Harrison Ruffin Tyler, born in 1928, died on May 25 at the age of 96.
Never heard of him? That’s hardly surprising. What makes him remarkable is not his long life, but his family history. He was the last living grandchild of John Tyler (1790-1862) who was president from 1841 to 1845.
Let that sink in a minute.
Tyler was elected alongside fellow Charles City County native William Henry Harrison in 1841. He was the back half of the famous campaign slogan “Tippecanoe and Tyler, too!” Born one year after the adoption of the Constitution, Tyler lived until 1862, when he died before joining the Confederate Congress. At some point in his life he owned 70 human beings as property. He is reported to have been a kind master — but he owned 70 human beings as property. In 1853, Tyler had a son. That son had sons of his own including, in 1928, Harrison Ruffin Tyler.
(John Tyler’s longest-lived child was his daughter Pearl, who was born in 1860 and died in 1947.)
Three generations to the beginning of the republic. Three generations spanning four centuries. One generation removed from the ownership of human beings as chattel, which formally ended in the United States 160 years ago.
Until recent years, one or both of President Tyler’s grandchildren (Lyon Gardiner Tyler died in 2020) lived in his former residence on the site of the slave labor camp called Sherwood Forest Plantation, which Harrison purchased and restored.
I don’t wish to cast aspersions on Harrison Ruffin Tyler; he is not culpable for his grandfather’s misdeeds. But he was a living beneficiary of the slave system that his grandfather participated in and sought to perpetuate. Many of us benefit from it — even me, the great-great-great grandson of a North Carolina farmer who at one time owned as many as six human beings.
The past seems so distant but, like objects in the rear-view mirror, it’s closer than it appears. Somewhere there are certainly Americans born of parents who had been enslaved, perhaps even at Tyler’s Sherwood Forest — where visitors can find a pet cemetery but no memorial to the enslaved — a lineage that ought to be as exalted as Harrison Ruffin Tyler’s but isn’t because their names are lost to us. Their names didn’t matter as much as the name of “the General,” John Tyler’s horse, buried on the grounds.
In 1955, a living witness to Abraham Lincoln’s assassination appeared on television, a year before the last Civil War veteran died. Irene Triplett of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, received her late father’s pension for serving in the Confederate Army until her death in 2020. Two living people bear the memory of the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921. Claudette Colvin who, as a 15-year-old Black girl in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus nine months before Rosa Parks became a household name for the same act of civil disobedience, is still alive at 85.
How can a past that is so close be over? And how can slavery, the Civil War and Jim Crow be a thing of the past while living memory persists? When so many of the lingering aftereffects are still visible to anyone who bothers to look?
History is not then; it’s now. It is still alive in all of us. All of the triumph uplifts us and all of the tragedy of it lingers in the air around us, weighing us down, threatening to drown us if we don’t contend with it.
Then, though the past will never be dead, we can at least learn to live with it.
