Zachary Taylor - 12th President of USA

by 2 people | Log in to rate

Ranked #5,652 in People, #104,652 overall

Zachary Taylor was the 12th President of the United States

Zachary Taylor (November 24, 1784 - July 9, 1850) was the 12th President of the United States

Known as "Old Rough and Ready," Taylor had a 40-year military career in the U.S. Army, serving in the War of 1812, Black Hawk War, and Second Seminole War before achieving fame leading U.S. troops to victory at several critical battles of the Mexican-American War. A Southern slaveholder who opposed the spread of slavery to the territories, he was uninterested in politics but was recruited by the Whig Party as their nominee in the 1848 presidential election.

Links to USA Presidents

Fetching RSS feed... please stand by

Presidency from 1784 to1850

President Taylor and his Cabinet, 1849 Daguerreotype by Matthew Brady
From left to right: William B. Preston, Thomas Ewing, John M. Clayton, Zachary Taylor, William M. Meredith, George W. Crawford, Jacob Collamer and Reverdy Johnson, (1849).

Although Taylor had subscribed to Whig principles of legislative leadership, he was not inclined to be a puppet of Whig leaders in Congress. He ran his administration in the same rule-of-thumb fashion with which he had fought Native Americans.
Under Taylor's administration, the United States Department of the Interior was organized, although the legislation authorizing the Department had been approved on President Polk's last day in office. He appointed former Treasury Secretary Thomas Ewing the first Secretary of the Interior.

By the time Taylor became President, the issue of slavery in the western territories of the United States had come to dominate American political discourse, and debate between extreme pro and anti-slavery viewpoints had become very pronounced. In 1849, he advised the residents of California, including the Mormons around Salt Lake, and the residents of New Mexico to create state constitutions and apply for statehood in December when Congress met.[ He correctly predicted that these constitutions would state against slavery in California and New Mexico. In December, and January 1850, Taylor told Congress that it should allow them to become states, once their constitutions arrived in Washington D.C. He also urged that there should not be an attempt to develop territorial governments for the two future states, since that might increase tension between pro and anti-slavery activists regarding a congressional prohibition of slavery in the territories.

Taylor and his Secretary of State, John M. Clayton, lacked much experience in foreign affairs before Taylor assumed the presidency, and Taylor was not directly involved in diplomacy or the development of American foreign policies. Taylor's administration attempted to stop a filibustering expedition against Cuba, argued with France and Portugal over reparation disputes, and supported German liberals during the revolutions of 1848. The administration confronted Spain, which had arrested several Americans on the charge of piracy, and assisted the United Kingdom's search for a team of British explorers who had gotten lost in the Arctic. The United States had planned to construct a canal across Nicaragua, but the British opposed the idea, arguing that they held a special status in neighboring Honduras. In what was described by one source as Taylor's "most important foreign policy move", delicate negotiations were performed with Britain, and a "landmark agreement" was reached called the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty. Both Britain and the United States agreed not to claim control of any canal that might be built in Nicaragua. The treaty is considered to have been an important step in the development of an Anglo-American alliance, and "effectively weakened U.S. commitment to Manifest Destiny as a formal policy while recognizing the supremacy of U.S. interests in Central America". The creation of the treaty was Taylor's last act of state.

The Compromise of 1850

The slavery issue dominated Taylor's short term. Although he owned slaves on his plantation in Louisiana, he took a moderate stance on the territorial expansion of slavery, angering fellow Southerners. He told them that if necessary to enforce the laws, he personally would lead the Army. Persons "taken in rebellion against the Union, he would hang ... with less reluctance than he had hanged deserters and spies in Mexico." He never wavered. Henry Clay then proposed a complex Compromise of 1850 . Taylor died as it was being debated. (The Clay version failed but another version did pass under the new president, Millard Fillmore

Death

The true cause of Zachary Taylor's premature death is not fully established. On July 4, 1850, Taylor consumed a snack of milk and cherries at an Independence Day celebration. On this day, he also sampled several dishes presented to him by well-wishing citizens. Upon his sudden death, five days later on July 9, the cause was listed as gastroenteritis. He was buried in a mausoleum in Louisville, Kentucky, at what is now the Zachary Taylor National Cemetery.
In the late 1980s, Clara Rising theorized that Taylor was murdered by poison and was able to convince Taylor's closest living relative and the Coroner of Jefferson County, Kentucky, to order an exhumation. On June 17, 1991, Taylor's remains were exhumed and transported to the Office of the Kentucky Chief Medical Examiner, where radiological studies were conducted and samples of hair, fingernail and other tissues were removed. The remains were then returned to the cemetery and received appropriate honors at reinterment. Neutron activation analysis conducted at Oak Ridge National Laboratory revealed arsenic levels several hundred times lower than they would have been if Taylor had been poisoned.

Despite these findings, assassination theories have not been entirely put to rest. Michael Parenti devoted a chapter in his controversial 1999 book History as Mystery to "The Strange Death of Zachary Taylor", speculating that Taylor was assassinated and that his autopsy was botched. It is suspected that Taylor was deliberately assassinated by arsenic poisoning from one of the citizen-provided dishes he sampled during the Independence Day celebration

Learn about other USA Presidents

Would you like to learn more about the other USA Presidents?

You may find out about the others by following links from this site which is called
USA Presidents