JULIANA GARDINER, was born 4 May 1820 on Gardiner's Island, New York. She
attended Chagaray Institute in New York, New York. The black haired,
gray-eyed woman made her debut at age fifteen, toured Europe, and posed for an
ad for New York department store Bogert and McCamly. Julia played the guitar
and sang. She lived animals, especially birds. As a debutante, she created a
fashion craze by wearing a diamond star on her forehead held in place by a
gold chain. When her father did she substituted a black stone for the
diamond, which she called Feronia. Julia was introduced to John Tyler by
Congressman Fernando Wood at a White House dinner. On 28 February 1844,
Tyler, Julia, and a host of other Washingtonians were sailing on the test run
of the USS Princeton, the first propeller-driven warship. During the
cruise, the ship's main gun, nicknamed the Peacemaker, misfired, and six
people were killed, including Julia's father, Senator Gardiner. Julia fainted
at the news, and the president himself carried her off the ship and comforted
her throughout her mourning. Her acceptance of his marriage proposal (he had
made five of them) so overjoyed him that he wrote a song in her honor called
"Sweet Lady Awake." He also imported an Italian wolfhound named LaBeaux for
her. The couple were married secretly on 26 June 1844 at the Church of the
Ascension in New York, New York, by the Right Reverend Benjamin Threadwell,
Onderdonck, Episcopal bishop of New York, assisted by the Reverend Dr.
Gregory Thurston Bedell. The bride wore a white dress with a gauze veil and
circlet of flowers. John Tyler's son Robert served as best man. The
newlyweds took a honeymoon cruise on the Hudson River and spent their wedding
night in a hotel room rented annually by Daniel Webster. Returning to
Washington, they were given a wedding feast by Congress. John C. Calhoun
helped cut the cake. Tyler's three sons by his first marriage accept Julia,
but his daughters did not. Julia and John had seven children of their own.
As First Lady, she received guests sitting on a platform flanked by young
girls all dressed in white. She adapted the presidential anthem, "Hail to the
Chief," from The knights of Snowden by John Sanderson. The words were
by Sir Walter Scott from 'The Lady of the Lake," Canto II. Julia
served as First Lady for less than eight months. After Tyler's presidency,
they returned to his Virginia retirement estate, Sherwood Forest, on the
steamer SS Curtis Peck. A Virginian by birth, Tyler sided with the
southern cause. He headed an unsuccessful Washington peace conference in
hopes of preventing war and later was elected to the Confederate Congress.
But he died before he could take his seat. During the war, Julia served as a
volunteer for the Confederacy. When federal troops invaded the Tyler estate
in 1862, she took her children and fled to the Gardiner family home in New
York. After the war, Julia divided her time between New York and rebuilding
Sherwood Forest. Some twenty-seven years after she left the White House,
Julia, who was raised an Episcopalian, converted to Catholicism. In the wake
of the Garfield assassination, all presidents' widows were given pensions and
she received $5000 a year. In 1887 she granted an interview with famed
reporter Nelly Bly. Julia died 10 July 1889 of a fever at the Richmond Hotel,
Room 27, in Richmond, Virginia, and was buried there in Hollywood Cemetery.
She died directly across the hall from where her husband died. As First
Lady, Julia was the first to be born in the nineteenth century, to be the
subject of a newspaper interview, to marry a president while in office, to
serve as First Lady while in their twenties, to hire a press agent as First
Lady, and to have the child of a president after leaving the White House.
Paletta, Lu Ann. The World Almanac of First Ladies. New York: Pharo
Books, 1990. 28-30.
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