Here's Where It Gets Interesting - The Nomadic Life of Army Wife Margaret Taylor

Episode Date: December 19, 2022

On today’s episode, we’re going to move from political power player Sarah Polk to our next first lady: a total frontierswoman who was more comfortable roughing it in the wild with Army soldiers than throwing a society ball in Washington D.C. Come meet Margaret “Peggy” Taylor, and learn about her unusual life traveling to the most remote areas of the nation. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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to your OpenTable account. From there, you'll unlock first come first serve spots at select top restaurants when booking through open table. Learn more at open table.ca forward slash visa dining. Hello, friends. Welcome. So glad you're here with me today because we are going to move from political power player Sarah Polk to our next first lady, a total frontierswoman who was more comfortable roughing it in the wild with army soldiers than throwing a society ball in Washington, D.C. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. Margaret Smith was born in September of 1788 in Maryland, just a few months after Maryland became the seventh state to ratify the Constitution. Her father was a celebrated Revolutionary War veteran and ran a successful tobacco plantation in the Chesapeake Bay region.

We don't have very much information about Margaret's early years, but we do know that she was raised, you guessed it, in a wealthy household and likely rubbed elbows with the other children of wealthy Virginia families. In fact, one of the few records we do have from Margaret's younger years indicates that she had a friendship with a girl named Nellie Custis. And that name may not ring a bell to you, but Nellie, short for Eleanor, was the youngest granddaughter of Martha Washington. Martha was widowed, remember, and so George Washington was her step-grandfather and president while she was growing up. Nellie lived at Mount Vernon and was under Martha's care. Nellie and Margaret Smith's other social acquaintances usually referred to her as Peggy. Peggy, it always seems, is an unusual nickname to get from Margaret. Nellie from Eleanor, yeah, okay, we get it. But Peggy from Margaret,

where does the P even come from? I will tell you. I will tell you, by the way. Nicknames were used in Europe before surnames. Last names were permanently adopted. They were an easier way to identify someone when there were multiple people with the same name, which, as we've learned throughout this series, was super common. How many times have we seen both sons and daughters named after their parents? Just try shouting John or Sarah in an 18th century household of 12, and more than one will likely come running. So some English-derived nicknames make perfect sense because they're just

shortened versions of the full name, like Dave for David and Pete for Peter, but others are less understandable. How does Charles become Chuck? Or Richard become Dick? Or Margaret become Peggy? Most often, these types of nicknames come from a combination of finding common phonetics or rhymes and letter swapping. Way back in the 1500s, there was a phonetic fad for rhyming M names with P, which is how we ultimately go from Margaret to Peggy. Just bear with me here. It's quite the evolution. Margaret was shortened to Marge. Okay, makes sense. And then to Mag or Maggie.

And then the vowel A was swapped for an E to get Meg or Maggie. Do you see where I'm going with this? And then the M in Maggie was swapped out for a P. And you might get Peg or Peggy. And while I'm not advocating for comparing first ladies to our pets, it's a similar sort of evolution, right? Your dog has a name, but do you call your dog that name? No! Over the years, you develop your own rhyming shorthand until the nicknames dripped further and further away from the original name

and they barely resemble it at all. I can think of so many examples of that, like even with my own pets. Like how did, how did you get that nickname? Well, it took a year and a half of morphing nicknames. And that's basically what happened in this scenario. Peggy became a nickname for Margaret through the use of just the way etymology evolves over time. Okay, back to Peggy. She was the youngest of seven children. And when her parents died, first her mother when she was 10, and then her father when she was 16, Margaret moved out of their Maryland plantation and into the home of her older sister, Mary Ann, in Louisville, Kentucky. Mary Ann was married to Samuel Chew, the son of

another well-off Virginia family. Chew liked Chew and Sw swallow. You can move a gal to the frontier, but she's still going to mingle with her hometown connections. And that is just what Peggy Smith did when she was 21. Peggy was introduced to a man named Lieutenant Zachary Taylor by a family friend back east. Zachary Taylor also had ties to the Virginia, Maryland area, but his family had joined the westward migration when he was a young boy, which perhaps this appeals to Peggy. He was a little rustic, a little stoic, and he was wearing a uniform. Peggy and Zachary married the following year and spent the first 12 or so months living on a Kentucky farm. But by their second year, Zachary Taylor had been promoted to captain and

Peggy was packing up their homes. For the next 30 to 40 years, she would live the nomadic life of an army wife. In 1811, Zachary Taylor was sent to the Indiana territory to assume control of Fort Knox. At the time, it was the most deserted, but then Governor William Henry Harrison recognized its strategic placement and had Taylor bring it up to snuff as conflict between Native tribes intensified in the lead-up to the War of 1812. From there, Zachary, Peggy, and their young children moved to a new part of Indiana, where Taylor was tasked with defending Fort Harrison during the war. But from there, Taylor's posts were all over the place. Literally.

The nation was doing everything it could to expand its land acquisition. And the tailors spent time in some incredibly remote places, everywhere from the dense forests of Minnesota and Wisconsin, which was literally the frontier at the time, to the swamplands of Louisiana and Florida. And you know what they found every time they moved to a new location? Nothing. Of course, there was nature and a lot of it, but there were no cities or settlements, no roads, no hotels, no bustling mess halls or kitchens. They were often building their own lodgings from the ground up. Even though the Taylors were a wealthy military family, there was no glamping

happening. No glamping. This was the army. They occupied crowded tents or constructed crude cabins that were nothing more than four walls and a fire pit. They were experts at roughing it. I mean, it goes without saying that this was completely off the grid, right? So this was not cute, tiny home off the grid. I have satellite internet situation. No. Was like, okay, we live in a tent in the swamp, completely with absolutely no connection to the rest of humanity. From all accounts, Peggy hardly embraced this life. She learned how to shoot a gun and became an expert at making do with what they had. She gave her children a foundational education and attended to the needs of her husband and the other army officers. It was really an all-hands-on-deck kind of wilderness experience. I think it's important to point out that Peggy

chose this life. Zachary Taylor was schlepping all over the place for the army, of course, but he was a very wealthy man. He owned land and properties in Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, and working that land were over 200 enslaved laborers. Peggy could have settled on one of these plantations to raise their children and live a comfortable life by her standards, never wanting for a soft bed and meals eaten off of fine china. But she chose to travel with her husband and live under extreme conditions. And despite these conditions, she worked hard to cultivate community in each new location. Peggy, along with her fellow military wives, raised chickens, planted vegetable gardens, and constructed dairy rooms to provide fresh butter and milk for

the encampments. During one post-assignment, Peggy even oversaw the establishment of a wine cellar for the fort and served the wine at parties with the families of the other officers or to guests who came to visit. While in Florida, she served as a nurse in the army hospital and tended to sick or wounded soldiers. Later in his life, Zachary bragged, my wife was as much of a soldier as I was. And that certainly continues to speak to today's military families. Military service is not just the commitment of the enlisted individual, right? It is a commitment of the entire family. I also need to point out that Peggy did this while she was raising six children. Six. Zachary and Peggy had five girls and one boy, most of them born at remote army posts.

It was actually an extremely risky thing to carry out a pregnancy and give birth to a child in such rustic settings. We all know the stories of how many children died, how many pregnancies ended sadly. We know the statistics. So the risks were very real. Small graves often dotted makeshift army post cemeteries and were a reminder that many children did not survive either their births or their childhoods. In 1820, while the Taylors were stationed in Louisiana, they lost two of their daughters, three-year-old Octavia and one-year-old Margaret, from what Zachary called a violent bilious fever. Peggy also suffered from the same sickness, and even though she recovered, her health became

more fragile. When they were old enough, Peggy and Zachary's remaining four children were sent back east to boarding schools where they could learn in less hazardous environments. Peggy sometimes went years without seeing her children as she continued to travel from post to post with her husband. Imagine going years without seeing your children as she continued to travel from post to post with her husband. Imagine going years without seeing your children voluntarily. In 1838, Zachary was promoted to colonel and given a two-year leave. You would think they might use that time to set themselves up in one of their big old houses and stay put for a while,

but no. They used the time to travel and visit their children, who were now grown, and other relatives. Eventually, they made their way to Washington, D.C., where they scored an invite to the White House, connected with resident president Martin Van Buren, who of course became president after my favorite, least favorite president, Andrew Jackson. Zachary's leave ended in 1840 and he was posted to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. With Zachary's promotion, Peggy would have been entitled to occupy a spacious home that had been built in the fort, but she turned it down. Instead, the Taylors purchased a small cottage surrounded by mossy oak trees and a view of the Mississippi River. And that was it for Peggy.

She finally felt at home. The next time Zachary traveled, she chose to stay at home in her cottage in Baton Rouge. In 1845, Zachary was called to command troops that were stationed near the Rio Grande in the Mexican-American War. This assignment reconnected him with a man he hadn't seen for years, a man who was connected to the painful memory of his daughter's death. A decade earlier in 1834, Zachary and Peggy's second daughter, Sarah Knox, who went by the nickname Knoxie, followed in her mother's footsteps and accepted an engagement proposal from a young lieutenant. That lieutenant, fresh out of West Point, was Jefferson Davis,

the future president of the Confederate States of America. Jefferson Davis is most often talked about in the context of his errors. He was so fervently in support of the institution of enslavement that he was elevated as the political leader of the Confederacy. But in 1834, he was 26, stationed under Zachary Taylor and in love with his commander's daughter. Listen to this letter that he wrote to Knoxie in December of 1834. Your kind, dear letter, I have kissed it often and it has driven many mad notions from my brain. Neglected by you, I should be worse than nothing. How I long to lay my head upon that chest which beats in union with my own, to turn from the sickening sights of

worldly duplicity and look in those eyes so eloquent of purity and love. I mean, people just do not write letters like that anymore, right? They just do not. Although Peggy and Zachary didn't really approve of this match, Noxie and Jefferson Davis married in June of 1835 and moved to Mississippi. But just three months after their wedding, both Jefferson and Noxie contracted malaria. Jefferson recovered, but Noxie did not. When she died, Jefferson Davis was devastated that he had lost her. Zachary Taylor, for his part, blamed Jefferson for his daughter's death, saying that he should have known better than to take her traveling in Mississippi during the fever season. When Davis served as a colonel under Taylor during the Mexican-American War 10 years later,

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While her husband was on the front lines of the war, Peggy was back in Baton Rouge, and she lived in constant fear that her husband would be killed. It marked a period of deep religious fervency for her. She had always been devout in her Episcopalian faith, but the separation from her husband amplified it. She prayed daily for Zachary's safe return. And he did return. After the war, he was in his 60s and ready to retire. The Taylors thought they would spend their twilight years living quietly in their little tree-lined cottage. But their life would be anything but quiet because Taylor had returned from the war as a national hero. Interestingly, while Zachary Taylor had an illustrious military

career, what he did not have was a political one. In fact, he was pretty staunchly apolitical throughout the majority of his life. He didn't like politicians or political bickering. And he didn't even vote. I think we need to have like a collective. He didn't even vote. I mean, don't get me wrong. He had opinions. A little from column A, a little from column B.

He thought that the country needed a strong banking system. And while he supported enslaved labor for Southern states, he didn't support expanding it into the new territories where it would be harder to grow plantation crops like tobacco and cotton. And because of his time at war, he did not believe in secession and more fighting as a way to solve the nation's growing rift over the practice of slavery. But the harder Zachary Taylor tried to stay out of politics, the harder his fans fought to get him into office. Political clubs for old, rough, and ready, as he had become

known, sprang up in support of his candidacy. He had support from all over, from Whigs, Democrats, Northerners, and Southerners. In the end, Taylor accepted the nomination from the Whig party, but wasn't particularly interested in promoting their platform. And even though he didn't consider himself a politician. He had mastered a critical political skill, publicly dodging tricky questions. He let his popularity do the work for him. He didn't have to answer anything difficult. And how did Peggy feel about this turn of events? Not great, y'all. Not great. In what may have been some foreshadowing on her part, she told her husband that his presidential run would shorten both of their lives.

But Zachary forged ahead and even delighted in telling people on his campaign trail the folksy anecdote that his wife prayed nightly that he would lose the election. But his path to the presidency had already taken off, and he won against his Democratic opponent, Louis Cass. Fun fact, part of that win may be owed to former President Martin Van Buren, who Taylor had connected with at the White House several years earlier. When Van Buren was president, he was a Democrat. with at the White House several years earlier. When Van Buren was president, he was a Democrat. But after he left office, he also left the party and joined a third party called the Free Soil Party. The Free Soil Party was pretty short-lived, and it ran on a single issue, opposing the

expansion of enslaved labor into Western territories. Van Buren wasn't exactly an abolitionist, but he did feel that the federal government needed to retain control over these new areas of the country. The Free Soil Party nominated him as the party leader, And in the 1848 election, he ran in the presidential election against Democrat Louis Cass and win Zachary Taylor. Van Buren didn't get very far, though. He only took 10% of the popular vote. But the Free Soil Party was popular in New York, which led Cass to underperform in a much needed state for the Democrat. cast to underperform in a much-needed state for the Democrat. So Zachary Taylor took home the presidential win and became the very last big party candidate to be elected into office. Peggy was not thrilled, as I mentioned, but she did pack up and join him in the White House.

By that time, she was 60 years old and the hardships of following her husband from fort to fort had taken its toll. She and Zachary had an understanding that she wouldn't be expected to take on the full duties of a White House hostess. Zachary famously said, she's done enough, and he seemed satisfied to just have her in Washington with him. After her husband's inauguration ceremony, Peggy skipped the two inaugural balls and retreated to the White House's second floor with her grandchildren. While Peggy did welcome friends, family, and special guests in her upstairs sitting rooms, she took very little part in formal social functions, with one big

exception. At the start of Zachary Taylor's term, both Peggy and Zachary Taylor attended the high-profile funeral of a relative. Zachary was the second cousin of President James Madison, Zachary was the second cousin of President James Madison, and his widow, Washington's favorite former first lady, Dolly Madison, regularly wrote to Zachary throughout his years, reportedly signing her letters, your friend and relation, Dolly. The president delivered the eulogy after Dolly passed away on July 12, 1849. President Taylor, along with his cabinet and all the congressmen, lined up to see off Dolly's coffin as it began its journey to her final resting place, with Zachary extolling her as the first lady of our land for half a century. Zachary Taylor's presidency was riddled

with arguments over enslavement and its potential expansion into the new territories acquired from Mexico. The crisis began escalating and Taylor worried about the potential for a violent secession of the Southern states. Despite his 40-year military career, war was the last thing he wanted.

He said, my life has been devoted to arms, yet I look upon war at all times and under all circumstances as a national calamity to be avoided if compatible with national honor. Senators Daniel Webster and Henry Clay sponsored the Compromise of 1850, a series of laws that attempted to resolve these controversies by balancing the interests of the southern slave states with the northern free states. But the president initially opposed it, believing it could lead to more discord, not less. But before the Compromise of 1850 could be reworked or legislated, Before the Compromise of 1850 could be reworked or legislated, Zachary attended a much-anticipated social event. For years, a large society of women, including Dolly Madison, had raised funds for the construction of the Washington Monument,

and July 4, 1850, was scheduled as a day of festivities to celebrate the newly dedicated grounds where the structure would be built. The legendary story goes that Zachary Taylor ate his fair share of cherries and washed them down with iced milk at the event. Then, in an attempt to settle his stomach, he drank several glasses of water when he returned to the White House. The summer months in Washington were hot, humid, and the worst kind of weather for the city's primitive sewage systems. Whether it was bacteria in the cherries or the milk or the water, there's no way to know. But President Zachary Taylor started to feel a little off. At first, it wasn't too bad, and he continued to work through his discomfort. But a few days later, Taylor's fever had him confined to bed. Outlook, not good. Five days after the Independence Day celebration, Zachary Taylor died. It was

an ironic fate for a war hero who had lived through some of the most violent battles the country had seen, and lived in some of the most remote places on the continent, on the continent, done in by a bowl of contaminated cherries at a society picnic. Almost immediately, a conspiracy was circulated that Taylor hadn't died from gastroenteritis, but was in fact poisoned because of his strong opposition to secession. Peggy was one of the firm believers in the theory of foul play, and the question of whether or not his death was planned lasted into the late 20th century. Wanting to know if Zachary Taylor and not Abraham Lincoln was actually the first assassinated president, the Taylor family descendants gave permission for his body to be exhumed and tested for poisons in 1991. They found nothing in his hair follicle and fingernail samples to suggest

he had ingested any high levels of arsenic or other poison. The medical examiner officially declared that Taylor's death was due to cholera morbus or acute gastroenteritis and his corpse was reburied. Peggy could not accept the reality of her husband's sudden death. For two dates, she begged his undertakers to not take him away. They obliged the widowed Peggy by covering his body with ice to slow his decomposition. Even then, Peggy repeatedly asked them to move aside the ice so she could look at his face one more time. Eventually, on July 13th, they held a simple funeral for the deceased president in the East Room, and although Peggy was told she could stay in the White House for as long as necessary while she mourned and made new accommodation plans, she left the evening of his funeral. Peggy spent the next two years traveling between the homes of her children,

and while she was with her daughter Betty in Mississippi, she died suddenly on August 14, 1852. Peggy was buried beside her husband back where they had started their lives together in the state of Kentucky. Before we wrap up for today, I wanted to make one more important note. A large portion of the collected Taylor family letters and papers were taken or destroyed during the Civil War. So some of what we know from Peggy comes from the surviving papers of a surprising source, Verena Davis, the second wife of the future Confederate president, Jefferson Davis. Both Peggy and Zachary mended their relationship with their former son-in-law

of three months, and Verena, Jefferson's second wife, was a frequent White House visitor during the Taylor's tenure there. Verena herself was never acknowledged as a former president's wife, even though Jefferson Davis was declared the president of the Confederacy, not just because the Confederacy lost the Civil War, but also because the post-war 1868 Supreme Court case, Texas v. White, ruled that states do not have the right to secede from the United States. The verdict meant that the former Confederate states during the Civil War had always remained part of the United States. Basically, there's no leaving the country. What do I always say? Texas cannot secede. The Confederacy never left. It's

like telling the woman who birthed you, you're not my mom. Whatever the relationship looks like, relationship looks like. Facts stay the same. Your birth mom is your birth mom and states cannot secede from the union. If you take anything away from today's podcast, let it be that there is no seceding from the union or frankly from your birth mom. I'll see you again soon. Thank you so much for listening to Here's Where It Gets Interesting. If you enjoyed this episode, would you consider sharing it on social media or leaving us a rating or review on your favorite podcast platform? All those things help podcasters out so much. The show is written and researched by executive producer Heather Jackson,

Valerie Hoback, and Sharon McMahon. Our audio engineer is Jenny Snyder, and it's hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. We'll see you again soon.