Zachary Taylor was the 12^th President of the United States. He was the fourth who had served as a general, the third to belong to the Whig Party, and he was the second to die in office. It was from cholera, after he drank some suspicious milk and ate a bowl of cherries. Ya gotta be more careful in the hot summer months in Washington, DC, a city that had open sewers at the time.

The son of a Revolutionary War veteran, Zachary Taylor was born and raised in Kentucky, then later moved to Louisiana. He owned plantations, and he owned slaves. Yet despite his being from the South, he actually sided more with the North when disputes arose over whether or not the new states and territories in the West would be slave or free. Taylor was a unionist, and he vigorously opposed anyone from the Soutth who even so much as hinted at secession. Good for him.

Before becoming president, Taylor had a long career in the Army. He fought in the War of 1812 and in the Mexican-American War, and he also fought the Indians in the Black Hawk War in Illinois and the Second Seminole War in Florida. He was not considered a great general, but he did become famous as one. His nickname was “Old Rough and Ready.” This helped get him elected in 1848. He ran against Lewis Cass, a Democrat from Michigan. He had not been elected to anything before becoming president, and he did not have very good political skills. His presidency lasted only a year and change.

Some fun facts about Zachary Taylor:

• One of his daughters married Jefferson Davis, who would go on to become president of the Confederacy! (But she died three months after the marriage, of malaria.)
• He was an admirer of Thomas Jefferson.
• He was often disheveled and wore sloppy clothes, even as a general.
• He had a bad temper, and he carried personal grudges.
• Not very educated or worldly.
• He never got into the habit of voting.
• It’s not in the book, but many had speculated that Taylor might have been poisoned! His body was exhumed in 1991, but no traces of arsenic were found.

I found “Zachary Taylor: Soldier, Planter, Statesman of the Old Southwest” by K. Jack Bauer to be a bit tedious. It was indeed a well-researched book, with plenty of footnotes and maps, and I found the analysis was solid and thoughtful. Yet for some reason I just did not enjoy this, the way I have eagerly devoured so many other presidential biographies I have been reading. (In my opinion the choice of a cover picture is atrocious, the worst I have ever seen.) And unfortunately, despite the author’s careful gathering of all the available facts, I felt I just could not really figure Taylor out by reading this. But I don’t think the author could either, as he summed it up well with the last line of his book: “He was and remains an enigma.”

It was in 1845, during the single term of James K. Polk, our nation’s 11th president, that someone coined the term Manifest Destiny — the concept that our country would one day go all the way to the Pacific Ocean.

The original 13 states were all on the Eastern Seaboard, but it did not take long for Americans to begin moving west, with new states and territories stretching all the way to the Mississippi River Valley. At the dawn of the 19^th Century, Jefferson doubled the size of our country with the Louisiana Purchase. But it was Polk, four decades later, who would pave the way for us to have what would become a coast-to-coast country. If you’ve ever been to Disneyland, or had a beverage from Starbucks, or if you’ve ever seen a Hollywood movie, you can thank James K. Polk. He used every tool at his disposal. He encouraged pioneers to pack up everything and trek across the Rocky Mountains in covered wagons. He sent the military to the frontier with vague or misleading instructions. If the generals went too far and grabbed too much territory, he wasn’t going to stop them. He got the British to the bargaining table over the jointly occupied Oregon Territory, securing what would eventually become the states of Idaho, Oregon and Washington.

But the grand prize was Alta California (upper California) and to get this, as well as the vast New Mexico Territory, he would play hardball with Mexico, eventually taking us to war. The Mexicans crossed the Rio Grande and attacked General Zachary Taylor’s troops, which gave Polk the opening he needed. Blood had been “spilled on American soil,” giving us an excuse to declare war, invade and occupy Mexico City. In the last days of the Tyler presidency, Texas had been added to the union as a state, but nobody at the time could agree on what the actual boundaries were. Polk took care of all that.

On the Fourth of July in 1848, on the very day that he attended a ceremony in which the cornerstone for the Washington Monument was laid, Polk held in his hands the final signed copy of the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, ending the war. Mexico got $15.8 million, and we got approximately one million square miles, what would become the states of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico. Cue the Village People song “Go West.”

At this point I should also mention slavery. All this acquisition of new territory was controversial at the time. Many in the north did not want us to acquire more territory because they feared this would lead to more slave states and would upset the balance of power in Congress. Many in the south were all for it though, because, yay slavery. Polk himself did not take a strong stand one way or the other on slavery, but, like many other presidents of the era both good and bad, he himself was a slave owner. Just a decade later, slavery would split our country in a tragic war, but that would be a fight for future presidents.

Trained as a lawyer, James Knox Polk got his start in politics as a clerk for the Tennessee state senate, before getting elected to the Tennessee state house of representatives. He then served seven terms in the in the U.S. House of Representatives. He became chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and later became Speaker of the House. Leaving Washington with hopes of returning someday as president, Polk was elected governor of Tennessee but then lost his re-election bid and lost again when he ran a third time. Having just suffered two humiliating losses at the ballot box, he was a bit of a surprise candidate in the election of 1844 when he got the Democratic Party nomination, facing the Whig candidate, Henry Clay. He promised he would serve just one term, and he kept that promise. Sadly, he died in June 1849, just three months after leaving office.

Like all Democrats in that era, he did not believe the federal government had any business spending money on “internal improvements” and he vetoed various infrastructure bills, including one that would have funded harbors on the Great Lakes.

He had a hard working, loyal cabinet, with the exception of his Secretary of State, James Buchanan, who was a vacillating, scheming troublemaker.

Some fun facts about Polk:

• Born in a log cabin!
• He was a workaholic and a micromanager who rarely took vacations and did not allow his cabinet secretaries to stray far from the capital.
• He was a disciple of Andrew Jackson.
• Married to Sarah. They had no children, possibly because he might have become sterile after undergoing a gruesome surgery for urinary stones when he was young.
• At the time he was elected in 1844, he was in his late 40s and was the youngest to have ever been elected president.
• To this day, he is the only Speaker of the House to later become president.

There are many biographies of Polk to choose from. I read “Polk: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America” by Walker R. Borneman. It was a page-turner. Complete with helpful maps and high-quality portraits of key players, I found it engrossing and I could not put it down. The author makes a strong case that Polk set himself above many other presidents by listing four very specific policy goals at the outset of his presidency, accomplishing them, and then stepping aside. The author also points out that Polk, in deciding to go to war with Mexico and getting Congress to rubber stamp it, wrested the war-making decision, rightly or wrongly, away from the legislative and to the executive branch.

Like Barbra Streisand and Pete Townsend, the 10^th President had a large, prominent nose.

He fathered 15 children with two different wives. His first wife, Letitia Tyler, popped out eight children and then died, making Tyler a widower. She was the first first lady to die while her husband was in office.

While he was still president, at age 53, John Tyler married again, to a wealthy 24-year-old named Julia Gardiner. Yes, she was just 24! They remained happily married long after his presidency and she popped out seven children. Julia Gardiner Tyler came from a rich family and was a society girl. She hired a publicist who named her “The Lovely Lady Presidentress” in newspaper articles, a title that did not stick.

Tyler survived a ghastly cannon fire disaster aboard a brand new Navy battleship in which his Secretary of State, his Secretary of the Navy, and several other dignitaries were killed. Julia’s father was also killed, and Tyler carried her off the boat in his arms after she fainted.

Tyler was elected vice president under William Henry Harrison (aka Old Tippecanoe; their campaign slogan had been “Tippecanoe and Tyler too”) but Harrison died after a month in office. A president had never died in office before, and the line of succession under the constitution wasn’t considered entirely clear on what to do. Tyler fought those who wanted to refer to him as “acting president” and took control of the federal government and the Cabinet, and took the presidential oath of office, setting a precedent for the smooth and orderly transition of power.

As president, Tyler successfully negotiated a dispute with Great Britain over the border between Maine and Canada. He opened up trade channels with China. He strengthened the Navy. He fought hard to annex Texas, which had recently declared independence from Mexico, and he finally accomplished that just days before he left office. He clashed with the powerful Senator Henry Clay.

Tyler issued tons of vetoes, and that caused many in Congress to hate him. He was burned in effigy, there was a move to impeach him, and his political opponents labeled him “His Accidency.” In an act of defiance, his entire Cabinet save one resigned on the same day. He had been elected on the Whig ticket, but when he did not go along with what the party wanted the Whigs expelled him. In the election of 1844 he tried running under his own party but it was futile. He later dropped out of the race and threw his support to Polk, largely to prevent Clay, whom he loathed, from getting elected.

Earlier in his career, Tyler had served in the Virginia state legislature and as governor of Virginia, and he served in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate.

John Tyler, the nation’s 10^th president, was not the first nor would he be the last to own slaves. Like many of the late 18^th and early 19^th Century presidents, Tyler was born into a slave society, an economy that was dependent upon forced, unpaid labor. Most of our early presidents knew that this system was unsustainable, and most also realized that the divisions between north and south over the institution would ultimately lead to civil war. Tyler, sadly, toward the end of his life, betrayed the constitution he had sworn to uphold and died on the wrong side of history. Less than two years before his death, the aged former president participated in a peace commission to avert conflict, but he ultimately sided with Virginia in seceding from the union. He was then elected to the House of Representatives — for the Confederacy. This was long after he had left the White House and just months before he died. His coffin was draped in the Confederate flag. In my view he died a traitor to the United States, which taints his what he accomplished as president. This is sad, because his accomplishments were not minor.

As presidential biographies go, I found Gary May’s “John Tyler,” part of the American Presidents Series, to be adequate. It was a short book about someone who is today a mostly forgotten president, but I sure learned a lot.

The first member of the Presidents Who Died in Office Club, William Henry Harrison — our nation’s ninth leader — served for just 30 days. That gave him just enough time to pick a cabinet. He was the third president, after Washington and Jackson, who had previously served as a general in wartime service to his country. He was the first president from the Whig party.

The election of 1840 was biggest contest the nation had yet seen. There were party conventions, newspaper wars, campaign trips, songs, parades, picnics and props — and that immortal slogan, “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.” In the slogan Tippecanoe was Harrison, and the Tyler Too was his running mate, John Tyler. Tippecanoe was a battle that took place in what is now Indiana, in which American troops under the command of Harrison were attacked by Indians.

While his term in office lasted for just a brief moment, William Henry Harrison’s career was long and important. He served as the first delegate to Congress from the newly established Northwest Territory, which encompassed what became the future states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and part of Minnesota. After Ohio split off to become a state, Harrison was appointed by President John Adams as governor of the Indiana Territory. As governor of the territory Harrison got various Indian tribes to cede millions of acres of land under about a dozen treaties. He was a general in the War of 1812 and he clashed with Tecumseh, the Shawnee chief, and his brother who known as The Prophet.

Speaking of the Indians, what happened was indeed tragic and inevitable. What Harrison did was in many ways not as bad as you might think. The British treated the Indians much worse.

After the war Harrison moved to Ohio and served in the U.S. House of Representatives and later in the United States Senate. He also served in the Ohio state senate. President John Quincy Adams appointed him ambassador to Colombia, but he was then recalled by President Jackson. During his one year in Colombia he got involved in all manner of diplomatic controversy. Before he returned to the United States, Harrison sent a scolding letter to Simon Bolivar, who had come to power as a liberator but who was quickly turning into a dictator.

He had a very impressive family tree, coming from a long line of Harrisons from Virginia. This is complicated so try to follow along as best you can. William Henry Harrison was the son of Benjamin Harrison the Fifth, who had been a signer the Declaration of Independence. Benjamin Harrison the First had immigrated to Virginia in the 1630s. Benjamin Harrison the Fifth (the “Signer”) had more descendants, who were also Benjamin Harrisons. William Henry Harrison (the current topic of discussion, also known as the General or Tippecanoe) also had a son named Benjamin Harrison, but it was another of William Henry Harrison’s sons, John Scott Harrison, who had a son named Benjamin Harrison, and it was that Benjamin Harrison who went on to become the 23^rd president. Oh, and Benjamin Harrison the future president was named after his uncle (the ninth president’s non-president son Benjamin Harrison).

More fun facts about William Henry Harrison:

• He was a strong and forceful military leader who was beloved by his troops.
• He was a workhorse in the U.S. House of Representatives.
• He did not drink or participate in duels.
• He kept a pet macaw that he had brought back from Colombia.
• He had 10 children in all. His wife did not come to Washington for the inauguration in 1841 but had planned to follow him that spring.
• He was the last president to have been born a British subject.
• He was the first president to have his photograph taken while in office. (John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson were photographed after their presidencies had ended.) The actual photograph of Harrison was lost, but copies survived.

As presidential biographies go, I found “Old Tippecanoe: William Henry Harrison and His Time” by Freeman Cleaves to be a challenging book to read. It was written in 1939, and many times I got tripped up in tangled sentence structure and odd phrasings. Yet I found the book to be well researched, fair and authoritative — especially in its presentation of Harrison’s activity as general during the War of 1812, and his dealings with the Indians. I was especially enthralled by the passages describing the encounter with Tecumseh in which the Indian chief pitched his tent in Harrison’s backyard with hundreds of Indian warriors.

Martin Van Buren was to Andrew Jackson what Goats Head Soup was to Exile on Main Street — a much-less-famous-yet-important follow-up. The presidency of this short Dutch guy from upstate New York has sometimes been called “the third term” of Andrew Jackson, but that would be giving short shrift to our nation’s eighth president, sometimes known as “the Magician” or “Matty.”

Van Buren knew how to pull strings, and he essentially founded modern party politics. He had just come into office when the Panic of 1837 hit, so he called Congress into a special session to deal with it. He fought for an independent Treasury. He was the first president to advocate for worker protections, issuing an executive order limiting the workday for federal employees to 10 hours a day.

A lifelong politician, he was elected a New York state senator, attorney general and governor, and also served as U.S. Senator, Secretary of State and Vice President. After he was defeated for re-election in 1840 he ran unsuccessfully for president twice more, in 1844 as a Democrat (he failed to receive the nomination at the party convention despite having won more votes than Polk, who was picked instead), and again in 1848 as a candidate of the anti-slavery Free Soil party (the first time someone had been a contender as a viable third-party candidate). He supported Lincoln in the election of 1860 and died two years later, during the Civil war.

A few other fun facts about MVB:

• He was the first president born after the Declaration of Independence.
• Like Jefferson and Jackson before him, he was a widower.
• He had big, ugly sideburns.
• He’s credited with coining the term “OK.”
• The advice columnist Pauline Phillips (better known as Dear Abby) chose her pen name, Abigail Van Buren, because she thought naming herself after the former president added an air of prestige.

There are not many biographies of Van Buren to choose from. Nothing by Chernow or Isaacson or McCullough. I went with “Martin Van Buren” by Ted Widmer, part of the American President’s Series. It was concise and insightful.

There is so much to say — both good and bad — about number seven. Up until this time, all the presidents had come from Massachusetts or Virginia and were elite and aloof. Andrew Jackson was arguably the first “man of the people” elected to the office. During his first inauguration in 1829, a mob of party crashers bum rushed the White House, stomping all over the place with muddy boots and knocking over furniture to get to the punch bowls. Many observers were aghast at such a shocking breach, but for good or bad the country was now going to be led by the people (provided those people were white and male, of course).

In office for two terms, Jackson expanded the power of the presidency. He was the first to use the veto power to great effect, and he took a hands-on, active role in the crafting legislation. One thing he got Congress to do was pass the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which led to immense suffering and death. The policy was racist, unjust and genocidal, but the growing slave societies in Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi needed more land for their plantations and so the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole people had to go. The “Trail of Tears” forced migration of native human beings from the Southeastern United States to what is now Oklahoma would largely come later, but it was Jackson whom we can thank (or blame, depending on what color you are).

Jackson’s biggest presidential achievement was successfully navigating the “nullification crisis” in which South Carolina threatened to secede from the Union over tariffs. Jackson also gets credit (in my view) for taking on the entrenched national bank and its all-powerful, well-connected leader, ending the bank’s charter and sending the country’s cash reserves to state banks. Oh, and he completely eliminated the national debt, too!

He was often called “Old Hickory” or “The General” or “The Hero” (but not “Stonewall Jackson,” who was a totally different person).

As a general during the War of 1812, he had led troops to a glorious, decisive victory over the British in the Battle of New Orleans. This single event cemented Jackson’s lifelong fame. The funny thing about it is that unbeknownst to everybody at the time, a treaty ending the war had already been signed, but the American people got news of the battlefield victory first.

Also notable about Jackson: There was tons of turmoil in his cabinet, with mass resignations lots of infighting (it was the first time in history a president had ever replaced his whole cabinet in one fell swoop). Jackson had two bullets lodged in his body, one from a duel in which he killed the other guy. He survived a physical assault and later an assassination attempt (also a first). His wife, Rachel, died after his election but before his inauguration. He was religious in his personal life but was a staunch advocate for the separation of church and state. Also of note to many who might be reading this, Jackson was still president when Michigan became the 26th state in 1837!

When I started reading about our seventh president, I thought he would come across as more of a villain, but I ended up liking him. I read two books: “The Life of Andrew Jackson” (pictured above) by the historian Robert V. Remini, which is a one-volume abridged edition of his much longer three-volume biography; and “American Lion” by Jon Meacham (pictured at left), the highly acclaimed, Pulitzer Prize-winning best seller from 2008. As presidential biographies go, I liked the Remini book much better. It covered Jackson’s entire life, including his humble beginnings in Tennessee, his military campaigns against the Indians, Spanish and British, the Battle of New Orleans, his marriage to Rachel, and much more. I also felt that Remini did a much better job of describing what Jackson was like as a person. But while I felt that I got to know Jackson better from Remini’s book, it was a paragraph at the end of Meacham’s that, for me, sums up the legacy of this important American leader:

“The tragedy of Jackson’s life is that a man dedicated to freedom failed to see liberty as a universal, not a particular, gift,” Meacham writes. “The triumph of his life is that he held together a country whose experiment in liberty ultimately extended its protections and promises to all — belatedly, it is true, but by saving the Union, Jackson kept the possibility of progress alive, a possibility that would have died had secession and separation carried the day.”

In the presidential election of 1824 it was a four-way contest. Andrew Jackson won the popular vote, but none of the candidates had a majority of the electoral votes, thus tossing the election to the House of Representatives to decide. After John Quincy Adams met with Henry Clay, Clay threw his support to Quincy Adams, who became the sixth president. He subsequently appointed Clay Secretary of State, and the whole affair came to be known as the “Corrupt Bargain.” (There is a song about this in the 2010 Broadway musical “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.”)

As a president, John Quincy Adams did not amount to much. He lacked the support of Congress and of the American people, and he was soundly defeated four years later by Jackson. But it was what John Quincy Adams did BEFORE and AFTER his presidency that really mattered. His true calling was as a diplomat and statesman.

He was only 12 years old when his father took him to France during the American Revolution, and he subsequently traveled to Russia, Finland, Sweden, Denmark and England. He was fluent in French, Dutch and German, and as a student he mastered Latin and Greek. George Washington appointed him minister to the Netherlands, and he later became a Senator representing Massachusetts. As Secretary of State under Monroe, he secured more territory for the United States, negotiating with France, England, Spain and Russia.

After his presidency, he was elected nine times to the House of Representatives from his home district in Massachusetts, and he became an outspoken abolitionist. He clashed with the racist southern Democrats, who tried unsuccessfully to shut him up with a “gag rule.” He spearheaded the founding of the Smithsonian Institution. He pushed for more roads, canals and bridges. He encouraged science and advocated observatories for the study of astronomy. Arguing before the Supreme Court, he secured the freedom of African slaves who had revolted aboard the Spanish ship Amistad. He attended every session of Congress. When he was 80 years old, he collapsed on the floor of the House during an important vote and he died right in the Capitol building.

He also went swimming, naked, in the Potomac almost every day, and he wrote poetry and kept an extensive diary. He was the first president to be photographed. In that last session of Congress he also met and served alongside a young Abraham Lincoln, who had just been elected from Illinois.

As presidential biographies go, I found this book by Harlow Giles Unger to be well written and quite a page-turner. Having just read several other much longer biographies of his predecessors, I did notice a few spots where the author glossed over things or inadequately explained stuff, but what the book lacked in long-winded scholarship it more than made up for in heart.

The last few pages brought me to tears. It’s hard to imagine our country becoming great without the lifelong service offered by John Quincy Adams.