Vice President: Millard Fillmore Secretary of State: John M. Clayton Secretary of the Treasury: William M. Meredith
Secretary of War: George W. Crawford Attorney General: Reverdy Johnson Postmaster General: Jacob Collamer Secretary of the Navy: William B. Preston Secretary of the Interior: (Department created by Congress in March 1849) Thomas Ewing
Father: Richard Taylor (1744-1829)
Mother: Sarah Dabney Strother Taylor (1760-1822)
Wife: Margaret Mackall Smith (1788-1852) Marriage: June 21, 1810 Children: Anne Margaret (1811-1875); Sarah Knox (1814-1835); Octavia (1816-1820);
Margaret (1819-1820); Mary Elizabeth (1824-1909); Richard (1826-1879)
Zachary Taylor’s defeat of the Mexicans at Buena Vista in February 1847 was one of the greatest victories in American military history.
He was the first president not previously elected to any other public office.
He neither smoked nor drank, but he chewed tobacco and in the White House had the reputation of never missing the sand-filled box that served as a spittoon in his office.
Visitors to the White House would take souvenir hairs from Whitey, his old Army horse, which he kept on the White House lawn.
He was the second president to die in office (like William Henry Harrison, from illness), and the second to die of the only two Whigs who ever won the White House.
World History
