class and in reaction they took Julia and her sister Margaret Washington, D.C. on August 9, 1840 where they were received at the White House by President Martin Van Buren.
Shortly thereafter, they were taken on a grand tour of Europe. Arriving from New York in London on October, 29 1840, they visited England, France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Holland, Belgium, Ireland and Scotland. Julia Gardiner was presented to the Roman Catholic Pope Leo, and also explored the volcano at Mount Vesuvius. She also carried on brief romances with a German baron and a Belgian count. While in Paris she was presented at the royal court of Louis Philippe on January 7, 1841. The family arrived back in the United States at the end of September 1841.
From January to the end of February 1842, Julia and the Gardiner family lived in Washington for the social season. In one letter, the future First Lady recorded that a married Congressman openly flirted with her. He turned out to be future president Millard Fillmore. On January 20, 1842, Julia Gardiner and her parents were welcomed as guests in the White House by President John Tyler, whose wife Letitia was unable to fill the role due to her recovery from a stroke.
Through rapidly-developing friendships with the President’s two eldest sons, Robert and John, the Gardiners became friends with the Tylers. Although it was only a matter of five months since President Tyler had been widowed by his wife of nearly thirty years, his affectionate attention to Julia Gardiner was noticeable. Tyler proposed marriage to Julia on February 22, 1843, at a White House masquerade Washington’s Birthday Ball. She refused to accept, and would continue to do so. They soon began a romantic correspondence and appeared together publicly, prompting open public speculation about the relationship.
On February 28, 1844, Julia Gardiner, her father, President Tyler and members of his Cabinet, as well as social figures like the former First Lady Dolley Madison were aboard the naval cutter Princeton when the vessel’s naval cannon “The Peacemaker” exploded. Among others, it killed the Navy Secretary and Secretaries of State and the Navy, and David Gardiner. According to one account, when Julia learned of her father's death, she feinted into Tyler's arms.
Less than four months later, 24 year old Julia was married to the President of the United States, on June 26, 1844 in The Church of the Ascension, New York City. The couple eloped, using the Gardiner family’s mourning as the reason. There were only twelve guests, including the President’s son John. After the ceremony, there was a wedding breakfast in the Gardiner home, followed by a ferryboat cruise, with various naval salutes in New York Harbor. The couple debarked at Jersey City, where they took a train to Philadelphia. Both there, and in Baltimore, the new presidential bride was the object of enormous public fascination. A two-hour White House wedding reception was held on 28 June 1844, with a wedding cake displayed in the Blue Room, and served with wine. The couple went to “Old Point Comfort,” at the federal Fortress Monroe, near Norfolk, Virginia on July 4th, where a honeymoon cottage had been outfitted for them. Finally, two days later, they went to the President’s new plantation home “Sherwood Forest,” in Charles City County, Virginia for several days before returning to Old Point Comfort. They returned to Washington in early August.
Julia Gardner gave birth to five sons and two daughters, all born after Tyler left the White House: David Gardiner Tyler (July 12, 1846 - September 5, 1927); John Alexander Tyler (April 7, 1848 - September 1, 1883); Julia Gardiner Tyler [Spencer] (December 25, 1849 - May 8, 1871); Lachlan Tyler (December 2, 1851 - January 26, 1902); Lyon Gardiner Tyler (August 24, 1853 - February 12, 1935); Robert Fitzwalter Tyler (March 12, 1856 - December 31, 1927); and Pearl Tyler [Ellis] (June 20, 1860 - June 30, 1947). Julia Gardiner Tyler is the only woman married to an incumbent President whose children were all born after her tenure as First Lady. Although the second wife of Benjamin Harrison bore him a daughter in his post-presidential years, she had not been married to him during his presidency.
She would have the shortest tenure as First Lady, lasting only eight months. Former First Lady Dolley Madison was living across Lafayette Square from the White House and was welcomed as part of the Tyler family circle. The two become close and travelled to New York together in September of 1844. Julia Tyler sought newspaper coverage that reported her social events as well as enhance her own profile. She befriended the reporter F.W. Thomas, a Washington correspondent for the New York Herald. He called her the grand “Presidentress” in his stories, and went into more glowing details about her clothes, skin and personality rather than the specifics of what transpired at the event. Her brother Alex Gardiner sometimes drafted or pre-approved what were essentially press releases.
Julia Tyler permitted an engraving to be made of her, based on an oil portrait by Francesco Anelli. It was inscribed with the title, “The President’s Bride” and mass-produced and commercially sold. She also became the first presidential wife who served as First Lady to have sat for her photograph, posing at the Anthony studios in New York. It was only rediscovered in the Library of Congress collections in 1987, and published for the first time three years later. Julia Tyler also gave permission for her name to be used on sheet music used for the popular polka dancing, called “The Julia Waltzes”.
Julia Tyler drove a regal coach with eight matching white Arabian horses, she dressed in lavish clothing and costumes, and she had an Italian greyhound dog, a relatively-exotic breed in the United States at the time, to accompany her one public promenade throughout the city (the dog was obtained through the U.S. Consul at Naples). The religious press disapproved of her for the abundant supply of champagne she had served to guests and the physical closeness of the new waltz dancing she sponsored and participated in. She was also criticized for her practice of receiving guests by seating herself among a dozen young women dressed alike in white, called her “vestal virgins.”
Julia Tyler received requests from individual citizens for executive clemencies, pardons, military leave and federal employment. She would pass these requests on to the appropriate Cabinet departments or the president himself and indicate whether she supported their plea. Her most successful intercession was helping to commute the death sentence of a notorious New Yorker nicknamed “Babe” accused of piracy on the high seas. She was also involved in an unsuccessful effort intended to forge a new party with Tyler as leader, and run him as President in 1848. She used her personal charm as part of a lobbying effort to promote the President’s proposed annexation of Texas among individual House and Senate members.
On 18 February 1845, she hosted a “Grand Finale Ball,” for three thousand invited guests. Some one thousand candles were said to be burned and ninety-six bottles of champagne consumed, with numerous bands providing continuous dance music. John Tyler's daughter from his first marriage Letitia Tyler Semple was always overtly hostile towards Julia Tyler.
A story that former President John Tyler and his wife were on the verge of divorce and already separated first appeared in the February 21, 1846 New York Morning News and was rapidly picked up in newspapers across the country. The story was true of John Tyler, Jr. and his wife but had been misunderstood to mean the former presidential couple.
In February of 1853, Julia Tyler again found herself in the national and even international news when England’s Duchess of Sutherland and other prominent women of the British nobility had signed a printed plea to American southern women to do all they could to support the abolition slavery. The story was published in American newspapers. Julia Tyler’s wrote a response “To the Duchess of Sutherland and the Ladies of England” which was first published on 28 January 1853 in both the Richmond Enquirer and the New York Herald. It was reprinted in the widely-circulated monthly magazine, Southern Literary Messenger in February. In her response, she said that most slave families were permitted to make the choice of whether they wished to join Christian churches and that selling individual members of slave families was generally avoided by slave-owners. She further mentioned that the population of freed slaves in Virginia was steadily rising and that the American Colonization Society was striving to offer freed slaves a chance to re-patriate to Africa. Her main point, however, was that England had no right to dictate the policies of another country. She used several points to make this argument: slavery had been introduced in the United States by the British; the Irish, impoverished factory workers in London and merchant and naval seaman class of England lived in what she claimed were more deplorable conditions than did African-American slaves.
During her lengthy post-White House years, Julia Tyler continued to travel extensively to the fashionable northern summer colonies of Newport, Rhode Island, Saratoga and East Hampton, New York. She met President Zachary Taylor at a reception in Richmond, Virginia in February of 1850. In February of 1861 she returned to Washington for the “Peace Conference,” an effort in which her husband participated in a last-ditch effort to avoid civil war. During their stay in Washington, Julia Tyler was called upon by her old friend, incumbent President Buchanan, but was not with her husband, to meet president-elect Lincoln. Julia Tyler strenuously defended her husband’s advocating secession and accepting a seat as a member of the Confederate States of America’s provisional Congress. However, he died several days after the Confederate Congress first convened in Richmond.
Despite her sectional loyalty, the widowed ex-president’s wife was able to occasionally obtain a pass that permitted her to travel between North and South lines. She spent part of the war years in Bermuda. There is also recent suggestion that she was received by Mary Lincoln in the White House. The end of the war, however, saw her residing in the Staten Island, New York home of her late mother. Following Lincoln’s April 1865 assassination, there was a raid on the house by some locals. Ignoring the humiliation that many Confederates felt in the immediate post-war years, Julia Tyler resumed residency in Washington, D.C. in January of 1872. She moved into a rental apartment on Fayette Street in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C. She made numerous visits back to the White House, under the Andrew Johnson and Ulysses S. Grant Administrations, receiving considerable publicity during her March 1872 visit to Julia Grant. She donated her portrait to its collection and for display there. Self-titling herself as “Mrs. Ex-President Tyler,” she would attend receptions hosted by some of her successors including Lucy Hayes and Rose Cleveland, and maintained a correspondence with Lucretia Garfield. She sought to ensure her place in history by providing biographical information to Laura Holloway, who authored the first comprehensive collective biographies of First Ladies to that time.
Julia Tyler left Washington in the spring of 1876 due to severe financial hardship and returned to Sherwood Forest which had been ordered sold by a court to pay a Bank of Virginia judgment against the Tyler estate. The unexpected sale of some other property kept it in the family and as the base for Julia where she looked forward to annual summer visits from her children and growing number of grandchildren.
During a period of financial and emotionally instability, Julia Tyler sought and found refuge in the Catholic Church. She converted to the faith and her decision proved to be positive publicity for Catholicism. Many women in the country wrote her for advice on how they might find the emotional support which the former First Lady declared that the conversion had provided for her. Mrs. Tyler became somewhat zealous with her circle of friends, family and associates in urging them to also make the conversion.
She successfully lobbied to not only gain federal jobs for two of her sons, but to gain for herself the presidential widow’s pension. When Mary Lincoln received it in 1870, Mrs. Tyler believed she would soon rightfully be awarded the same amount of $3000. In the election year of 1880, she was advised by Evarts that Congress was now likely to award it and in 1881 she received $1200 – less than half of what Mrs. Lincoln collected. With Lucretia Garfield becoming widowed upon President Garfield’s assassination later that year, however, all four living presidential widows (Tyler Polk, Lincoln, Garfield) were awarded the same annual amount of $5,000 on 31 March 1882. In late 1882, she leased a home in Richmond, Virginia, first in the Church Hill area and then in a house on Grace and Eighth Streets, across the street from her Catholic parish, St. Peter’s Cathedral. She continued to visit one son in Washington, however, in the winter social seasons until 1887.
Julia Tyler died on July 10, 1889 in Richmond at the age of 69. She is buried at Hollywood Cemetery, in Richmond, Virginia