The Louisiana State Capitol stood like a frozen sentinel on a frigid, windy January night as I jogged up and down its ten miles of serpentine pathways. Up and down I plodded next to rows of boxwood hedges and under sweeping live oaks. After about 20 minutes I spotted my quarry, a small marker on the southwest corner of the 27 acre Capitol grounds (North 3rd Street and Spanish Town Road). The marker signified that Zachary Taylor, President Number 12, had once lived close by. The plaque read:  |
| Tribute to Old Rough and Ready in Baton Rouge |
To honor
Zachary Taylor
U.S. Army General and Twelfth President
of the United States
known to Americans as
"Old Rough and Ready"
and who lived for a time some 200 yards
southwest of this spot
The actual address is 727 Lafayette Street; the street is still there but the structure has long since vanished.
Which is the case with much of Taylor’s life. There is just not much physical evidence remaining. All his personal papers were incinerated when his son’s home in Baton Rouge was burned by Union soldiers. Cypress Grove, his plantation in Jefferson County, MS, was swept away in the great Mississippi River Flood of 1927.
His boyhood and young adult home, Springfield, just outside Louisville still stands. However, the home is private and not open to tours.
Cathy and I decided not to journey to Louisville to glimpse the outside of a house but rather to learn about Taylor through a series of small adventures.
Baton Rouge was the first, which I visited alone while there on business.
Zachary Taylor, Soldier
Taylor was a career military man. He joined the army in 1808 when he was 24 years old and began what was to become a stellar military career. He gained initial fame when he defended Fort Harrison—named after General William Henry Harrison who built it—from Indian attack during the War of 1812. General Taylor and his 50 soldiers repelled a massive force of about 600 warriors.
By the 1820s Taylor was in Louisiana, where he established two forts: Fort Selden and Fort Jesup, not far from the Texas border. It was while in Louisiana that he purchased Cypress Grove plantation. He would eventually relocate his family there from Springfield.
In the 1830s he fought in the Indian wars including the Black Hawk War (1832) and the Second Seminole War (1837-1838). It was during the Second Seminole War that his grateful men tagged him, “Old Rough and Ready.”
Taylor was a soldier’s soldier known to be “frank, willful, hard-bitten, and stubborn.” (Singletary, 1960). He was not afraid to get in the middle of a battle even as a general. But he also had a caring side. He reportedly memorized the names of each soldier (although that is somewhat hard to believe). When his troops occupied Matamoros during the Mexican War, he kept the troops outside of town, cared for the Mexican wounded in the hospitals, and paid local prices for food.
He became nationally renowned for his success in the Mexican War (1846-1848). (We wrote about this war during our pursuit of President Polk.) Taylor led the troops that shed the first blood of the war at Rio Grande. But later, he agitated President Polk when he granted Mexican General Pedro de Ampudia an eight-week armistice with limited conditions just when he had him on the ropes.
But Taylor was becoming a national hero and Polk feared his rising power, eventually removing him from command.
The Election of 1848
When the election of 1848 approached, many eyes turned to Taylor. But there was one problem: Taylor was apolitical. In fact, there is no evidence that he had ever even voted. But since he was a larger-than-life Mexican War hero, he was recruited by the Whigs anyway.
Taylor wanted to be the president of all the people, so he avoided consulting with prominent Whigs like Senators Henry Clay and Daniel Webster leading up to the election. He was an advocate of limited government with a weak executive and he vowed to limit the use of the veto. But like a Whig, he supported protective tariffs.
Taylor and his vice president, Millard Fillmore, ran against Democrat Lewis Cass, another hero of the War of 1812. But Taylor also ran against a third candidate. Remember Martin Van Buren, the Red Fox of Kinderhook? He came back for another crack at the presidency under the banner of the Free Soil Party, which supported the Wilmot Proviso—meaning no slavery in new territories won in the Mexican War.
Taylor gained the presidency with 163 electoral votes (compared to Cass with 127 and poor Van Buren with none). However, Taylor entered office with the Whigs a minority in both houses of Congress—a first in U.S. history for a sitting President.
In his inaugural address he said that he would “be devoted to the welfare of the whole country, and not to the support of any particular section or merely local interest.” Ironically, this old soldier also vowed to hone to a foreign policy that would “exhaust every resort of honorable diplomacy before appealing to arms.”
Taylor’s short tenure in office was primarily occupied with the setting up initial phases of the Central American canal as well as adding territory to the United States in a manner that satisfied slavery and anti-slavery advocates.
The Central American Canal
One order of business during his presidency was the cross Central American canal—one day in the distant future to be known as the Panama Canal. In the 1840s, the likely spot was Nicaragua. Much to the annoyance of the United States, Great Britain was busily staking territorial rights for the canal’s footprint. But eventually Secretary of State John Clayton and Great Britain’s Sir Henry Lytton Bulwer negotiated a treaty that laid out the rules for territorial claims. Neither the U.S. nor Great Britain would be allowed to claim exclusive control over a canal site in Nicaragua or anywhere else in Central America for that matter. Taylor signed the treaty in April 1850.
Compromise of 1850
The major order of business was the struggle to add territory in a manner that was palatable to all…but that couldn’t happen. The nation was torn, of course, with the battle over slavery.
Taylor, being a strong nationalist, desired to preserve the Union above all else. He placed the interest of the country above his own slave-holding views. In fact, he vowed to lead the Army to quell any state that threatened to secede from the Union.
Another compromise would be needed.
The compromise, crafted by aging Senator Henry Clay, was shaping up something like this: California would be admitted as a free state; the slave trade in Washington, DC (but not slavery itself) would be abolished; New Mexico and Utah would be admitted as territories with the right to vote for or against slavery; the Fugitive Slave Act would be tightened; and Texas would be paid $19M to relinquish territorial claims to adjoining western lands.
But Taylor never had a chance to act on the bill. He died suddenly in July 1850, just 16 months into his term.
Visit to the Washington Monument
We came to the Washington Monument to commemorate the death of Zach Taylor.
The Washington Monument is a 10-15 walk from the Smithsonian Metro stop.
It was here that Taylor was stricken on a sweltering July 9, 1850. You have to live in DC to appreciate how hot and humid summers in Washington are. On that July day, he appeared at a ceremony at the Washington Monument. He reportedly indulged in cherries and cold milk, one of which was likely contaminated. He contracted severe gastroenteritis.
Astonishingly, within four days he was dead. His final coherent words were: "I am not afraid to die; I have done my duty; my only regret is leaving those who are dear to me."
There were rumors that he was poisoned by his political enemies. It wasn’t until 1991, that this theory was finally tested. Old Rough and Ready was roused, tested for arsenic poising, then restored to his mausoleum in Springfield, KY. The tests were negative.
 |
| Fenced Out |
We stopped at the stone masonry visitor center and asked one of the women working there what she knew about Zachary Taylor’s fatal visit to the monument, but she was unfamiliar with the story.
So we stared at the monument from behind chain-link construction fencing. Although today the world’s tallest stone structure scratches the sky at 555 feet 5+1⁄8 inches, in 1850 the monument was still in the initial stages of construction and quite possibly only the base was complete.
His Funeral
The National Intelligencer (1850) reported in striking detail the magnificent funeral procession that accompanied President Taylor’s body to Congressional Cemetery. They even mentioned his favorite war horse, “Old Whitey." They said:
Yes, Whitey! You are surrounded by soldiers, as you were wont to be; the cannon thunder in your ear; that is a familiar sound; and near you is he whose heart never quailed and whose sword was never turned back from the fight; but, alas! He has met, at last, a foe he could not conquer, and the hand that so often patted your neck and reached you a morning token of his loving care, is cold in death and will caress you no more!
The National Intelligencer further reported:
Arriving at the graveyard, the artillery were posted on a rising ground, the troops drawn up in double line, and the coffin, preceded by the Clergy and attended by the Pall-Bearers, passed through the center gate, and slowly reached the front of the receiving vault, which had been tastefully decorated with festoons of black, and was guarded by sentries to keep off the pressure of the crowd, which had already filled the enclosure. Here, the bier being set down, the Rev. Mr. Pyne read the solemn and beautiful service for the dead appointed in the Episcopal liturgy; when the body was taken up and deposited in a place appointed for its reception, until it shall be finally removed to its last earthly resting place in the West, where the remains of Zachary Taylor will be emphatically at home.
Pall bearers included Senators Clay and Webster. Newly sworn in President Millard Fillmore was there was well.
Congressional Cemetery
Later in April, we ventured to the Congressional Cemetery in Southeast Washington, DC, to visit the afore mentioned vault. Originally known as the Washington Parish Burial Ground, this is the oldest cemetery in Washington. Established in 1807, it is 70 years older than Arlington National Cemetery.
Congressional Cemetery is a few blocks walk from the Potomac Metro stop.
We discovered an oasis of oak, maple, magnolia, flowering dogwood and freshly mown grass in the  |
| Joy |
We also crossed a field of 165 dirty white sandstone “cenotaphs” that honor Congressmen and Senators who died in office. Only half of the cenotaphs—with their distinctive cone-shaped tops—lie atop bodies; the remainder are commemorative.
As we arrived at the Public Vault, we practically tripped over the shiny headstone of Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, former Speaker of the House.
The Public Vault is a semi-circular vault barricaded by a stone façade and an imposing black metal
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| A Peak into the Past |
Final Words
Before we end our pursuit of Zachary Taylor, there are some interesting tidbits to mention:
• Taylor enslaved more than 100 people but reportedly treated them well. He called these enslaved people his “servants.” He was pro-slavery but did not support the expansion of slavery into the newly acquired territories.
• His wife, Margaret Mackall Smith, did not want him to be president and stayed mostly hidden from view.
• Taylor was the first person to use the phrase “First Lady” which he did during the funeral of Dolly Madison in 1849, also at Congressional Cemetery.
• Taylor had ties to the future president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, who became his son-in-law. Because Taylor did not want his daughter, Sarah, to marry into a soldier’s life, Davis secretly married her in 1835. But she died from malaria during their first year of marriage. Later Colonel Davis served as the commander of the 400-man First Mississippi Rifles under General Taylor, and helped turn the tide of the Battle of Buena Vista in Mexico.
• Since I am of Hungarian heritage, I found this tidbit pretty interesting: In his only State of the Union address, Taylor indicated his support to the Magyars trying to break from the Hapsburg Empire.
References
Dugard, M. 2008. The Training Ground: Grant, Lee, Sherman, and Davis in the Mexican War, 1846-1848. Little Brown and Company, New York, NY.
Eisenhower, J.S.D. 2008. Zachary Taylor. Henry Holt and Company. New York, NY.
Riccards, M. 1995. The Ferocious Engine of Democracy: A History of the American Presidency. Volume 1. Madison Books. Lanham, MD.
Singletary, O. 1960. The Mexican War. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.
Smith, C. 2005. Presidents: Every Question Answered. Hylas Publishing.
Unknown. 1850. National Intelligencer. The Funeral. July 15, 1850.
http://www.congressionalcemetery.org/president-zachary-taylor
http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev27-12/text/ansside6.html
