Zachary Taylor was born in Virginia in 1784 and was raised on a Kentucky plantation. Taylor had a career in the army but wanted to raise cotton because he owned a plantation in Mississippi. He would later become the twelfth president of the United States. Though he owned a plantation, he did not support slavery or Southern succession. He spent most of his career guarding the frontier borders from Indians and he fought in the major battles in the Mexican American War and was also Ulysses S. Grant’s general during that war. President Polk would not allow him and his men to fight in Mexico City in order to deprive him of fame because he was of the Whig Party. Taylor was nicknamed “Old Rough and Ready” due to the casual nature by which he ran his military but was also very successful in all of his battles. Once Taylor was elected president, he did not want to be controlled by his party so he put his partisanship aside in order to run the country properly. One of the key issues during his presidency was whether slavery would be legal in the newly acquired territories. Taylor decided to make the territories states and have the new states decide for themselves whether slavery would be legal or not. This made the Southerners furious and they threatened succession but Taylor said that if the South decided to rebel, he would personally lead an army to fight them. Taylor later became fatally ill and died after five days of becoming sick. He would never see the war that he predicted but his son would serve as a general for the South.
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