Lyon Gardiner Tyler
Historian who spanned history himself as the grandson of the 10th president of the US, John Tyler
LYON GARDINER TYLER, who has died aged 95, was an American lawyer and historian, but perhaps more of note for being the grandson of the nation’s 10th President, John Tyler, who occupied the White House between 1841 and 1845 – and was born in 1790.
Moreover, Lyon’s father, Lyon Gardiner Tyler, Sr, was born some 170 years ago, in 1853. Accordingly, he well remembered the outbreak of America’s Civil War when he was seven. Remarkably, therefore, in just three generations the Tylers spanned almost the whole history of the United States as an independent republic.
The family had a tradition of reproducing late in life. Lyon Gardiner Tyler, Jr, was born in Richmond, Virginia, on January 3 1925. His father was then 72, and two years before had married – as his second wife, his first having died – Sue Ruffin, some 35 years his junior. No doubt encouraged by his son’s arrival, Lyon Sr went on to sire Harrison when he was 75, and then Henry, who died in infancy.
Lyon Sr’s father, the President, had himself been 63 when his son was born, as the fifth of his seven children by his second wife, Julia Gardiner.
John Tyler had 15 offspring in all, the most of any president.
His own father, also John, had been born in 1747, in the reign of George II. He became Governor of Virginia, and was a lifelong friend of Thomas Jefferson, his room-mate at the College of William & Mary, Virginia, with which the Tylers were to have a long association.
The younger John Tyler became Vice-president in 1840 as the running mate of William Harrison. He had been put on the Whig ticket, as a slaveowning Southerner, to attract voters who feared that Harrison, and the incumbent President, Martin Van Buren, favoured the rights of central government over those of the individual states.
But Harrison died from pneumonia just a month after his inauguration, at which he had insisted on making a two-hour-long speech in the rain to prove his health was strong. Tyler was unexpectedly thrust into office.
It was the first time that a VicePresident had succeeded to the top job and Tyler soon found himself at odds with his cabinet and much of Washington; he is now best remembered for presiding over the annexation of Texas. He died in 1862, shortly after winning election to the Confederacy’s House of Representatives.
His grandson never nurtured any political ambitions. He recalled meeting as a child a woman who knew his antecedents. “She asked me, ‘Little boy, are you going to be president when you grow up? ‘No. I’ll bite your head off,’ I said. Then she asked me, ‘What would you do with the bones?’ and I told her, ‘I’ll spit ’em out.’ ”
Despite these bloodthirsty tendencies, he passed quietly through St Christopher’s School and at 16 on to William & Mary, after Harvard the country’s second oldest seat of learning, of which his father (who died in 1935) had been head. After serving in the Pacific as a naval officer during the war, Tyler became a lawyer and practised in Virginia.
From 1959 to 1963 he helped to run the state’s Civil War centennial commission. Subsequently, he studied for a doctorate and began to teach military history at the University of Richmond. All his life he remained a champion of his grandfather’s legacy, which is not rated highly by most historians.
Tyler liked to remember a granddaughter of Robert E Lee telling him that being a descendant of Lee was not a privilege, it was a responsibility. In 2018, with other presidential descendants, he signed a drawer in a copy of the Resolute desk that stands in the Oval Office.
His wife Lucy, whom he married in 1958, died in 2001. He is survived by their daughter – and his brother.