Zachary Taylor and the Election of 1848

THE ELECTION OF 1848 has in the past attracted the attention of historians because the failure of the two major parties to take a stand on the question of the status of slavery in the territories, the only real issue before the country, gave rise to the Free Soil Party which in the next decade became the nucleus of the powerful Republican organization. This aspect of the election needs no retelling. But the story of Zachary Taylor's candidacy and his fight to escape the controlling influence of the party machine and to be an independent candidate and president has never been adequately presented. No other president, before or since, with the possible exception of Grover Cleveland, rose as rapidly as Zachary Taylor from obscurity to the White House. So suddenly was he thrust upon the American people that if the Whig National Convention that assembled at Baltimore in 1844 had been told that four years later their party would nominate Zachary Taylor for president the convention would have been amazed and mystified. Few of the delegates would even have heard of him, and those few would never have thought of him as a presidential candidate. Taylor's sudden emergence into the political limelight was the direct result of the military fame achieved by him as the commanding general of the United States forces during the first year of the war with Mexico. When at the outset of the war he won the unexpected victories at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma against forces that far outnumbered his own, and thus rescued his army from a situation that the American press had depicted as full of danger and peril, politicians and newspaper editors of both major parties began to talk of Old Rough and Ready for the presidency. His capture of Monterey, four months later, even though his terms of capitulation were criticized by the administration in Washington as too lenient, stimulated this Taylor-for-President talk. When on February 22, 1847, after being stripped of most of his regulars who were transferred to General Scott's Vera Cruz expedition, he turned what seemed like certain disastrous defeat at the hands of Santa Ana's superior numbers into the victory of Buena Vista, the Taylor-for-President movement began to appear irresistible. State and local meetings representative of both parties

Political science · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History

• Henry Clay and the Whig Party

  Theodore Calvin Pease, George R Poage•The Mississippi Valley Historical…•1937

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