Zachary Taylor; Soldier, Planter, Statesman of the Old Southwest

Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985. Third Printing [stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Good. xxiv, [2], 348, [2] pages. DJ is in a plastic sleeve. Sleeve has some soiling. DJ spine may have some soiling. Frontis illustration. Maps. Illustrations. Footnotes. Acknowledgments. Abbreviations. Preface. Sixteen chapters. Essay on Sources. Index. Short ink notation at bottom right of fep. Name of previous owner and date in ink inside front cover. This is one of the Southern Biography Series. Karl Jack Bauer (born 30 July 1926 in Springfield, Ohio - died 17 September 1987 in Troy, New York), was one of the founders of the North American Society for Oceanic History (NASOH) and a well-known naval historian. NASOH's K. Jack Bauer Award is named in his memory. Jack Bauer attended Harvard University, where he completed his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1948. He went on to graduate study at Indiana University, where he earned his M.A. in 1949 with a thesis on "United States naval shipbuilding programs, 1775-1860" and his Ph.D. degree in 1953 with a dissertation on "United States naval operations during the Mexican War." Jack Bauer worked at the National Archives as an archivist in 1954-55, then in 1955-57 was appointed an historian with the U.S. Marine Corps Historical Branch, where he worked on a volume of the USMC history of World War II. In 1957, he transferred to the Naval History Division, where he worked with Samuel Eliot Morison's staff in preparing Morison's monumental History of U.S. Naval Operations in World War II. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute appointed him an associate professor in 1965 and then professor of history in 1970, serving there for the rest of his career. Considering the course his life took, one might wonder how Zachary Taylor ever came to be elected the twelfth president of the United States. According to K. Jack Bauer, Taylor "was and remains an enigma." He was a southerner who espoused many antisouthern causes, an aristocrat with a strong feeling for the common man, an energetic yet cautious and conservative soldier. Not an intellectual, Taylor showed little curiosity about the world around him. In this biography--the most comprehensive since Holman Hamilton's two-volume work published forty years ago--Bauer offers a fresh appraisal of Taylor's life and suggests that Taylor may have been neither so simple nor so nonpolitical as many historians have believed. Taylor's sixteen months as president were marked by disputes over California statehood and the Texas-New Mexico boundary. Taylor vehemently opposed slavery extension and threatened to hang those southern hotheads who favored violence and secession as a means to protect their interests. He died just as he had begun a reorganization of his administration and a recasting of the Whig party. Balanced and judicious, forthright and unreverential, and based on thoroughgoing research, this book will be for many years the standard biography of Zachary Taylor.-- "Journal of American History"