Margaret Taylor

First Lady

• Born: September 21, 1788
• Birthplace: Calvert County, Maryland
• Died: August 14, 1852
• Place of death: Pascagoula, Mississippi

President:Zachary Taylor, 1849-1850

Overview

Born and raised in Maryland plantation society, for thirty-five years Margaret Taylor followed her husband, Zachary Taylor, from one wilderness Army fort to another, making a comfortable home for her family wherever they lived. Just as the Taylors had begun planning their retirement to a southern plantation, Zachary’s heroics in the Mexican War thrust him into the national spotlight and then the presidency. Margaret, who did not want to serve as First Lady, delegated her official duties to her daughter. When Zachary fell ill and died the year after entering the White House, the grief-stricken Margaret retired to Mississippi for the remaining two years of her life.

Early Life

Margaret Mackall Smith was born September 21, 1788, on a plantation near St. Leonard’s, Maryland, in rural Calvert County between Chesapeake Bay and the Patuxent River. Peggy, as the family always called her, was the younger daughter of Major Walter Smith, a state militia commander during the American Revolution, and Ann Mackall Smith. The Smiths were members of the plantation gentry and enjoyed a comfortable social and economic position but were not among the grandees of planter society.

Little is known of Margaret’s childhood or education, but they were probably similar to those of other southern planters’ daughters: a grounding in the basics by an itinerant tutor or her mother, with a heavy emphasis on household and domestic management as well as the social graces, in preparation for her presumed future as a planter’s wife. Eligible men in her neighborhood, however, must have been scarce or incompatible; the slender, attractive Peggy remained unmarried at the age of twenty-one.

For a woman who was not rich herself, choosing an acceptable husband—a man of similar social class with stable financial and professional prospects—was a matter to be taken quite seriously. Young women of marriageable age frequently went to visit relatives or friends in larger towns or resort areas, such as spas, where dances, parties, and promenades gave single people a greater opportunity to encounter one another, while their families assessed the financial advisability of any prospective union. The nineteenth-century view of matrimony was decidedly practical.

In 1809, Peggy came west for an extended visit with her elder sister Mary and her husband, Samuel Chew, who lived in the vicinity of Louisville. By this time, Kentucky had mostly outgrown its frontier past. Plantations were well established, and towns such as Louisville enjoyed many of the amenities of the eastern seaboard, including brick houses, shops, churches, a newspaper, and a very active social round. Among the ambitious young men of Louisville was Zachary Taylor, four years Peggy’s senior and the third son of a prominent local family.

The Taylors, originally from Virginia, had come to the area in 1785 and by this time owned several thousand acres of prime farmland as well as town property. Zachary had decided to pursue a military career, receiving his commission as first lieutenant in the regular Army in the spring of 1808. Serving in Louisiana, he had become ill and was sent home in the fall of 1809 to recuperate. It was probably then that he met Peggy Smith. He wrote of her: “I am confident the feminine virtues never did concentrate in a higher degree in the bosom of any woman than in hers,” and he never looked at another woman.

Marriage and Family

Margaret and Zachary were married the following summer, on June 24, 1810, with the groom receiving 324 acres of land as a wedding present from his father. During the first year of their marriage, the newlyweds lived in Louisville, where their daughter Ann Mackall was born, and Zachary was promoted to captain. With the outbreak of the War of 1812, he was posted to the Indiana territory, the first of many frontier assignments. Throughout his military career, Taylor generally served at outposts in the Western territories of Wisconsin, Michigan, or Minnesota as well as serving hardship duty in the backwoods of Louisiana and Mississippi. Not being a West Point graduate counted against him, but much more damaging to his career was the lack of significant “interest,” that is, influence, brought to bear in Washington on his behalf to gain rapid promotions and plush assignments.

For thirty-five years, Peggy accompanied her husband to one wilderness fort after another, unless active warfare threatened her life or those of their daughters. Ann Mackall had been followed by Sarah Knox (always called Knox), Octavia Pannill, and Margaret Smith. Discomfort, loneliness, or primitive conditions could not deter Peggy. In an era when officers on Western duty were seldom joined by their wives, being with Zachary was Peggy’s primary concern, even though their children had to be sent back East to be educated. With the addition of such comforts as mahogany dining room furniture, Peggy made each post a home, entertaining officers and travelers graciously and impressing them with her composure and quiet charm.

Life was tenuous in the nineteenth century, on or off the frontier. On a family visit in Louisiana, Peggy and her daughters contracted one of the region’s endemic fevers; the two youngest girls died, and their mother’s life was in danger. Zachary was distraught, writing, “At best her constitution is remarkable delicate. . . . my loss will be an irreparable one.” Peggy did recover, but she never shared her husband’s robust constitution, causing her family to worry about the state of her health throughout the rest of her life.

During the long years of Western exile, two more children were born: Mary Elizabeth (Betty) and Richard, their prized only son. The Taylors began to make plans for their retirement. While serving in Baton Rouge, Taylor had begun to purchase plantations in Louisiana and Mississippi, which were put in the hands of managers while he was away on active duty. They lived in Peggy’s favorite home, the old Spanish commandant’s house in Baton Rouge. A simple four-room cottage with galleries all around, it sat on a bluff on the Mississippi River. Open and breezy, it was surrounded by gardens and trees. It exactly suited the lifestyle they had evolved over the years, intimate and unpretentious, with room for family and close friends but no provision for grand entertainments or unwanted guests.

All three of their daughters married military officers, despite their parents’ wish for them to enjoy comfortable civilian lives. Given the family circumstances, however, the Taylors could hardly have expected anything else: all eligible bachelors the girls met were Army men. They approved Ann’s choice of assistant surgeon Robert Crooke Wood and Betty’s, nearly twenty years later, of Lieutenant Colonel William W. S. Bliss, her father’s adjutant and most trusted adviser. For reasons still unclear, they adamantly opposed the courtship of their second daughter, Knox, by Lieutenant Jefferson Davis. The young couple eventually prevailed, but the Taylors refused to attend the wedding ceremony at an aunt’s house in Louisville, where, of the immediate family, only the Woods were present. Within less than three months, the newlyweds contracted malaria while visiting Davis’s sister in Louisiana, and Knox died. The estrangement between the Taylors and Jefferson Davis continued for many years, but they were eventually reconciled. They came to look on him as another son-in-law, and his second wife, Varina Howell Davis, was considered a daughter of the family.

The life trajectory of “Old Rough and Ready,” as the broad-shouldered, bandy-legged Zachary Taylor was known by his soldiers, was completely changed by the Mexican War. Despite assiduous attention to duty and success in battle, promotions had come slowly and grudgingly during nearly forty years in the Army. Then, in 1845, General Taylor was posted to Texas to press U.S. claims there against Mexico, and his signal victories at Palo Alto, Resaca de la Palma, Monterrey, and Buena Vista suddenly shot him into national attention. On his return to Louisiana in 1847, he found himself a hero and was widely touted as a possible presidential candidate.

An apolitical man who had never voted in his life, Taylor hesitated at first to have his name put forward by the Whig Party, perennial losers in presidential elections, who wanted a hero to capture the White House for them. Peggy Taylor, like many First Ladies before and since, was horrified to see her husband’s candidacy assume inevitability just when she had expected a quiet retirement. She prayed nightly that her husband would not become president.

When Zachary was handily elected in 1848, Peggy refused to accept the corollary that she also had a position to fill. Pleading poor health (very much exaggerated) as an excuse, she delegated all White House ceremonial functions to her daughter Betty Bliss, a delightful and efficient young woman who thoroughly enjoyed serving as her father’s hostess on formal occasions.

Presidency and First Ladyship

The position of First Lady—unofficial, undefined by law, and unelected—is inherently laden with ambiguity and contradictory expectations. Whatever her own wishes, the American public regards the president’s wife as the hostess of the nation. First Ladies have always been criticized for perceived social shortcomings, but such sniping was initially kept more or less private. When the capital of the United States was moved to the raw, unfinished village of Washington, D.C., in 1800, society there was predominantly masculine and informal, as the wives of legislators stayed at home.

By 1849, though still lagging behind established cities, Washington was indubitably the center of national political power. European diplomats, longtime congressmen, and successful military officers and their families came to be semi-permanent residents of the city, and the older area of Georgetown was home to a resident population of wealthy and socially prominent merchants, bankers, developers, and professionals. These Washingtonians saw the capital as their city and its social life as their concern. The occupants of the White House, particularly Westerners, were seen as outsiders whose tenure would be brief. The president and his lady should, they believed, adapt to the city’s society, not attempt to lead it.

When the Taylors arrived in the capital, the rules of society were almost as rigid as those of any European court. Society doyennes decided who would, or would not, be received, sometimes precipitating a political crisis by their actions. Frontier representatives were sneered at for their perceived gaucheries. The ritual of paying calls—sometimes as many as fifty in a day—was an essential way of occupying time for women and some men. Fortunes were spent on houses and their furnishings, gowns, servants, food and drink, hothouse flowers, and all the other appurtenances of social status seeking. The favored adjectives of the day were “choice,” “rare,” “select,” or “exclusive,” the old democratic ideals forgotten. After years of developing a simple and satisfying lifestyle, Peggy simply had no interest in joining this social scene or allowing herself to be patronized by society matrons. She was perfectly capable of serving as the president’s hostess—she had, after all, trained Betty Bliss—but she did not care to do so.

Brief as it was, Taylor’s presidency was filled with violent controversy: The Union groaned under the pressure of pro- and antislavery forces as they battled over the question of extending slavery into the Western territories. Although he was a plantation owner and slaveholder, Taylor was as pro-Union as his predecessor Andrew Jackson. The newspapers of the day were viciously partisan, without any pretense of fairness. Democratic papers commonly portrayed Taylor as an illiterate, dialect-speaking hick. Beginning with the divorced Rachel Jackson, newspapers had also begun to make a habit of attacking First Ladies. The refined and quiet Peggy Taylor was lampooned as a weather-beaten, pipe-smoking, backwoods crone who was kept out of the limelight to avoid embarrassing the White House. As the object of such scurrilous attacks, it is no wonder that she did not care to mix with capital politicians.

Far from being a recluse, Peggy led a very active private life, constantly surrounded by her family and favored visitors. A devout Episcopalian, she attended services nearly every day at the nearby Saint John’s Episcopal Church and was active in the Sunday school movement. The private quarters of the White House were full of comings and goings, and the Taylors’ grandchildren, nieces, nephews, and other young people kept things lively. Sympathetic friends such as Varina and Jefferson Davis, Daniel Webster, and Martha Washington’s grandchildren, George W. P. Custis and Nelly Custis Lewis, were frequent and welcome visitors.

Despite a serious illness the year before, President Taylor’s final sickness and death were completely unexpected. On July 4, 1850, a broiling hot day, he attended the lengthy ceremonies marking the inauguration of the Washington Monument. Back at the White House, he bolted raw fruit and perhaps vegetables and washed them down with icy milk and water. Soon he was suffering from cholera morbus, a term in those days for acute indigestion and diarrhea. At first the indisposition seemed minor, but five days later the president was dead.

Peggy gave way completely to her grief. In the intervening days before the funeral on July 13, the sobbing widow had the undertaker remove the ice from Zachary’s body and lay it out several times for repeated farewells. Funerals were primarily masculine affairs in the nineteenth century, and many widows including Mrs. Taylor did not attend the public ceremonies. Despite Millard Fillmore’s thoughtful offer, as the new president, to await her convenience, Peggy left the White House the evening of the funeral and never again mentioned the presidential mansion, even as she apportioned keepsakes to friends and supporters. Four months later, she met with her daughters and son in New Orleans to divide Zachary’s considerable property. Peggy then retired to East Pascagoula, Mississippi, where she lived with the Blisses until her death on August 18, 1852.

Legacy

Peggy Taylor was very much an anomaly among First Ladies. Although there have been reclusive presidential wives who did little public entertaining, their reasons—severe illness or chronic depression—have been indisputable. Peggy’s health was not robust, but she led an active social life with family and friends, while declining to serve as the official hostess of the White House. Zachary Taylor had chosen to become president; Peggy Taylor chose not to serve as First Lady.

Bibliography

Bauer, K. Jack. Zachary Taylor: Soldier, Planter, Statesman of the Old Southwest. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993.

Dyer, Brainerd. Zachary Taylor. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1943.

Farrell, John J., ed. Zachary Taylor, 1784-1850, and Millard Fillmore, 1800-1874: Chronology, Documents, and Bibliographical Aids. Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.: Oceana, 1971.

Hamilton, Holman. Zachary Taylor. 2 vols. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1951.

Nevins, Allan. Ordeal of the Union: Fruits of Manifest Destiny, 1847-1852. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1947.