12) Zachary Taylor - Old Rough and Ready

Zachary Taylor was the first president for which I chose one of The American Presidents Series books. These biographies are meant to give the reader an overview of the major events in each presidents’ life and presidency in a quick, readable volume. John Eisenhower’s “Zachary Taylor” achieved this goal, however 140 pages was not enough to get a good sense of Taylor and his times. For that reason, this is likely the last of these books I’ll read during this project.

Born in Virginia, not far from Montpelier, Zachary Taylor was a distant cousin of James Madison. Taylor’s family moved west to Kentucky when he was young, so like Polk and Jackson before him, Taylor was raised on the frontier. At 23 years old in 1808, he joined the Army. The timing was fortuitous as the young country was about to go back to war with England in the War of 1812 and many proxy battles would occur on the frontier. Taylor’s gained notoriety in the Indiana Territory as he heroically defended Fort Harrison against natives led by William Henry Harrison’s oft antagonist, Tecumseh. Taylor’s performance ultimately led to his promotion to Major, however when the War ended and the size of the Army was reduced Taylor was demoted back to Captain. With his pride wounded he retired from the Army until his rank of Major was returned to him the next year.

Taylor's image seems to fit the nickname
"Old Rough and Ready"

Military life kept Taylor away from his family often and he was determined that his daughter never marry a military man for that reason. As fate would have it his daughter, Sarah, would fall in love with and marry an Army man and Taylor did not approve. Sarah married the future president of the breakaway Confederate States, Jefferson Davis. Tragically, both contracted malaria shortly after their marriage. Jefferson got better, but Sarah went quick. Taylor and Davis would find themselves on the same steamship about 12 years later in Louisiana as Davis was on his way to marry his second wife, Varina Howell. The animosity Taylor had felt toward Davis was gone and while they didn’t agree politically Taylor treated him like a son for the rest of his life.

By the time of the Mexican American War, Taylor was a General and deployed by President James Polk into contested territory in West Texas. When Taylor’s troops were engaged he wrote to his Commander in Chief that hostilities had begun, kicking off the war. Taylor would go on to win victories against the Mexicans, most notably at Palo Alto and Buena Vista.

During his military career Taylor had never made public his political leanings however his success during the war with Mexico had turned him into an American hero. The Whigs needed a viable candidate to challenge the Democrats and Kentucky senator John Crittenden acted as kingmaker pushing for Taylor on the 1848 ticket. The Whigs needed Taylor to declare his politics though. Knowing this, Crittenden deployed three of his aides to Taylor’s Mississippi home who cajoled him into writing a letter to his friend Captain J.S. Allison. The publishing of supposed private letters was a standard form of press release in 18^th and 19^th century American politics. The Allison letter served to establish Taylor’s Whig credentials and Taylor and Millard Fillmore were elected to the Whig ticket at the party’s convention in Philadelphia. As was customary of the time, the potential nominees did not attend the convention. Taylor was home in Mississippi and alerted by mail of his selection. However, more than a month past with no response and party officials began to get anxious. It turned out that the letter had been sitting at the Baton Rouge post office. In 1848 postage stamps were yet to be invented and Taylor had informed the postmaster that he would no longer accept incoming mail on which postage was due, so the postmaster had thrown the letter from Philadelphia into a dead letter file.

Taylor’s presidency was dominated by the issue of slavery. Despite a rush gold-seekers to the California Territory, Congress could not vote on statehood due to the implications of congressional imbalance between slave and non-slave states. The organization of the Oregon Territory was engulfed in the slave issue as well. Meanwhile, Texas had designs on the newly acquired New Mexico Territory and even threatened secession over the issue prompting one of my favorite presidential quotes to date: “If it becomes necessary I’ll take command of the Army myself and if you are taken in rebellion against the Union I will hang you with less reluctance than I hanged deserters and spies in Mexico.” Taylor’s desire was not to be questioned, despite Polk’s misgivings as discussed in the prior post.

Following July 4^th festivities in 1850, Taylor became ill. He would expire on July 9^th, less than a year and a half after taking office. It was likely cholera that killed him, the same ailment that killed his predecessor James Polk, however rumors persisted that he was poisoned by pro-slavery Southerners. This has never been substantiated despite testing. It seems odd that conspiracy theorists would hold that a slaveholder was killed by those with pro-slavery sympathies. Perhaps, Thomas Hart Benton’s effusive eulogy can shed some light. Benton was a congressional institution during the mid-1800s and a Democrat, who owed Taylor no favors in Eisenhower’s words. Benton said of Taylor:

“His death was a public calamity. No man could have been more devoted to the Union or more opposed to the slavery agitation, and his position as a Southern man and a slave-holder, his military reputation and his election by a majority of the people of the States would have given him a power in the settlement of these questions which no President without these qualifications would have possessed.”

Counterfactuals sometimes feel like a cheap attempt to rewrite history and it feels unfair to Lincoln and the other politicians and soldiers who gave their lives to preserve the Union to bestow on Taylor any credit toward that achievement. However, Benton’s words are about a man who does not get any credit. Taylor remains a president little remembered by history, in part due to Union soldiers destroying his son’s house during the Civil War and with it all of his personal papers. Benton’s words give us insight into the convictions of a president who, unlike his successor Millard Fillmore, believed that the Union must be preserved without slavery not preserved by allowing slavery to fester, ignored, in the South. Three presidents and ten-and-a-half years are all that would separate Taylor’s death and the first shots of the Civil War in South Carolina, whether the survival and reelection of Taylor could have altered that remains an unknowable what-if.

5) James Monroe - The Last Cocked Hat

Even when looked at in comparison to other great men of his time, James Monroe led a remarkable life. His childhood was not easy; school was a 5-mile trek through the Virginia wilderness that had to be made, musket in hand, three months out of the year. By sixteen both of his parents had passed. History has James’ influential uncle, Judge Joseph Jones to thank for the fifth president of the United States. Jones paid the family’s debts, gave James’s older sister the wherewithal to raise their two younger brothers, and brought James with him to Williamsburg, where Jones was a member of the House of Burgesses, and enrolled James at the College of William & Mary.

At William & Mary, Monroe was exposed to the simmering resentment against the Crown and shortly thereafter dropped out of class to join the Virginia Infantry. Monroe’s regiment marched to New York, but arrived after the American retreat from New York City was underway (explained in more detail during the George Washington posts). Monroe was in the group of soldiers Washington led across New Jersey into Pennsylvania during the winter of 1776 and was one of the soldiers to cross the Delaware. At the ensuing Battle of Trenton, Monroe took a musket ball to the chest and escaped death thanks to the work of a field medic.

Monroe is depicted holding the flag in Emanuel Leutze's
famous painting, "Washington Crossing the Delaware"  

Following the war, Monroe returned to William & Mary where he received tutoring from his uncle’s acquaintance, Thomas Jefferson. Monroe’s uncle was elected to the Continental Congress in 1782 and recommended Monroe to take his seat on the Virginia Assembly, a post he would win. Monroe’s seat on the Virginia Assembly marked the first in a long string of political offices he would hold including US Congressman, US Senator, ambassador to France during the French Revolution, ambassador to England, minister to Spain, Governor of Virginia, Secretary of State, Secretary of War during the War of 1812, and President of the United States.

The list of offices that Monroe held hints at his proximity to many important events in American history. James, his wife Elizabeth, and their eight-year-old daughter Eliza set out for France in 1794, they stepped off the boat into the genocide that was the French Revolution – 17,000 were already dead and nearly half-a-million were in prisons. Monroe spent much of the goodwill he built up with the French leaders extracting Americans from French prisons. In one of the more interesting stories of his time in France, Monroe set out to free Marquis de Lafayette’s wife, Adrienne, who had been imprisoned after the Marquis fell afoul of the Jacobins. Elizabeth insisted on visiting Adrienne herself and the resulting scene, combined with Monroe’s diplomatic efforts, so affected the French people that Adrienne was released shortly thereafter. The Monroes reunited Adrienne with her son, George Washington Lafayette, who James then issued an American passport to get him out of France. While in the United States, Lafayette’s son would briefly live with his namesake.

Monroe’s efforts during the Jefferson administration are his most enduring. In 1803, Jefferson asked Monroe to travel back to France to help negotiate the purchase of New Orleans and West Florida from the French. His instructions were specific to the purchase of just the two territories mentioned above and he was further instructed to spend no more than $9 million. However, Monroe sensed that Napoléon desired to exit North America altogether and he arranged the purchase of an area larger than Great Britain, France, German, Spain, and Portugal combined. Monroe agreed to $15 million in exchange for what was to become known as the Louisiana Purchase, it would become the largest peaceful transition of land from one nation to another in history. Despite some concern about how the country would react, and Jefferson’s brief contemplation about the Constitutionality of the purchase, Congress approved the purchase and the United States doubled in size.

James Monroe played an important role in the War of 1812 as well, during Madison’s administration he took control of the War Department from the hapless, and possibly treasonous, John Armstrong. After the war, Monroe succeeded Madison in the Nation’s highest office and presided over a prolonged period of peace, which would become known as the Era of Good Feelings. So good were the feelings that Monroe won reelection with 231 of the 235 electoral votes, this count included 3 abstentions and 1 vote for John Quincy Adams (rumored to have been a symbolic vote meant to preserve Washington’s place in history as the only unanimously elected president). During his penultimate State of the Union Address, Monroe would articulate the concept for which he is most remembered, the Monroe Doctrine. The Doctrine sought to prevent European meddling in the affairs of the United States and its neighbors, but has since been invoked by many presidents seeking to protect American interests. Like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams before him, James Monroe would die on July 4^th, 55 years after the founding of the Republic.

While James Monroe seems to have been a great American, Harlow Giles Unger’s book was difficult to get through. The hero-worship for Monroe was, at times, laughable and severely detracted from my enjoyment of the book. Unger considers the presidents preceding Monroe “mere caretakers,” a view that he shares with few others. The book never touches on Monroe’s slave ownership, which seems worth writing about because I don’t believe he inherited any. Unger also writes about Madison as though he was a sickly, bumbling fool who cowered behind Monroe as Monroe held his presidency, and the nation, together.

With the end of Monroe’s presidency the revolutionaries have also passed us by. Next up, John Quincy Adams and the beginnings of the slow march toward the Civil War.

4) James Madison - Father of the Constitution

It now feels like I've began my presidents project in earnest. Not only have I made it through four presidents, but James Madison is the first president who isn’t well known to modern Americans. Lynne Cheney’s book is subtitled ‘A Life Reconsidered’ and it sets out to “[explode] the myths that have burdened his reputation.” I wasn’t aware of said myths, but I was ready for fireworks.

James Madison was the driving force behind one of the two bedrock documents of the United States. While everyone remembers that Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence, Americans rarely recall that James Madison is the “Father of the Constitution”. Additionally, while he didn’t believe them to be necessary and didn’t initially support them, Madison shaped the amendment process and shepherded the Bill of Rights through Congress.

Madison was like many presidents in that many of his great accomplishments occurred before assuming the nation’s highest office. Despite having won a war for independence from Great Britain, America in the mid-1780s was less a united country than a loose-affiliation of nation-states. Those nation-states were bound by the Articles of Confederation, a document that reflected 18^th century Americans’ deep mistrust of centralized government. In 1787 representatives from the different states gathered at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia to revise the Articles. Representing Virginia, James Madison arrived in Philadelphia fearing the dissolution of the United States and planned not to amend, but to create a new, stronger government.

We owe much of what we know about the proceedings of the Constitutional Convention to the exhaustive notes that Madison took. Without Madison’s voluntary effort to record the conversations and arguments, an effort he later said “nearly killed him,” we would know little about what was said inside the Pennsylvania State House in the summer of 1787. I came away from Cheney’s book believing that this effort was Madison’s most underappreciated contribution to the United States.

After the Constitution was signed the hard work wasn’t over. The document had to be ratified by the states and there was deep suspicion about the newly proposed government. Because of these doubts, particularly in Virginia and New York, Alexander Hamilton began a campaign to convince New York to support ratification. Hamilton drafted Madison and John Jay for a campaign that, while lasting less than a year, yielded 85 essays. Though Hamilton later claimed to have written 63 of the essays, historians generally accept that fifty-one were written by Hamilton, twenty-nine by Madison, and five by Jay. Besides helping to encourage ratification, Madison’s work on the Federalist Papers is notable for two other reasons. First, these works, which have become a part of American canon, were authored anonymously. Second, Hamilton and Madison would become bitter rivals later in their political lives.

While Madison’s work toward ratification was remarkable, it is important not to trivialize Madison’s work on the creation of the Constitution. While difficult, it is important to study 18^th century American history without the assumption that the United States was inevitable. The states in the late-1700s were far less “united” than they are today. Madison had to shape a document sensitive to the differing desires, fears, and mistrusts of the states. The final product was a document that no one loved (something that may be surprising to us today), but those that fought for the Constitution believed it was superior to the Articles and was the only way to prevent disunion.

While Dolley Madison in many ways
helped to shape the modern first lady,
she is often remembered for saving the
above portrait of George Washington
from destruction during the War of 1812.

Health was a constant struggle for Madison. He battled epilepsy and it seems to have been a private battle due to the supernatural stigmas attached to the condition. The time at which Madison assumed the office of the president was a particularly stressful time. Jefferson’s embargo as well as war in Europe had created a tinderbox. A letter from Madison’s cousin after his election said in part, “You will indeed, I fear, have a stormy time to encounter, but that is the season in which the pilot discovers his superior skill.” The tinderbox ultimately ignited into the War of 1812 which saw the burning of Washington DC, likely in retaliation for the razing of Parliamentary offices in York (Toronto). The War of 1812 is remembered as a war that accomplished nothing. The Treaty of Ghent, which ended the war, brought relations between Great Britain and the United States back to their pre-war status quo. The Treaty failed to address the simmering issues between the two nations such as the impressment of American sailors into the Royal Navy or the refusal of England to abandon their forts in the western United States. However, the world had changed during the War. Napoleon was exiled and England and France were no longer at war, therefore the impressment issue was largely moot. Ultimately, the War of 1812 was significant in that it improved Americans’ view of the strength of their country, the world’s view of American strength, and helped secure American control over northwestern territories thus encouraging westward expansion. And of course the Battle of Baltimore inspired the country’s national anthem.

Madison’s efforts to bind the nation with the Constitution were not able to prevent the Civil War that he and other founders feared. However, the Constitution remained after the war ended and the amendment process that Madison crafted ultimately ended American slavery and help stitch the nation back together.

3) Thomas Jefferson - The Sage of Monticello

While it’s probably unfair, I approached Thomas Jefferson with more of a negative bias than Washington or Adams. Prior to this project, I didn’t know much beyond the well-worn legends about our first two presidents. However, I can remember the beating that Jefferson took in the popular press when DNA studies linked him to his enslaved concubine in the 1990s.

I call my bias “probably unfair” because Jefferson was far from the only slaveholder we lionize today. Eight of the first ten presidents were slaveholders, John and John Quincy Adams the exceptions. The issue of Sally Hemings is difficult on many levels, the obvious being that she was Jefferson’s slave. She was also 30 years Jefferson’s junior. The third issue first struck me when reading about Washington. Many rationalize slavery as a part of 18th century life in the United States, something we can’t hold against the founders. I believe that is partially true. However, it is clear that Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and many other prominent slaveholders knew slavery was morally repugnant. Unfortunately, these men did little to purge the United States of the institution of slavery, believing abolition and independence were battles that could not be won simultaneously. That these men were also unable to rid their own lives of dependence on slavery causes one to question their commitment. The belief that abolition and independence had to be achieved separately was based largely on Jefferson’s failed efforts to liberalize slavery laws in Virginia while a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, in the General Assembly, and in the Continental Congress when a passage on the abolition of the slave trade was struck from the Declaration of Independence. These efforts have to be weighed against the fact that Jefferson both owned slaves and believed that when slavery was eventually abolished, the two races would never be able to coexist. Slavery displays the complexity and hypocrisy of Jefferson’s character.

By the end of Meacham’s book, I had a much greater appreciation for Jefferson’s contribution to the United States today. Jefferson’s early writings helped galvanize Virginian opposition to the British, from his quill came the Declaration of Independence, as Minister to France he helped establish trade agreements between France and the United States, with the Louisiana Purchase he doubled the size of the country, he organized westward exploration trips (including the famed Lewis & Clark expedition) to better understand the country, and founded the University of Virginia to name some of his greatest contributions.

No leader is perfect. Jefferson was maligned for decisions he made as governor of Virginia during the Revolution. As British forces closed in on Virginia, Jefferson waited too long to assemble the militia allowing Benedict Arnold to rampage across the state. Further, Jefferson’s decision to flee Monticello ahead of a British plot to kidnap him was a source of embarrassment for the rest of his life. That Jefferson was supposed to sit at Monticello waiting to be captured sounds ridiculous to me, however the late 18th century was a time when men defend their honor by duel. From this event comes a great anecdote about Jack Jouett, the 6 foot 4, 220 pound Virginia militiaman who embarked on a harrowing, 40 mile, nighttime ride to warn the future president of the plot. The thrashing that Jouett’s face took from this ride was said to leave scars for the rest of his life.

The Embargo Act of 1807 was likely his most difficult decision as president. The Act is amazing in its severity; all the more amazing when considering it was signed by a president who had championed a weaker central government. The Act was in response to continued harassment of American ships by the British and it outlawed the export of all goods from the United States. The embargo proved impossible to fully enforce and damaged both the United States and British economies. While the embargo did not prevent war with England, which would come in 1812, many historians believe that by delaying a war which the United States was not yet prepared to fight, the embargo was not a complete failure.

Something I enjoy most when reading about the founding fathers is quotes that contradict the ideals often attributed to them today. We often hear the founders referred to as if they were a singular group who labored in unison to create a perfect government. This notion is evoked when a modern politician is perceived to be following a course counter to the founders. Late in life, Jefferson said the following:

They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well: I belonged to it… I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions… but I know also that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind… We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

I don’t believe I can sum-up my reading of Jefferson better than Jon Meacham summed-up Jefferson with the following passage:

Had he been only a philosopher he would not have endured as he does. Had he been only a legislator, or only a diplomat, or only an inventor, or only an author, or only an educator, or even only a president he would not have endured as he does. He endures because we can see in him all the varied and wondrous possibilities of the human experience – the thirst for knowledge, the capacity to create, the love of family and of friends, the huger for accomplishment, the applause of the world, the marshaling of power, the bending of others to one’s own vision. His genius lay in his versatility; his larger political legacy in his leadership of thought and of men.