ZACHARY TAYLOR

12th President, 1849–1850

Historian: Elbert B. Smith

Elbert Smith was a professor at several universities before joining the faculty at the University of Maryland. A former Fulbright Scholar of American History and International Relations, he later became president of the Fulbright Association. He joined C-SPAN on May 31, 1999, during the network’s yearlong American Presidents television series to discuss his book, The Presidencies of Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore.

Zachary Taylor was born in Virginia, but he grew up in northern Kentucky near Louisville. His political opponents tried to make him out to be an ignorant, uneducated backwoods general who came from nowhere and didn’t know anything. It’s totally incorrect. I’ve always had trouble understanding why so many historians picked that up and got that myth going. Actually, he came from very distinguished parentage. He and President James Madison have the same great-grandfather, who was a very wealthy member of the Virginia elite. His mother came from a very prominent family, the Struthers family. Through her, he was descended from two leading people who came on the Mayflower. So, he had a very distinguished heritage.

His father was reasonably wealthy; he had a big plantation. Zachary Taylor had very little formal schooling. We can only speculate on this, but I have to believe that he probably had private tutors because he wrote very well and had a very strong vocabulary, and he had a very strong understanding of what was going on. He was criticized then and now because he never voted, but that’s primarily because he was usually out on the wild frontier somewhere defending settlers against Indians, or in many cases, defending Indians against the settlers. That was [a]… reason I liked Taylor because he believed that the US government should honor its treaties. If the government said the Indians can keep this amount of land, he was ready to burn the houses of white settlers who got on it. So, he was never very popular with the white settlers. He believed that if the United States made a deal that we should stick by it, and he was furiously angry at his cousin President James Madison because Madison won’t back him up on this. He wrote some very strong language to both Madison and the secretary of war on this.

Taylor had very little military training. What happened in the wars in those days, the lieutenants were usually selected from the educated, better-off families. So, he simply went into the army as a lieutenant, and by and large did get on-the-job training. From the beginning, he showed a tremendous ability to command. He went up the ladder;… he was almost always in command of something.

He had a strong voice. In battle, he was a great battlefield commander… and he was constantly exhorting his troops. He was a cheerleader- type general who exposed himself to great danger. It’s a wonder he didn’t get killed, or at least seriously wounded.

His wife [Margaret] went with him almost everywhere except when he was actually fighting battles. When he was commander of the different forts and bases out in the West, she was right there with him. And, if you can partly measure a man’s enlightenment by his ambitions for his children, his daughters got the best education available; he sent them back East for a good education. His son spent a year in Paris in school, then spent a year in Edinburgh, and then came back and graduated from Yale. He didn’t want his son to be a military man. He said, “Get a literary education,” and he saw to it that his son got the best possible kind of literary education. His children adored him. Between commands, at one point where he had about six months off, he headed towards the North, and he took his family there. They went to New York. They went to Buffalo. They went to Boston. He traveled all over the North. He didn’t… believe any of the Southern stereotypes about the North; he looked at the North for himself, and this is why he was ready to defend the North’s right to oppose slavery.

One of the reasons why he didn’t resent antislavery people was that he had no guilt feelings. Unlike Andrew Jackson who died broke and George Washington who died money broke [but land wealthy] and Thomas Jefferson who died money broke—all of these people who owned slaves and died broke—Taylor died a very rich man. He started with practically nothing. He inherited a very small plantation, which he sold, in Baltimore. Even though he spent all of his time in the army and got a very low salary, he kept accumulating plantations and slaves, and he kept making money.… So, Taylor never felt any guilt about slavery.

Perhaps one of his closest friends was [future Confederate president] Jefferson Davis. Taylor was serving out on the frontier, and Davis was a lieutenant under his command. Taylor’s daughter fell in love with Jefferson Davis. Taylor did not like this. He tried to tell her, “Look at what a harsh, tough life your poor mother had to lead following me around out there on the frontier. You don’t really want to marry an army officer.” This made Davis so angry that at one point he threatened to challenge his commanding officer to a duel, but fortunately Davis’s friends talked him out of this.… Taylor gave in; Davis ultimately left the army and married Taylor’s daughter, but then [she] died shortly thereafter. Taylor and Davis were finally reconciled.

… In the War of 1812 and in the Indian wars, he performed very bravely and very skillfully, and he went up the [command] line. He was not popular on the frontier [because] he always spoke his mind. He thought the [1832] Black Hawk War, for example, was caused by the American government violating its pledges; but having spoken his mind, he obeyed his orders and fought them on the battlefield. He was against the Mexican War [1846–1848], and he had opposed the annexation of Texas; he didn’t want to start this war, but once it started, he fought it and fought it extremely well.… He won battles. He treated the Mexicans with great respect. For example, after the [May 1846] Battle of Matamoros, he had his own doctors take care of the Mexican wounded and even, at one point, contributed several hundred dollars of his own money to help the people he had just defeated.

When he took Monterrey, Mexico, [in September 1846,] he incurred the wrath of President James K. Polk. Polk was, by this time, jealous of the possible presidential aspirations of Taylor. When he took Monterrey after several days of really fierce fighting and a lot of bloodshed, the Mexicans offered to surrender if Taylor would promise not to advance for a couple of months. General Taylor wasn’t going anywhere for a couple of months anyhow because his army had just fought a terrible battle. So, he accepted this, and he always argued that he saved several hundreds of lives by so doing, and probably did.… He also put out proclamations, and did his best to enforce them, that there should never be any warfare against civilians and that, as much as possible, the daily life of people should go on just like it was. This was the way he handled himself with the Mexicans.… He was very honorable in this respect. He honored his opponents. He would win a battle, and he would make agreements, and he would keep the agreements.

When the Mexican War started, President Polk made Winfield Scott the commander in chief, but then Scott dilly-dallied around in Washington for three or four months getting ready, and Polk got impatient. He didn’t exactly fire him, but he shifted the burden and made Taylor the commander in chief. When Taylor won these spectacular battles and people started talking about him, including Abraham Lincoln,… [as a potential candidate] for president, Polk then got jealous and reversed it. He made Scott the commanding general again and took most of Taylor’s best troops and gave them to Scott for the invasion of Veracruz. He left Taylor with a bunch of raw recruits to withstand a much bigger army from Mexican general Santa Anna. Of course, Taylor won. Taylor got great satisfaction from the fact that he got elected president [in 1848] and Scott [who was also a contender for the Whig nomination that year] did not.

Taylor didn’t find out he had been nominated for a month [after the Whig convention]. He often got what we today call fan letters, and they often came postage due. So, he simply sent a notice that he would no longer accept anything where postage was due. The official letter informing him that he had been nominated to run for president came postage due, and it got sent back to the dead letter office. [During the campaign,] he didn’t make any speeches. He wrote a few public letters in which he expressed his principles, and one of those was that he would only veto bills that were unconstitutional.

He and [his running mate, former New York congressman] Millard Fillmore did not know each other before they were put on the same ticket.… The Whig Party had been waiting twenty years to get some of the federal jobs, the patronage. The Taylor administration had a terrible time passing out jobs; the cabinet was kept up night after night after night on this. It was a difficult situation. Patronage in New York was extremely important. Millard Fillmore was the leading Whig in western New York, from Buffalo. Senator William Seward was the leading Whig in eastern New York, from Albany. The most powerful newspaper in New York was run by Thurlow Weed, who dreamed of making his dear friend Seward president. There was a fierce rivalry between Fillmore and Seward. Seward ingratiated himself into Taylor’s friendship and ended up getting the patronage and cut Fillmore loose. Fillmore’s friends were very unhappy about this, and Fillmore was not happy about it either. It would have been difficult to be close to both Seward and Fillmore, and Seward got there first. So, Taylor and Fillmore’s relationship was cool, but Fillmore always, in things he wrote and said, was very respectful. He admired Taylor. Fillmore was a good man in this respect, too. He did not build up resentments.

… William Henry Seward’s… most noteworthy comment in the Senate was, “The Constitution recognizes slavery, but there’s a higher law than the Constitution, God’s law, which does not recognize slavery.” Taylor loved to have Seward over [to the White House] for dinner and argue with him. Southerners were furious;… they believed that Seward was influencing him. Seward didn’t influence him, but Taylor always remembered that he was a minority president. The other two candidates got 160,000 more votes than he did. He didn’t have a majority in either house of Congress. He needed to unite North and South. So, I must say that Seward used Taylor,… but Taylor didn’t use Seward, because he was trying to bring the two sections together behind some of the other policies that had nothing to do with slavery. And, as far as he was concerned, the best way to do this was to keep the sections at peace, to deal fairly with each section, and to try to get them to look at the whole situation realistically, which a great many people did not.

This 1848 campaign banner labels Gen. Zachary Taylor as the “People’s Candidate for President” and describes vice-presidential candidate Millard Fillmore simply as “Whig Candidate.” Courtesy Library of Congress

Taylor’s cabinet, particularly the secretary of the Treasury, William Meredith, got very close with him. In fact, if you read the letters that his cabinet wrote to their families, they had tremendous respect for him and affection for him. And while Taylor’s enemies were saying that he was just the tool of his cabinet, they made it quite plain in their own writings that he was the boss, he was always the boss. Taylor made the decisions.

I’d done a book on the presidency of James Buchanan, so I knew this period very, very well, and I had more or less accepted a long-held view by a lot of historians. It’s very dramatic and makes a good story, but it’s not true at all, namely that Taylor opposed the Compromise of 1850 simply because he was jealous of Henry Clay and then he died just in time for Millard Fillmore to save the compromise. That’s quite inaccurate. To begin with, Taylor did not oppose the Compromise of 1850. As long as the compromise was in the form of separate bills dealing with each issue, Taylor was for it. But when they combined it into one bill, which could not possibly pass because there were too many people opposed to one or more parts of it—that he opposed. He considered, and I think quite correctly, that combining the compromise measures into one bill was a Southern ploy to get what they could get in return for a free California.

Taylor had sent a slaveholding Georgian out to California to help the Californians form a state. He believed that the best way to avoid a conflict between the North and South was to make California and New Mexico into states as soon as possible. Once they became states, there would be no arguments because state rights, after all, was a holy writ for the South. The argument always was whether or not they could have slavery while they were still territories because territories belong, in theory, to all the states. He instructed his envoy to California: don’t take sides on the slavery issue.

The Southerners, by combining the measures into one, put in another part that Taylor was very strong on. When Texas won its independence from Mexico in 1836, it wrote a constitution, and it defined its boundaries to include large parts of four Mexican states that had never at any time been part of Texas. Texans always do things in a big way. This included two-thirds of present-day New Mexico. When the war started, and the United States invaded New Mexico,… the Mexican generals put out proclamations that they would fight to the death, and then they surrendered without firing a shot.… As part of the agreement by which Mexico surrendered, New Mexico was promised by the United States that it would maintain its integrity; it would be a territory and would eventually become a state.

Then, Texas starts claiming its rights in New Mexico. In 1848, the Texas legislature organized New Mexico and their six Texas counties and announced they were sending officials to take it over.… That was a very important sectional issue because as part of Mexico, both California and New Mexico had been free.… But if it belonged to Texas, it is slave because Texas is a slave state. Taylor was absolutely determined to enforce the promise that the US government had made. He sent extra troops to New Mexico to protect it. This is a very important issue; by tying the two together, the Southerners hoped… maybe they can make a swap. Taylor… knew if [the Compromise of 1850] ever passed, it would pass only with Southern support after they had amended [the bill] to give New Mexico to Texas—and he would not stand for this. Ultimately, Taylor had his way. After he died, they defeated the omnibus bill, and the compromise that passed was almost exactly what Taylor wanted: California came in as a free state; New Mexico kept its original boundaries and got a territorial constitution with no mention of slavery.… I’ve argued this [point] that I don’t think he would have vetoed any part of [the compromise] bill at all.

If war had come, would Taylor have prosecuted it more vigorously than Abraham Lincoln? I think the answer is no. I do not believe that [President] Taylor would have ever drawn his sword, would have ever fought a war against the South. He owned 140 slaves. His son was later a Confederate general, and this is what he kept saying over and over: that he would defend the rights of the South, and he would also defend the rights of the North. His objective was to prevent a civil war in 1850. His approach to the South was, you can’t get New Mexico, you can’t get California, so why stir up the North about it? Why do you incur all of this enmity against yourself? Settle for what we’ve got. No one is threatening slavery at all in 1850. In fact, no one was threatening slavery where it existed in 1860. So, I don’t think President Taylor would have ever gone to war against the South.

[On July 9, 1850, President Zachary Taylor died in office after a four-day bout with an intestinal disorder. Some conspiracy theorists suggested for years that he had been poisoned.] But if you’re looking at Southerners wanting to get rid of Taylor, the vice president was Millard Fillmore, who was on record as an opponent of slavery.… Fillmore owned no slaves. He had no identification with the South whatsoever. Taylor did. Taylor said to Jefferson Davis, “So far as slavery is concerned, we, of the South, must throw ourselves on the Constitution and defend our rights to the last. And when arguments would no longer suffice, we will appeal to the sword, if necessary to do so. I will be the last to yield an inch.” So, why would Southerners want to get rid of a man who talks that way in favor of one who has no connection [to the South]?

[In 1991, to try and get answers to the conspiracy theories,] they did exhume him, and tissue samples were examined by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. They had a pretty good chance to examine him because his wife, Margaret, would not let them embalm him; she had trouble accepting the fact that he was dead.… People that I know in Kentucky thoroughly examined the remains and found no trace of poison whatsoever. I would not impugn either their ability or their integrity. So, I really do not think that he was assassinated or poisoned by anyone. His doctors did perform some horrendous medical steps, but they did that to everyone. They bled him; they blistered him; they dosed him up to here with calomel, which is part mercury. But these decisions really were raised by committee of doctors rather than just one. Taylor had several doctors watching over him.

I came to like Zachary Taylor very much. He was very straightforward. He was totally honest. He knew where he wanted to go. He had a better understanding of the [contemporary political] situation than most of his contemporaries. He never hesitated to stand up for what he thought was right. The fact is that he was a slaveholder, but he made it plain in letters to his former son-in-law Jefferson Davis that while he would fight for the South if necessary, he would also defend the right of Northerners to criticize slavery. He said, in effect, they have just as much right to criticize it as we do to defend it. And he [promised] he would be a president not of one section—that the North, East, South, and West would all have equal rights, and he would defend the rights of the entire nation, that he would be a president of the whole nation.

The last few lines of Zachary Taylor’s inaugural address sum up his attitude towards what his job was. He said, “For more than half a century during which kingdoms and empires have fallen, this Union has stood unshaken. Upon its preservation must depend our own happiness and that of countless generations to come. Whatever dangers may threaten it, I shall stand by it and maintain it in its integrity to the full extent of the obligations imposed and the powers conferred upon me by the Constitution.”