Zachary Taylor

Taylor grew up on the Kentucky side of the frontier, on land his father claimed for Revolutionary service, and got his schooling in pieces — his mother first, then whatever tutors passed through. He never learned to spell reliably and his handwriting stayed hard to read all his life. A commission arrived in 1808, first lieutenant, signed under Thomas Jefferson, and he simply never left: Fort Harrison in 1812, colonel in the Black Hawk War in 1832, brigadier general after Lake Okeechobee on Christmas Day 1837. He married Margaret Mackall Smith in 1810 and moved her from post to post across the Southwest for three decades. Between assignments he bought cotton land, and then more of it, and the people to work it.

Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma in May 1846, Monterrey that September, then Buena Vista in February 1847 against a force several times the size of his own. That last one made him a national name, and the Whigs handed the nomination to a soldier who had never held any civil office. Sixteen months into the term he was dead, in the middle of the argument over what to do with the ground his own campaigns had taken. BriefHistory has the administration and the crisis. Here the subject is the estate and the family.

In April 1842 Taylor paid 95,000 dollars for Cypress Grove, 1,823 acres of cotton ground in Jefferson County, Mississippi, and the 81 enslaved people already working it. That was on top of what he held in Kentucky and Louisiana — well over a hundred men, women and children in all, and by some counts a great many more. He also told Southern leaders that California and New Mexico should enter as free states and that he would answer secession with the army. Both things were true at once, and he never had to reconcile them. The family had already paid a separate bill. His daughter Sarah Knox married Lieutenant Jefferson Davis on June 17, 1835, over her father's objection that army life had nearly ruined her sister. She was dead of fever on September 15, three months later, at 21.

Little moved, because there was not enough presidency to reassess — historians have parked him near the bottom for a century and a half. What moved was the body. In 1926 he came out of a Washington vault and into a mausoleum outside Louisville. In June 1991, on a writer's theory that slaveholders had poisoned him, Kentucky exhumed him again and Oak Ridge National Laboratory found arsenic levels hundreds of times too low to have killed anyone. He was reburied within days. The stranger afterlife belongs to the family: his son Richard became a Confederate lieutenant general, and the young lieutenant he had not wanted his daughter to marry became president of the Confederacy.

Zachary Taylor's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Defense of Fort Harrison other
  Held a small Indiana garrison against a night attack and fire 1812
• Battle of Lake Okeechobee other
  Fought on Christmas Day and won him a brigadier generalship 1837
• Cypress Grove Plantation other
  1,823 acres in Mississippi, bought with 81 enslaved people for 95,000 dollars 1842
• Battle of Buena Vista other
  Badly outnumbered and still on the field at dark — it made him a candidate 1847
• Clayton-Bulwer Treaty other
  Signed weeks before his death — it governed Anglo-American canal rights for 50 years 1850

• May 3, 1808 aged 23 Commissioned a first lieutenant in the 7th Infantry He stayed in uniform for the next 40 years.
• June 21, 1810 aged 25 Marries Margaret Mackall Smith
• September 5, 1812 aged 27 Holds Fort Harrison through a night attack One of the first American land successes of the War of 1812.
• September 15, 1835 aged 50 His daughter Sarah Knox dies three months after marrying Jefferson Davis Fever, contracted on a summer visit to Louisiana. She was 21.
• December 25, 1837 aged 53 Wins at Lake Okeechobee in the Second Seminole War
• 1842 aged ~58 Buys Cypress Grove and the 81 people enslaved on it A 95,000-dollar purchase in Jefferson County, Mississippi.
• February 23, 1847 aged 62 Holds the line at Buena Vista against Santa Anna
• July 9, 1850 aged 65 Dies in the White House after five days of illness Acute gastroenteritis, five days after a Fourth of July ceremony.
• June 17, 1991 Exhumed in Louisville to test a poisoning theory Neutron activation analysis at Oak Ridge found no meaningful arsenic. He was reburied within days.

• Jefferson Davis 1808–1889
  President of the Confederacy whose defense of slavery and secession made him central to the Civil War and its memory. father-in-law of
• Winfield Scott 1786–1866
  Commanding general whose long career, Mexico City campaign, and Anaconda Plan shaped nineteenth-century U.S. military strategy. rival
• Henry Clay 1777–1852
  Senator and statesman known as the Great Compromiser for his role in preserving the Union. took the nomination from
• Osceola 1804–1838
  Seminole leader whose resistance during the Second Seminole War challenged federal removal policy. fought against
• Black Hawk 1767–1838
  Sauk leader whose 1832 resistance to removal from Illinois lands became the Black Hawk War. fought against
• John C. Calhoun 1782–1850
  Vice president and theorist of slavery and states’ rights whose doctrines intensified sectional conflict. opposed