Julia Tyler 1820–1889

Born Gardiner’s Island, New York
First Lady 1844–1845

Julia Gardiner and the recently widowed President John Tyler fell in love when he comforted her following her father’s death. After becoming the first woman to marry a president in office, she enjoyed just eight months holding court. Enamored with European pageantry, she sought to elevate the presidency by having “Hail to the Chief” played on state occasions.

Raised in a wealthy slaveholding family on Long Island, Julia Tyler adapted easily to the Southern lifestyle of her Virginia-born husband. In 1853, she published an open letter defending slavery and describing the care that she claimed Southern ladies lavished on the people they enslaved. Later, she encouraged her sons to fight for the Confederacy. Financially strapped after the war and her husband’s death, Tyler lobbied Congress for a presidential widow’s pension, and it was granted in 1880.

This portrait, by Italian-born artist Francesco Anelli, was probably painted at Sherwood Forest, the Tylers’ plantation in Virginia.

The White House