Born on Nov. 9, 1928 in Richmond, Tyler was the son of Lyon Gardiner Tyler and Sue Ruffin. His father was a son of President John Tyler and president of William & Mary for more than three decades; his mother came from another Virginia family of long lineage and ardent support for slavery and secession.... President John Tyler was 63 when Lyon Gardiner Tyler was born; Lyon was 75 when Harrison entered the world.... At age 8, he was invited to the White House to meet President Franklin D. Roosevelt....
My son Chris, who is dedicated to reading a biography of every American President, read "President without a Party: The Life of John Tyler," by Christopher J. Leahy (commission earned). Chris does not read books on Kindle, so when he wants to share something with me, he texts me a photo. For Tyler, he sent this:
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54 टिप्पणियां:
Well, it wasn't the first time that Texas was thought of as a 'safety valve', politically, and it wouldn't even be the first time the idea was proven badly wrong. The Mexican government originally encouraged Americans to settle in the Texas frontier, in the hopes that it would present a useful obstacle to the infernal seasonal raiding by the Comanche Indians, who were reaching further and further south into Mexico every year. They were right about that, but in a different way, as it turns out.
"The president fully concurred with the overt racism of Walker's letter..."
I don't like an author inserting that kind of modern commentary in a biography. It detracts from the dive into history and a look at the mindset of the people. It's fascinating when slavery supporters turn to an economic argument to justify their position. The Texas plan speaks for itself; I don't need the author to lead me.
Seems like that book lacks sufficient citations. Is that author older than everybody writing from personal recollection?
"I don't like an author inserting that kind of modern commentary in a biography...."
It was out and proud racism. You think that's "modern commentary"?
Prof: 'It was out and proud racism. You think that's "modern commentary"?'
Well, it is kind of like a marine biologist saying "man, all these sea anemones and lanternfish are wet as hell!"
Racism was the water people swam in back then.
JSM
Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too. The Tyler seed doesn’t age
The past is never dead. It's not even past.
JSM
"It was out and proud racism. You think that's "modern commentary"?"
The first google hit: "The Oxford English Dictionary's first recorded utterance of the word racism was by a man named Richard Henry Pratt in 1902. Pratt was railing against the evils of racial segregation."
I'm not going further down the rabbit hole than that. Yes, I think labeling the mindset of an 1840's person using a word that wasn't in their vocabulary is an author's intrusion.
Agree with Kate.
I've read what I consider to be a lot of US history and never came across the safety valve theory before.
Sounds like another case of kicking the can down the road. What could go wrong?
What we call racism today was "science" in the past. Spend some time reading geography and history texts from, say 1900 - 1910, such as my father would have studied in school; particularly those that originated from Princeton (hello, president Wilson!) You will be amazed at the description of races and peoples of Africa and the middle-east.
Our elites and experts at the universities have frequently been not just wrong, but evil.
His grandfather died 66 years before he was born. That’s more like a great great great grandfather.
The first big planters were allowed into the Mexican territory under two conditions--no slaves, and conversion to Catholicism.
They cheerfully agreed and bided their time. They knew that pledges made to Papist greasers were not really binding.
I've always felt that Texas is Tennessee's finest child, myself.
Yeah, what a piece of propaganda. LOL. Sure, they'll just eventually migrate to Mexico. haha. However, the northern sentiment against adding Texas was short-sighted an foolish. Adding another slave state would be balanced by adding more free states. And eventually slavery would end, and we'd still have Texas.
Another US Senator in the 1840s tried to get Northern support by offering a bill to annex Texas, and then split it in two. One slave, bascially east texas and the gulf coast. And another free state, making up the rest. A sensible compromise.
The first big planters were allowed into the Mexican territory under two conditions--no slaves, and conversion to Catholicism.
True, but Austin started to build the American colony in Texas in 1821 and Mexico didn't outlaw slavery until 1829 and exempted Texas. In 1836, there were 50,000 people in texas and only 5000 were slaves.
Mexico in 1829 didn't really need slavery. They had peonage.
The stupidity of the southern slave holders is almost unsurpassed. It should have been obvious slavery was doomed once the Brits abolished it in the 1830s followed by the rest of Europe. But they acted like it would last forever. Even worse, Sharecropping could have given them the same result if implemented and done away with slavery. No more selling and buying of human beings. No lack of freedom. Just get blacks to pick the cotton.
Anyway, they paid dearly for their dumbness.
BarrySanders20 said...
“I've read what I consider to be a lot of US history and never came across the safety valve theory before.”
Yeah, ditto. And one of my high school history teachers was an expert(*) on the Civil War and its causes, and I don’t remember him mentioning anything like this.
(*) - This was back in the early 80s when being an expert actually meant something.
Jefferson was the first to use the "safety value" argument to justify slavery in Missouri. It was a secondary argument. The main argument was the South wanted it, and would leave if they didn't get their way.
So Robert J Walker wanted to send masses of migrants to other countries? Sounds like he was the Maduro of Mississippi.
And tell me you know nothing about Mexico by suggesting to send them a large number of English blacks and mulattos.
...I think labeling the mindset of an 1840's person using a word that wasn't in their vocabulary is an author's intrusion.
Well put. However, are we to assume our modern attitudes and assumptions that we lump together under the rubric racism were not similarly categorized in the 1840s? In other words, if they lacked the word did they also lack the thought?
RCOCEAN II said...
“The stupidity of the southern slave holders is almost unsurpassed. It should have been obvious slavery was doomed once the Brits abolished it in the 1830s followed by the rest of Europe. But they acted like it would last forever. Even worse, Sharecropping could have given them the same result if implemented and done away with slavery. No more selling and buying of human beings. No lack of freedom. Just get blacks to pick the cotton.”
Don’t forget poor whites, too. More Whites than African Americans were sharecroppers after the Civil War.
I've always found the existence of Tyler's living grandson to be a really interesting anecdote. I'm a little sad that he has passed on, but I guess he was 96!
It was out and proud racism. You think that's "modern commentary"?
@Althouse, I think commentators Kate and john mosby have done a good job of responding. As a Civil War buff (I can just about walk to the Cedar Creek and Kernstown battlefields from where I now live) I am irritated beyond belief at people, however we’ll-educated and well-meaning, who thoughtlessly persist in viewing the past through the veil of the present. Even Abraham Lincoln, who later wrote the Emancipation Proclamation, entered the White House believing that black people were lazy and intellectually inferior. This was honestly come by, since Lincoln, as a young man, was in a position to contrast the lack of evident lack of intellectual curiosity and lack of effort of black slaves with his own eagerness to learn and hard work to get ahead. I believe it was meeting Frederick Douglas that helped Lincoln ask questions along the lines of “If showing that I had taught myself to read would earn me a beatng or worse, how bright would I show myself to be?” and “If my hard work enriched not myself but another man, would I work any harder than it would take to avoid being whipped?”
I've read what I consider to be a lot of US history and never came across the safety valve theory before.
Same here. One could write an interesting alt-history novel based on the Walker letter and what might have happened if it had played out as predicted.
Narr said...
“The first big planters were allowed into the Mexican territory under two conditions--no slaves, and conversion to Catholicism.
They cheerfully agreed and bided their time. They knew that pledges made to Papist greasers were not really binding.”
Regarding the second criteria for immigrating… I guess Texas was worth the price of a Mass?
I think liberal/leftist historians are always trying to introduce new words and concepts into history in order to annoy and piss off their "enemies". Aka white people with knowledge.
So we get the introduction of "racism" to discuss the 19th century when everyone was "racist". And the use of "enslaved people" instead of "slaves". And who can forget CE and BCE?
Hassayamper said...
“One could write an interesting alt-history novel based on the Walker letter and what might have happened if it had played out as predicted.”
Someone should suggest the idea to Harry Turtledove.
T J Sawyer said..."Spend some time reading geography and history texts from, say 1900 - 1910...You will be amazed at the description of races and peoples of Africa and the middle-east."
You don't have to go back that far. From the time I was a boy, I could spend hours just leafing through old encyclopedias. Today, I have a few encyclopedia sets spanning the 20th century, and you could read about "friendly natives" into the 1960s, at least.
Speaking of the history of the word "racism", I think it is fascinating to think about how quickly and completely "racism" replaced "prejudice" and "bigotry". When I was a kid in the 70s, it was all about fighting prejudice. In 2025, "prejudice" sounds almost quaint, like the way your grandmother used to talk about the "Orient" instead of "Asia".
I attribute the switch from prejudice to racism to political utility. Prejudice seems like a personal, individual phenomenon, whereas racism can be "systemic" and "endemic" and "pervasive" in nature, requiring massive government funding intervention to combat. A social phenomenon you can use to demonize groups of "deplorable" people.
Left Bank of the Charles said...His grandfather died 66 years before he was born. That’s more like a great great great grandfather.
Fun fact: the last surviving Civil War widow--Helen Jackson, whose husband served in the Union Army--died in 2020.
Tippacanoe and Tyler too
Quaestor said...if they lacked the word did they also lack the thought?
Obviously, there were abolitionists, some willing to kill and die for the cause, so there was a range of opinion on race relations, but to my knowledge, it never occurred to anybody that race is a social construct and white and black people are the same in all meaningful respects.
I think I have commented here in the past about the alt-history question: could we have gone straight from slavery to Jim Crow, without the war?
Most people's answer would be no. The war wasn't about slavery qua slavery; it was about the Southern model undercutting the livelihood of free white farmers.
Southerners saying "okay, we'll set them all free, and still not pay them to farm our land" (because that's what sharecropping is) wouldn't have made the economic or moral abolitionists happy. The North still would have been hostile to the Southern model. And the Southerners would still have been too proud to negotiate with Yankee rabble.
The weird proto-green argument of "we're going to work the land to death pretty soon, so don't worry about it," got any traction at all only because it was a dueling culture, so you couldn't just tell someone how preposterous it was. People already knew about crop rotation. Chemistry was advancing; people were already thinking about artificial fertilizers. The cotton monoculture could switch to another monoculture.
The South was going to secede as soon as it couldn't live with whatever deal the North wanted to impose.
Only the sunk cost of the Civil War could prevent a Civil War, I guess.
JSM
This phenomenon is in my life. My great-great grandfather fought in the War of 1812. Older men often lost wives and then married a second wife later in life. Two of my family’s generations were really four generations in years.
Chris is awesome!
I guess it could have been "successful" if you didn't get caught in a slave revolt in the meantime.
DEIsts.
I don't like an author inserting that kind of modern commentary in a biography
Kate makes a great point that extends far beyond biography. It is a feature of our lives among the bug-eyed lefties that they have the hubris and preening singular virtue that they can measure the lives and actions of those who went before us through the lens of today.
Columbus was disease-bringer and colonizer. Jefferson boned Sally, nasty brute. The revered musicologist, Heinrich Schenker, was a white supremacist. Churchill and Rhodes were imperialists and racists.
...as if any of those shouting today, pulling down statues, renaming schools, Army bases, and holidays would have somehow been so virtuous were they contemporaries of those figures. History will similarly not be kind to today's child mutilators and racists lefties.
- Krumhorn
It is often said that we can't judge the past by present-day standards, but that's nonsense. Of course we can, and do--today's standards are the only ones most people will ever know.
The question is whether, having so judged, we're any closer to understanding the people of the past, their PsOV and problems, their motives and goals, their successes and failures . . . and usually the answer is "no."
As long as we're doing Whattiffery, one of my favorites is to take a date--say 1619 for no reason in particular--and ask what would have happened if there had been laws or rules in effect forbidding either or both slavery and the importation of Africans.
Who wants to argue that the next three centuries or so would have been worse for America?
Speaking of the past, as in earlier this week, describing Jeffrey Epstein's death by suicide in 2019:
FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino promised the release of new video from the [Metropolitan Correctional] cell bay housing sexual predator and human trafficker Jeffrey Epstein around the time of his suicide to prove “no one was there but him.”
So a video is available that has never been released nor has the trove of Epstein documents that Pam Bondi promised the public would see three months ago. Maria Bartiromo doesn't believe the suicide story preached by our failed politician who just couldn't convince voters in a Senate and House election in Maryland (2012 and 2014) then he rushed down to Florida, where he lost even with MAGA support in 2016.
Now he has miles to go and promises to keep.
.
Tip and Ty
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFaRklAYanY
I’d like to know more about Robert Walker; he seems to have been an interesting man. He served as Polk’s Sec. of the Treasury. When Buchanan became president, he inherited the disastrous Kansas situation Pierce had helped create and responded by appointing Walker territorial governor – Walker was seen as a heavyweight kind of guy to appoint. There had been a series of elections in Kansas, all won by the pro-slavery forces, and the territory was officially governed by a pro-slavery government. The anti-slavery people claimed all the elections had been fraudulent, had boycotted most of them, had held their own elections and set up their own government. Much violence had accompanied all of this. Walker showed up, investigated the situation, and reported back to Buchanan that the elections were indeed grossly fraudulent (Example: in one election, hundreds of voters had signed the rolls in alphabetical order, with the same handwriting, the names being identical with a page from the Cincinnati city directory). Walker told Buchanan that the free state forces were sure to win any fair election, which should be held immediately. Buchanan ignored this and continued to insist the pro-slavery government was legitimate. Walker resigned in disgust. He supported the Union when the war came.
I wonder if Walker really believed in his safety-valve theory, or if it was just a line he took to push for Texas annexation, which he very badly wanted to happen. Walker was apparently very clever. He made a real impression on his contemporaries and on at least one historian. If I recall correctly (I read the book decades ago) Allan Nevins in Ordeal of the Union says that the papers Walker wrote supporting Polk’s tariffs were the ableist papers written by any cabinet member since Hamilton. In other words, abler than anything written by Madison, Gallatin, JQ Adams, Calhoun, Clay, Webster, or Roger Taney when they served in the cabinet.
Southerners saying "okay, we'll set them all free, and still not pay them to farm our land" (because that's what sharecropping is) wouldn't have made the economic or moral abolitionists happy. The North still would have been hostile to the Southern model.
All I can say is, that the Civil war would never been fought over Sharecropping. And that if the South in 1862 had announced it was willing to set the slaves free in exchange for UK recognition, it would got England on their side and won their freedom from the North.
The North almost agreed to a permenant ban on Abolitionism, aka no meddling with the southern "percuiliar institution" if the South would agree no more slave states and no seccession.
IRC, Lincoln was pondering the matter, when the South opened fire on Ft Sumter.
When the Irish General Cleburne suggested Negroes be given freedom in exchange for military service, he was denounced to Richmond by *some* of his fellow Generals. One paraphrased said: "After all, if we aren't fighting for our property, and the Southern way of life, what are we fighting for?"
"IRC, Lincoln was pondering the matter, when the South opened fire on Ft Sumter."
What does anything Lincoln might have thought about the subject have to do with it? The real question is- what would the district judges have thought?
In his old age, John Tyler was a delegate to the Confederate Congress. His son Lyon Gardiner Tyler was a passionate, some might say fanatical, defender of the "Lost Cause" of the Confederacy. Advanced paternal age can create a lot of problems in offspring. DNA tends to wear out over time. Something about telomeres. Senoprogentiveness or gerogenesis or whatever it's called isn't a great reproductive strategy, though it does make for good anecdotes.
Lyon's mother Julia Gardiner, the president's second wife was a New Yorker, from the family that owned Gardiner's Island in Long Island Sound, since Charles I gave it to them in 1639. Another form of longevity. They are down to their last living descendant, or at least the last heir of the recent generations of the family.
Don't get me started on Grover Cleveland ... Lots of creepy stuff there.
Walker, like many others, was conflicted about slavery. At one point he wanted to admit Texas on the condition that it supported gradual emancipation (and resettlement abroad) of its slaves. Americans back then were all "racist" and Southern senators had to deal with the fact that slavery was the basis of their economy and society. Walker, at least, may have recognized that slavery wasn't going to be a forever thing.
"What does anything Lincoln might have thought about the subject have to do with it? The real question is- what would the district judges have thought?"
Touche!
"Whatiffery" (I like that word) never works. Each generation, each century, each millennium brings new knowledge and morals. We don't impale criminals or enemy soldiers on posts anymore, and after God-knows how many millennia slavery in the West was ended one hundred seventy years ago. Sharecropping would not have been a solution. The slave-owning populace did not live on vast, beautiful plantations, but owned three- to five slaves, farm laborers. These farmers were not much above the white (and free black) trash of the antebellum south. Let us not forget the Tribes who owned black slaves, too.
And as an aside, Sally Hemmings and her family were Jefferson's in-laws, Sally Martha's half-sister. And if they did have a relationship, why does the left get so angry about miscegenation? Any offspring from a Jefferson-Hemmings coupling would be black because of the Democrats' one-drop rule, which they should rejoice instead of condemn.
I claim the coinage "Whatiffery" until someone shows me an earlier use than mine.
What-ifs are implicit in historical accounts and arguments, and can be useful--not for proving anything, but for isolating the salient factors in a given scenario. Without them, history is but a chronicle of inevitablities.
I recently went to a theater screening of Gone With The Wind and, sure enough, before the opening credits, a message displays saying to the effect this movie has some nasty racey stuff, etc, etc, etc
I chuckled. Did they think someone would watch the movie and think, Well that slavery stuff wasn't so bad
My mother's side has some old gents who were still siring young'ns in their 50's, but 60's and 70's? Quite a feat. My grandfather was born in 1870, son of a Civil War vet, and begat mom when he was about 57. He died before I came along, but the ancestral farm in Preble County (Oh) was the home of about three generations from pre-CW to early 2000's.
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