Letter from John Tyler to Julia Gardiner Tyler, p. 1

In the first page of a four-page letter dated April 17, 1861, John Tyler writes to his second wife, Julia Gardiner Tyler, about the effects of the secession vote passed by a majority of the assembled delegates at the Virginia Convention. "Well my Dearest One," he begins the letter, "Virginia has severd her connexions with the Northern hive of abolitionists and takes her stand as a soveriegn and independant State … The die is thus cast and her fortune is in the hands of the God of Battle— The contest into which we enter is one full of peril— but there is a spirit abroad in Virginia which cannot be crushed until the life of the last man is trampled out."