Job Roberts Tyson

Job Roberts Tyson (February 8, 1803 – June 27, 1858) was an American lawyer, author, and politician who served as a Whig member of the U.S. House of Representatives for Pennsylvania’s 2nd congressional district from 1855 to 1857. During his one term in Congress, he was identified with both the Whig and Independent political labels in Pennsylvania and participated actively in the legislative debates of a turbulent pre–Civil War era, representing the interests of his Philadelphia-area constituents.

Tyson was born on February 8, 1803, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Joseph Tyson and Ann Van Tromp. He was descended from a Quaker family that had settled in the Pennsylvania colony in 1683, a heritage that shaped his early outlook and reform interests. As a youth he worked as a clerk in a store and attended the common schools. At the age of seventeen he became a teacher in Hamburg, Pennsylvania, where he taught English to German-speaking students and, in the process, learned to speak German himself. After returning to Philadelphia, he came under the influence of Roberts Vaux, an early founder of the city’s public school system, who helped him obtain a position teaching in the first public school in Philadelphia. While teaching, Tyson devoted himself to intensive study, learning Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. After two years he was appointed director of public schools in Philadelphia, a role that placed him at the center of the city’s emerging public education system. In these years he also engaged in prison reform work, supported the apprentices’ library, and assisted in organizing the temperance movement in Pennsylvania.

In 1825, Tyson began the study of law under John Wurts in Philadelphia. He was admitted to the bar in 1827 and established a legal practice in the city, where he developed a reputation as a thoughtful writer and speaker on questions of history and jurisprudence. His interest in penal reform led the Law Academy of Philadelphia to publish an essay he wrote on the penal system of Philadelphia, and he delivered public addresses on the trial of William Penn and on the broader history of Pennsylvania. Tyson’s legal work extended into the burgeoning field of transportation and infrastructure; he served as a lawyer for the Pennsylvania Railroad, reflecting his long-standing advocacy for improved internal improvements in the state. In 1851, in recognition of his scholarly and professional attainments, he received the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws (LL.D.) from Dickinson College.

Tyson’s reform and literary activities were extensive. In 1833, responding to concerns among Philadelphians about the social and moral effects of gambling, he was commissioned to write on the problems posed by lotteries, then a common means of financing public and private projects. He produced several influential tracts, including “A Brief Survey of the Great Extent and Evil Tendencies of the Lottery System, as Existing in the United States” (1833) and “The Lottery System in the United States” (1837), in which he argued that lotteries were a destructive form of human behavior. Although opposition to lotteries had begun among Quakers, Tyson’s forceful arguments helped galvanize broader religious and civic resistance; by 1835 nine states had banned lotteries, and several new states barred them in their constitutions. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1836, served as vice president of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and was vice-provost of the Law Academy of Philadelphia. Over the course of his career he published numerous historical and literary works, including an address for the Apprentices’ Library Company (1830), a “Memoir of Thomas C. James, M.D.” (1835), several historical discourses before the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (notably on colonial history and on the two hundredth anniversary of William Penn’s birth), a discourse on history as a branch of national literature delivered before the Belles Lettres Society of Dickinson College (1849), “Letters on the Resources and Commerce of Philadelphia” (1852), and an address before the Montgomery County Agricultural Society (1856).

Tyson also pursued an active political career at the state and local levels before entering Congress. In 1840 he served in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, where he aligned his reform interests with legislative work. By the mid-1840s he had become a prominent advocate for improved transportation links across the state. In an address delivered on April 28, 1846, to a group of influential Philadelphians, he argued for the necessity of a railroad connection between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh to secure the city’s commercial future. He was subsequently elected to the Select Council, the upper house of the Philadelphia City Council, where he continued to press for internal improvements and helped move the city toward the establishment of what became the Pennsylvania Railroad. Through these roles he combined legal expertise, economic analysis, and public advocacy in support of infrastructure development.

In 1854, Tyson was elected as a Whig, and also identified with the Independent Party in Pennsylvania, to the Thirty-fourth Congress, representing Pennsylvania’s 2nd congressional district from 1855 to 1857. His service in Congress occurred during a significant period in American history marked by sectional conflict over slavery and the future of the Union. Tyson contributed to the legislative process during his one term in office and took strong positions in several high-profile debates. He spoke forcefully in favor of the expulsion of Representative Preston Brooks after Brooks assaulted Senator Charles Sumner on the Senate floor in 1856, aligning himself with those who viewed the attack as an assault on free debate and the dignity of Congress. Tyson also secured the passage of a resolution for Congress to fund the publication of a book on Elisha Kent Kane’s Arctic explorations, reflecting his interest in science, exploration, and the dissemination of knowledge. In 1857, after leaving Congress, he delivered a notable speech on fugitive slave laws in which he called for a return to the principles of the Compromise of 1850. While he professed opposition to slavery, he articulated views on race that reflected the racial prejudices of his time, arguing that Africans, whether born free or enslaved, were “elevated in character, and improved in condition and happiness, by his residence among a religious, an educated and a free people,” and asserting that “The natural inferiority of the negro is physically and metaphysically, a fact.”

Tyson’s personal life was closely tied to Philadelphia and its environs. On October 4, 1832, he married Eleanor Cope; the couple had no children, and she died in 1847. He maintained an estate called “Woodlawn” in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, where he spent his later years while continuing his legal, literary, and public activities. Job Roberts Tyson died at “Woodlawn” on June 27, 1858. He was interred in Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia, a resting place for many of the city’s prominent figures. His life and work, including his writings and public addresses, were later noted in genealogical and memorial literature, such as Carroll S. Tyson’s “Memorial Biographies of the New England Historic Genealogical Society,” which preserved the record of his contributions to law, politics, historical scholarship, and civic reform.