I've finished President #12, General Zachary Taylor, which means we're over a quarter of the way through our current 46 presidents. If I ever finish this venture, we'll definitely have had more than 46 presidents but let's celebrate the small victories where we can get them. Old Zack was a pretty boring subject so let's just get this over with.
Zachary Taylor was born into a well-off family of Virginia planters in 1784, making him the last president born before the adoption of the Constitution. His family moved out to Kentucky before he was even a year old. He was commissioned as an officer in the U.S. Army in 1808, and in 1810 he married Margaret Mackall Smith who also came from a well-to-do family. They had six children together, but only three of the six outlived their parents. Two of their daughters died in 1820 when malaria swept through the family, and their second daughter Sarah died at the age of 21 only three months after marrying Jefferson Davis.
Taylor committed his entire adult life to the military, and he was the first president to be elected without ever having held any political office. He had virtually no political experience, and he didn't seem much interested in being president at all. The Whigs chose him as their candidate based solely on their single previous victory running American war hero William Henry Harrison (who, if you'll remember, died after only one month in office), and despite the fact that Taylor was hardly a committed member of the Whig party. Taylor died suddenly after only sixteen months in office which means the only two Whig presidents ever elected both died in office. Coincidence?
Taylor's presidency was pretty forgettable. The country was embroiled in the conflict of whether or not to admit California, New Mexico, and Utah—all recently acquired in the Mexican-American War—as states or territories, slave or free. While California and New Mexico went ahead and drafted state constitutions for themselves as free states, they became political bargaining chips for the muckety-mucks in Washington to argue over. Despite being a slave-owner, Taylor was against the expansion of slavery, but he pretty much washed his hands of most political involvement and left everything up to Congress. The only thing really accomplished during his sixteen months as president was the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty which, to be honest, wasn't much of an accomplishment as it basically kept the U.S. and Britain from retaining any rights to an Atlantic-Pacific canal which in practicality meant that no canal was built for another 50 years. And when Theodore Roosevelt determined to get that canal built, the treaty of Taylor's presidency ended up being more of a headache than anything for Roosevelt to get around.
And that's pretty much it. Taylor got sick on July 4, 1850 and died less than a week later. His wife, who was not at all happy that her husband was elected president (like, she prayed every night during the election that he would lose) and who lived on the second floor of the White House as a virtual recluse while her daughter filled the role of hostess, died two years later. They lived a pretty non-eventful, comfortable life. All their properties did well, and they never struggled with financial hardship.
This slim biography of Zachary Taylor by John S. D. Eisenhower was published in 2008 as part of The American Presidents series, and while it covered Taylor's life from beginning to end, it was sparse and sorely lacking in detail. That may be due in part to the fact that much of Taylor's personal papers and correspondence were destroyed in the Civil War when the Yankees burned his son's Louisiana home to the ground, but I learned more about Taylor's home life and children from a quick Wikipedia search than I did from reading this entire biography of him. Eisenhower only mentions family events in passing, and I wasn't sure how many children Taylor had or even that he had a son until the final pages of the biography when it was casually mentioned that Taylor instructed his son to buy a certain property shortly before his death. Eisenhower really hones in on Old Rough and Ready's military exploits which weren't anything to write home about anyway, and having just finished up an excellent biography of Polk recently which covered the Mexican-American War pretty thoroughly, I didn't learn much from this one. Scholars like to speculate on how a two-term Taylor presidency would have affected American history in regards to the Civil War, but I'm not as confident as they are that Taylor would have even been re-elected. His victory over Lewis Cass was hardly a sweep. While my trusted presidential biography source and authority Stephen Floyd says the definitive bio on Taylor by Jack Bauer isn't much better, I can't help thinking I maybe should have invested the time in it rather than this paltry offering.
Oh well. On to the next!
