The Taylor File [Hardcover]

He was the Eisenhower of his time. Against enormous odds, this non-political soldier was sent to the White House in 1848 on a wave of hysterical enthusiasm for his victory over Mexico--and the acquisition of vast lands that would become the American West. That land would also, like a curse from a Greek drama, predict the untimely death of Zachary Taylor.

The date was also significant, for in January, 1848, gold was discovered in California. Thousands sailed around South America or trudged overland to the gold fields. Greed spread like wildfire, from the smallest hamlet to the big corporations of the time, those cotton plantations in Georgia, sugar plantations in Louisiana or rice fields in South Carolina. Empty land meant expansion, and expansion meant the extension of slavery. Because Zachary Taylor owned a hundred slaves and a 2,000-acre cotton plantation in Mississippi, the pro-slavery politicians thought they had their man.

They could not have been more wrong. They forgot that this was a forty-year veteran of the frontier army who saw the country as a whole, not in sections. He was a man of action, not words. He single-handedly got California into the Union as a free state, bypassing territorial status. And he would have done the same for New Mexico, if he had not been ill the day the New Mexico state constitution, requesting admission as a free state, reached St. Louis and was never seen again.

There were other mysteries that first week in July, 1850, when Taylor died after eating fresh cherries and drinking cold milk at the White House on July 4th. Knowing how critical transportation would be for California, he had negotiated a treaty with England to build a canal through Nicaragua. The Senate ratified it. Contracts were confirmed with the engineers. Taylor signed the treaty on July 5. Then, as with the New Mexico state constitution, it disappeared. Lord Balfour issued a counter-declaration, inserted into the U.S. archives after Taylorl³!