Zachary Taylor

President of the United States (1849–1850)

• Born: November 24, 1784
• Birthplace: Orange County, Virginia
• Died: July 9, 1850
• Place of death: Washington, DC

After climaxing a nearly forty-year military career with major victories in the Mexican War, Taylor used his popularity as a war hero to win office as twelfth president of the United States but served only a little more than one year before he died.

Early Life

Born at a kinsman’s Virginia country home, Zachary Taylor was the third of eight children of Richard and Sarah Dabney Strother Taylor, both members of prominent Virginia families. His father had been a lieutenant colonel in a Virginia regiment during the American Revolution; his paternal grandfather, also named Zachary Taylor, was a wealthy planter and surveyor general of Virginia.

During 1769 and 1770, Richard Taylor surveyed land in central Kentucky and around the falls of the Ohio at the modern city of Louisville. In the spring of 1785, shortly after Zachary’s birth, Richard Taylor moved his family to Jefferson County, Kentucky, where he carved out a farm known as Springfield, near Louisville. As a youth, Zachary studied under Kean O’Hara, who would become one of Kentucky’s leading early-nineteenth-century educators, and Elisha Ayer, an itinerant Connecticut teacher. He also assisted his father with farm work.

In 1806, possessing a youthful passion for a military career, Taylor got a brief taste of army life as a volunteer in the Kentuckian militia. His long career as an officer did not commence until June 1808, however, when he received a commission as first lieutenant in the United States Army from Secretary of War Henry Dearborn. Appointed to the Seventh Infantry Regiment, he spent several months on recruiting duty in Kentucky, followed by temporary command of Fort Pickering, near modern Memphis, Tennessee, before reporting to General James Wilkinson at New Orleans in June 1809. A short time later, he contracted yellow fever and returned to Louisville to recover. While at home, he met Margaret Mackall Smith, whom he married on June 21, 1810. They had six children, four of whom lived to maturity. Their daughter Sarah Knox Taylor was the first wife of Confederate president Jefferson Davis. Richard Taylor, their only son, became a lieutenant general in the Confederate army.

After his recovery and marriage, Taylor was promoted to captain and assigned to General William Henry Harrison, territorial governor of Indiana. In April 1812, just before the War of 1812, Captain Taylor assumed command of Fort Harrison, near Terre Haute, which he successfully defended against an attack by several hundred American Indians of various bands the following September. Promoted to the rank of brevet major, he commanded several frontier posts during the second war with England.

In early 1815, Taylor won promotion to the full rank of major, but when the army was disbanded, he was reduced to his prewar rank of captain. Deciding to pursue private business, he declined reassignment, resigned his commission, and returned to his family’s Kentucky farm.

At thirty years old, Taylor epitomized neither the country gentleman nor the military hero. Five feet, eight inches in height, he was muscular and broad-shouldered with disproportionately long arms. He had an oval face, a wide, somewhat slanting brow, and prominent cheekbones. His long nose and hazel eyes gave him an eaglelike appearance.

Life’s Work

Zachary Taylor was devoted to the soil, but his passion for military service was even stronger. Thus, in 1816, when President James Madison offered to reinstate him at his previous rank of major, Taylor accepted. His initial assignment was command of Fort Howard, near Green Bay, Wisconsin, where he remained for two years. After a furlough in Kentucky, he received a promotion to lieutenant colonel in 1819 and was assigned to the Fourth Infantry at New Orleans. A series of commands and special assignments followed over the next twelve years.

In 1822, Taylor built Fort Jesup, Louisiana, and the following year, he served as commandant of Baton Rouge. In 1824, he was appointed superintendent general of the recruiting service at Cincinnati and Louisville and served until 1826, when he reported to Washington, DC, to serve on a board chaired by General Winfield Scott to study militia organization. In May 1828, Taylor assumed command of Fort Snelling, in the unorganized Minnesota territory. Fourteen months later, he took command of Fort Crawford at Prairie du Chien in the Michigan Territory, now part of Wisconsin. There he remained until mid-1830.

In April 1832, Taylor was promoted to colonel. Meanwhile, the Black Hawk War had erupted in Illinois. Colonel Taylor, on leave in Kentucky after recovering from an illness, sped to Galena, Illinois, and in May took charge of the First Infantry Regiment, under command of General Henry Atkinson. Three months later, Taylor participated in the decisive Battle of Bad Axe on the Mississippi River, north of Prairie du Chien. Black Hawk escaped the battlefield but was captured in late August. Taylor received custody of the defeated war chief and turned him over to Second Lieutenant Jefferson Davis, who escorted Black Hawk to Jefferson Barracks, Missouri.

With the end of the Black Hawk War, Taylor resumed command of Fort Crawford, where he remained until November 1836. During this duty, he demonstrated a strong interest in the education of both white and Indian children and attempted to control the harsh practices of whiskey merchants and fur traders in their dealings with the tribes in the region. Upon relinquishing his command at Fort Crawford, the colonel reported to Jefferson Barracks and took charge of the right wing of the army’s Western Department under General Edmund P. Gaines. In this capacity, Taylor exercised military authority over the entire Northwest.

Taylor’s new command lasted less than eight months. In July 1837, Taylor received instructions to take elements of the First Infantry from Forts Snelling and Crawford to Tampa Bay, Florida, where General Thomas S. Jesup was bogged down in the Second Seminole War. While the colonel was en route, Jesup violated a temporary truce and captured Seminole leader Osceola and about two hundred of his followers—but hundreds more waited deep in the Everglades.

Taylor and his troops arrived in Florida in the fall, and the colonel took command in the field. In early December 1837, after weeks of preparation, Taylor left Fort Gardiner with a force of more than one thousand regular and volunteer troops. Pursuing the Seminoles into the vicinity of Lake Okeechobee, Taylor made contact with a large force on Christmas Day. In a fierce battle that cost the lives of several of his top officers, Taylor routed the Seminoles and drove them from the field. The victory won for Taylor a promotion to brevet brigadier general, and a short time later, he replaced General Jesup as commander of the Florida theater.

General Taylor remained in Florida for two more years before assuming command at Baton Rouge. The following year, Taylor succeeded General Matthew Arbuckle as commander of the Second Department, Western Division, headquartered at Fort Smith, Arkansas. There he remained until May 1844, when he returned to Fort Jesup to assume command of the First Department. In June 1845, after the United States annexed Texas, he received orders to move his troops to Corpus Christi, on the Nueces River, to protect the new state in case of attack by Mexico. The following January, President James K. Polk ordered Taylor to move to the Rio Grande, occupying territory whose possession was a source of dispute. In late March, Taylor established a position opposite the Mexican town of Matamoros. A month later, several American soldiers were killed in a skirmish with Mexican troops. On May 13, 1846, Congress declared war on Mexico.

Taylor, however, did not wait for the declaration of war. On May 8, he engaged and defeated a much larger Mexican force at Palo Alto. The next day, he defeated the Mexicans again at Resaca de la Palma. As a result, Polk promoted him to major general and gave him command of the Army of the Rio Grande. More victories followed as he captured Monterrey in September and crushed a force under General Antonio López de Santa Anna at Buena Vista in February, 1847.

With the end of the Mexican War, Taylor returned to the United States, receiving a hero’s welcome at New Orleans in December 1847. A short time later, he retired to his home in Baton Rouge and began tending to the affairs of Cypress Grove, the Mississippi plantation he had acquired a few years earlier. His retirement was brief. In 1848, the Whig Party, starved for victory, nominated the military hero for president and secured his election over Democrat Lewis Cass and Free-Soiler Martin Van Buren.

Although a slaveholder, President Taylor was a staunch Unionist. Faced with the volatile issue of slavery in the territories acquired from Mexico, he supported California’s admission as a free state in 1849 and the organization of New Mexico and Utah without consideration of the slavery issue. When Congress convened in January 1850, Senator Henry Clay proposed a series of compromise resolutions designed to defuse these and related issues, including a Texas-New Mexico border dispute, the fugitive slave question, and the future of the slave trade in Washington, DC.

While Congress debated the Compromise of 1850 , delegates from nine southern states met in Nashville in June to consider the defense of southern rights and their section’s future within the Union. Moderate voices prevailed, but more radical “Fire-eaters” raised the specter of secession. Taylor, however, continued to resist any compromise that would promote the expansion of slavery and promised to meet disunionist threats with force.

The political deadlock remained on July 4, when Taylor attended a ceremony related to construction of the Washington Monument. He became overheated and, according to tradition, tried to cool off by consuming large quantities of cherries and iced milk. During that same evening he contracted gastroenteritis, from which he died on July 9.

Significance

In many respects, Zachary Taylor symbolized both the aspirations and the anxieties of the American people during the mid-nineteenth century. In a period pervaded by the spirit of Manifest Destiny, his victories in the Mexican War contributed to the nation’s acquisition of a vast new territory, including the future states of California, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and Utah. Only four days before his death, President Taylor signed the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty with England, the first diplomatic step toward construction of the Panama Canal.

As president, however, the victor of Buena Vista had to deal with the practical consequences of Manifest Destiny. As both a Unionist and a plantation owner with more than one hundred slaves, he embodied the conflicting social and economic forces that confronted the nation during the decade before the Civil War, especially citizens of the border states and Upper South. In Taylor’s case, Unionist sentiments formed during four decades in the nation’s military service triumphed over his own economic interests. During the decade that followed his death, however, a growing number of his fellow southerners resolved the conflict between slavery and Union in the opposite direction. When the election of Abraham Lincoln as president in 1860 convinced many southerners that they no longer could protect their “peculiar institution” within the Union, they chose secession. They elected as their president Zachary Taylor’s friend and son-in-law, Jefferson Davis.

Bibliography

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