Harrison Ruffin Tyler, grandson of 1840s president, dies at 96
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.'
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.'
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Chicago Tribune
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Hamilton Spectator
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Smith, the grandson of a former PNBC president, stood before delegates and described his just-completed tour as a Marine Corps command chaplain in Okinawa, Japan, and his plans to report to a ship in Norfolk, Virginia, to begin a tour of Europe and the Middle East and be promoted to lieutenant commander. 'My team and I have ministered to thousands of Marines, sailors, civilians and Japanese,' he said. 'We increased our chapel's membership from eight to 100. We incorporated spiritual readiness into our base's core curriculum.'' ___ This content is written and produced by Religion News Service and distributed by The Associated Press. RNS and AP partner on some religion news content. RNS is solely responsible for this story. ___ Chaplains serve in hospitals, hospices and manufacturing plants, and while chaplaincy researchers see commonalities among them, there are also key differences in the military. All are involved in gaining the trust of people who are in their particular milieu, enabling them to think and sometimes pray through their times of greatest need and day-to-day struggles. An example of both the danger and the dedication of military service chaplaincy is the 1943 death of four chaplains — two Protestant, one Catholic and one Jewish — who helped save some of those aboard a World War II ship, turning over their life jackets and praying and singing hymns before it sank. All four were trained at Harvard University , then the site of the Army's chaplain training school, during a two-year wartime period. 'It was a real defining moment,' said retired Gen. Steve Schaick, who served as Air Force chief of chaplains from 2018 to 2021, and in the same role for the Space Force from 2019 to 2021. 'The stories that came from that really kind of highlighted chaplains at their best.' The Army's chaplaincy corps also includes religious affairs specialists and religious education directors. Some service members provide armed protection to unarmed chaplains and set up worship spaces in on-base chapels or makeshift altars on truck hoods in the field. For example, Berry Gordy, who later founded Motown Records, served as a private in the Korean War and played a portable organ and was known as a chaplain assistant, notes ' Sacred Duty ,' a new comic book posted on the Army's website to mark the anniversary. While 218 chaplains served in the Revolutionary War, 9,117 chaplains served in World War II, according to the Army. Currently, the Army has 1,500 chaplains on active duty. The Navy Chaplain Corps, which began on Nov. 18, 1775, had 24 chaplains during the Civil War; 203 by the end of World War I; 1,158 at its height in 1990; and currently has 898 on active duty, according to the Navy. 'Today's Chaplain Corps includes Chaplains representing a multitude of faith groups, and the Chaplain Corps recruiting team is actively working to increase the Corps' diversity, with a special focus on increasing the number of women Chaplains in the Corps and the number of Chaplains representing low-density faith groups,' reads an Army historical booklet marking the Chaplain Corps' 250 years. Initially, U.S. military chaplains were Protestants. The first Catholic chaplains served in the Mexican-American War in 1846, and the first rabbi was commissioned in 1862 and served in the Civil War. The first Muslim chaplains were commissioned in the Army in 1993. The first Buddhist Army chaplain was named in 2008, followed by the first Hindu chaplain in 2011. Chaplain Margaret Kibben, acting chaplain of the House of Representatives and former chief of chaplains of the Navy — the first woman in that role — said the isolation and the immediacy of ethical decisions faced by military members, as well as a high level of confidentially, can make the work of military chaplaincy teams different from other settings where chaplains work. 'It's the one place that people can go where there's essentially a sanctuary around them, wherever they find themselves, a safe place to have somebody to talk to about a whole host of issues,' she said, adding that topics can include anything from supporting their families to handling combat responsibilities. 'How do you deal with those issues in a place where you're not going to look stupid, you're not going to look weak or unreliable because you have these doubts and you have these concerns — to have a place that you can go to ensure that you can get that off your chest?' Those private conversations often are not faith-filled, added Kibben, reflecting on her military career that began in 1986. 'What I realized later, 20, 30 years later, was that many service members have never learned the language of faith,' she said, citing terms like confession and forgiveness. 'So as a chaplain, we had to figure out our way around the lack of a lexicon of faith. How do you speak about grace to someone who doesn't have a clue how powerful grace is?' Another change, sparked by the efforts of Julie Moore, the wife of a military officer who served in the Vietnam War, was the Army's method for notifying the next of kin when a soldier died. Soon after a 1960s battle in that war, a chaplain and a uniformed officer began teaming up to knock on families' doors; prior to that time, the news arrived in a telegram delivered by a cab driver. The work of chaplains has sometimes been the source of church-state debates. For example, Michael 'Mikey' Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for separation of church and state in the U.S. military, has questioned what he viewed as proselytism in the chaplains' ranks. Meanwhile, conservative Christian organizations have voiced concerns about an antipathy against some Christians in military ranks. Karen Diefendorf, a two-time Army chaplain and a board member of the U.S. Army Chaplain Corps Regimental Association, which supports chaplains and their families, said the primary goal for chaplains is 'to provide for the free exercise rights of every soldier, sailor, airman, Marine, Coast Guardsman.' She currently is an interim minister of an independent Methodist church in South Carolina, after serving as a chaplain at Tysons Foods and in hospice care. 'I had soldiers who were practitioners of Wiccan faith, and my job is not to say to them, 'Hey, wouldn't you like to love Jesus?'' she said, recalling how she assisted a Wiccan Army member serving in Korea. 'My job was to help that young soldier find where his particular group of folks met and where he could practice his faith.' Also during her service in Korea in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Diefendorf said she provided cassette tapes of sermons to soldiers and entrusted one with Communion elements because she knew she wouldn't be able to reach their location often. 'So far, the courts have upheld that you certainly have two competing clauses within the First Amendment, establishment and free exercise,' she said. 'And at this point, certainly chaplains have to walk that fine line not to create establishment in the midst of trying to also enable people to practice their beliefs.' Schaick recalled being deployed overseas in the Air Force when a new rabbi joined his staff. On arrival, the rabbi described himself as 'first and foremost a chaplain and secondarily a rabbi' — an order of priorities that Schaick said applies to chaplains to this day, regardless of their faith perspective. 'The longer you serve in the chaplaincy, I think the closer you get to really believing that — and therefore, religious affiliation becomes secondary,' he said. 'It's 'How're you doing today?' and 'I'd love to hear what's on your heart' and 'How can I be able to help you today?' Those kind of questions, quite frankly, are impervious to religious distinctions.' Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP's collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. Error! Sorry, there was an error processing your request. There was a problem with the recaptcha. Please try again. You may unsubscribe at any time. By signing up, you agree to our terms of use and privacy policy . 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