Gardiner practiced law for several years, but beginning in 1815 when he married Juliana McLachlan, one of the wealthiest women in New York, he also managed her extensive real estate holdings in
Manhattan. Gardiner was a supporter of
John Quincy Adams, member of the People's Party, which was opposed to the emerging
Democratic Party, led by
Andrew Jackson. In the 1840s, he took his family to Washington, D.C., for several months of the year, in part to find an appropriate husband for his daughter
Julia. His family became part of the social circle of President John Tyler and his family.
Death aboard the Princeton lithograph depicting the explosion Gardiner died in an explosion aboard the
USS Princeton on February 28, 1844. President Tyler had proposed to his daughter Julia in February 1843. She had refused him at first but sometime in 1843 they agreed to marry at some future time out of respect for the fact that the President had only been a widow since September 1842. David Gardiner and his daughters Julia and Margaret were aboard a pleasure cruise on the
Potomac River. Gardiner was interred in the
Public Vault at the Congressional Cemetery in
Washington, D.C. His remains were later moved to the Gardiner family plot at the South End Cemetery in
East Hampton, New York. President Tyler proposed marriage several more times before being accepted. He and Julia Gardiner wed on June 26, 1844. They named their first child
David Gardiner Tyler in honor of his maternal grandfather. ==Personal life==