Zachary Taylor

Zachary Taylor was the twelfth president of the United States and died sixteen months into the term. He spent forty years in the army before that, fighting in the War of 1812, the Black Hawk War and the Second Seminole War, and his men called him Old Rough and Ready for his indifference to uniform and his habit of sitting sideways on his horse. Polk sent him into the disputed strip between the Nueces and the Rio Grande in 1846, where the clash that started the Mexican-American War took place. He won at Palo Alto, Resaca de la Palma and Monterrey, then held off a Mexican army several times his strength at Buena Vista in 1847 after Polk had transferred most of his regulars to Winfield Scott. The victory made him a national figure and the Whigs nominated him in 1848, although nobody was sure what he believed and he had never voted in his life. He was a Louisiana slaveholder who nevertheless opposed the extension of slavery into the territories taken from Mexico, urged California and New Mexico to apply for statehood directly as free states, and told southern leaders threatening secession that he would lead the army against them himself. He died on 9 July 1850 after a bout of gastroenteritis, and the compromise he had been blocking passed within weeks under his successor. His body was exhumed in 1991 to test a poisoning theory; the arsenic levels were normal. His son-in-law was Jefferson Davis, who would become president of the Confederacy. He owned well over a hundred enslaved people and never freed them, which sits alongside his opposition to extending slavery westward rather than cancelling it. He was the last president to hold enslaved people while in office.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history