Zachary Taylor: The American Presidents Series: The 12th President, 1849-1850 - Hardcover

Eisenhower, John S. D.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805082379 ISBN 13: 9780805082371

Publisher: Times Books, 2008

Synopsis

The rough-hewn general who rose to the nation's highest office, and whose presidency witnessed the first political skirmishes that would lead to the Civil War

Zachary Taylor was a soldier's soldier, a man who lived up to his nickname, "Old Rough and Ready." Having risen through the ranks of the U.S. Army, he achieved his greatest success in the Mexican War, propelling him to the nation's highest office in the election of 1848. He was the first man to have been elected president without having held a lower political office.

John S. D. Eisenhower, the son of another soldier-president, shows how Taylor rose to the presidency, where he confronted the most contentious political issue of his age: slavery. The political storm reached a crescendo in 1849, when California, newly populated after the Gold Rush, applied for statehood with an anti- slavery constitution, an event that upset the delicate balance of slave and free states and pushed both sides to the brink. As the acrimonious debate intensified, Taylor stood his ground in favor of California's admission―despite being a slaveholder himself―but in July 1850 he unexpectedly took ill, and within a week he was dead. His truncated presidency had exposed the fateful rift that would soon tear the country apart.

About this title

About the Authors

John S. D. Eisenhower was a retired brigadier general, a former U.S. ambassador to Belgium, and the author of numerous works of military history and biography, including General Ike: A Personal Reminiscence; They Fought at Anzio; Yanks: The Epic Story of the American Army in World War I; and So Far from God: The U.S. War with Mexico, 1846–1848.

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., (1917-2007) was the preeminent political historian of our time. For more than half a century, he was a cornerstone figure in the intellectual life of the nation and a fixture on the political scene. He won two Pulitzer prizes for The Age of Jackson (1946) and A Thousand Days (1966), and in 1988 received the National Humanities Medal. He published the first volume of his autobiography, A Life in the Twentieth Century, in 2000.

Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton University, is the author or editor of several books, including Chants Democratic and The Rise of American Democracy. He has also written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, and other publications. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Reviews

Eisenhower (So Far from God: The U.S. War with Mexico), a military historian and retired army general, has a secure mastery of his subject and his era in this addition to the American Presidents series of nutshell biographies. Taylor's career, in Eisenhower's retelling, had two principal foci. First, he was a general in the American incursion into Mexico in 1846, and his campaign, crisply recounted here, was perceived as a success by the American populace, catapulting Taylor (1784–1850) to national prominence. Second, Eisenhower spotlights Taylor's equivocal relationship to slavery. A lifelong slave owner himself, he opposed abolishing slavery where it existed to preserve the Union. Yet Taylor claimed to oppose slavery on principle as well as its spread to California, New Mexico and other new states. Taylor lived only 16 uneventful months after his inauguration in March 1849, so Eisenhower's treatment of his presidency necessarily deals more with congressional debates on slavery than with Taylor himself. Eisenhower takes a nuanced view of the 12th president, finding Taylor gentle in civilian life, something of a disappointment as a soldier, but most fundamentally a man who aimed to preserve the Union. 1 map. (June)
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Eisenhower puts his subject’s best foot forward by recalling a remark to the effect that Taylor (1784–1850), a slaveholder who opposed extending slavery into new states, might have prevented the Civil War. A career army officer until mere weeks before his inauguration, Taylor also owned extensive plantations. He was wealthy but not haughty. Willingness to share his soldiers’ discomforts and, while maintaining military discipline, dressing informally endeared him to the troops. He served without great distinction until the Mexican War, which President Polk gave him discretion to start. By winning the war’s first great battle at the right time to attract the attention of Whig Party kingmakers looking for a winner in 1848, he wound up in the White House, intending to be a president for all the people—vainly, Eisenhower thinks. He died rather suddenly, in the wake of the Compromise of 1850, one constituent of which, the Fugitive Slave Act, he despised. Eisenhower doesn’t venture a guess, but would Taylor have vetoed it? The piquancy of such a question makes Taylor’s biography curiously ponderable. --Ray Olson

Edition details

• Publisher: Times Books
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0805082379
• ISBN 13: 9780805082371
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 192
• Editor: Schlesinger Jr. Arthur M., Wilentz Sean