Washington, D.C., Feb. 16, 1861
His was a quintessential Virginian face: refined, hawkish, melancholy. It was now slightly diminished, to be sure; the cheeks sunken, the lips pinched, the gray curls retreating from the high forehead. But it was hardly fair to call him, as certain radical Northern papers did that winter, a “tottering ashen ruin,” a relic of some “antediluvian” age. The much blunter epithet that would soon be applied to him – traitor – is still a matter of debate.
John Tyler, the former president, had, in any event, lately shown a surprising burst of energy. “Who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him?” asked the editor of the Richmond Examiner, quoting “Macbeth” to good effect. Perhaps Tyler’s vitality should never have been in question: he had fathered no fewer than 15 children, the latest one at age 70, no small achievement in the pre-Viagra era. (That child, a daughter, lived until 1947; two of Tyler’s grandsons, Lyon and Harrison, are still alive today, remarkably enough, 211 years after his birth.)
Now Tyler had taken on a different sort of paternal role: that of founding father. Or, rather, re-founding father. Since early February 1861, he had been presiding over the Peace Conference, a gathering of elder statesmen making a last-ditch attempt to rescue the Union as it pitched toward civil war.
The meeting was taking place, appropriately enough, at Willard’s Hotel, a Washington institution where, according to many insiders, more government business was enacted than anywhere else in the capital. (Its anteroom, where patronage-seekers mingled with political bosses, is said to have inspired the word lobbyist.) Since its founding as a small inn in 1818, Willard’s had come to occupy almost an entire block. Rather than demolishing the buildings that stood in its path, it strangled them like some relentless jungle vine, sending out shoots and tendrils of faux marble, carved oak and polished brass until the unfortunate structures were wholly engulfed. Most recently, it had swallowed up God himself in the form of a handsome little Greek Revival church whose Presbyterian congregation had hastily vacated, paying due reverence to the superior claims of America’s nascent hospitality industry.
That sanctuary had been reconsecrated as a conference room. Three figures from American history – George Washington, Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay – were installed in lithographic form at its altar end. A fourth, Tyler, was installed beneath them in the flesh.
In several respects he had a great deal in common with those other heroes. Like Washington, Jackson and Clay, Tyler owned slaves (43 of them, according to the last census). Like them, he was a border state man – in his case, a Virginian, a scion of the Cavaliers, not one of those swaggering Gulf Coast parvenus who had lately led the drive to secession. And like them, Tyler loved the Union – at least for the time being. On the basis of these claims, the last one especially, he had been selected as the conference’s president by unanimous acclamation.
The other delegates were among the most distinguished men America had to offer: not merely an ex-president, but senators, congressmen, former ambassadors, war heroes and railroad owners. They were also, as many observers noted, disproportionately elderly, in some cases actually decrepit. One man, 77-year-old John C. Wright of Ohio, was feeble and nearly blind – and, having vowed to sacrifice his life for the Union, made good that pledge by dying eight days into the convention.
Many, like Tyler himself, had been born in the 18th century; their cherished nation’s revolutionary founding was hardly ancient history to them. The ex-president was speaking quite literally when he exhorted his fellow delegates on the second day: “Our godlikefathers created, we have to preserve.” The post-revolutionary generation of Americans would now finally have its shot at undying glory. Tyler continued:
[Our fathers] built up, through their wisdom and patriotism, monuments which have eternized their names. You have before you, gentlemen, a task equally grand, equally sublime, quite as full of glory and immortality. … If you reach the height of this great occasion, your children’s children will rise up and call you blessed.
Conservative newspapers throughout the country praised Tyler’s oration: the Washington Star went so far as to call it “one of the most affecting and eloquent efforts … ever spoken in this country.” (Even the staunchly Republican New York Times offered plaudits.) Others were not so complimentary. One Ohio paper called Tyler “a man who is more cordially despised by honest men than any man who ever occupied the presidential chair.” The 22-year-old Henry Adams saw Tyler at a ball hosted by Senator and Mrs. Stephen A. Douglas:
A crowd of admiring devotees surrounded the ancient buffer Tyler …. Ye Gods, what are we, when mortals no bigger – no, damn it, not so big as – ourselves, are looked up to as though their thunder spoke from the real original Olympus. Here is an old Virginia politician, of whom by good rights, no one ought ever to have heard, reappearing in the ancient cerements of his forgotten grave – political and social – and men look up to him as they would at Solomon, if he could be made the subject of a resurrection.
Indeed, Tyler had been controversial ever since, two decades earlier, he had unexpectedly become chief executive after the sudden death of President William Henry Harrison. Many Americans in 1841 believed that the Constitution did not mandate that the vice president actually assume the highest office in the land, but merely that he execute its powers while retaining his title. So when Tyler asserted that he was actually president, he was condemned as a usurper and ridiculed as “His Accidency.” The following year he became the target of the first congressional impeachment attempt in American history. Northerners believed that his actions as president– especially his appointment of an almost wholly Southern cabinet and his push to annex Texas as a slave state – had done much to deepen fissures in the Union.
Tyler remained a staunch advocate not just of slavery’s existence but of its expansion. The week after Abraham Lincoln’s election in November 1860, he wrote to an old friend:
On one thing I think you may rely, that [Virginia] will never consent to have her blacks cribbed and confined within proscribed and specified limits – and thus be involved in all the consequences of a war of the races in some 20 or 30 years. She must have expansion, and if she cannot obtain for herself and sisters that expansion in the Union, she may sooner or later look to Mexico, the West India Islands, and Central America as the ultimate reservations of the African race.
In 1861, many Northerners had little faith that Tyler could truly serve as a neutral arbiter of the secession crisis. Several state legislatures even refused to send delegates to the Peace Conference. Among radical Republicans, the assembly became an object of derision; Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune consistently referred to it as “the old gentlemen’s convention.”
At any rate, the proceedings at Willard’s went steadily downhill after Tyler’s opening address. The problem, indeed, was that the delegates were too eloquent: hour after hour, they declaimed on the urgent necessity of saving the Union – invoking Washington, Franklin, Bunker Hill and Yorktown – while making precious little headway toward actually doing anything about it. On the morning of Feb. 16, a delegate proposed that speeches be limited to no more than 30 minutes each – and the body then proceeded to spend almost the entire day debating this, to no conclusive result. Henry Adams predicted: “I suppose they will potter ahead until no one feels any more interest in them, and then they may die.”
Tyler and his colleagues pottered ahead, but they did not die quite yet. On Feb. 23, the conference became even more surreal when the man whose recent victory had caused the Union’s split – President-elect Lincoln – arrived in Washington and checked into a suite at the hotel, just upstairs. Tyler and other delegates visited him that evening. One convention member warned that unless Lincoln placated the South, the nation’s economy would crumble: “It is for you, sir, to say whether grass shall grow in the streets of our commercial cities.” Lincoln replied: “If it depends upon me, the grass will not grow anywhere but in the fields and the meadows.”
Several days later, the conference adjourned after approving a set of proposed constitutional amendments that stood little hope of mollifying either North or South – and even less of being passed by Congress. Tyler returned to his home in Richmond, Va. on Feb. 28. That evening, a group of admirers came to serenade him on the veranda of the Exchange Hotel. He replied with a speech denouncing the conference, assailing its proposed compromise as a “miserable rickety affair” that did little to protect Southern slaveholders, and calling for Virginia to secede immediately as the only means of preserving its sovereignty.
Later that spring, Tyler cast a vote for Virginia’s secession and personally drafted a document placing the state’s militia force under Jefferson Davis’s direct control. His son Robert, then a lawyer in Philadelphia, narrowly escaped a lynch mob as he fled southward; his neighbors satisfied their fury by burning him in effigy in his own front yard.
In November 1861, John Tyler was elected to the Confederate Congress – becoming the only former American president ever to win office in a foreign country. Arriving in Richmond in January for the opening session, he took a room once again at the Exchange Hotel. Two days later, he had a sudden attack of the chills and nausea, then collapsed unconscious onto a sofa. Less than a week later, he was dead, having never taken his seat in the rebel government.
Back in Washington – the city where he had once presided as chief executive, now an enemy capital – Tyler was subjected to a final indignity when his portrait was removed from its place of honor in the Capitol and exiled to deep storage. But the passage of 150 years has effected a rehabilitation: that painting now hangs in the Blue Room of the White House.
Sources: Robert Seager II, “And Tyler Too: A Biography of John and Julia Gardiner Tyler”; Gary May, “John Tyler”; Robert Gary Gunderson, “Old Gentlemen’s Convention: The Washington Peace Conference of 1861”; Dean R. Montgomery, “The Willard Hotels of Washington, D.C., 1847-1968,” (Records of the Columbia Historical Society, 1968); L.E. Chittenden, “Recollections of President Lincoln and His Administration”; U.S. Census, Slave Schedules, 1860; New York Times, Feb. 6, 1861; Henry Adams to Charles Francis Adams, Feb. 8 and 13, 1861, in J.C. Levenson et al., eds., “The Letters of Henry Adams, Volume I: 1858-1868”; New-York Tribune, Feb. 14, 1861; L.E. Chittenden, ed., “A Report on the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention, for Proposing Amendments to the Constitution of the United States, Held at Washington, D.C., in February, A.D. 1861”; Harold Holzer, “Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter 1860-1861”; William C. Allen, “History of the United States Capitol: A Chronicle of Design, Construction, and Politics.”
Adam Goodheart is the author of the forthcoming book “1861: The Civil War Awakening.” He lives in Washington, D.C., and on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where he is the Hodson Trust-Griswold Director of Washington College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience.
