In finding a text for this entry of the blog, I have learned that John Tyler had four First Ladies (official and acting) during his presidency of just under four years. His first wife, Letitia Christian Tyler, died while her husband was in office, so her tenure as official First Lady was relatively short: 4 April 1841 – 10 September 1842. Even shorter was the tenure of Tyler's second wife, Julia Gardiner Tyler: 26 June 1844 – 4 March 1845. In between marriages, Tyler had his daughter-in-law, Priscilla Cooper Tyler, and, very briefly, his daughter, Letitia "Letty" Tyler, control hostess duties. From what I have gathered through quick scans of information online, Priscilla Cooper Tyler apparently took on White House hostess duties in place of Tyler's first wife, who was physically unable to do so, and continued on after Letitia's death until moving away from Washington in the spring of 1944.
While this information should probably lead me to be reading two or even three books, I have chosen to read just one. There is no monograph-length piece on Letitia Christian Tyler. And while there is an older biography of Priscilla Cooper Tyler, written by John Tyler's great-granddaughter, I have decided to make things easier on myself and disqualify her as "unofficial" and focus on a biography of Julia Tyler written by an historian perhaps a tiny bit more objective than a family member. I have obtained a digital copy of Theodore C. DeLaney's 1995 Dissertation, Julia Gardiner Tyler: A Nineteenth Century Woman, which will serve as my education on this brief era in Presidential history. Yes, there is a massive biography of John and Julia Tyler by Robert Seager, first published in 1963. But who wants to read 700 pages of outdated pros about both John and Julia, when I can just easily get my hands on 300 pages of updated information on just Julia? Neither was available on the shelves at the public library, so the shorter female-centric study was the way to go.
