President Tyler’s grandsons, still kickin’
This bit of news has been bouncing around the Interwebs for a few days, and justifiably so, if you have a sense of history: two grandsons of President John Tyler, 10th president of the United States, born in 1790, are still alive.
It is not quite Abraham and Sarah territory, and it makes sense once you break it down: President Tyler had a son in 1853 when he was 63, and that son (and his wife, ahem) had sons when he was 71, in 1924, and four years later at 75. Both of those men are still living, and doing fine, according to New York magazine’s interview with Harrison Ruffin Tyler.
But this story still gives me that enjoyable frisson of historical proximity, that sense of the intervening years collapsing the mind’s eye. I am easy in this regard: I get that charge from walking a 2,000-year-old Roman road, or viewing the relic of a saint.
I wonder if this sensibility didn’t come from sitting at my grandmother’s knee and listening to her recall stories that her own father would tell of fighting in the Civil War (for the North — phew). She’d pull out his letters, and souvenirs, like old mini balls, some of which wounded him. (He lost his leg three days before Appomattox.) It seemed so immediate, so close, and was, though I’m not sure everyone shares that view. (Not with today’s media-induced amnesia.)
My great-grandfather was born in 1841 — the year Tyler became president — and he had two sons with his first wife, who died, then a daughter in 1888, my grandmother, with his second wife, who survived him. (He worked in the customs house here in Brooklyn, and spent a year in Havana after the Spanish-American War.)
My grandmother then had four children, and along came my mother at 45, a “change-of-life” baby, as they apparently said then. Hence my relatively few degrees of separation from the nineteenth century. But we got nothing on the Tyler dynasty.
Wow, you must be even older than me! My great grandfather was born in 1860 and used to tell about when Lincoln was shot and seeing “HMS Pinafore” in New York City … when it was new.
I’m 52, Jean, but with a six-year-old daughter, feeling like those are dog years…
A great story. How handsome Harrison Ruffin Tyler still is.
On Ancestry.com, he appears in the 1930 census, living in Tyler, Virginia, with his brother, his 76-year-old father (a historian), and his 42-year-old mother.
There’s also a picture of him, age 20, beautiful, in the William and Mary yearbook for 1949. Vice-pres. of sophomore class, varsity track, Kappa Alpha, etc.
Thanks for this. The story is also a reminder of the truth comedian Louis C.K. has spoken of, namely that American slavery is “just two old ladies back-to-back” away from us. (Or, in the case of the Tylers, two old men.) John Tyler, the only US president to serve in the Confederate legislature, has living grandsons.
Luke, leave it to Louis C.K. to sum up in a one-liner what I couldn’t! That’s perfect.
Was Tyler seated in the legislature? I thought that he died just before it convened and therefore would not tecnicallly be conbsidered a traitor?
When I was about seven or so, I knew a woman, born in England, whom I heard reminisce about how exciting it was when the boys came home from the the war. As my mother explained to me, the war she meant was that fought in the Crimea — and the boys who came back were lucky not to have been in the Light Brigade.
My father knew a great-grandfather (who died at 92) who as a young man went exploring up the Mississippi River and went all the way to Chicago. At that time Chicago was little more than an Indian village.
@David Pasinski (2/2,2:49 pm). Thanks for the questions. According to Tyler’s Wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Tyler), you’re right that Tyler, though elected to the Confederate House of Representatives, died before taking office.
He was, however, a delegate to the Provisional Confederate Congress for most of the last year of his life. Because of his allegiance to and service of the Confederacy, Tyler’s death is the only US presidential death not officially observed by the US government.
One of the drawbacks of being the grandson of of an early arrival in this country is that I never had contact with my my grandfather. I am 75 and my father was born in 1891; his father arrived at the from Ireland in the early 1860s and died three years after I was born. Unfortunately, I never heard any of his oral history first hand. It has been lost forever.