American History Hit - President Zachary Taylor

Episode Date: January 8, 2024

Once the most popular man in America, hero of the Mexican-American war Zachary Taylor is our twelfth President and the subject of this episode.To find out what Taylor managed to achieve in his 16 months in office, and how his presidency was marred with debates over the spread of enslavement across the newly won West, Don speaks to Cecily Zander from Texas Woman's University.Produced by Freddy Chick and Sophie Gee. Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Dan Snow, James Holland, Mary Beard and more.Don’t miss out on the best offer in history! Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 for 3 months with code AMERICANHISTORYHIT1 sign up now for your 14-day free trial https://historyhit/subscription/You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. With rifle shot whizzing close overhead, soldiers of the U.S. Army, the Second Indiana, Second Illinois, Kentucky, and Arkansas volunteers and others,

confront a determined attack by Mexican forces under the command of General Lopez de Santa Ana in what will become known as the Battle of Buena Vista. Enemy cannons have taken a severe toll on the Americans' weak left flank, but U.S. troops, though outnumbered by thousands, are able to reposition. their superior artillery to counter the assault. Amidst the chaos and clatter of war, as American troops in navy blue wool push forward against the light blue uniforms of the Mexican lines,

one can spy a steady-eyed figure in the midst. U.S. Major General Zachary Taylor, atop his beloved steed, old whitey. Never one for pomp or pretense, Taylor is uniformed modestly, plainly. He even wears a disheveled straw hat. It's an appearance and demeanor. Ciener cultivated from so many years of rugged combat, earning him the affectionate nickname,

old rough and ready, among his men. Today, under Taylor's leadership, they will move to surprising victory against the odds here at Buena Vista, a military triumph that will go far in burnishing Taylor's political ambitions back home, eventually carrying him far beyond the battlefield, all the way to the presidential mansion. Let us invoke a continuance of the same protecting care which is a led us from small beginnings to the eminence we this day occupy, and let us seek to deserve that continuance by prudence and moderation in our councils, by well-directed attempts to assuage the bitterness, which too often marks unavoidable differences of opinion, by the promulgation

and practice of just and liberal principles, and by an enlarged patriotism, which shall acknowledge no limits, but those of our own widespread republic. Hello, history hitters. It's Don Wildman. And in today's episode, we head back to the White House. Still called the presidential mansion in March 1849, when Zachary Taylor is sworn into office as the 12th president of the United States. Proceeded by James K. Polk, number 11, Taylor, will be succeeded by his vice president,

as we will soon discuss. Major General Zachary Taylor, triumphant hero of the recent Mexican. American War, his will be a presidency tinged with a fateful irony. Taylor inherits a circumstance largely of his own making. The spoils of the war in which he played such a prominent role would open up a squirmy can of worms. How to legislate the issue of slavery in the vast territories acquired from Mexico was developing into a duel between opposing forces of manifest destiny, a showdown over the fate of the American West to determine the moral ground of upon which this nation would forever stand.

Polk may have started the war, but it's on Taylor's watch that the battle in Congress ensues. And to explain how President Taylor attempted to manage this crisis in the short time he had left on earth, we have Cecily Zander, professor of history at Texas Woman's University, whose work and writing is focused on civil war history. Her new book, The Army Under Fire, Anti-Militarism in the Civil War era, comes out in 2024. Welcome, Professor Zander. Don, thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here. It's worth noting at the outset. I want to make an interesting historical note here. 1848, the year of Zachary Taylor's campaign for

presidency would have been one of celebration. We just won the war and gained tremendous territory. It's startling, really. In 1776, when we declared independence, the U.S. is around 809,000 square miles or something, and 13 states. Here we are, almost 75 years later, thanks to the Louisiana purchase, and the Mexican-American War, we are three million square miles and 30 states with more to come. Meanwhile, over in Europe, it's the year of revolution, 1848. Everywhere on that continent, there is massive unrest and revolution. So Americans are congratulating themselves. Our democratic experiment has proven itself.

We are expanding. Certainly if you're a white person, it's going very well. We are the future. Quite a time to become president, isn't it? Oh, absolutely. And I think you've sort of hit the nail on the head of the thing. that really defines Zachary Taylor's ideology, I think Taylor is perhaps the greatest nationalist of this era in terms of his view of the country and his true belief in American exceptionalism.

And I think that there's two strains of that. He sort of brings a revolutionary heritage to bear on the presidency. His father fought in the revolution. But he also is a soldier. And he did fight in that war to kind of extend the United States. And so he gives one state of the union address during his presidency. It's a 16-month presidency. But he does. talks exactly about that. He concludes with this idea that the United States is the only democratic experiment that is succeeding. And he makes direct reference to those European revolutions and their failures and the fact that these monarchies continue to dominate the European question. And he says, the United States has to be, he says, habitually fostered in every American heart. The kingdoms and

empires of Europe have fallen. And he says, but the union is unshaken. And so there's a lot of ironies in Taylor's presidency, but that belief in nationalism and that deep commitment to preserving the union as the country is growing to these ever larger proportions is a huge part of his outlook. Listeners should really hang their hat on that idea of nationalism because that figures prominently in his election to the presidency and his outlook on things. It's very interesting because he's a southerner, but he is also a military man. And so as this has become such a theme with the wigs and the Democrats, your good faith in the federal government has become this new element of presidential candidacies, really. There aren't too many military generals that have made it to the executive

mansion or the White House later. We have basically Washington, obviously, Andrew Jackson, U.S. Grant, Eisenhower, but it's not something Americans have ever been comfortable with, right? The separation of the government and the military should be. Right. Exactly. And it's a huge factor in why this is the case and it's much more pronounced in the 19th century. We sit here in a modern moment. We are very comfortable as Americans with the idea that the the armed forces are going to absorb the lion's share of the federal budget. It's really never a question of whether we're going to fund the military. In the 19th century, it was a much more precarious existence for soldiers. And they had to be apolitical. And I mean that in the sense that they had to serve wigs or

Democrats or later Republicans or Democratic Republicans and what have you. So they, really couldn't have a political ideology because it kind of compromised their position as representatives of the federal government. And so you have people like Taylor will say it and U.S. Grant will later say it. They never voted until they were civilians because they didn't believe it was their role as soldiers. But that doesn't make them friends of the government or it doesn't create a government that is necessarily friendly to them.

And in this period, what you have is that Democrats are very friendly to the army because the army is the main body of men who you. you have to expand slavery into the West. And I think a lot of our conversation is going to hinge on this. But what that means is that both the Whigs who oppose the expansion of slavery and later the Republicans who are going to come out of the wreckage of the Whig Party in the 1850s are very suspicious of the Army because they view it as an ally of the Democrats. They view federal soldiers as conservative and often pro-slavery.

And the evidence kind of bears this out, right? We're going to get to the Civil War 12 years from the point we're talking about. and you're going to have several hundred officers resign their commissions and fight to establish an independent slaveholding nation against the government that paid for their education and their salary and kept them employed for most of their careers. So there's reason for suspicion. But Taylor is someone who in this period views the military as one of the true apolitical and national institutions, which is why he believes he makes a good presidential candidate

because he thinks Americans should vote for him regardless of their politics. Compare that to the Air Force flying over the Super Bowl every year, you know, our complete good faith and embrace of our military. How interesting. Yeah, whereas, you know, in the 19th century, they tried to get them as far away from centers of population as possible. If you could put them in a tiny fort in the mountains of Colorado, so much the better. Keep them far away from society as possible. They're a bad influence. And then as you say, yeah, military demonstrations and flyovers and all kinds of things. It's a much more patriotic climate that we live in today. Surely a 20th century phenomenon. Before we delve into Taylor's time as president,

he is like so many of our early presidents from an agricultural upbringing in Virginia, specifically. I mean, he comes from Virginia, eventually Kentucky. So many of our early presidents come from this plantation background. But Taylor is always surprising to me because he's so otherwise known as a military man. Yeah, absolutely. So he's born in Orange County, Virginia, not far from James Madison's plantation, Montpelier, the Orange County Museum, if folks ever go visit, they have a bunch of Zachary Taylor paraphernalia, including his camp desk for the Mexican War.

But he's born there. His dad is a Revolutionary War veteran and is given land in Kentucky when Taylor is six years old. So the family relocates to what is near present-day Louisville, Kentucky. And he primarily grows up in Louisville in that area along the rivers. And we know that in the 19th century, those rivers are so important for slave traffic, for moving enslaved people and the products of slave labor from what it was then the West to the East and so on.

So Taylor is enmeshed in this slave holding environment. He does own slaves. There's some pretty strong evidence that he's the last president to bring enslaved people to the White House with him. So he will be the last president to own slaves as president. He buys several plantations in his lifetime. He's very interested in what crops are going to be successful. And so one reason he is more, he is less sanguine, I should say, about slavery moving into the West is because he doesn't think you're going to be able to grow cotton and tobacco in places like Texas and New Mexico, which are much more arid. And we know those crops are incredibly demanding on the soil and water usage. But he buys several plantations. He buys a plantation in Louisiana for his son, Richard Taylor. Richard Taylor will go on to be a prominent Confederate general and fight to preserve slavery with

the Confederacy. It is Taylor's. plantation, which I believe was called Fortune, that union troops burn in 1862, along with all of Zachary Taylor's correspondence. And so one reason that Taylor is a little less understood as a president is we don't have a lot of his lifetime letters, because inadvertently, these union troops who thought they were getting the better of this prominent Confederate general accidentally burned all of the correspondence of an American president. So it's one of those sort of little accidents in history. So Taylor is a slaveholder, and he owns enslaved people, and he doesn't It doesn't seem as far as we know to have too many qualms about the fact that he does own black people.

He's sort of like Henry Clay in this way. And Clay and Taylor kind of have these parallel careers. They buy for the Whig nomination in 1848. And Clay, also a slave owner, also a Kentuckian, is sort of trapped in this conundrum that I think Thomas Jefferson expressed best at the end of his life. The problem was slavery. Everyone knew it was a problem. Everyone knew its expansion was going to be the thing that really tested the

ability of the union to persevere, you have a wolf by the ears. You can't let it go, but you also don't want to be holding a wolf by the ears, right? You're in this classic conundrum. And so I think Taylor is very much stuck in that mode, but he does own enslaved people. He also opposes the expansion of slavery. So he is contradictory like so many of these 19th century figures at this time. Historians seem to differ on his career in the military. He's not a good student, for one thing. he gets a commission from family connections, not from something like West Point. He fights in the military in war of 1812, and then he's off to the frontier fighting Native American forces. He is posted everywhere, this guy, you know, in the early decades of the 1800s.

His poor wife and kids who have to follow him from Wisconsin to Florida, eventually making his name and his nickname fighting the Seminoles down there in Florida, right? Yep, absolutely. And that's one reason he was adamant. that his daughters would not marry military officers because he did not want them subjected to the life that he had subjected his own family to. Of course, I think fathers and daughters, it's always interesting. His oldest daughter defies that prohibition that she marries a young officer named Jefferson Davis. After Jefferson Davis resigns from the army, after serving his five years commission once he graduates from West Point. And unfortunately for Davis and his young bride,

he dies just less than a year into the marriage of, you know, one of this classic 19th century maladies. And Davis is heartbroken. And it's really difficult for him. And it sort of binds Davis and Taylor in this really interesting way. They become allies when Taylor becomes president. And Davis is by then a prominent senator from Mississippi. But yeah, Taylor's military service is a bit of a mixed bag. He was not adept at playing the political games that helped officers get promoted in the 19th century army. He wanted to let his actual actions do the talking. So he actually kind of leads the U.S. forces in the Black Hawk War, a war in which Abraham Lincoln participates, but jokingly always refers to as his only military experience. Lincoln tells a great story about being unable to remember

the command to get his troops from walking in line to walking in column. They're approaching a fence. There is only a small gap in the fence. Lincoln panics, orders a full halt to the line and says fallout and reform on the other side of that fence. So he solves the problem. But Taylor's the actual U.S. Army officer in charge in the Black Hawk War. He's then in charge down in Florida. And the Florida War, the second Seminole War, the first was fought kind of by Andrew Jackson in the wake of the war of 1812, is a war of removal to try and get the Seminoles who had signed a treaty to agree to remove to what is present-day Oklahoma. Multiple U.S. Army officers meet their match in the war in Florida. like Thomas Jessop and even Winfield Scott, failed to get any traction in this war against the

Seminoles. And although we don't want to sort of celebrate the fact that Zachary Taylor was the most successful U.S. officer in this war of removal against the indigenous population of Florida, he certainly was the U.S. officer who actually had the most success on the ground. He manages to achieve some success in getting the Seminoles out. It's really the U.S. Army's first experience of a guerrilla war. The Seminoles sort of take to the swamps and the jungles of Florida and evade capture. And so what Taylor, quote unquote, innovates in the war in Florida

is the use of bloodhounds to track the seminal down. But this was also a popular tactic, of course, used by slaveholders to chase down enslaved people when they ran away from plantations across the south. So it says we would sort of view it as a very barbaric tactic, but Taylor kind of adapts that to use in the army. And he's successful in Florida. And it positions him well to be the guy that James K. Pol,

is going to tap first to lead U.S. forces in the war with Mexico. Where does his nickname come from, old rough and ready? When did that happen? So I think that comes from Florida. He kind of, Taylor was very much, he did not ascribe to the idea that he needed to be in full dress uniform all the time. He would walk amongst the soldiers, the enlisted men. He did not kind of keep himself to his staff and his tent. Again, we have U.S. Grant here to rely on. Of course, Grant's going to go on to be the next kind of soldier president in U.S. history, but Grant was fortunate to serve under both Taylor and Winfield Scott in Mexico, and these are the two prominent officers of the era. Grant said both Winfield Scott and

Zachary Taylor were pleasant to serve under, but he said that Taylor was pleasant to serve with. And I think what he meant by that was that Taylor was someone who could kind of come down to the level of the common soldier who didn't put on airs and that kind of thing. And so that old rough and ready nickname works well. He would never kind of dress up. He was always wearing a kind of field uniform, dirty, spattered. And of course, this is something I think Grant really takes on when he becomes commander of all Union armies in 1864. Of course, we have the iconic image of Grant and Lee, showing up to the McLean House at Appomattox to negotiate the surrender. Lee in full dress uniform, polished sword, epaulettes, what have you, Grant's in muddy boots and, you know, shirt untucked,

and just from the field writing out. And I think Grant really took on that ideology of Taylor. You have to be able to convince the men that you're doing the work with them. Taylor would be on the field. Winfield Scott kind of commanded from behind the lines. And I think the real thing that sets them apart, Winfield Scott, one of the greatest American soldiers of all time, writes his autobiography in the third person.

So we'll say things like General Scott victoriously wrote into Mexico City, Zachary Taylor would never have written, you know, his life story in that way. So it's, they're very different. But I think that's where Taylor's real nickname comes from. He's seen as a humble, every man kind of guy. Yeah. His big intersection with history, I suppose, begins in Texas. I mean, he really, he is chosen by James Polk to lead this incursion into this new territory. Texas has created its own republic at 1836. Let's set the stage for how this works for Taylor and eventually gets us into a war. Yeah. So Texas is, and I say this is someone who now lives in Texas and has become familiar over the last few years with the peculiarities of that particular place. I used to say that

Texas is, of course, the only state that was its own country, and that's why it's such a strange place. But I was recently corrected because, of course, Hawaii was its own sovereign nation as well. But I think Texas has more of an attitude about it. And I think we could fairly say, so Texas wants to become part of the United States. This is always a kind of debate. So Texas is an independent republic after the Texas Revolution. Remember the Alamo, the Battle of San Jacinto. And about 10 years later, they want to come into the union. Of course, by this time, we have in place the compromise of 1820, which says that there's that parallel drawn across the U.S. every state that comes in below that line, the Mason-Dixon line, is going to be a slave state, and every state above it is going to be a free state.

and for most of the 19th century, we're working at keeping a balance between free states and slave states because slave states want fair representation in the Senate. So every state gets two senators. So we want equal representation. Texas coming in threatens to upset that balance, but the United States also wants more of that territory. And so they're going to go to war with Mexico to extend the boundary of Texas to the Rio Grande River. And that's what the war is really about. So James K. Polk has two options. He can pick Zachary Taylor or he can send Winfield Scott. And what Polk is doing is he knows he wants to fight the war with Mexico. He knows he wants to extend Texas's boundary to the Rio Grande, potentially claim New Mexico and present-day Arizona for the United States so we can get that

southern tier of the country solidified from Texas all the way to California. And he looks at Taylor and Scott and in the balance, he thinks, Taylor is less of a political threat. Scott by this time had expressed ambitions to become president of the United States. And so James K. Polk says, I want a guy who's not going to be a threat to my administration or my party. And Scott had also pretty much declared himself a wig at this point. And so Polk basically puts Scott on ice and says Zach Taylor, please go to the Rio Grande, make a show in force, try and induce or coax the Mexican army to come out and face you. And eventually that's what happens. The claim is that Mexican troops across the Rio Grande River, fire shots at the American soldiers there. American blood

is shed on American soil. And James K. Polk goes to Congress and says, we have to go to war with Mexico. The resolution passes with almost unanimous support. There are wigs, of course, who oppose this, but they have to get on board with the war pretty quickly because it's not a good look to be a member of the Senate or the House in a time of war and oppose the fighting, especially when you're levying volunteers from every state to go and fight. And so Taylor is going to fight a series of campaigns in what is today northern Mexico that helped to open up the war. Eventually, it becomes clear that the United States, in order to get Mexico to come to the negotiating table, is going to have to capture Mexico City. And it's Winfield Scott, who's going to be tasked with that job. And Scott's campaign,

which involves a landing of U.S. troops at Barracruz and then an Overland march to Mexico City becomes one of the most iconic campaigns in American military history. Taylor's part in the war is often a little bit forgotten, but he became a national hero. He wins victories at places like Buena Vista and Monterey against the Mexican army. And he's essentially pulled out about halfway through the war and told to kind of stand down as Scott takes over. But the reason Taylor is in charge first is he was viewed as less of a political threat. And he declared that he didn't have any political allegiances. By the time the war is reaching its conclusion in 1848, Taylor is here rumblings that the Whig Party might want to make him their candidate. And he begins to give some

serious consideration to this. But he makes it clear that whatever party nominates him, and I think he would have accepted the nomination from either party, he wants to be voted president by all Americans. He doesn't want it to be a party vote or a sectional vote. He wants to be like Ronald Reagan, you know, in his second election. He wants to be voted president almost unanimously. And he's not going to get that. And it disappoints him a little bit. It's nearly a 50-50 vote at the end in 1848. I want to ask you about that. First of all, just backing up for a moment, was Taylor acknowledged as any kind of genius military man? Or where did his successes come from? And how was that an indication of his character? I think he was not considered a strategic or tactical genius in the way that Scott was. Scott's Veracruz campaign is still taught today as one of these kind of. Yeah, the halls of Montezuma.

Right, these great innovations in military thinking. I don't think Taylor really had that kind of capacity, but he was persistent. He had a doggedness that he was always going to do what he could to succeed to try and win a victory. And so he just doesn't give up. He kind of has that bulldog quality that is going to define. Again, I think you can draw a lot of parallels to U.S. Grant's willingness to just keep pressing, keep pressing, keep pressing. And Taylor just kind of followed the Mexican army to the point where he got capitulation. But there were instances such as Buena Vista.

He has tactics which are very interesting and win the day. But he's often credited for victories that had a lot to do with the blunders of his opposition. Sure, exactly. Yeah. And Buena Vista is the best example of why he should get a lot of credit for being present on the battlefield. Because Army officers, generals have different kind of opinions about this. Some like to be right up front and see what's going on, and others like to kind of command from behind the lines based on information that they're receiving. And Taylor is right there. He sees that his troops are struggling. The Mexican Army nearly achieves a breakthrough in these narrow streets of this Mexican town of Buena Vista, this pass in the mountains. And he pulls up a regular army officer and artilleryman named Braxton Bragg, who will go on to have one of the most spectacularly awful Civil War careers of any general, either side of the war. And he says famously, but apocryphly to brag, a little more great Mr. Bragg,

which is a type of artillery, it's a small, slightly larger than musket balls, packed into a metal canister, fired out of a gun and they explode and kind of rain down musket balls on the enemy. And Bragg says, absolutely, I'll do that. And they push back the kind of last gasp of the Mexican advance. But Taylor is right there on the battlefield. And he's trying to assess the situation and give his subordinates a direct order as to how to handle it. And I think he should get credit for being that kind of opposite. Yes, against far superior forces in numbers, enormous losses on the Mexican side. This all makes him, I mean, a number of battles.

We're talking about Monterey, Palo Alto, Vista. There's a number of battles which get a lot of coverage in the press, I'm sure, because we have this emerging new media that's covering these things a lot more colorfully. He becomes a national hero from this, even while the war is on, right? Yeah, absolutely. And he's sort of shocked by this because he's in Mexico. And so he's not seeing the daily newspapers, but there's, of course, the famous painting of war news from Mexico where the whole town is kind of gathered around the post office and reading the paper. And it was avidly consumed by the American public. There were reporters kind of for the first time embedded with the American army, sending back dispatches as to what's going on.

And it makes Taylor a huge national figure. And he comes back to the U.S. in the kind of midst. of the war and is just stunned to find out that he's a national hero. He's probably the most popular man in the country, which of course, gnaz a little bit of James K. Polk, right, who kind of always struggles with this question of popularity. And I think what Polk also knew and is important to keep in mind, right, Polk's a protege of Andrew Jackson. So he knows how much power can come from military fame in terms of boosting someone who maybe never should have been president or didn't necessarily have the qualifications. And I think in Taylor's Cake,

Polk certainly believe the intelligence to be president, kind of boosting them into the presidency. And so Polk always has that on the back of his mind. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. His apolitical outlook on presidential politics, certainly, has a lot to do with his candidacy, doesn't it? He has chosen over others as the campaign develops in summer of 1848. The Whig Convention is 18 June. Tell me about them choosing this guy to run for president. Yeah, I think they thought his popularity would be the thing that kind of pushed them past that hump.

The Wigs had always struggled to get a big enough coalition of voters to push their man to the White House. And again, Taylor's military fame is really important there. I guess we should mention, we talked about the soldier presidents. William Henry Harrison, of course, is a soldier as well. It wins the famous battle of Tippecanoo, but he's president for, you know, a month. So we often forget about it. You're right. It's six generals.

What am I saying? Yeah. But in terms of Taylor, it's that nonpartisan or potentially bipartisan appeal that the wigs really go in on, I think. And again, Taylor, you could compare him to a number of presidents, but he certainly is the first president to really have no political experience. I think the closest corollary in our modern period would be Jimmy Carter in terms of someone who had very little kind of sense of how politics works. And just as it did in Carter's case, it hampers Taylor to some extent. He doesn't know how to get along, how the kind of sausage gets made, if you will. And so he doesn't know how to instruct people.

But I think what the Whig Party wants, they've tried, you know, the probably the closest viable candidate that the Wigs could have nominated is Henry Clay. And they tried the Henry Clay thing three times prior to that. And it hadn't worked out in their favor. So I think they just want to try something different. And they know, I think everybody knows. that whoever they nominate is probably going to win as long as they nominate a soldier. And then again, it's between Winfield Scott and Zach Taylor.

And I think people just found Taylor a little bit more relatable. Cecily, how much was it publicly being debated how a presidential candidate needed to reflect a middle road stance on the issue of slavery at this point? Was that the strategy that people were following outwardly or was that sort of a behind closed doors look at things? I think that's a little more inside baseball, if you will, at this point. I think what Taylor represents again is someone who is going to fight to keep the union together. And again, this is a period when the cracks are starting to show a little bit. And you have both parties, but especially the Southerners, and they tended to be Democrats, invoking the idea of disunion if they don't get their way. And this is a huge kind of component of 19th century culture that we struggle in the classroom and in a popular discourse to get folks to understand.

But it goes back to that idea that the U.S. is the only successful democratic experiment at this time. It's an exceptional case in world history. And Americans know that. But any threat to dissolving that union will mean the failure of that experiment that the founders set up. And so disunion has a powerful, this kind of sense or definition that comes with it. It's a huge threat. Yeah. And so for Southerners to invoke disunion is a huge problem.

And I think Taylor is seen as a guy who will stand in the way of that rhetoric and who will stand in the way potentially of any actual efforts to dissolve the union as it exists. I mean, Taylor says at one point during his presidency, he will happily hang any Southerner who threatens disunion just the same way he hung his Mexican enemies during the war. So he really doesn't stand for it. No, exactly. And this is why he's a Whig candidate. He believes in the power of the federal government.

He believes in the goodness of it and its potential. And very basically, he believes in the military, and that is the federal government. So there you are. I want to draw this conversation towards this famous iconic image. Now, this is a radio challenge here. We're going to describe a visual that is very famous. You could look it up online in a second as sort of Taylor's iconic campaign poster. 1848.

It's a beautiful image. I mean, it's a really interesting image. It's very, very playful, actually, in a way. It's the name Taylor in big, bold capital letters, but each one of those letters is basically its own depiction of one of those famous battles, dating back to his Western days and straight through the Mexican War, over which an American eagle is descending. What's your take on this image and how this is basically how he was being promoted as a candidate, yes? Yeah, again, remember what he has done to bring about the present condition of the union. which is to say he's instrumental in adding this territory that the United States had so desperately wanted for so long.

You know, he's the first image in the T is the Black Hawk War. So talking about bringing the upper Midwest or the old northwest really firmly into the union. And then there's an image of Florida. Florida is a huge element of this conversation about maintaining the balance between free states and slave states. Obviously, Florida is going to be a slave state. And then Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, which are really the. apple in the eye of the federal government at this time. And in terms of the reasons for that,

they're not great for growing crops. Anyone who's ever been to New Mexico or Arizona knows that you're not going to get large-scale plantation agriculture there, at least not until the 20th century brings irrigation technology that can actually help you grow things. But they are the passage to California. And just remember how desperate the U.S. is to link California and its vast mineral wealth to the East coast. And Taylor is seen as a huge player in that puzzle. So they're reminding people. And again, this is a period in which you cannot underestimate how much Americans unironically and uncritically embraced manifest destiny. They just did. They thought it was their right to conquer these territories. And Taylor was the man who had been put in the front of the American effort to do that.

I always remind people when we talk about these things, so do we. You know, in our own way, we unironically supported itself every time we get on a plane and happily go to Los Angeles, you know, or whatever. Right, exactly. You can't take part in the sea to shining sea without accepting some responsibility for this and yourself and therefore understanding what was going on back then, as much as you may disagree with how we attained it. I just want to hang with this image for a bit because it's just rather delightful.

All the graphics of it are fascinating. It's really playful little cartoon character. It speaks to the emerging media as well. what I'm really trying to say. Oh, yeah, sure. And how these newspapers were telling the stories of these candidacies. And it really is, you can draw a straight line from today back to that in terms of, you know, how much the newspapers play a role in shaping American politics. It's amazing. And, you know, this is not an air. So photographs cannot be reproduced in newspapers yet. And of course, there's no, there's almost no chance that the average guy is going to actually see Zachary Taylor in person.

There's not video recording or even photographs of the battles. And so, It's the one way we have of bringing this heroism home to the average American reader. Of course. And again, this is an increasingly literate society, something like 70% of Americans are able to read at this time. And so it's a huge moment for this. And these presidents become sort of pro-no celebrities in their own way. In this triumphalism that's going on in this image, they're not talking about that which he really has to deal with. once president, he is then called upon to lead the debate on the expansion of slavery in the West or not.

He's not the most qualified person for this job, politically speaking. Right. And maybe not the most appropriate, given that he's a, you know, he has his own plantations and so forth. He's a Southerner. He's wealthy from those slaveholding plantations. But he is anti-expansionist. I mean, he's outwardly so, yes, vocally? Yeah.

He has several reasons for that. And again, I think one thing about it is, Southerners are already. threatening. They sort of begin to threaten even before any kind of prescription has come down about what's going to happen to New Mexico or Arizona or California. They're already threatening saying, if you don't let them be slave states, we're going to leave, right? We're going to take our soccer ball and we're going to go home and we're not going to play with you anymore. And Taylor wants to shut that down from the beginning. He says, we're not having conversations about disunion during my presidency. But he also, as I said, has enough experience to know that opening up those territories in the

southwest to slavery isn't really an economically viable decision. Cotton markets are going crazy throughout the 1850s. As we know, the demand is kind of ebbing and flowing for cotton. Taylor has experience of this, right? He's growing crops for export to European market. He actually has a really refined sense of how crops are selling and going. And so he sort of is also saying, you know, it's a bad investment to open these territories up to slavery because you're never going to be able to grow cotton out there in New Mexico. The response to that, of course, what we know now as historians is in slavers or slave owners would have adapted slave labor to the other industries that exist in the West.

And the most prominent, this, of course, is mining for silver and gold and other minerals. But it's really that question of keeping the balance. And so Taylor is aware of the fact that Southerners are desperate to keep the balance equal between free states and slave states. We don't yet quite have a conception of popular sovereignty. The California gold rush, we cannot forget, you know, California or busts of 1849, that sparks during Taylor's first year in office. And there's a flood of people moving to California, and they quickly have enough population

to feasibly apply for statehood. And so once California kind of triggers that event saying we want to come in as a state, you have to then have a huge debate about how to maintain the balance. And that debate is going to take place largely in the legislative branch. Because the other thing to note about Taylor is he believes the executive should kind of exist above the fray of partisan politics. And he doesn't believe that the president should really be telling Congress what to do. He'll work with them a little bit.

But again, this is his political naivete at play. He doesn't know how to work with Congress to kind of help achieve or, make his ideas about what the West should look like a reality. And so it falls into the hands of Henry Clay, who is also reaching the end of his life and his last great kind of contribution to American political life, along with the two other kind of great legislators that formed this triumvirate in the 1840s and 1850s, John C. Calhoun and Daniel Webster. They're going to work through, along with a young senator named Stephen Douglas, a compromise that will become the compromise of 1850 that will help, again, push the slavery

problem just a little bit further down the road. The compromise of 1850, we're going to talk about a lot in Millard Fillmore's episode coming up next. But right now, I want to understand a term you've introduced their popular sovereignty. That's kind of what maybe Taylor's oversimplified solution to this would be. Let's let each state, as we bring them in, decide for themselves. whether they want to have slavery or not. This would seem like a very sensible thing, but it was very explosive position. Yeah, absolutely, because there was almost no way to actually police whether or not the votes

that took place in those places would be fair, because as we would see, we will see in Kansas in just a few years from Taylor's presidency, both sides of the issue are going to illegally flood voters over the borders. You're going to have contested governments. You're going to have a free state government and a slave government. and a slave government, both claiming to be the legitimate government of the territories. And so there have been all out democratic experiment to decide whether or not slavery should expand proves to be a real failure.

This is going to be the crux of the Lincoln-Douglas debates eventually. Because Stephen Douglas is going to be the one to really propose popular sovereignty, and Lincoln is going to be a huge credit of it. And they're going to go back and forth in the late 1850s about whether it was successful. But that's kind of what Taylor believes. Again, he's a true believer in the democratic ideology that if you're going to have a democracy, you're going to call your government a democracy. You have to let the people decide for themselves what they want to do.

Some other folks, maybe more experienced politicians, are going to say, I don't necessarily want the people deciding for themselves. And Congress, to some extent, does feel constitutionally that they have a mandate to manage the territories. And they want to maybe set things more specifically. But again, popular sovereignty is a compromise. It's trying not to upset either side by giving both pro-slavery and anti-slavery advocates an equal chance at establishing good government. By the time we get to his demise, which we'll discuss in just a moment, how far along is he in getting this thing addressed?

You know, where is he in this debate? So he kind of, he'll speak to Clay occasionally and Jefferson Davis a little bit as well. but he's not interceding heavily, putting his hand on the scales one way or another. He does firmly state that he wants California to come in as a free state. He believes that. And he believes that New Mexico should get to decide for itself. So he's made that publicly very clear. But in terms of the actual mechanics of what's going on, he's not heavily involved.

He does oppose the provision that the Southerners are most invested. and getting on the kind of docket of bills that are going to make up the compromise of 1850, Taylor does not abide with an expansion or strengthening of the fugitive slave law. He does not believe that American citizens, ordinary civilians, should be forced into becoming slave catchers and returning escape slaves to slavery, which is what that strengthened fugitive slave act will require when it does become part of that omnibus package of bills in the compromise of 1850. Taylor does not believe that's the job of the citizenry, if anything, is the job of the state. But he doesn't think that the federal government can force states to tell their citizens how to behave.

And so citizens of a free state should not have to become allies to or supporters of slavery. And it's that that becomes for abolitionists, that is the thing that really lights the fire of the abolitionist movement and really kicks it into overdrive. And Frederick Douglass will say that strength in fugitive slave law is the worst mistake the South ever made in terms of creating animings for themselves. But that comes later. July 1850, he's at a July 4th celebration where one year before the 75th anniversary since the Declaration of Independence, as we said at the opening, there's a lot to be celebrating for people generally speaking in American success story and all that. You know, he attends the festivities. Word is he eats cherries, lots of fruit that. may have been bad, heads back to the presidential mansion and begins to feel sick. It is this gastroenteritis, which history tells us is probably the reason that he perished a number of days later. Do you

buy into that story? Yeah, I think, you know, Henry Clay was deeply sick at the same time. Just a reminder, the city of Washington was not quite as shored up from being the swamp that it is, quite literally a swamp in terms of geography. So the marshes of the kind of Potomac River were actually right up against the White House. These people are not drinking filtered water. They are not free from bacteria. Taylor's a really healthy guy for his age in the mid-19th century. He probably got some waterborne virus like cholera and just did not have the strength

to recover. But yeah, something about eating cherries, drinking a bunch of cold milk, they seem to think for a while may have caused some kind of sickness. But I do. Yeah, I think he, I mean, there was some speculation that he was sort of poisoned with arsenic or something and so on. But I don't, I just think, remember that this is the 19th century and those waterborne illnesses are just absolutely killer. But he is, it isn't a really, I think, right, it's the second time now in a matter of sort of years that we've had a president die in

office. And it becomes increasingly important to both sides all of a sudden. They realize that the vice president isn't just a symbolic kind of dude. This is a guy who could legitimately genuinely become president. So you have to be really thoughtful. about who you put on the ticket. And maybe you need your president to cooperate a little more with the vice president because Taylor and Miller and Fillmore had a cordial relationship, but they were, Taylor was not bringing Fillmore in on a lot of decision making, which does not set up your successor for success in the untimely or unfortunate event that you should have to vacate the office for whatever reason. It's interesting. You know, the notion that the compromise of 1850 really

tamps down for the moment, the huge tensions that are growing over, you know, Western slavery, that gets pinned to Miller Fillmore. How much you think we should give that responsibility to Taylor? You know, had he lived on, do you think he would have figured out how to make this thing? Is that part of the legacy that we're missing here? I think Taylor might have been more staunch about refusing to sign the compromise into law, just given the fact that we know he had some real qualms about that strengthened fugitive slave act. and some real questions about whether there was a better way to handle the addition of new states in those territories. I think I sort of see Fillmore in some ways like a Harry Truman or a Lyndon Johnson.

You're handed the presidency in the midst of a crisis. Now for both Truman and Johnson, it was a war. And so Truman has to decide whether he's going to drop an atomic bomb. Johnson has to decide if he's going to escalate U.S. involvement in Vietnam. on Philmore has to decide whether he wants to try to keep the peace, to endear himself to this legislature that has not, and a country that has not elected him directly, he is the succeeding vice president. I think part of the reason he may go for this is to keep the peace. I don't know that Philmore kind of felt he had the political strength to oppose this. I think Taylor may have felt he had enough popular will or goodwill from the public that he could have made a strong.

or display against the strengthened fugitive slave act or making the South understand that they could not continue to threaten disunion every time they didn't get their way. But we're also at a point where this era of compromise is ending, and it's ending in part because these great legislators, the people who had managed against all odds that are going of hold the union together like Henry Clay are also reaching the end of their lives. And so it's this subsequent generation like the William Henry Seward. and the Lincoln's and the Stephen Douglases, who are going to have to pick up this mantle,

but they don't have quite the gravitas to be able to achieve success in the same way. I don't know if Taylor would have signed the compromise, even if he had, I think he would have very publicly expressed his qualms with some of the elements of the bill. The other side of the scale, though, is an emerging American public that has much more information, much more actively involved. there's just a huge amount of awareness that did not exist in the early part of the century, for whatever reasons.

You know, you can draw some parallels between today's chaos that's going on and the amount of information we get today. What happens when there's a lot of voices able to speak up? And that's what's beginning in the middle of the 19th century. I think people forget, you know, today, of course, you can choose which kind of news channel you want to watch, which party you want to get your information from. This is also a thing in the 19th century. every single newspaper would say, we're a Republican paper or we're a Democratic or we're a Whig paper.

And every town would have basically a major paper from both parties. So you could decide in the same way that you only wanted to get your information from the Whig paper. And so 19th century Americans also had the ability to kind of select for whatever agreed with their politics or their views. And so they would get fed the information that they wanted in much the same way that we Americans today can choose, you know, whatever news channel we want. to get our slant from. And I think we don't think about that because our newspapers today are much more kind of bipartisan for the most part. Our newspapers are less political. But in the 19th century, newspapers were explicitly political. And this is an era of mass newspaper circulation. Yeah. I can't wait until we get to Lincoln for so many different reasons. But one of which is to

understand what happens to these wigs after they were so powerful for 20, 30 years, suddenly they're going to disappear from the American landscape and confuse everybody for ages to come. Yeah, you're going to have Democrats and Republicans forever since that. I mean, what's amazing is this era, the turnover of political parties up through the end of the Whig Party. And then although the parties kind of switched their philosophies, they kept the same names, you know, up to the present day. Boy, folks, you have been listening to a masterful mind at work. I mean, this is what excites me about American history is making the connections and drawing the parallels. It's really fun to hear you. Cessley, talk through this for us. I've said very little in this podcast, which is my favorite kind of podcast. to do, but that's because you're making so much sense of it all. I really appreciate it. Cessely Zander is a assistant professor of history at Texas Women's University. Her focus is in military history around the Civil War era, as we have heard. Her first book will be published in 2024 by Louisiana State University Press. It's called the Army Under Fire, Anti-Militarism

in the Civil War era. Fascinating stuff. Thank you so much, Cecily. I hope we have you back again soon. Thanks so much, Don. I had the best time, and I hope to do it again. I appreciate it. I hope you enjoyed this episode of American History Hit. Please remember to like, review, and subscribe. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts. And I'll see you next time.