Abraham Lincoln

by Peter Cates

Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) first met Mary Todd (1818-1882) at a formal dance in Springfield, Illinois, in late 1839 where he had been practicing law for two years, while she had just recently moved in with an older sister from their home state of Ken­tucky.

Mary Todd Lincoln

Despite their vast differences in background – she having grown up in wealth and he in poverty – they took an instant liking to each other and visited constantly; they shared mutual interests in literature, especially reciting and rereading Shakes­peare tragedies, along with history, geography and politics and swapping anecdotes of their early years in Kentucky.

Both of them also had a keen sense of the absurd and shared much laughter as a result.

Within a year the two were engaged but then, due to an ongoing fear of marriage, he broke off the engagement. They went their separate ways for two very long years, however, not at all losing their affection for, and commitment to, each other. Mary, already knowing of Abe’s tendencies to melancholy, prayed for that glorious day when “Hamlet will be himself again,” as she confided to a close friend.

“That glorious day” finally arrived. The couple announced their intention at the very last minute and they were joined in marriage in her sister’s parlor.

Libraries of material abound on Lincoln’s rise as a politician in Congress, his horrifically challenging presidency during the Civil War and his assassination with its radical reconstruction aftermath.

His wife had her manic/depressive ups and downs but the couple loved each other up to that fateful night of April 14, at Ford’s Theater. Of their four sons, Edward died at 4 years old, in 1850, Willie at 12, in 1862, at the White House, and Tad at 18, in 1871. The oldest son Robert died at 84 in 1926.

Losing the youngest son is believed by many to have caused several breakdowns in her mental and physical health. Robert had his mother institutionalized for a few months in 1876 but her older sister eventually secured her release and freedom, after which Mary moved to France for four years.

By late 1880, due to a paralyzing fall from a chair while hanging a picture, she moved back to the states and moved in with her sister back in Springfield, Illinois, where she died in July 1882, from a stroke.

Mary Todd Lincoln was 63.

James Buchanan

by Peter Cates

James Buchanan

After the very sad four White House years of Franklin Pierce, that of former 15th President James Buchanan (1791-1868), with the help of his niece/hostess Harriet Lane (1830-1903), began with an inaugural ball described as follows by Christine Sadler in her 1963 America’s First Ladies:

“Five thousand revelers danced the night away in a specially built structure and between the reels they consumed ‘twelve hundred gallons of ice cream plus four hundred gallons of oysters, five hundred quarts of chicken salad, five hundred quarts of jelly, sixty saddles of mutton, and thousands of dollars worth of wine. ‘ All this in addition to a four-foot cake featuring the thirty-one states of the about-to-be-dissolved union.”

Harriet Lane

(With respect to Miss Lane, more later!)

Buchanan was born April 23rd, 1791, into prosperity in Pennsylvania, his father being a very successful store owner. He began practicing law in 1812 and became so good at it that, by the time he was 30, he was earning today’s equivalent of 220 thousand dollars a year.

Very cautious and low key in personality, he approached life as a game of chess and shrewdly assessed all angles before making any move while sustaining the sweetest, most charming one on one personality in terms of eye contact, ironic as he was near-sighted in one eye and far-sighted in the other and was always cocking his head in the direction of anyone whom he engaged in conversation.

Buchanan was elected to the State Legislature in 1814 and Congress in 1821. Not being very good at public speaking, Buchanan focused his talent on behind the scenes committee work, slyly working his way through the treacherous labyrinths of state and national politics and its changing winds. Beginning as a Federalist in Congress, he made the safe leap to the Democratic party in 1831 during Andrew Jackson’s administration and was appointed Minister to Russia in 1832 where he served for two years before heading back to run successfully for the first of three-terms as Senator.

Buchanan would serve as Secretary of State for President Polk and as Minister to England for his predecessor Pierce, with whom he shared a rather wary rivalry as fellow Democrats but like-minded in their belief that the federal government had no business interfering with the rights of slaveholders in the South though personally detesting slavery as an institution.

By the time Buchanan assumed the Presidency for his one term in 1857, the country was split horribly and very dangerously on the slavery issue and his cautious neutrality made his Presidency a lame duck one. Details of its failures can be read about in Wikipedia and elsewhere.

Back to his niece, Harriet Lane. What little good her Uncle James accomplished at 1600 Penn­sylvania Avenue may have been partly due to her charm, beauty, wit and savory smarts as his First Lady . As hostess, she brought a level of culture and fine arts to the social gatherings on a level comparable to that of Jackie Kennedy while similarly advocating worthwhile causes, a noteworthy one being the living conditions of Native Americans on the crowded reservations.

After she and her uncle left the White House, Harriet married a wealthy Baltimore banker Henry Johnston at 36 in 1866 while the President retired to his large estate Wheatland where he died in 1868 at 77.

The Lanes had two sons but, by 1885, Harriet had not only lost her uncle but also her husband and both sons. After her own death in 1903, the will bequeathed generous amounts of wealth to, among other charities, establish a boy’s school and children’s hospital while her collection of paintings were donated to the Smithsonian.

Franklin Pierce

by Peter Cates

Franklin Pierce

The 14th President Franklin Pierce came from New Hampshire, was born with a silver spoon in his mouth having a father who was a big wig in state politics, started practicing law at 22, won a seat in the State House at 24, and became its Speaker of the House at 26.

He attended Bowdoin College, in Bruns­wick, where he fell in love with Jane Apple­ton, daughter of the college p resident. Unlike her gregarious husband, she was very religious, painfully shy and an invalid most all her life. She despised anything to do with politics and, like a few other former First Ladies, did not enjoy living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue .

Jane Appleton Pierce

They had three sons; one died as a baby, the second at three years old, and the third, who was their absolute pride and joy and only living child up to when Pierce was elected president, was with his parents on a train from Boston to Concord, New Hampshire, in January, 1853, two months before the inauguration when their car went off the track down a ravine. Miraculously his parents escaped with minor injuries but he was crushed to death before their eyes at the age of 11.

At Bowdoin, Pierce was a classmate of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Later Hawthorne wrote a campaign biography of his good friend in 1853 and made the following observation:

“I have come seriously to the conclusion that he has in him many of the chief elements of a great ruler. His talents are administrative, he has a subtle faculty of making affairs roll onward according to his will and of influencing without showing any trace of his action….He is deep, deep, deep. ”

Unfortunately, others didn’t feel the same way. Even though Pierce abhorred slavery, he didn’t think, as did Millard Fillmore, that the federal government had any right to interfere in the South. He was pretty much more anxious to please others and blow the way the wind blows, following the advice of his father and party leaders.

Additionally, he was a close friend of Jefferson Davis, later President of the Confederacy.

In 1863 on July 4th, [after his time as president was over, he continued to be involved in politics] he gave a speech in Concord, New Hampshire, condemning the useless bloodshed of the Civil War just when word came in of the Union victory at Gettysburg. He alienated his supporters even further.

His wife died at the end of that year.

The next year Pierce took his friend Hawthorne on a trip to the White Mountains to help the writer’s frail health.

But Hawthorne died one night in an adjoining hotel room. At Hawthorne’s funeral, Pierce was snubbed sharply by the other New England writers and not included among the pallbearers.

In very poor health, Franklin Pierce died on October 8, 1869, at 65.

Millard Fillmore

by Peter Cates

Millard Fillmore

The 13th President Millard Fillmore (1800-1874) was born into grueling poverty, in the Finger Lakes region of Western New York State, to Nathaniel (1771-1863) and Phoebe Millard Fillmore.

Fillmore was truly a self-made man in his endeavors to improve himself. He studied law and clerked for a judge who just happened to be his father’s landlord, one of the wealthiest men in the County and a cheapskate who paid young Millard very little. When Fillmore, on his own initiative, took on a paying client as her attorney to earn some badly needed money, the judge fired him.

Fillmore also subscribed to a local library and read almost all of the books on the shelves. At the age of 18, he enrolled in the class of a 20-year-old schoolteacher, Abigail Powers (1798-1853), whom he would fall in love with and marry seven years later.

By a combination of his wife encouraging him and his own endeavors, he arose in the ranks of New York state politics to serve in its legislature, as a representative from Buffalo, which would be his home base for most of his adult life, and to become State Comptroller, just before being picked by the Whigs as Zachary Taylor’s running mate.

Fillmore served two separate terms in Congress from 1833 to 1841 and appointed as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.

Taylor ignored his vice-president most of his 16 months in office. After Taylor’s death, his cabinet, per tradition, offered their resignations, expecting to be kept on, but Fillmore accepted those resignations.

During his years in office, he sent Commodore Matthew Perry on an 1853 trip to Japan, which up to then had been a closed society, and was successful in opening it up for trade.

Fillmore also stopped France’s attempt to annex Hawaii, eased sectional tensions between Texas and New Mexico and appointed Mormon leader Brigham Young as the first governor of the Utah territory.

To his discredit, Fillmore supported the Compromise of 1850, which stopped the extension of slavery in the western states and territories and enforced the Fugitive Slave Act. While being personally opposed to slavery, he didn’t believe the federal government had any right to interfere in the South.

Abigail Fillmore

Fillmore’s wife Abigail established the first White House library and held literary salons, entertaining such writers as Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray and Washington Irving, but had frail health due to a broken ankle and couldn’t stand for very long periods of time; daughter Mary (1832-1854) assumed most other duties as a very charming hostess and talented musician on the harp, piano and guitar.

Fillmore was defeated in his re-election bid so he and his wife planned a tour of the South, but Abigail came down with a cold after being outdoors too long at Franklin Pierce’s inauguration, and died on March 30, at D.C.’s Willard Hotel. Daughter Mary died a year later of cholera.

The couple had a son Millard Powers Fillmore (1828-1889) who became a lawyer and who never married. After he died , his will directed that all of his correspondence, including that of his father, be burned and this act has aroused much curiosity.

After leaving office, the former president traveled to England where he was received by Queen Victoria who described him as the most attractive man she ever met.

In 1858, he married a wealthy widow, Caroline McIntosh (1813-1881), with whom he also had a very happy marriage, but she demanded he sign a prenuptial agreement.

Fillmore experienced very good health until he suffered a stroke and died shortly after, at 74, in 1874. Three U.S. Senators attended his funeral including Maine’s Hannibal Hamlin.

Millard Fillmore was heavily criticized for his weak stand against slavery, in particular by Harry Truman who called him “a weak, trivial thumb-twaddler who would do nothing to offend anyone.” But later historians have rightfully credited him for his tact and moderation during an era of grueling tensions and violence leading up to the Civil War.

Zachary Taylor

by Peter Cates

Zachary Taylor

For all the fascination of the first 11 characters to occupy the White House, they did not grab my interest to quite the same degree as #12, Zachary Taylor (1784-1850), affectionately known as “Old Rough-and-Ready”.

The unsigned essayist in Volume 4 of the American Heritage Book of the Presidents and Famous Americans astutely made the case for Taylor’s phenomenal jump to fame during the mid-1840s as the Whig Party nominee for president:

“After nearly forty years of relative obscurity as a United States Army officer, Zachary Taylor suddenly found himself propelled to prominence by the war with Mexico. He had long been respected by his colleagues for his obvious ability to lead soldiers and for his bravery and effectiveness as a frontier commander. Although Andrew Jackson told James Polk that Taylor would be ‘the man to lead our armies ‘ in any war with England, junior officers criticized General Taylor’s lack of organization. But General Taylor was at his best once a fight was under way, improvising, and inspiring his men. It is said his sudden appearance on the battlefield at Buena Vista, and his coolness while his clothes were ripped by bullets, were enough to rally the American Army from the verge of defeat. He became an instant legend and a potential presidential candidate. ”

During his presidency, he stood firmly on California and New Mexico being admitted as states on their own terms instead of those dictated by the Henry Clay compromising Congress – and he knew they’d be free ones; thus he ticked off both Clay and his other fellow Whigs – and, although Taylor was a Southerner from Kentucky and a slaveholder, he alienated the Southern Democrats who were hoping for the expansion of slavery in those western states. When the South was talking about secession, Taylor even threatened to use military force to put down any revolt.

(Interestingly Taylor’s daughter Sarah got married in 1835 to future Confederacy President Jefferson Davis but died within four months from malaria at the age of 21 . Taylor was at first miffed when his daughter and Davis married without the permission of her parents, and, even though Davis also contracted malaria and almost died, Taylor blamed him for Sarah’s death. But years later he came to have a high regard for his son-in-law. )

Margaret Taylor

Zachary Taylor married Margaret Mackle Smith (1788-1852) in 1810. In addition to Sarah, they had five other daughters and a son. Two of the daughters died about the same time during very early childhood from what was termed “bilious fever” in 1820, then one of the hazards of frontier life when Taylor was serving at a military outpost.

Taylor’s wife, known affectionately as Peggy, was hoping that, after her husband resigned from the military, they could enjoy a much-needed retirement and was very upset when he felt called to run for president. During his administration, she let another daughter Mary Elizabeth (1824-1909) assume the duties of hostess and retired to her suite, receiving only a handful of visitors.

For decades, Margaret Taylor was the only First Lady of whom no photo or sketch existed until 2010 when a daguerreotype plate turned up and was verified as being of her.

Son Richard Taylor (1826-1879) served as a general in the Confe­derate Army during the Civil War while his uncle Joseph Pannell Taylor (1796-1864) was a general in the Union Army.

On July 9, 1850, Zachary Taylor died from gastroenteritis which was believed to have been caused by eating some uncooked fruit and vegetables; he was 65.