Zachary Taylor

Zachary Taylor took a regular army to the Rio Grande and then refused to let a larger Mexican force talk him off a prairie. In May 1846, after the Thornton affair had already drawn blood, he met Mariano Arista at Palo Alto on the eighth and again at Resaca de la Palma on the ninth. The flying guns did work a bayonet charge could not. Monterrey in September was a street fight he ended with an armistice the War Department disliked. Buena Vista, on February 22–23, 1847, was the stand that made him a public name: Santa Anna came on in numbers, and the line of regulars and volunteers held a ranch and a ravine south of Saltillo.

He was born in Orange County, Virginia, on November 24, 1784, and raised on the Kentucky frontier. The army had already used him for thirty years of Indian-war and garrison work before Polk sent him to the disputed river. The men called him Old Rough and Ready. The nickname is in the newspapers of 1846. This page will not turn it into a costume.

The war page is the soldier of 1846–47, not the later president. He was elected in 1848 as a Whig who had not spent a career asking for votes. He died in the White House on July 9, 1850. Later arguments about the cause of death are a medical industry. The record that belongs here is four actions on the southern border and a general who would take a field and then stop when the field was his.

Congress thanked him and struck gold medals for the Rio Grande and for Monterrey and Buena Vista. Those votes are in the public statutes. This register will not invent a Medal of Honor the regular army of 1846 did not yet award. It will say a career officer opened a war the country then sent another general to finish in the Valley of Mexico.

He is buried near Louisville. Palo Alto is still a National Park Service field. The campaign is the likeness.