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Considering the course his life took, one might wonder how Zachary Taylor ever came to be elected the twelfth president of the United States. According to K. Jack Bauer, Taylor "was and remains an enigma." He was a southerner who espoused many antisouthern causes, an aristocrat with a strong feeling for the common man, an energetic yet cautious and conservative soldier. Not an intellectual, Taylor showed little curiosity about the world around him. In this biography--the most comprehensive since Holman Hamilton's two-volume work published forty years ago--Bauer offers a fresh appraisal of Taylor's life and suggests that Taylor may have been neither so simple nor so nonpolitical as many historians have believed.

Taylor's sixteen months as president were marked by disputes over California statehood and the Texas-New Mexico boundary. Taylor vehemently opposed slavery extension and threatened to hang those southern hotheads who favored violence and secession as a means to protect their interests. He died just as he had begun a reorganization of his administration and a recasting of the Whig party.

Balanced and judicious, forthright and unreverential, and based on thoroughgoing research, this book will be for many years the standard biography of Zachary Taylor.

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Library Journal Review

Bauer assesses Zachary Taylor as ``a man of limited emotional and intellectual capacity'' behind ``a nearly impenetrable mask.'' The mask is lifted only slightly in this new biography. Although Bauer purports to show ``part of Taylor's life that shaped his later actions,'' this account adds little to what we already know from Holman Hamilton's two-volume Zachary Taylor (1941-51), and Hamilton is far better on the White House years. But so little Taylor correspondence has survived that he must remain an enigma to any biographer. Bauer confirms that he was a competent small-unit army commander, a wrong-headed, stubborn president, and a poor politician. For scholars who need a one-volume life. Thomas E. Schott, Office of History, Engineering Installation Div., Tinker Air Force Base, Okla. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

CHOICE Review

Zachary Taylor was a professional soldier, an unusual occupation for an American in the pre-Civil War era. He won some minor acclaim as an officer during the War of 1812 and, after the war, stayed in the army. The picture that emerges of Taylor is that of a narrow, jealous, competent soldier whose career is typical for that time: a series of slow promotions and minor wars, including service in the Blackhawk and Seminole wars. His assignment to the Mexican border was based purely on his availability. At no point does Bauer accuse Taylor of imagination or military ability in those maneuvers that led to the outbreak of the Mexican War or in his four successful battles. As a result of the fighting in northern Mexico, Taylor emerged as a presidential possibility. Since he had never voted, it was not clear to his contemporaries for which party Taylor would serve as a candidate. Taylor became the Whig candidate in 1848, in part because of support from southern Whigs. As President, however, he did not act as a southerner or a slaveholder; rather, he acted as a nationalist. He took an extreme hard line to threats of disunion and opposed most of the Compromise of 1850, although he died during its debates. A very solid study, based on the most recent scholarship and written authoritatively. Excellent bibliography. Highly recommended for public and academic libraries, community college level and up.-I. Cohen, Illinois State University

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

K. Jack Bauer (1926-1987) was a professor of history at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, and the author or editor of many books on American military history, including The Mexican War, 1846-1848, American Secretaries of the Navy, and U.S. Naval and Marine Corps Bases.