Zachary Taylor Research Paper

Zachary taylor was the 12th president of the United states, serving from March 1849 until his death July 1850. Before his presidency, Taylor was a career officer in the United States Army, rising to the rank of major general. Taylor status as a national hero as a result of his victories in the Mexican- american war won him election to the white house despite his vague political beliefs. His top priority as a president was preserving the union, but he died sixteen months into his term, before making any progress on the status of slavery, which had been inflaming tension in Congress. He is the first and only president to come from louisiana.
Taylor was born into a prominent family of planters who migrated westward from virginia to kentucky in …show more content…
At the 1848 whig national convention, Taylor defeated scott and former senator henry clay to take the nomination. He won the general election alongside New York politicon Millard Fillmore, defeating Democratic Party candidate Lewis Cass and William Orlando Butler, as well as a third-party effort led by former President Martin Van Buren and Charles Francis Adams, sr. of the Free Soil Party. Taylor became the first President to be elected with no prior office.
As President, Taylor kept his distance from Congress and his cabinet, even as partisan tensions threatened to divide the Union. Debate over the status of slavery in the Mexican Cession dominated the political agenda and led to threats of secession of southerners. Despite being a southerner and a slaveholder himself, Taylor did not push for the expansion of slavery, and he sought sectional harmony above all concerns. To avoid the issue of slavery, he urged settlers in New Mexico and California to bypass the territorial stage and draft constitutions for statehood, setting the stage for the compromise of …show more content…
He is inconclusively believe to have been born at the home of his maternal grandfather, Hare Forest Farm. he was the third of the five surviving sons in his family and had three younger sisters. His mother was Sarah Dabney Taylor. His father. Richard Taylor, had served as a lieutenant colonel in the American Revolution.
Taylor was a descendant of Elder William Brewster, the pilgrim colonist leader of the Plymouth Colony, a Mayflower immigrant, and one of the signers of the Mayflower Compact; and Isaac Allerton Jr, a colonial merchant and colonel who was the son of Mayflower Pilgrim Isaac Allerton and Fear brewster. Taylor’s second cousin through that line was James Madison, the fourth president
Leaving exhausted lands, his family family joined the westward migration out of Virginia and settled near what developed as Louisville, Kentucky, on the Ohio River. Taylor grew up in a small woodland cabin before his family moved to a brick house with increased prosperity. The rapid growth of louisville was a boon for Taylor’s father, who came to own throughout KEntucky frontier, and Taylor had a sporadic formal education. A schoolmaster recalled Taylor as a quick learner. His early letters show a weak grasp of spelling and grammar, and his handwriting was later described as “that of a near illiterate.”
Marriage and

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