Zachary Taylor

Zachary Taylor was a United States Army officer whose victories during the Mexican-American War made him a national political figure. He had previously served in the War of 1812, the Black Hawk War and the Second Seminole War. Elected as the twelfth president of the United States in 1848, he served only sixteen months before dying in office in 1850.

Taylor entered the presidency without extensive political experience and attempted to hold together a Union increasingly divided over whether slavery would expand into territories acquired from Mexico. Although a slaveholder himself, he opposed the immediate extension of slavery into California and New Mexico and threatened force against secessionist resistance. His sudden death in July 1850 brought Millard Fillmore to office during the negotiations that produced the Compromise of 1850.

In Lucia St. Clair Robson’s Fearless, in 1845, Sarah Borginnis Bowman follows the United States Army to Corpus Christi as a laundress and cook attached to Zachary Taylor’s forces. In Robert Shea’s Shaman, Historical figures including Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Winfield Scott, Zachary Taylor and Jefferson Davis enter the narrative, but the novel remains centred on Sauk families facing hunger, flight and the destruction of their homeland.