Zachary Taylor

Amidst the first year following the Mexican-American War, Zachary Taylor, a hero of that conflict who led US troops to a duo of crucial victories against Mexico, won the presidency on the Whig ticket. This was a surprising development for the general, who had been staunchly apolitical for most of his life. He was a military man through and through. He loved his country and few things brought him more joy than defending it, but he cared little about arguments over slavery, tariffs, states' rights, territorial expansion, infrastructure spending, or any of the other major topics of discussion defining his era. In fact, prior to 1848, Taylor had never even voted in an election! But the Whigs, still riding the success of "Tippecanoe and Tyler too!" as a reference to 1840 Whig candidate William Henry Harrison leading troops during the Battle of Tippecanoe, craved the ability to nominate Taylor. Taylor was essential to ensuring America's victory against Mexico over the previous 2 years, and so had become beloved across the land. Taylor reluctantly accepted these terms, running for president with Millard Fillmore as his running mate.

In the generals, Taylor competed against Democrat Lewis Cass. A third candidate existed: Martin Van Buren, who was running with the single-issue anti-slavery Free Soil Party. The Free Soil ticket was drenched in presidential prestige, in fact, with the son of John Quincy Adams - Charles Francis Adams - being Van Buren's running mate. Despite this, Van Buren faired horribly in the race, winning only about 10% of the vote of New York and no significant sum of support anywhere else in the country. Cass bordered on victory but lost in a narrow competition. Taylor's status as a war hero made him appealing to voters across the country, but this was especially true in the south. Taylor was born in Virginia and spent most of his childhood in Kentucky, both of which were southern states. Taylor was also a slaveowner, making many southerners comfortable with the idea of a Taylor victory, as that may mean the preservation of chattel slavery. Because of these factors, when Election Day arrived, Taylor won.

On March 5, 1849, - a Monday; Taylor refused to be inaugurated on the traditional March 4 because it fell on a Sunday that year - Taylor took the oath of office, ceremonially initiating his presidency. Unfortunately, Taylor inherited a massive, intense debate from his predecessor, James K. Polk. After failing to convince Mexico to sell California to the US, Polk, on April 25, 1846, dispatched some troops to a disputed area between the Nueces and Rio Grande Rivers, scaring Mexican troops and causing them to shoot at the American soldiers. Using this as an excuse, Polk sent Congress a message on May 11, 1846, requesting a declaration of war against Mexico. Equal in genuine outrage to Polk's faux indignation, Congress obliged, and Polk signed the resulting declaration of war on May 13, 1846, beginning the Mexican-American War.

Taylor, who commanded the same troops ordered to cross into disputed lands by Polk, also led American forces to a vital victory in the Battle of Monterrey in September 1846. Soon after, in February 1847, Taylor caused Mexican troops to retreat after they lost to the US in the Battle of Buena Vista. This opened a path through which fellow-General Winfield Scott could invade, attacking the cities of Veracruz and Mexico City and pressuring Mexico into surrender in September 1847. On February 2, 1848, the Mexican-American War ended in a US victory with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. This treaty required Mexico, among other things, to cede what are now the states of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and California to America. From there, a massive argument regarding whether or not slavery should be allowed in the new lands broke out. This debate would prove to be a major cause of the civil war.

Many reasonably expected Taylor to side with the south. Taylor was from Virginia and Kentucky and owned roughly 300 slaves, after all. However, their expectations were soon shattered by a bizarre, yet uplifting reality: Taylor had the wisdom and virtue to oppose the expansion of slavery into the Mexican Cession. Taylor had been working in the military since 1806 when he was 22, and as such, had become extremely patriotic. Consequently, he hated to see how slavery was ripping apart the land he loved the best. For this reason, he became one of the boldest and most impassioned opponents of slavery ever to occupy the White House. Much like Thomas Jefferson before him, Taylor ignored his personal guilt and complacency regarding slavery to ensure his more extreme fellow slave-holders could not cut America in two. Throughout his presidency, Taylor urged New Mexico and California to submit their proposed state constitutions for approval then and there. These constitutions already banned slavery and Taylor didn't want these two states to have any additional time where pro-slavery clauses could be forced in.

Hoping to quell the vicious arguments over slavery in the Mexican Cession, Henry Clay proposed the Compromise of 1850. The third in a trio of compromise measures sponsored by Clay across his half-century in politics, the Compromise of 1850 admitted California into the Union as a free state at the same time that it allowed residents of the Utah Territory (composed of both Utah and Nevada at the time) and the New Mexico Territory (composed of both New Mexico and Arizona at the time) to vote on whether their region of the country would allow or prohibit slavery. Regarding slavery in the abstract, it banned the importation of slaves into Washington DC and required all Americans to report any escaped slaves they witnessed. Though this was unrelated to slavery, it encouraged Texas to end its claims to land in the New Mexico Territory by promising to pay Texas' debts from the Mexican-American War in exchange for its revocation of those claims.

Despite what Clay hoped, the Compromise of 1850 only irritated sectional tensions even more. The fugitive slave clause rightfully outraged northerners and the institution of elections in Utah and New Mexico went on to inspire the Kansas-Nebraska Act under Franklin Pierce, another central cause of the civil war. The Compromise of 1850 was also unpopular in its own day. Clay originally presented its ideas in the form of a single bill, which was so abhorrent to both halves of Congress that it was immediately rejected. Abraham Lincoln's rival Stephen Douglas had to step in for Clay, breaking the Compromise of 1850 up into 5 separate bills so that they would be less repugnant to southern extremists and northern abolitionists. South Carolina even threatened to break away from the Union in response to the Compromise of 1850. Taylor wisely opposed the Compromise of 1850, making it abundantly clear to Clay and Douglas that he would veto it if the proposal ever crossed his desk.

Sadly, Taylor's view would not prevail. On July 4, 1850, Taylor attended an Independence Day party hosted to raise funds for the still-incomplete Washington Monument. There, he ate large amounts of cherries and drank numerous glasses of milk. Unbeknownst to the president, these refreshments and fruits were infected, leaving Taylor extremely ill. On July 9, 1850, he died, ending his presidency after just 15 months. Actually, many people lump Taylor in with William Henry Harrison and James A. Garfield as having served too short a term to be fairly judged. Regardless, Taylor was dead and Fillmore was now president. In September 1850, Fillmore signed each of the 5 bills composing the Compromise of 1850 package. Civil war was now stumbling closer and closer to the realities of American life.

Although Taylor's presidency ended prematurely in a miserable tragedy, it was not without its benefits. The Mexican Cession was not the only battleground where Taylor bravely fought the expansion of slave-owning elitism and southern racism. Many southerners wanted to annex Cuba and turn it into a slave state (an idea far from exclusive to the Taylor and Fillmore eras; Polk, Pierce, and James Buchanan also dealt with similar calls), something that Taylor convinced them not to do. In February 1850, as tensions over slavery expanded further and further, Taylor issued a statement saying that if, while he was still in the White House, a pro-slavery, southern secessionist revolt was launched, anyone taken prisoner by the US military would be hanged. Had this sort of stringent intolerance toward disunion and pro-slavery expansionism been exercised by Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan, perhaps the south would have been too scared to spark a civil war and eventually would have peacefully relinquished the slavery system.

Even outside of his opposition to the spread of slavery, Taylor was a great president. When a group of British explorers became lost in the Arctic, Taylor contributed funds and supplies to the UK's efforts to recover the missing adventurers. On January 9, 1848, while Polk was still president, the people of various European nations - beginning with Italy - rebelled in a series of revolutions meant to protest the economic incompetence and political authoritarianism of antiquated monarchies. Taylor vocally supported these revolutions and provided refuge to persecuted progressives fleeing imprisonment and execution. Domestically, Taylor did appoint a rather inept and corrupt cabinet, but there's evidence that just before he died, President Taylor realized this and started planning to fire the guilty officials.

Taylor also signed the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty with Britain on April 19, 1850. The agreement had London and Washington DC work with one another to construct a canal in Nicaragua. While I dislike this provision on the grounds that Nicaragua never got to decide independently whether or not it wanted to sponsor this canal, I still consider the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty a positive. This is because, alongside commissioning said canal, the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty also said that once the canal was complete, Britain and America would be prohibited from intervening in the internal affairs of Central America any further. The Clayton-Bulwer was a short-term loss for Central American independence, but a long-term victory. Had the treaty been enforced, it would have dramatically improved life for people in countries like Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica, and Panama.

Zachary Taylor is a fascinating president. He was an elderly southern man who fought in James K. Polk's imperialist war of aggression, likely started by the Polk White House to expand the presence of slavery across the North American continent. Born in Virginia and raised in Kentucky, Taylor owned 300 slaves. Despite these facts, he was a dedicated patriot who was determined to halt the growth of slavery, attempting to quarantine the institution within the states where it already existed. Had nature not slain him so early into his tenure, perhaps America's slaves could have looked forward to emancipation far sooner than the one they experienced in our own timeline. Outside of that, he supported the Revolutions of 1848, helped Britain recover some lost explorers, stood up to corruption in his cabinet, and tried to end Anglo-American intervention in Central America.