The history people of Zachary Taylor

　　Zachary Taylor served as the 12th president of the United States from the period 1849 to 1850. He was a successful military leader and his contribution as a military leader was immense. He fought the Presidential election as a Whig party candidate in 1848 and went on to win it by defeating his opponent Lewis Cass. He was the last Whig to win the presidential election and hold slaves under him. His military career lasted for a period of forty years while serving in the United States Army. He led the War of 1812, the Black Hawk War and the Second Seminole War as a military leader. He headed the American troops to victory in the Battle of Palo Alto and the Battle of Monterrey during the Mexican-American War. He faced criticism for his moderate approach on the issue of slavery. He also urged the settlers of New-Mexico and California to form statehood and hereby set the stage for the Compromise of 1850. He served as President for just sixteen months and died of gastroenteritis. It's the shortest tenure served by any U.S. President.

Zachary Taylor Childhood & Early Life
Zachary Taylor was born in a well-to-do prominent family of planters on 24th November, 1784 in Orange County Virginia. He was the youngest of all the nine children in the family. He was born to Richard Taylor and Sarah Strother Taylor. His father had served under George Washington during the American Revolution. His father Taylor was a direct descendant of the Elder William Brewster, the Pilgrim colonist leader and spiritual elder of the Plymouth Colony. He was a passenger aboard the Mayflower and one of the persons signing the Mayflower Compact along with Isaac Allerton Jr., the son of Mayflower Pilgrim Isaac Allerton and Fear Brewster.
Education and Early Life
Zachary graduated from the Harvard College became a merchant in Colonial America. It was his first venture in business with his father in New England, and after his father's death he served as a Burgess for Northumberland County and also as a Councillor of Virginia. He was an active member of the Virginia militia and was promoted to the rank of colonel. James Madison was his second cousin, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Robert E. Lee were his kinsmen.
He lived on the frontier in Louisville, Kentucky, in his youth and he stayed there in a small wood cabin during his entire childhood. He later moved to a brick house after his family prospered financially. He lived there with all his seven brothers and sisters. His father was a proud owner of 10,000 acres of land in Louisville and his father owned 10,000 acres (40 km2), town lots in Louisville, and twenty-six slaves by 1800.
Taylor did not attend any school since there was none on the Kentucky frontier. His only source of primary education was his tutors appointed by his father to teach him during his early years. He was not a very bright student when it came to studies. His handwriting, spelling, and grammar were described as "crude and unrefined throughout his life." As he grew up, he decided to join the military.
Military Career
Taylor joined the U.S. Army on May 3, 1808 after receiving a commission as a first lieutenant of the Seventh Infantry Regiment from his cousin James Madison. He was posted to the Indiana Territory, and was later promoted to the rank of captain in November 1810. He took command of Fort Knox and held it until 1814.
Taylor’s military career started off with a success after he defeated Fort Harrison in Indiana Territory, following an attack by Indians in the War of 1812 under the command of Shawnee chief Tecumseh. Post this victory, Taylor was promoted to the temporary rank of major and led the 7th Infantry in a campaign putting an end to the Battle of Wild Cat Creek. Taylor was also chosen as the commander of Fort Johnson (1814) for a short period and his troops retreated to Fort Cap au Gris. He was then demoted to the rank of captain after the war in 1814. He then resigned from the army and took re-entry only after he was re-commissioned as a major a year later. He was promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel in 1819, and later to a higher position of colonel in 1832.
In 1821 he was stationed along with the remaining of 7th Infantry. In March 1822, Colonel Taylor took command of Fort Jesup originally called Shield's spring. Taylor led the 1st Infantry Regiment during the Black Hawk War in 1832. In 1837, he was sent to Florida where he defeated the Seminole Indians. Hereafter, he was promoted to the position of Brigadier General. He then had the sole command over all the American troops in Florida. He later became the commander of the southern division of the United States Army in 1841.
Mexican-American War
In 1845, Texas became a U.S state. In order to avoid any dispute and guard against Mexico’s attempt to take it back in 1836, President James K. Polk deployed Taylor and his troops on the Texas-Mexico border. Taylor was vested with the command of American troops on Rio Grande and the Army of Occupation on April 23, 1845. An attack on Taylor’s army by the Mexican forces initiated the start of the American-Mexican war in 1846. The same month, Taylor commanded the American troops in the Battle of Palo Alto and also defeated the Mexican forces at the Battle of Monterrey. Taylor’s army was then asked to join General Winfield Scott’s soldiers after they had seized Veracruz. Mexican General Antonio López de Santa Anna, with the intention of defeating Taylor’s 6000 men, went with an army of 20,000 men to attack Taylor at the Battle of Buena Vista in February 1847. This resulted in 672 American and 1,800 Mexican casualties. Taylor’s success in the Buena Vista war with much lesser military strength turned him to a hero among the mass. He was then compared to the likes of George Washington and Andrew Jackson in the American popular press.
Presidency
He served as the President from 4th March, 1849 to 9th July, 1850. He went on to become the 12th President of the United States. Taylor defeated his democratic candidate Lewis Cass and the Free Soil candidate Martin Van Buren.
Marriage
Taylor got married to Margaret Smith in 1810, and together they had six children. Among them their only son Richard, became the Lieutenant General in the Confederate Army. Sarah Knox Taylor was one of Taylor's daughters who decided to marry Jefferson Davis, the future President of the Confederate States of America who was then serving as a lieutenant in 1835. Taylor's another daughter, Margaret Anne, died of liver failure at the age of 33.
Death
It is assumed that Taylor died of gastroenteritis on 9th July, 1850 at the age of 65 in Washington D.C.

Edward VIII: Backing the Wrong Duke

　　Michael Bloch’s essay on the almost forgotten historian, Philip Guedalla (1889-1944), and his defence of Edward VIII is a timely reminder of the king’s youthful charm and glamour, today qualities harder than ever to associate with the king who died in France in 1972 in a welter of bitterness and recrimination. He had ruled for just 326 days but was never crowned.

‘When Edward succeeded in January 1936,’ wrote Bloch, ‘Guedalla greeted the new reign with jubilant enthusiasm.’ This was only in part because he hoped for an official appointment. Guedalla, the Balliol-educated brilliant wit, barrister, would-be Liberal politician and one of the most popular historical writers between the wars, was also, according to Bloch, ‘one of the most delightful men in London Society’. Guedalla genuinely admired the prince ‘with whom he shared certain qualities: an outspoken impatience with cant, an exuberant sense of adolescence in middle age ...Above all the modern, 41-year-old monarch was a man after his own heart and an almost miraculous relief from the tired, slow, incompetent old men who were governing Britain when he came to the throne.’
The two men got to know each other after Guedalla went on a cultural mission to Argentina, a country with strong British commercial interests. This led to the founding of the Ibero-American Institute of Great Britain, through which Guedalla, as director, had about a dozen interviews a year with the prince between 1931 and 1936. Bloch believes the institute played a key role in promoting British social and cultural influence in South America.
The Abdication came to Guedalla as a shattering blow – more of a deposition than an abdication was his verdict. The debacle was so swift that when Edward made his farewell broadcast at Windsor Castle and sailed off in the night to await marriage to ‘the woman I love’ there was much still to be agreed about his future. But leaving for a life of exile was never what the duke had intended. He believed that, once married, he would be able to return to England, live at Fort Belvedere in Surrey and be given useful tasks befitting a former monarch supporting a younger brother. Initially the nervous new king and his queen did not want them back in case their appearance, by reminding the British public of the lost glamour and promise of reform, might destabilise the monarchy. When war came, the duke’s defeatist talk meant it was more important than ever to keep the couple away. Abandoned without advisers, their reputations were easily tarnished.
It might have been expected that in the 21st century, as new papers have been released following the death of the Queen Mother, the shine would return, as it was no longer necessary to protect a monarchy which had more than demonstrated its stability and worth. This has not proved the case. In fact, the picture now emerging is of a man more flawed than was previously realised, certainly by the British public. Several courtiers close to Edward, it is now known, believed him to be ‘mad’– a word that could not be used at the time – unreliable or ‘ethically impotent’. According to letters written to an early lover, Freda Dudley Ward, Edward revealed that he believed the time for monarchies was over and he harboured a deep seated loathing of his tyrannical father and suicidal wishes for himself.
According to unpublished letters written by Wallis to her second husband Ernest Simpson at the time she was divorcing him, she also believed Edward to be immature and derided him for what she termed his ‘Peter Pan plans’. This correspondence reveals Wallis as a frightened, lonely woman who wanted to escape from a situation in which she felt trapped by the suicidal threats of her obsessive lover and proves that there was illegal collusion in the 1936 divorce proceedings which, if known,would have invalidated it. That the king,who was meant to uphold the law, was allowing it to be subverted for his own benefit had long been worrying Cosmo Lang, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Lang may have been justified in his assessment of the unsuitability of Edward Vlll as king but it is also worth remembering that in 1936 Edward had his supporters of whom perhaps the least likely was the brilliant Jewish intellectual, Philip Guedalla.

Columbus blamed for Little Ice Age

　　Christopher Columbus gets blamed for lots of things from being a poor manager to being one of the causes of the mass genocide in the new world. However, one thing he is not associated with is global climate change. Until now anyway...

An article by Devin Powell titled Columbus blamed for Little Ice Age has some details. It notes, "By sailing to the New World, Christopher Columbus and the other explorers who followed may have set off a chain of events that cooled Europe’s climate for centuries. The European conquest of the Americas decimated the people living there, leaving large areas of cleared land untended. Trees that filled in this territory pulled billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, diminishing the heat-trapping capacity of the atmosphere and cooling climate, says Richard Nevle, a geochemist at Stanford University."
Dr. Nevle is quoted, "“We have a massive reforestation event that’s sequestering carbon … coincident with the European arrival.”
I am not going to doubt the sincerity of this research. The world was changed by the European discovery of the new world. Lots of things happened. But Columbus sailing his boats across the Atlantic caused the Little Ice Age in Europe? I think it goes to show how we just don't understand everything about the global weather and how it acts over the long term yet.