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| Julia Gardiner Tyler. Image from Wikimedia Commons |
Julia Gardiner Tyler (JGT) was born into a moderately wealthy and generally well-connected New York family in 1820. Her education included boarding school and a European grand tour, through which she underwent serious academic studies, learned proper feminine skills, and experienced the grandeur of European royalty against the visible poverty of many European cities and the famine in Ireland. When she was presented to the Washington, D.C., social scene in her early twenties, she was well-prepared to engage in both the heated political debates of the time and the flurry of social activity that netted her a prominent husband. While at least one critic would accuse JGT of fulfilling selfish and blind ambitions by flirting her way to the top, being seen as desirable while politically savvy and knowledgeable was an ideal expression of womanhood at the time that would have certainly attracted politically powerful and socially prominent men, including the president. John Tyler and JGT were married in 1844.
While her mother expected JGT to fulfill her domestic duties while in the White House through more menial tasks like cleaning and redecorating, JGT preferred to spent her time serving as her husband’s trusted friend, hostess, and political aide. With Dolley Madison as a mentor, she made White House receptions as elegant as possible, added excitement to Tyler’s final year in office, and did all she could to use the receptions to aid in her husband’s bid for annexation of Texas. When it became obvious that Tyler would not seek reelection, JGT was disappointed that her time of national prominence was cut short but dutifully devoted herself to the life of a Southern wife at the Tyler retirement home in Virginia, Sherwood Forest.
What I found most striking about JGT was her ability to adapt to the gendered expectations of her time when going from Northern socialite to First Lady to Southern plantation wife. Relatively indifferent to slavery as a Northern woman, JGT “enthusiastically embraced and defended Southern culture and its definition of womanhood” after moving to Sherwood Forest. While not immune from the influence of her upbringing and family in the North, she was intent on being a proper Southern wife and woman. She learned to manage a plantation of slaves but hired white women to help with rearing her children. She maintained an image of traditional wife, a gentle woman making personal sacrifices for the love of her husband, but became increasingly independent and honed her skills in self-sufficiency. By 1853, she publicly defended the peculiar institution with a published pro-slavery essay in which she appealed to gender roles of proper Southern women who never criticized their homeland. When war finally came, she seceded along with the Tyler family, but took advantage of her Northern connections to find safety for herself and her children in New York after John Tyler’s death in 1862. Indeed, JGT remained in the North after the war, converted to Catholicism in the 1870s, and became somewhat more tolerant of people outside her own race and class.
In some ways, JGT lived an opposite trajectory from Sarah Grimke, of whose life I recently read a fictionalized version in Sue Monk Kidd’s The Invention of Wings. Sarah Grimke lived with but despised slavery during her upbringing in Charleston, South Carolina. When accompanying her father on a failed attempt to rejuvenate his health in the North, she was introduced to Quaker ideals and dedicated herself to conversion. She eventually moved North permanently and became one of the most famous abolitionists of her time, along with her sister Angelina, by using her personal experience of Southern slavery to speak out against it. I think the lives of JGT and Sarah Grimke show how location and societal expectations can dictate how one lives and the way they choose to define themselves. When reading about JGT, I was also struck by how common it is for Presidents and First Ladies to live lives of wealth and comfort but to do so while buried in financial debt. The comparable situation that stands out most in my mind is that of Dolley Madison. JGT’s most significant contribution in this case was her fight for a pension for all surviving First Ladies. In 1881, Congress awarded her $1200 a year, but Julia argued for equality to Mary Todd Lincoln, who was awarded $3,000 annually in 1870. After the assassination of President Garfield, the measure passed in 1882 at $5,000 annually for all Presidential widows—at that time Garfield, Lincoln, Polk, and Tyler—allowing JGT to live the last several years of her life in Richmond with her sons.
