#“I am the righteous hand of god song but buddy my man take it easy

[underyourbedtoday]

John Price is like the very fucked up hand of god but to be fair, god himself must be hella morally gray and no one can look at those mutton chops on price and tell me otherwise so—

I just feel like you could get some good old religious themes or something with him ya know? Like the 141 and anyone who follows him are his flock and he’s their shepherd

[sstthings]

President John Tyler - by Dr. Lyon Gardiner Tyler

My granddaddy, John Tyler, was President of the US way back in 1841-45.  He was born in 1790, 228 years ago.  My Aunt Pearl died in 1947 at a ripe old age and whose grandfather was John Tyler, Sr., the president’s father, who was born in 1747. This marvel, that 3 generations could span 200 years, was written up in Ripley’s Believe It or Not.  My “little 89 year old brother” and I are already at the 228 year old mark.

 I heard too much about presidents growing up. A few years ago I met a lady who told me that she had come to our house in Virginia when I was probably 3 or 4 years old and I met her at the front door.  She said that she had asked me, “Are you going to be President when you grow up?” and I said, “I’ll bite yo head off.”  She said she said “And what will you do with the bones?” and I replied, “I’ll pit ‘em out!”  In college, a buddy of mine brought me down to earth by saying, “Tyler, the best part of your family is underground.”  I had to agree.

 John Tyler was President of the United States from 1841-45.   He agreed with the principles of the Jeffersonian tradition of limited federal government, strict construction of the Constitution and fiscal frugality. He opposed the American System of Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams, which advocated federal building of roads and canals, a Bank of the United States, controlled by private interests, and a high tariff on imported goods. Tyler believed in the so-called “manifest destiny” of the United States to expand across the continent and to help. the blessings of freedom__  and democracy around the world.

 John Tyler’s father, also named John, was Thomas Jefferson’s roommate at the College of William and Mary.  Jefferson and John Tyler, Sr. shared the same political views, played their fiddles together in college and remained life-long friends.  John Tyler, Sr. was speaker of the House of Burgesses, and he and Patrick Henry organized a militia company just prior to the American Revolution.  John, Sr., served in the Virginia legislature, where he made the motion that eventually led to the United States Constitutional Convention.  He also served successively as Judge of the Admiralty Court, the General Court and the Supreme Court of Appeals, as well as on the U.S. District Court at President Jefferson’s urging.  He also was Governor of Virginia.  He had 8 children.  After his wife died, when the future President was just seven years old, the father took care of all of them, besides serving as surrogate father for 15 or 20 foster children. A busy man! 

John Tyler entered the College of William and Mary at age 13 and graduated soon after his 17th birthday.  He gave the Valedictory address, remarkably, about the importance of women’s rights – especially in the field of education. 

Before I attempt to discuss Tyler’s presidency, let me say a few words about his previous career and some things that can show us the kind of man he was:John Tyler was a state legislator in his early 20’s. Then he was a congressman, Governor of Virginia and US Senator.  As a senator he was a loyal Democrat, but was disturbed by some of President Andrew Jackson’s over-reactions, similar to his earlier unauthorized invasion of Spanish Florida and his later reaction to the South Carolina attempt to nullify the Federal tariff when Jackson threatened to hang John C. Calhoun, his Vice President.  

Both Jackson and Tyler opposed the recharter of the Bank of the United States, a privately owned bank which kept the government’s funds, but Tyler thought Jackson had gone too far when he removed the government’s money from the bank before its charter expired and put it in state banks which had supported him, hence known as Jackson’s “pet banks.” 

Tyler in his campaign for the U.S. Senate had stated that as a Senator he would obey the instructions that might be given him by the state legislature.  But he would soon face a dilemma concerning that promise.  The US Senate had adopted a resolution to censure Jackson for removing the funds from the Bank.  Then the Virginia legislature instructed Tyler to support a measure that would rescind the censure, which he felt was wrong because Jackson had broken the law.  At the same time Tyler could not go back on his campaign promise to obey the state legislature.  So he resigned and made this statement:By the surrender of the high station to which I was called by the people of Virginia, I shall teach them to regard as nothing place or office, when either is to be obtained or held at the sacrifice of honor.President John F. Kennedy included John Tyler in his Profiles of Courage for this incident.

It was always his children who were his primary concern.  In his letters to his many sons and daughters the need for honesty is a regular refrain.  Hear, for example, this from a letter to his son, John, Jr., back in 1832:

Truth should always be uttered no matter what the consequences.  Nothing so degrades a man as equivocation and deceit.  When I am in company with a double-dealing man – one who has one language on his tongue and another in his heart—I am involuntarily made to avoid him as I would a poisonous reptile.  Trust such a person with not even the slightest circumstance on earth; for he will deceive you, if it be to his interest to do so.  Learn then, my son, to speak the truth always.  By doing so in trifling matters, it will grow into a habit from which you will not afterwards separate yourself.

In the words of a toast once offered to Tyler, he was a man “too firm to be driven from his principles—too upright to be swerved by the laws of ambition or power.”  Indeed he was known as “Honest John.”

In 1840, the Whigs chose as their candidate William Henry Harrison, former Governor of the Indiana Territory, and victor over the Indians in the Battle of Tippecanoe and then the British in Canada in the War of 1812.  For the Vice Presidential spot Henry Clay and the Whig Party settled on John Tyler of Virginia, hoping he could attract disgruntled Democrats.

It’s interesting that the future President Harrison and Vice President Tyler in this election grew up in the same small Virginia County just ten miles apart.  Actually through Tyler’s mother they were kin.  Through my mother’s side I am not descended from President Harrison, but I am from his father, Benjamin Harrison, Governor of Virginia and signer of the Declaration of Independence.

The Whig campaign of 1840 was the first modern campaign with all the trimmings: buttons and banners, songs and slogans.  The Whig slogan “Tippecanoe and Tyler too,” really meant, “We’ll give you Harrison, a war hero.  He’s for a strong national government, roads and canals, a national bank, and a high tariff, but if you don’t like that; we’ll give you Tyler. He’s for states’ rights and against all that other stuff.

The Whigs won easily and Harrison became president, but Harrison had already given away the store.  He had agreed to be a one-term president and to have just one vote in the Cabinet which was to be hand-picked by Henry Clay, but Harrison died of pneumonia a month after the election.  Nobody, including John Tyler, expected that he’d become president. The Whigs in Congress were shocked.  They refused to recognize Tyler as the real president, since this was the first time a president had died in office. 

But Tyler believed that according to the Constitution he was the President and he was determined to be President.  He would make the decisions.  He would not promise to let Henry Clay run the show.  As a matter of fact when Henry Clay showed up to tell the Accidental President whom to appoint and how to conduct his office, Tyler thundered, “You go, Mr. Clay, to your end of the Avenue where stands the Capitol and there do your duty as you see fit and, so help me God, I will do mine at this end of the Avenue as I see fit.”  From then on Clay had the votes but Tyler had the vetoes. 

Tyler’s first act as President was to proclaim a National Day of Fasting and Prayer, to mourn the death of President Harrison, in which he stated, “When a Christian people feel themselves to be overtaken by a great public calamity, it becomes them to humble themselves under the dispensation of Divine Providence, to recognize His righteous government over the children of men�� and to supplicate His merciful protection for the future.”

If Tyler had gone along with Clay and the Whig majority in Congress he could have had an easy road and many would have deemed his presidency successful.  But he refused to take the easy road.  He vetoed the bill to re-charter the Bank of the United States and the Whigs read him out of the Party.  The veto caused his Cabinet to resign, except for Daniel Webster, his Secretary of State.  Instead Tyler proposed a banking system with a Board in Washington and branches in various parts of the country, a system almost identical to the Federal Reserve System which was subsequently adopted in 1913.

Tyler was unable to do much of anything in the domestic area, but his administration is being increasingly recognized for his accomplishments in foreign affairs, including the settlement of the boundary line between the United States and Canada over half way across the continent. Tyler invoked the Monroe Doctrine to prevent the British and French from taking over the Hawaiian Islands.  He sent the first American mission to China, which resulted in a treaty in 1844, opening for the first time the profitable trade between the two countries and granting American citizens in China extraterritoriality, the right to be governed by their own laws and not those of China.   Tyler pushed through the annexation of Texas at very end of his administration by the novel use of a joint resolution by both houses of Congress.

Tyler’s first major biographer called him a Champion of the Old South – but I believe that is “incorrect.”  Tyler had troubling doubts about slavery and never saw it as a positive good, though he was a slave owner.   In 1832 he had introduced a bill to end the slave trade in the District of Columbia.  He was also president of the Virginia Colonization Society, which aimed to resettle freed slaves in Liberia.

Tyler’s administration was hog-tied but its social life excelled.  His first wife Letitia Christian, a beautiful Christian woman, was an invalid when Tyler became president and died during his second year in office.  His daughter-in-law, Priscilla Cooper Tyler, then served as White House hostess, with the help of former first lady, Dolly Madison. 

Tyler’s second wife was Julia Gardiner, my grandmother, a 24 year old debutante and beauty from Long Island, New York, who married the President when he was 54.  Tyler was completely captivated by her vivacity, good humor, poise and stamina.  When someone asked him if he wasn’t too old for her, he replied, “Well, I’m in my prime.”  The reply was “When she’s in her prime, where will your prime be?”  But John Tyler kept his into his seventies, later siring seven more children by her.

There was tragedy in their love affair, however.  The navy had a new ship, the “Princeton, which was equipped with a huge new cannon dubbed the “Peace Maker.”  The President, his cabinet, and all the important people in Washington were invited to a cruise down the Potomac.  The cannon was fired when they passed Mount Vernon and everyone retired below for food and music.  On the return trip someone suggested they fire the cannon again.  Most of the people went up on deck but the President and Miss Gardiner stayed to hear one more song.  The cannon was fired and it exploded killing the Secretary of State Abel P. Upshire, the Secretary of the Navy Thomas Gilmer, and others, including Miss Gardiner’s father.  She fainted at the tragic news and President Tyler carried her down the gangway and sent her to the White House.  Soon afterwards they eloped to New York City and were married there. 

Tyler’s new young bride, Julia Gardiner Tyler, was a great political asset.  The Whigs called Tyler “a man without a party,” but most everyone in Washington turned out for Julia’s parties.  Julia had made the grand tour of Europe and had been presented at royal courts.  She had been the first woman ever to be featured in a newspaper ad.  She was called the Rose of Long Island.

After John Tyler retired, the couple went back to Virginia to the place he had purchased during his term in office. For a time he was very unpopular but he harbored no bitterness and he eventually regained the respect and admiration of the people of his state.  Since he had incurred the displeasure of both parties and since he was accused of being an outlaw like Robin Hood, he renamed his plantation “Sherwood Forrest.” Julia made the plantation the social center of Charles City County.  She decorated and they enlarged the dwelling until at 100 yards in length, it became the longest frame house in America.  John and Julia had seven children to go with the eight that he had produced in his first marriage.  The ex-president loved children.  He never tired of them, took them hunting, fishing, riding and boating.  On summer evenings, he would play the fiddle and sing with the black and white children.

He ran the farm himself.  There were no whips, lashes, or brutal overseers.  He saw that the slaves were adequately fed, clothed and honored.  He would not sell any or break up families. 

My great, great grandfather on my mother’s side was Edmund Ruffin, known as the “Father of scientific agriculture in America.”  He was the same age as the ex-president but two more generations back from me.  He had opposed Tyler, but he came to visit and was captivated by him.  Ruffin would give up farming and research for politics.  He was to be one of the fire-eaters who stirred up the South to Secession and he hated Yankees.  He would wrap himself in a Confederate flag and commit suicide after the South lost the war and leave these last words in his diary, “Would that I could bequeath these words to every Southerner living or yet to be born, to have no traffic with Yankees nor any political, social or business dealings with the vile, perfidious and malignant Yankee race.”

Nevertheless, Ruffin could recognize virtue even though he could not seem to exercise it.  In spite of all the ex-President’s enemies, Ruffin had hardly heard an unkind or hostile remark from Tyler and he would confide to his diary after the ex-President’s death in 1862 these thoughts: “How difficult and how much worse would I have acted in this their situation.  I should have returned these undeserved manifestations of hostility, and of ingratitude, with scorn, contempt and hatred.  I would have so increased and kept alive and increasing, the hostile feelings of all other persons to me - and I should have become a miserable misanthrope, living and dying without a friend.  But more wiser and more politic was John Tyler.” Ruffin would even say that John Tyler completely exemplified the description of love as found in St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians.

After Henry Clay died, Tyler spoke at his memorial service.  Tyler admitted that “We gave each other a few bruises, but he was a great man.”  He noted Clay’s many accomplishments including his work in effecting the Compromises of 1820 and 1850, which helped to keep the nation together for a considerable time.

When the Deep South states seceded Tyler pleaded with the Virginia legislature to call a meeting of the Border States to try and form a bridge between the two sections.  But the state delayed and invited all the states to what was called the “Peace Convention” which sought to find a way to restore the Union and prevent a war.  John Tyler addressed the assembly in this manner:” Our godlike fathers created; we have to preserve; they built up.  You have a new task equally grand, you have to preserve the Government and to renew and invigorate the Constitution.  If you reach the height of this great occasion, your children’s children will rise up and call you blessed.”

But it was too late.  On the same date the convention met at the Willard Hotel in Washington, the seven Deep South states met in Montgomery, Alabama, to establish the Confederate States of America.  President elect Abraham Lincoln soon after arrived in the Capitol City in disguise for fear of assassination and told Tyler that it was too late to reconcile the sections, that the die was already cast.

When Virginia seceded Tyler saw no other course than to stick with his state.  Elected to the Confederate Congress, he died suddenly before he could take his seat in 1862.

The unknown President could be an example to us all.  We might ponder these observations from people who knew him:

“An honest, affectionate, benevolent, loving man, who had fought the battles of his life bravely and truly, doing his whole great duty without fear, though not without much unjust reproach.” (Henry A. Wise)

“A career which for rapidity in achievement, consistency of conduct, and exalted moral character, finds few equals, and no superior in the annals of American history.”  (George L. Christian)

On the grave marker of his horse “General,” John Tyler wrote these words:  “He never stumbled.  Would that his master could say the same.”  John Tyler was not perfect, but he came close.