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Boston Globe
3 days ago
- General
- Boston Globe
Harrison Ruffin Tyler, grandson of 1840s president, dies at 96
Mr. Tyler suffered a series of small strokes starting in 2012 and was later diagnosed with dementia. In recent years, his son William Bouknight Tyler oversaw the James River plantation that had been his family's ancestral home. Mr. Tyler, a retired businessman, and his older brother, Lyon Gardiner Tyler Jr., who died at age 95 in 2020, were sons of Lyon Gardiner Tyler Sr. (1853-1935), a longtime president of the College of William & Mary. Their grandfather was the U.S. president who pushed for the annexation of Texas as American expansion moved west, but he is perhaps best known for the Whig Party's memorable 1840 presidential campaign slogan, 'Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.' Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up In a remarkable instance of successive longevities and late-in-life paternities, the Tyler family produced a genealogical marvel, if not a singularity: three generations that spanned nearly the entire history of the American experience. Advertisement Successive longevities over centuries are not uncommon, although they are not easily documented in ordinary families. But that was hardly the case with the former president and his academically distinguished son. And in 2012, when the website Mental Floss reported that two grandsons of President Tyler were still alive, the news -- 'an amazing, seemingly impossible piece of American trivia,' as New York magazine put it -- went viral. Advertisement Yahoo, The Huffington Post, Fox News and Politico all rushed to publish articles. There were interviews with the grandsons, who told of other famous ancestors, including a great-grandfather, John Tyler Sr., born in 1747, who was a roommate of Thomas Jefferson at William & Mary, served in the Continental Army, became governor of Virginia and had eight children, including the future president. 'I heard too much about presidents growing up,' Lyon Gardiner Tyler Jr. told the Daughters of the American Revolution chapter in Dyersburg, Tennessee, in 2013. He recalled family anecdotes about Patrick Henry, Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster, the American Revolution, the Civil War and, especially, President John Tyler, his grandfather. Born in 1790, less than a year after Washington's first inauguration, John Tyler became the governor of Virginia, a United States representative and a senator. In the election of 1840, the Whig Party chose William Henry Harrison, a former governor of the Indiana Territory and senator from Ohio, as its presidential candidate, and John Tyler as his vice-presidential running mate. Historians say John Tyler, a lifelong slave owner and advocate of states' rights, was selected to balance the ticket and attract Southerners who feared Harrison might harbor abolitionist leanings. Harrison, known as Old Tippecanoe, had led American forces that defeated Native Americans at the Battle of Tippecanoe in Indiana in 1811. The Whigs attacked Martin Van Buren, the Democratic incumbent, with a bandwagon campaign featuring the 'Tippecanoe and Tyler Too' slogan. Harrison and John Tyler won handily and were sworn in on March 4, 1841. But Harrison died of pneumonia after only a month in office. John Tyler, the first vice president to succeed a dead president, quickly took the oath of office, moved into the White House and assumed the full powers of the presidency. Advertisement His claim to the presidency was disputed by many in Congress and never accepted by some, who referred to him as 'His Accidency.' But his forceful grasp of the office set a precedent and served as a model for successions until the issue was clarified by the 25th Amendment, ratified in 1967. John Tyler, who regarded much of the Whig platform as unconstitutional, vetoed legislation and bypassed Whig leaders, who expelled him from the party and tried, unsuccessfully, to impeach him. Most of his Cabinet resigned. His most notable achievement was his advocacy for the annexation of Texas, which became the nation's 28th state in 1845. Robert Seager II, in a 1963 biography, 'And Tyler Too,' called John Tyler 'one of America's most obscure chief executives,' adding, 'His countrymen generally remember him, if they have heard of him at all, as the rhyming end of a catchy campaign slogan.' After leaving the presidency, John Tyler retired to his Virginia plantation and withdrew from politics. When the Civil War began in 1861, he sided with the Confederacy and was elected to the Confederate legislature, but he died in 1862, at age 71, before taking office. He fathered 15 children, the most of any American president, with two wives: Letitia Christian, who died in 1842, and Julia Gardiner, a 24-year-old debutante who married him in 1844, when he was 54. The 13th child, Lyon Gardiner Tyler, who lived to 81, served as president of William & Mary, the nation's second oldest college (chartered in 1693), from 1888 to 1919. He had three children with his first wife, Anne Baker (Tucker) Tyler, who died in 1921. In 1923, he married Sue Ruffin, and they had three more children: Lyon Gardiner Jr., Harrison Ruffin and Henry, who died in infancy. Advertisement Harrison Ruffin Tyler, who was born in Virginia on Nov. 9, 1928, earned a degree in chemistry at William & Mary in 1949 and a chemical engineering degree at Virginia Tech in 1951. In 1968, he was a founder of ChemTreat, an industrial water treatment business. He retired in 2000. Mr. Tyler married Frances Payne Bouknight in 1957; she died in 2019. In addition to their son William, he is survived by their daughter, Julia Gardiner Tyler Samaniego; another son, Harrison Ruffin Tyler Jr.; and eight grandchildren. Mr. Tyler and his wife helped to restore his ancestral home, Sherwood Forest Plantation, a 1,600-acre National Historic Landmark on the James River in Charles City County, Virginia, and lived there for many years. The plantation was built around 1730 and bought by the family in 1842. In 2001, Mr. Tyler donated $5 million and 22,000 books to the College of William & Mary history department, which was renamed in his honor in 2021. In 2012, he told New York magazine that he was not much interested in modern politics. 'Oh, my family's conservative,' he said. 'I served as the chairman of the Republican Party here, but I'm sorry, I've sort of lost interest. They're killing each other, on both sides. The campaigns are just horrible. It has nothing to do with what we really need.' Advertisement This article originally appeared in
Yahoo
20-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
On This Day, March 20: Sarin attack on Tokyo subway kills 14
March 20 (UPI) -- On this date in history: In 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was published. In 1854, in what is considered the founding meeting of the Republican Party, former members of the Whig Party met in Ripon, Wis., to establish a new party to oppose the spread of slavery into the western territories. In 1963, a volcano on the East Indies island of Bali began erupting. The death toll exceeded 1,500. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered the Alabama National Guard to provide security at a planned civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery the next day. Earlier marches turned violent and deadly, but the third march was considered more of a success both in terms of safety and in spreading the message of the right to vote for black Americans. In 1976, San Francisco newspaper heiress and kidnapping victim Patty Hearst was convicted of bank robbery. Hearst served 22 months in prison and eventually was granted a full pardon. In 1987, the U.S. government approved the sale of AZT, a treatment, but not a cure, for AIDS. In 1995, 12 people were killed, and more than 5,000 made ill in a nerve-gas attack on the Tokyo subway system. A 13th victim died a day later and a 14th in 2008. The perpetrators, members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult, were executed in 2018. In 1996, the world learned of "mad cow" disease from a British government report questioning the safety of beef in Britain. In 1997, the Liggett Group, fifth-largest U.S. tobacco company, agreed to admit that smoking was addictive and caused health problems and that the tobacco industry had sought for years to sell its products to children as young as 14. In 2001, five days after explosions destroyed one of its support beams and killed 11 people, the largest oil rig in the world collapsed and sank off the coast of Brazil. In 2003, U.S.-led coalition forces begin military operations in Iraq. The Iraq War officially ended In 2004, after narrowly escaping assassination the day before, Chen Shui-bian was re-elected president of Taiwan with about 50 percent of the vote. In 2007, former Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan was hanged in Baghdad for his part in the 1982 deaths of 148 Shiites. In 2010, the first eruption of a volcano in southern Iceland since the 1820s forced the evacuation of 450 people, but there were no reports of injuries or major property damage. In 2016, President Barack Obama became the first sitting U.S. president to visit Cuba since 1928 after normalizing relations between the two countries. In 2019, the Walt Disney Co. officially completed its $71.3 billion purchase of a large chunk of 21st Century Fox. In 2024, the Biden administration released a finalized new Environmental Protection Agency rule regulating vehicles that leans heavily on significant increase in electric and hybrid vehicles on the market in eight years. Less than a year later, the Trump administration announced a rollback of dozens of EPA regulations, including those seeking to reduce vehicle emissions.
