Review of Zachary Taylor: Soldier, Planter, Statesman of the Old West by K. Jack Bauer

“He was and remains an enigma.”  So writes the late historian K. Jack Bauer of Zachary Taylor, the twelfth president of the United States.  Taylor, Bauer elaborates, “was a man of limited emotional and intellectual capacity who appears to have developed a nearly impenetrable mask.”  Despite this, Bauer in the mid-1980s decided to attempt to peel back the mask of this little-known and often forgotten president.  The result is Zachary Taylor:  Soldier, Planter, Statesman of the Old West, a now-classic biography of “Old Rough and Ready.”

Given that Taylor was the first president to have been a solider for nearly all of his adult life, it is not surprising that Bauer devotes 210 of 327 pages (64%) of the book to Taylor’s long military career.  Prior to the Mexican War, Taylor spent much of his time helping protect America’s western frontier, and like most such soldiers, his service was characterized mostly by tedium punctuated by occasional fighting, including action in the Black Hawk and Seminole Wars.  Taylor’s competent service as a junior officer led to him reaching the rank of brigadier general in 1838 and being placed in command of the Army’s Western Division three years later.

When the United States annexed Texas in 1845, Taylor and his army were ordered to the Nueces River and then to the Rio Grande, which the Mexican government believed to be solidly within Mexico’s boundaries.  This led to the outbreak of hostilities in May of 1846.  Over the next nine months, Taylor won four straight battles against Mexican forces, although Bauer argues that none of these battles were a result of Taylor’s great prowess as a military commander. For Bauer, Taylor was a generally competent, but not outstanding, commander whose success was the result of able subordinates, terrible decisions by Mexican commanders, and just plain luck.  After his victory at Buena Vista in February, 1847, Taylor’s force was essentially put on hold for the rest of the war, even as a large portion of it was stripped away to augment General Winfield Scott’s attack on Veracruz and his subsequent march toward Mexico City.

Taylor’s military success led to him being touted as a potential presidential candidate for the 1848 election, although it was not sure which party’s ticket he would lead.  Taylor, perhaps the least politically-minded candidate to that time, had never voted in any election.  Ultimately, he was persuaded to run as a Whig, due to his having a nationalist viewpoint at a time when the Democratic Party was increasingly under the domination of pro-slavery elements.  Prior to the election, the Democrats split, leading to a Taylor victory.

Despite being a slaveholding southerner, President Taylor pursued a nationalist agenda, strongly opposing the spread of slavery into the territories won from Mexico.  He also worked to improve relations with Great Britain, including acknowledging Britain’s right to establish a colony (modern-day Belize) in Central America while relinquishing any American claims to Latin American territory.  In this, he surprised many, for as Bauer writes,

few presidents have proven in practice to be as different from their expected roles as Zachary Taylor…it is doubtful that many Americans in 1848 would have predicted that the slaveholding planter from Louisiana would emerge as the champion of exclusion of slavery from the territories or that the victorious solider of the Mexican War would have presided over the renunciation of Manifest Destiny and the curtailing of the Monroe Doctrine. (320)

What further contributions President Taylor may have made will, of course, be forever a mystery, since only 16 months after becoming president, Taylor died of a stomach ailment, the cause of which is still not completely understood.

Zachary Taylor:  Soldier, Planter, Statesman of the Old West is a serviceable and generally readable story of the life of Zachary Taylor.  Bauer’s descriptions of Taylor’s Mexican War battles, along with the brief narrative of his presidency are the book’s greatest strengths, while the parts that deal with Taylor’s pre-Mexican War military career and the 1848 election are a bit tedious.  Bauer presents a balanced portrait of Taylor, being neither too complimentary nor too critical.  For someone who wants to learn in some depth about Taylor and his times, Bauer’s biography is an excellent choice.