Lyon Gardiner Tyler Jr., who died Sept. 26 at 95, might well have been sent down from central casting when the call went out for a Virginia Gentleman of the Old School.
Born in Richmond and raised largely at Sherwood Forest, his family’s 18th-century estate along the James River, Tyler attended St. Christopher’s School in Richmond, the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, and the University of Virginia law school in Charlottesville. His tenure at William and Mary was interrupted by World War II, in which he served as a naval officer in the Pacific. He stayed on in the Naval Reserve, rising to the rank of commander, and after UVA, he clerked for a federal appeals court judge. He practiced law for some years and was elected commonwealth’s attorney in his ancestral Charles City County.
Then, his path took a measured, if perhaps predictable, detour: In 1960, he was appointed as the director of the Virginia Civil War Centennial Commission, which, in turn, prompted him to switch from law to history, earning a doctorate from Duke University in 1967. The balance of his career was spent teaching and writing history at the University of Richmond, the Virginia Military Institute, and The Citadel. In his later years, he migrated to his wife’s family farm in Franklin, Tennessee, just south of Nashville, the site of a bloody and decisive Confederate defeat in 1864.
Yet, the ordinary facts of Tyler’s life disguise an extraordinary detail: He was also the grandson of John Tyler, the 10th president of the United States who left office 175 years ago (1845).
Indeed, in the course of just three generations, Lyon Gardiner Tyler’s family spans the length of the history of the U.S., beginning with his grandfather’s birth (1790) in the first year of George Washington’s first term as president. A younger brother survives him.
To be sure, there is an obvious explanation for this. John Tyler was married twice (fathering 15 children, a presidential record), and his 13th child (Lyon Gardiner Tyler Jr.’s father) was born when the ex-president was 63. For his part, Lyon Gardiner Tyler Sr. carried on the family tradition: He, too, remarried when his first wife died and was 72 years old when Lyon Gardiner Tyler Jr. was born.
As a historian, Tyler was aware that his grandfather’s record was mixed in his day and is, at the moment, in particular disfavor. Sometime congressman, governor of Virginia, and senator, John Tyler was added to the 1840 Whig presidential ticket partly to carry Virginia, then the South’s most populous state, and partly to balance the Whig standard-bearer William Henry Harrison, who was suspected of abolitionist sentiments.
Of course, one month after his inauguration, Harrison was dead, and since no chief executive had ever died in office, Tyler’s automatic succession to the presidency was initially disputed. Harrison’s Cabinet sought to usurp Tyler’s powers, and in Congress, Rep. John Quincy Adams referred to him as an “acting president,” while Sen. Henry Clay regarded his administration as a “regency.” Opponents referred to Tyler as “His Accidency.”
Texas was annexed during his presidency, and he vetoed so much Whig legislation that, as president, he was expelled from his own party, which sought to impeach him. The slaveholding Tyler’s reputation has not been helped by the fact that, as a former president, he was elected to the Confederate Congress in 1862, although he died before taking his seat.
His grandson was always careful to point out that his ancestor had, in fact, been opposed to secession and, in 1861, was one of the organizers of the last-ditch Washington peace conference which sought to hold the union together. In that sense, Lyon Gardiner Tyler Jr. bore the weight of his legacy just as a historian should, gracefully balancing the facts with understanding, and quoting his grandfather: “Truth should always be uttered no matter what the consequences.”
Philip Terzian is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
