First Ladies of the United States: Julia Tyler

The second wife of President John Tyler, Julia Gardiner was born into wealth and influence on May 4, 1820, on Gardiner's Island, New York. She was the third of four children of lawyer David Gardiner and heiress Juliana McLachlan Gardiner. The family was acutely aware of the advantages of marital alliances, social exclusivity, and money. Julia was schooled in an elite private academy for girls and trained in the female subjects of the times: music, French literature, ancient history, and composition. When she was 19, she went on a year-long European tour designed to meet appropriate suitors. On a visit to Washington in early 1842, the family was invited to a reception at the White House, where Julia was first introduced to President John Tyler. Priscilla Cooper Tyler, the president's daughter-in-law, presided as official hostess as First Lady Letitia Tyler was confined to a wheelchair in a second-floor bedroom.

President Tyler invited the Gardiner family to the White House often, and the families grew close. By 1843, although still in mourning for his first wife, who had died in September 1842, he decided that he wanted to marry Julia. She rejected his first proposal, but a second one articulated in front of Julia's sister was conveyed to her parents. They were pleased with the development and used it as an opportunity to get a political appointment for her brother before agreeing to the marriage. On June 26, 1844, John Tyler and Julia Gardiner were secretly married in New York City. He revealed the marriage to his children and to the country only after it had taken place. John Tyler's oldest children (three who were older than Julia) were shocked by their father's secret marriage so soon after their mother's death. Although all but one would ultimately reconcile; the eight months remaining of John Tyler's term were often tense.

At 24 years old, Julia was the youngest first lady in history, and she sought advice from Dolley Madison. Like her mentor, she loved to entertain and brought many of the flourishes and customs of European courts to the White House—for instance, beginning the tradition of “Hail to the Chief” being played when the president entered at official state functions. Julia created her own “court,” made up of four close female relatives, to serve as her “ladies in waiting.” She also created positive press attention by secretly employing her own press secretary to “sound Julia's praises far and near in Washington.” She used the few perks of the office to her personal advantage and extended them to her entire family as well, such that the entire Gardiner clan enjoyed the franking privilege to send mail without cost.

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In January 1862, John Tyler was in Richmond for the Confederate House of Representatives meeting when Julia had a dream that he was dangerously ill. Although she found him well when she arrived, he lapsed into sickness just days later and died on January 18, 1862. Julia was left to raise their seven children, the oldest 15 and the youngest just two.

The war years found Julia at odds with the rest of the Gardiner family, particularly her brother David. When she tried to move her children to her mother's house in New York to escape the fighting, she found David's family already in residence. She ordered him to leave, he refused, and ultimately she ferried her children back to Sherwood Forest. Out of respect for her former position, the Union army maintained a sentry around her plantation, and when she traveled north with her children, she did so on a Union-issued pass and with federal protection. Even so, she continued her work in support of the Confederacy by distributing pamphlets, collecting relief supplies, and campaigning for General George McClellan to replace Abraham Lincoln as president.

Upon her mother's death, Julia entered a legal battle with her brother David over the Gardiner estate. This was the first of several lawsuits she was involved in at war's end, many in an attempt to regain property seized by Union troops during the war. In 1872, she moved back to Washington, but the depression of 1873 required her to sell off all her property with the exception of Sherwood Forest, which remains in the hands of her descendants. She lobbied to receive a federal pension as a president's widow and an additional monthly sum as a widow of a veteran of the War of 1812. She was successful on both counts. On July 10, 1889, at the age of 69, she died of a cerebral stroke. She is buried next to John Tyler in Richmond, Virginia.