IV
* * *
In 1850, Henry Clay looked at the first year of Zachary Taylor’s presidency and concluded, “I have never seen such an administration. There is very little co-operation or concord between the two ends of the avenue. There is not, I believe, a prominent Whig in either house that has any confidential intercourse with the Executive.”61 Lincoln agreed. There was no prominent Whig leader in the Cabinet, either. Taylor left filling vacancies within the administration to his Cabinet heads, but they felt little loyalty to Taylor or his policies. The ensuing disorder was compounded by Taylor’s refusal to abide by one of the central tenets of the Whig Party—presidential deference to the will of both Congress and the Cabinet. In one of his few acts as president before he died, William Henry Harrison had rejected that practice as well, arguing that he, not they, was elected to office and their job was to advise him, not the other way around. Taylor followed suit, and, like Harrison, found himself at odds with his own Cabinet.
Taylor’s next move infuriated the Whig faithful further. As a presidential candidate, Taylor had gone to great lengths to assure loyal Whig voters that he shared their principles of governance. In the second of the letters that he had written to his brother-in-law John Allison, he had reemphasized that “I am not prepared to force Congress, by coercion of the veto, to pass laws to suit me or to pass none.”62 Though Taylor had made no reference to those principles in his first public statement following his election, many Whigs were reassured by his declaration in his Inaugural Address that “it is for the wisdom of Congress itself, in which all legislative powers are vested by the Constitution, to regulate [various] matters of domestic policy.”63 He went further, at that time, to say, “I shall look with confidence to the enlightened patriotism of that body to adopt such measures of conciliation as may harmonize conflicting interests and tend to perpetuate the Union which should be the paramount object of our hopes and affections.”64
However, in Taylor’s first—and, as it turned out, only—Annual Message to Congress (delivered at the end of 1849), the fears of his Whig constituents were fully realized: rather than wait for any lead or signal from Congress, he laid out the bold proposal for Congress to admit California and New Mexico separately as new states into the Union and leave each of them to decide how they would handle the issue of slavery. While Taylor recognized that Congress had complete discretion to condition the admission of a new state on any basis it chose, he made clear that his proposal should be the first and only order of business in Congress. Everyone knew that if Taylor’s plan were followed, it would tip the balance of power in Congress in favor of antislavery forces, because both California and New Mexico were disposed to endorse antislavery constitutions and the Senate was at that time evenly split between slave and free states. Many Whigs liked the idea of weakening the slaveholders’ power in Congress, but they liked even less that Taylor was demanding that they do as he directed. Taylor stuck by his proposal because he believed it would avoid, rather than provoke, a nasty fight in Congress over extending slavery into the territories. He thought the plan had the further advantage of respecting popular sovereignty, because it would have allowed each territory to choose for itself in its constitution whether to allow or prohibit slavery. Most members of Congress, including Stephen Douglas (who considered himself the principal champion of popular sovereignty), objected to Taylor’s plan because they either disagreed with it substantively or objected to his making demands of Congress rather than following its will. House leaders refused to take any action on his plan, while Senate leaders refused to act on hundreds of his nominations to positions requiring confirmation. Taylor then set a record for making the most recess appointments by any president till then.
New Mexico responded to the president’s plan immediately by applying for statehood under an antislavery constitution. Texas authorities had other ideas. To expand the domain of slavery, they threatened to acquire, by force if necessary, all the New Mexico land east of the Rio Grande, including Santa Fe. They declared that it belonged to them and threatened civil war if the United States tried to stop them.
The prospect of war didn’t deter Taylor; indeed, it strengthened his resolve. In February 1850, he met with Southern leaders in Congress and warned them that anyone “taken in rebellion against the Union, he would hang . . . with less reluctance than he had hanged deserters and spies in Mexico.”65 He sent federal troops to Santa Fe and directed the colonel in charge to prepare his men to rebuff any invasion of New Mexico. These soldiers kept Texas forces at bay. Taylor made clear that if Texas made any aggressive move to capture any portion of New Mexico, he would lead federal troops in response.
Taylor tried repeatedly but unsuccessfully to persuade Democrats and Southern Whigs that his plan was the best possible compromise because it gave “the North substance of the Wilmot Proviso but without forcing the South to swallow it as a formally enacted principle.”66 The fact that Taylor’s chief defender in the Senate was Andrew Jackson’s old Democratic ally, Thomas Benton of Missouri, revealed how much Taylor’s leadership violated Whig principles. Not only that, but Southern Whigs, led by Henry Clay, responded with their own proposal that included a fugitive slave law. Whereas Clay favored a compromise that helped the slave power, Taylor did not, objecting that it would have drawn the federal government into supporting slavery and would have ripped the Union apart. Southern Whigs, including Clay, were outraged by Taylor’s threatened veto of the compromise because they believed, in accordance with Whig orthodoxy, that a president should veto only measures that are clearly unconstitutional, and since the Constitution at that time recognized slavery (for example, in calculating the populations of congressional districts), their legislation did not exceed that threshold. Accordingly, on May 21, 1850, Clay formally broke with Taylor, arguing that Taylor, “entertaining that constitutional deference to the wisdom of Congress which he had professed, and abstaining from any interference with its free deliberations, ought, without any dissatisfaction, to permit us to consider what is best for our common country.”67
Taylor again warned Southern Democrats that they would be worse off if they failed to support his proposal. He argued that their opposition ran the risk of motivating Congress to approve the Wilmot Proviso to ban slavery in any of the territory acquired from Mexico in the Mexican-American War, which, he made clear, he believed was constitutional. In response, several Southern Democrats, including Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis, declared their opposition to Taylor’s plan because it enabled antislavery forces to become a majority in the Senate—after already controlling the House—and thus provided a back door through which to enact the Wilmot Proviso. When other Southern Democrats, including John Calhoun in his last statement on the floor of the Senate, threatened secession rather than accept Taylor’s plan, the president issued his own threat—to use military force to stop any secession movement. He was ready to stop Texas aggression and Southern secession.
By the spring, with war threatening on two fronts, Taylor’s problems with his Cabinet worsened. On one front, Taylor had managed, in his lame efforts to secure geographical balance, to exclude anyone from the Northeast. Thus the only contingent that actually supported his plan, the Northern Whigs, were absent from his team. At the same time, a scandal of unprecedented proportions threatened to rip Taylor’s administration apart. His attorney general, Reverdy Johnson, had authorized Treasury Secretary William Meredith to pay the full amount of the interest on a claim that the Galphin family had made against the U.S. government for wrongfully seizing control of their family estate in Georgia in 1773. When it became known that just before Taylor took office Congress had enacted a law directing that the interest should be five times the size of the principal and that half of the principal and half of the interest were owed to Taylor’s war secretary, George Crawford, for his legal services on behalf of the Galphin family, a public outcry arose. The matter festered for months, while the House considered censuring not only Cabinet memb
ers Johnson, Crawford, and Meredith but perhaps also Taylor. Under intense pressure from Congress to get his administration in order, Taylor considered firing his entire Cabinet to remove any appearance of corruption within his administration. Not satisfied with that response from Taylor, some House leaders considered initiating an impeachment inquiry against Taylor for allowing such corruption to fester in his administration.
With a stalemate in Congress over the admission of the two new states and a threat of impeachment hanging over him, Taylor reluctantly made plans to reorganize his administration. It included dismissing his entire Cabinet. Taylor knew Jackson and Tyler had each removed their Cabinets entirely, so neither he nor his able attorney general, Reverdy Johnson, had any doubts that he had the power to do the same thing. As Taylor prepared to go public with his plans, he died unexpectedly from either a stomach virus or cholera on July 9, 1850.
Back in Springfield, Abraham Lincoln was as stunned as most Whigs to read about the turmoil in Taylor’s Cabinet and the impasse over admission of California and New Mexico. Now Taylor’s death left nearly all of them speechless—all but Lincoln. He was one of the few prominent Whigs who took the opportunity to eulogize the late president. He put aside his disappointment in not securing an appointment with the Taylor administration, the debacle of Taylor’s Cabinet appointments, and the anger over Taylor’s break with Clay. Long overshadowed by the tribute that he would offer his idol Henry Clay two years later, this eulogy reveals Lincoln’s significant affinities for his subjects—a fondness sculpted by a great deal of selective recall. In its fourth sentence, Lincoln notes that Taylor’s “youth was passed among the pioneers of Kentucky, whither his parents emigrated soon after his birth; and where his taste for military life, probably inherited, was greatly stimulated.”68 Lincoln said nothing of the time Taylor spent in any other state, particularly Louisiana, where he had owned a plantation with slaves.69
Zachary Taylor came into prominence and the presidency because of his military career, and Lincoln’s eulogy was devoted almost entirely to that period of his life. Yet the fact that Polk picked Taylor as his initial commanding general in Mexico went without comment.70 Nor did Lincoln mention that Polk had removed Taylor from command in Mexico.71 Instead, Lincoln recalled the fallen heroes in that “last battle” of Taylor’s, including Henry Clay’s son, as well as John Hardin, his onetime friend and rival. “Passing in review, General Taylor’s military history, some striking peculiarities will appear.”72 For Lincoln, the first was this:
No one of the six battles which he fought, excepting perhaps, that of Monterey, presented a field, which would have been selected by an ambitious captain upon which to gather laurels. So far as fame was concerned, the prospect—the promise in advance, was, “you may lose, but you can not win.” Yet Taylor, in his blunt business-like view of things, seems never to have thought of this.73
Lincoln found most significant the fact that “it did not happen to Gen. Taylor once in his life, to fight a battle on equal terms, or on terms advantageous to himself—and yet he was never beaten, and never retreated. In all, the odds was greatly against him; in each, defeat seemed inevitable; and yet in all, he triumphed.”74 Lincoln did not have to mention the race for the presidency, since that turned out just as every other battle in Taylor’s life did, with Taylor prevailing in the end. “Wherever he has led,” Lincoln noted, “while the battle still raged, the issue was painfully doubtful; yet in each and all, when the din had ceased, and the smoke had blown away, our country’s flag was still seen, fluttering in the breeze.”75
Though Lincoln had never seen, much less participated in, an actual battle, he recognized the greatness in Taylor as a military commander. Lincoln declared, “General Taylor’s battles were not distinguished for brilliant military maneuvers; but in all, he seems rather to have conquered by the exercise of a sober and steady judgment, coupled with a dogged incapacity to understand that defeat was possible.” Here was Lincoln delivering his greatest acclamation for Taylor and most aspirational for himself and the country. “His rarest military trait,” Lincoln said of Taylor, “was a combination of negatives—absence of excitement and absence of fear. He could not be flurried, and he could not be scared.”76 At the precise time in Lincoln’s life when he had reason to be scared that he might never win another campaign or achieve the fame he desperately desired, Taylor’s capacity to be unafraid of failure was inspiring.
It is perhaps enough to say—and it is far from the least of his honors that we can truly say—that of the many who served with him through the long course of forty years, all testify to the uniform kindness, and his constant care for, and hearty sympathy with, their every want and every suffering; while none can be found to declare, that he was ever a tyrant anywhere, in anything.77
The “tyrant” was a not so subtle reference to the difference between Taylor and the Democratic presidents who preceded him. He was not, in other words, disposed to be a Jackson, a Tyler, or a Polk. Lincoln did not yet know all of the men who would look back with gratitude at Taylor’s “uniform kindness” as a leader and mentor, but on the night of Taylor’s inauguration, he had likely met two of them—Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis.
While Lincoln was serving in the Black Hawk War, Taylor’s daughter, Sarah, had met and fallen in love with Davis, who was a lieutenant under Taylor’s captaincy. Taylor opposed the marriage because he thought the life of a military wife would be too hard for her. Davis then resigned from the service, and the two were married with Taylor’s blessing in 1835. For their honeymoon, Davis brought her back to his family’s plantation in Mississippi, where she contracted malaria and died just a few months later. Taylor vowed never to forgive Davis, but after nearly a decade of not speaking to each other Davis returned to the army, the two men reconciled, and Davis served with distinction under Taylor during the Mexican War. Later, shortly after Taylor’s election, Taylor told Davis to follow his personal and constitutional convictions without fear of losing Taylor’s respect. In turn, Davis was one of the three senators who planned Taylor’s inauguration, though he vigorously opposed his policies. The two kept in touch, though they never discussed politics. Davis was at Taylor’s bedside when he died, and he persuaded House leaders to put aside the movement to censure Taylor after his death. In his eulogy, Davis defended Taylor’s proposals on California and New Mexico as the only way to preserve the opportunity for Congress to peaceably settle the boundaries of Texas and New Mexico.
Lincoln could only stand in awe of a man who could earn the allegiance of a fierce proslavery senator like Davis and a fierce abolitionist like William Seward, who was widely believed to be Taylor’s closest confidant. Taylor was the model of a man who could separate politics from the personal in order to maintain bridges across the chasm of political differences defining his time.
Having lauded Taylor for his military prowess and lack of any pretensions or arrogance, Lincoln moved next to the “point of time” when “Taylor began to be named for the next Presidency.”78 He noted, “The incidents of his administration up to the time of his death, are too familiar and too fresh to require any direct repetition.”79 Thus Lincoln was able to gloss over most of the chaos of Taylor’s fifteen months in office. After all, Lincoln said, “The Presidency, even to the most experienced politicians, is no bed of roses; and General Taylor like others, found thorns within it.”80 In apparent acknowledgment of the hostile House he faced at the time of his death, Lincoln observed, “No human being can fill that station and escape censure. Still I hope and believe, when General Taylor’s official conduct shall come to be viewed in the calm light of history, he will be found to have deserved as little as any who have succeeded him.”81
Of Taylor’s death, Lincoln could not help but wonder “what will be its effect, politically, upon the country.”82 Lincoln knew, as did the nation, that Taylor’s death elevated to the presidency an old-line Whig—his vice president, Millard Fillmore. “I will not pretend to believe,” Lincoln expresse
d hopefully, “that all the wisdom, or all the patriotism of the country, died with General Taylor.”83 Yet as a close student of the news printed in the Whig papers that he religiously read, Lincoln expected Fillmore to be hard pressed by Clay, Douglas, and others to bend too far in favor of the slave power to spare the country from a civil war. “I fear,” Lincoln then said, “the one great question of the day, is not now so likely to be partially acquiesced in by the different sections of the Union, as it would have been, could General Taylor have been spared to us.”84
This was as far as Lincoln would go to opine on the choices facing the nation, but he knew whom he hoped would come up with the answer. “Yet, under all the circumstances, trusting to our Maker, and through his wisdom and beneficence, to the great body of our people”—meaning, in Lincoln’s parlance, the Congress—“we will not despair, nor despond.”85
Before Lincoln closed with a quotation from the Gospels, a hymn from Isaac Watts (the “Godfather of English hymnody”), and several stanzas from one of Lincoln’s favorite poets, William Knox,86 he reminded the audience of its “duty.” He repeated the word three times,87 emphasizing that he expected “the American people” and their leaders to undertake it now that Taylor was dead.88 In closing, Lincoln said,
The death of the late President may not be without its use, in reminding us, that we, too, must die. Death, abstractly considered, is the same with the high as with the low; but practically, we are not so much aroused to the contemplation of our own mortal natures, by the fall of many undistinguished, as that of one great, and well known, name. By the latter, we are forced to muse, and ponder, sadly.89
The prospect of “duty and death” bracketed not just Taylor’s life but Lincoln’s own.
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