Zachary Taylor

Zachary Taylor: Old Rough and Ready

At Buena Vista in February 1847, a sixty-two-year-old American general with roughly 6,000 men faced Santa Anna's army of 20,000 and beat it. The victory made him, in the Miller Center's estimate, a national hero of the order of Washington and Jackson. Two years later he was President of the United States. He had never held elected office, had never cast a vote in his life, and had never told anyone what he believed politically.

A Planter's Son with Bad Spelling

Taylor was born on 24 November 1784 into a Virginia planting family and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. His father did well: by the end he owned 10,000 acres, town lots in Louisville, and twenty-six enslaved people. Taylor had seven siblings, married Margaret Mackall Smith in 1810, and had six children, two of whom died young.

The family valued education; the boy did not take to it. The Miller Center is unusually blunt on the point: his handwriting, spelling and grammar remained "crude and unrefined" for the whole of his life. Whatever gift he had, it was not literary.

Forty Years on the Frontier

He took his first commission in 1808 and was posted to Fort Pickering, on the site of present-day Memphis. From that year until the day he entered the White House he served at frontier garrisons across the Mississippi Valley — a career of four decades in the field.

In 1812 he held Fort Harrison against attack in what has been described as the American forces' first land victory of the war. He campaigned against Native peoples across Wisconsin, Minnesota, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Kansas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Florida and Texas, fought Black Hawk's Sacs in Illinois in 1832 and the Seminoles in Florida in the late 1830s. His men called him "Old Rough and Ready" because he shared their hardships rather than commanding from comfort. He also grew rich: by 1850 his estate was reckoned at around $120,000 — the equivalent of some $6 million today — built on land in Kentucky, Louisiana and Mississippi.

Palo Alto to Buena Vista

The Mexican War of 1846 to 1848 made him famous. He beat larger Mexican forces at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma, then stormed Monterrey and inflicted heavy casualties, though the generous armistice he granted there drew criticism. Then came Buena Vista, and the reputation was sealed. A general who repeatedly won while outnumbered was exactly the figure a party looking for a candidate wanted.

The Man Who Had Never Voted

The Whigs wanted him and had to persuade him. Taylor had never voted and had never publicly revealed a political conviction. He agreed to run, and on 7 November 1848 — the first occasion, the Miller Center notes, on which the entire nation voted on the same day — he narrowly defeated the Democrat Lewis Cass and the Free-Soil candidate Martin Van Buren.

He arrived in office with a theory of the presidency that matched his career: the president should stand above party politics. It was a soldier's idea of civilian leadership, and it cost him. The Miller Center's judgement is that Taylor "probably damaged his cause by refusing to engage directly with Congress."

Statehood, and a Threat to Hang

His one large policy was clean and unexpected. Taylor owned enslaved people; he nonetheless opposed the expansion of slavery into the western territories, on the practical ground that it made no economic sense there. His proposed solution was to let California and New Mexico write their own constitutions and apply immediately for statehood, bypassing the poisonous congressional argument about slavery in the territories altogether.

Southern Democrats began talking of a secession convention. Taylor's answer had nothing of the lawyer about it: he said he would hang anyone who tried to disrupt the Union by force or by conspiracy. It is the most quoted sentence of his presidency, and it came from a Louisiana slaveholder.

He opposed the Compromise of 1850, the rival package of measures then being assembled in Congress to settle the same questions his statehood plan was meant to sidestep.

Cherries and Iced Water

On 4 July 1850 Taylor sat through Independence Day orations, walked along the Potomac, returned hot and tired, and "drank iced water and consumed large quantities of cherries and other fruits." Severe stomach pain set in and lasted five days. His physicians diagnosed cholera morbus. At about ten on the morning of 9 July he told his wife, "I have always done my duty, I am ready to die. My only regret is for the friends I leave behind me," and was gone. His funeral on 13 July drew some 100,000 people in Washington, with a hearse pulled by eight white horses and his own horse, Old Whitey, in the procession.

Rumours of poisoning survived him for 141 years. In 1991 his body was exhumed and neutron activation analysis found no arsenic; the conclusion was acute gastroenteritis.

Why Zachary Is Called a Genius

The claim cannot rest on intellect, and pretending otherwise would be worthless. Taylor's own biographical record notes that his spelling and grammar were crude to the end of his life, and he came to the presidency without a single day of political office or, apparently, a single vote cast. He was not a reader, a writer, or a theorist of government.

The genuine ability was tactical command, and it was formidable. Forty years of frontier soldiering produced a general who repeatedly won engagements against materially superior forces — Palo Alto, Resaca de la Palma, Monterrey, and above all Buena Vista, where roughly 6,000 men broke an army of 20,000. That skill consists of specific, hard things: reading terrain, holding a line under pressure, judging when an outnumbered force can attack, and above all commanding the loyalty of soldiers. "Old Rough and Ready" was not a public-relations invention; it came from troops who watched him take the same conditions they took.

There was also a strand of political intelligence that historians tend to underrate. His statehood plan for California and New Mexico was a genuinely ingenious piece of constitutional footwork, designed to route around the argument that was tearing Congress apart. And his readiness to threaten secessionists with hanging showed a clarity about the stakes that his far more experienced successors — Fillmore, Pierce, Buchanan — conspicuously lacked.

The counter-case is that none of it worked. He held office for sixteen months, refused to deal with Congress on the theory that presidents should float above party, and thereby damaged his own programme. His death handed the government to Fillmore, who promptly backed the Compromise of 1850 and, in the Miller Center's phrase, cancelled out much of the impact of Taylor's presidency. He was a great soldier and an unfinished president.

Legacy

Taylor is the last president elected from a party that would soon cease to exist, and a slaveholder who nonetheless took a hard line against secession. What he actually left is a counterfactual: a Southern general who would have fought to hold the Union together in 1850, removed by a bowl of cherries and five days of untreatable illness, and replaced by a man who believed the opposite. The 1991 exhumation closed the conspiracy theories. It did not close the question of what he might have done with four years.

Achievements

• President of the United States (1849–1850)
• President-elect of the United States (1848–1849)
• president
• Congressional Gold Medal
• Educated at Virginia Military Institute