Holding public office in America should be an honor and a trust. Because today (November 24) is his birthday, I’m going to talk about an American hero who really did merit the honor and trust of holding public office.
The American people elected this man, Kentucky’s Zachary Taylor, as president in 1848. They chose him not because he was a skillful politician, but because they appreciated his lifetime of service to the nation as a military officer who made good decisions and shared the dangers and deprivations of his men on the frontier and in battle. Taylor was one of the nation’s best military officers in the half-century before the Civil War.
Taylor himself was a kind and honest man who was accused of being an American Indian lover because he was much more fair to them than the average officer. During the Seminole War, Taylor and his men captured a number of blacks who lived with the Seminoles and he allowed them to go to Oklahoma with the Seminoles according to their wishes instead of selling them into slavery, like many speculators and slaveholders wanted him to do. Taylor punished men in his command who raped or robbed or wrongfully shot Mexican civilians during the Mexican War. He paid for the treatment of severely wounded abandoned Mexican soldiers out of his own pocket because he told his men they were from a fellow Christian land, even if they were Catholics instead of Protestants like he and most of his men were. And he stood up to the wrongful conduct of his superiors in the Polk Administration. All of the above marked “Old Rough and Ready” as a truly great man.
Taylor’s wife Peggy, instead of sipping juleps on the porch of their plantation, served on the frontier with him. She lived in rude housing, raised their children, sewed uniforms, nursed the sick, and wrote letters home for illiterate soldiers. She turned down the honor of being the First Lady (a term her husband coined) because she made a vow to God to turn down the honors of Society if only He would let her Zack come home safe from the Mexican War. (Their charming daughter Betty served in her stead as “Hostess of the White House.”) No woman of Peggy’s wealth would do these things today. She was a noble woman in the best sense of the word.
Zachary Taylor. “Old Rough and Ready.” Our 12th President.
Taylor, despite being a slaveholder, saw slavery was tearing the country apart. So he decided to limit slavery with an eye toward ending it. Senator William Seward evidently got him to consider using federal money to buy the slaves their liberty and set them up as sharecroppers or pioneers in the West. The Democrats, the party of slavery, opposed Taylor. Taylor’s own Whigs, like the GOP today, were led by establishment politicians who were spineless. Taylor defied them all. He maneuvered to get gold rushing California and mostly Spanish and Catholic New Mexico into the Union as free states to break the slavery deadlock in the Senate. He threatened secessionist politicians to their faces with hanging if he was to catch them in rebellion. He sent troops to New Mexico to keep Texans from seizing the land. And he considered the Mormons were degenerate polygamists, so he rejected their claims to Nevada, and large parts of Wyoming, New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, Idaho, and California, and kept them in limbo.
Senators like Whigs Henry Clay and Daniel Webster and most Democrat senators wanted to put a fugitive slave act on the books, which would allow white trash to crisscross the free states grabbing blacks and enslaving them. Taylor opposed this as well. Taylor said slaves ran away because they were being mistreated. Even though he was outnumbered in votes in the Senate and House, Taylor could veto legislation, order the Army to protect the people of New Mexico from invasion by Texans, and order the Navy to block a slaveholder attempt to invade Cuba and make it a slave state. “Old Rough and Ready” did all three.
Taylor blocked the Democrats and his own party’s senators’ attempt to sell out on the expansion of slavery. Taylor also blocked the demands of speculators to use federal money to cover bonds Texas had issued because it wasn’t the public’s duty to bail out greedy speculators. Taylor, on the verge of victory over the enemies of the Republic, sickened suddenly on the 4th of July, 1850, and died five days later. He served only 16 months as President, all of which were filled with tumult. After his death, a series of punk presidents (Fillmore, Pierce, Buchanan) and cowardly congresses made the Civil War inevitable. It remained for Taylor’s followers Abraham Lincoln and U.S. Grant to deal with this horrible disaster.
Some speculated Taylor was poisoned to make it possible for Millard Fillmore and Congress to roll over for the slaveholding interests and those who held Texas bonds who wanted big money. The coroner of Jefferson County, Kentucky, at the request of more than 100 descendants of Zachary Taylor, exhumed Taylor in 1991. Since all that remained of Taylor were his bones, hair, and nails, the only poison forensic scientists could check him for that caused the symptoms he suffered was arsenic. Taylor had an arsenic level in him average for men of his era. They could not rule out poisoning by another method (one type of poisonous mushroom causes symptoms like Taylor suffered as he lay dying), so Taylor’s death remains an unsolved mystery.
Taylor looked for adult solutions to a terrible problem. He would use force to preserve the Union, and evidently leaned toward using federal money to pay slaveholders for the liberty of their slaves. Had he lived, the Civil War would have not occurred, or only a few states would have broken with the Union. if Taylor was still alive, most of the generals who would later lead the Confederacy would have listened to his counsel and would not have broken with the Union, because they served under him and admired him.
Taylor, by his service for the nation, and by his courage, honesty, and common sense, won the public’s trust, and proved himself worthy of it in the final mission of his life. He dared to confront the slavery issue which threatened the nation’s life, and died while doing so. His death was a national calamity every bit as big as the murder of his legendary supporter (and subordinate in the Black Hawk War) Abraham Lincoln.
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