Sometimes the world surprises even us historians. Less than two weeks have passed since my last blog entry, and I didn’t intend to return so soon. But recent news makes this seem the right time to share events from the 1840s and 1850s that will sound familiar today.

Two stories in presidential politics have dominated the headlines this month. First, a would-be assassin shot Donald Trump. The former president and Republican nominee, thank goodness, survived, but one supporter was killed, and two others were severely injured. Second, amid questions about Joe Biden’s age and capability, some Democrats have called for the incumbent president’s replacement as their presumptive nominee. Yesterday, President Biden announced his withdrawal from the race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris.

Neither Zachary Taylor nor Millard Fillmore, to our best knowledge, was the target of an assassination attempt. Some have speculated that Taylor’s death while president, usually attributed to gastrointestinal illness, resulted instead from murder by arsenic poisoning. But neither documentary nor chemical evidence—the latter obtained when his body was exhumed in 1991—supports that hypothesis.

Taylor and Fillmore did, however, live in an age when some presidents voluntarily served only one term. From 1888 until yesterday, every president who completed a first term sought and won his party’s nomination for a second. Not so before then. In the decade our project studies, not just one, and not just two, but three first-term presidents chose not to seek a second. Two of them did so despite significant support from constituents. John Tyler in 1844, James K. Polk in 1848, and Fillmore in 1852 either prevented or declined their parties’ nods for four more years.

In 1844, Tyler had little chance of victory. Previously a Democrat, he had been elected vice president as a Whig in 1840. When President William Henry Harrison died after one month in office, Tyler succeeded him. Never having supported many policies popular with Whigs, he made decisions as president that led to their officially expelling him from the party and left him with little support anywhere. In 1844 he launched a third-party candidacy under the so-cleverly named “Tyler Party.” In August, however, facing the reality that he could not win and the satisfaction that the Democrats had not nominated Martin Van Buren, whom he detested, Tyler ended his campaign. The election came down to the Whig Henry Clay and the Democrat Polk. Polk won.

Four years later came Polk’s chance for reelection. He, however, already had dismissed the idea. Right after his nomination in 1844 by the Democratic National Convention, Polk took his friend Aaron V. Brown’s advice to pledge that he would serve only one term. (Harrison had made such a pledge in 1840, but his death had rendered it a moot point.) In his letter accepting the nomination, Polk announced that, if elected, “At the end of four years I am resolved to retire to private life. In assuming this position I feel that I not only impose on myself a salutary restraint, but that I take the most effective means in my power of enabling the Democratic party to make a free selection of a successor.” (Brown’s May 30 and Polk’s June 12 letters are published here.) In other words, Polk seems to have been motivated by other Democrats’ ambitions for the White House. He would defer those ambitions for only four years, not eight.

The pledge did not stop supporters from trying to change Polk’s mind. Benjamin Boston, an Indiana Democrat, wrote him on July 7, 1847, “I have heard that you had Declined Being a Candidate for the Presidency. I hope it is not So for the Country Canot Do Without your Services four years Longer and I hope you Will consent to Run a Second time.” Right up until the convention, held in Baltimore in May 1848, some argued that only Polk could unite the party and defeat the Whigs. After some delegates told him that they might nominate him in spite of his wishes, Polk found it necessary to write a letter to the convention on May 20 forswearing his own candidacy and vowing to support the nominee. The convention nominated Lewis Cass, who lost the election to the Whig Taylor.

In 1852, it was Fillmore’s turn. Having been elected vice president in 1848 and succeeded to the presidency after Taylor’s death in 1850, he had time to consider whether to seek a term in his own right. And he took his time. By the end of 1851, he privately had indicated a lack of interest in the Whig nomination and support for the candidacy of Daniel Webster—who, as secretary of state with the vice presidency vacant, was the second most senior member of the administration. But Fillmore did not formally withdraw or otherwise publicly announce his plans. He wrote to his friend Thomas M. Foote on April 27, 1852, laying out his stance: he did not want the nomination, and he would not work to obtain it, but he would not stop others from trying to give it to him. He admitted to Foote that this was “a false position before the public.”

Fillmore’s supporters, neither encouraged nor impeded by him, pursued his nomination. Some described him as the party’s only chance at victory. Fillmore delegates joined those supporting Webster and Winfield Scott (the other lead Mexican-American War general, besides Taylor) at the Whig National Convention in Baltimore in June. There were no primaries in the nineteenth century, so delegates got to make their own decisions about whom to nominate.

Just before the convention began, Fillmore finally issued his decision—sort of. He sent a letter to the convention, via delegation leader George R. Babcock, announcing his withdrawal. But Babcock ignored the letter and pursued the nomination anyway. (The Babcock correspondence is in the Free Library of Philadelphia’s Presidential Letters collection). So the delegates voted . . . and voted . . . and voted. They voted fifty-three times.

From the start, Fillmore and Webster together had a majority. But neither of those two insider candidates had one alone. For days, neither publicly announced his withdrawal in the other’s favor. Then, without consulting each other, each notified the convention simultaneously that he was withdrawing. Their conflicting telegrams merely confused the delegates. Even Fillmore and Webster afterwards wrote to each other expressing uncertainty about how the convention would react (but not proposing any clarification). In the end, absent any coordination between those two, a few delegates from each camp switched to Scott and gave that outsider the nomination. He lost the election to the Democrat Franklin Pierce.

Thus Tyler, Polk, and Fillmore—at least in part by choice—became one-term (or less) presidents. After four years out of office, Fillmore did again seek a second term. The Whig Party having collapsed, he won the American (or Know-Nothing) Party’s nomination in 1856. Meanwhile, under different circumstances, a trend continued: in neither 1856 nor 1860 did the incumbent president get his party’s nomination. But that’s another blog.

 

For more details on these presidential withdrawals, see the Tyler biographies by Oliver Perry Chitwood and Christopher J. Leahy, the Polk ones by Louise A. Mayo and  Walter Borneman, and the Fillmore ones listed here.

Finally, we have a social media update! You can now follow us @ZTandMF on both X and Threads. You also can subscribe to this blog, if you’re viewing it on a computer, in the column to the left.

April 25, 1846, was a dark day in North American history. Literally. On that day, the moon passed directly between Earth and the Sun. Some Caribbean islands experienced a total solar eclipse. Much of Mexico and the United States got a partial one. As on April 8, 2024, the sky’s light was blotted out.

But that was not all. For those who cherished peace, April 25 was also a dark day in a figurative sense. Near the shore of the Rio Grande, in territory disputed between the two countries, Mexican troops surrounded and fired on US ones. On that dark day, the Mexican-American War began.

 

With the occasional break for astronomical phenomena, much of the news today centers on international violence. Most prominent are the wars between Ukraine and Russia and between Israel and Hamas. This emphasis is not new. Both news cycles and historical eras have long been defined by wars. Historians of the United States, for instance, divide their timeline into the Revolutionary Era, the Civil War Era, the Cold War Era, and suchlike.

That periodization makes me think about our project’s place in the span of US history. We are editing letters written between 1844 and 1853. That decade was part of what historians usually call the antebellum period, meaning the period before the war. The label is accurate, as both the chronology and the letters reflect. Americans fought the Civil War eight years after Millard Fillmore’s presidency. His and Zachary Taylor’s letters, including some that I’ve quoted in this blog, express fears or threats of such a conflict.

But our decade wasn’t just before a war. The United States, from 1846 to 1848, was at war. In addition to the numerous violent struggles with Indigenous peoples whose land White Americans coveted—struggles in which Taylor had built his military career—these years revolved around the Mexican-American War. Given how central it was to Taylor’s life, and how central it will be to our first volume of letters—which is rapidly approaching completion—it seems high time to devote a blog entry to it. Regular readers of the blog, and users of our teaching guide, already know parts of the story. Today I want to highlight some tragedies and dilemmas of war that, though in different forms and contexts, persist across space and time.

 

It started with Texas. In 1821, Mexico won its independence from Spain. One of the new nation’s states was Coahuila y Tejas. White Americans soon began immigrating into the part of it that they called Texas, often bringing enslaved African Americans and setting up cotton plantations. Mexico’s closing the border in 1830 did not stop them from immigrating illegally. In 1836 US expatriates outnumbered Mexicans in Texas, controlled its government, declared its independence, and asked the United States to annex it. The US government hesitated, fearing that annexation would anger both Mexico, which still claimed Texas, and Northern US Whites, who resented the political power of Southern enslavers. Interested parties did not even agree on how much hitherto Mexican territory Texas included. But in 1845, at the insistence of Presidents John Tyler and James K. Polk, the United States admitted Texas as a state, come what might.

Those anticipating Mexico’s anger had been right. As far as its government was concerned, the United States had no right to annex Mexican Texas. And it had even less right to annex the land southwest of the Nueces River and northeast of the Rio Grande, which Polk claimed was included in the deal but which Mexico denied was even part of Texas. Both nations prepared for war. Under orders from Washington, General Taylor led troops into Texas in 1845 and to the Rio Grande in 1846. On April 25, Mexican troops ambushed a US scouting party at the Carricitos Ranch, just north of the river. Eleven Americans died, and the war had begun.

I won’t give all the details here. You can read them in narratives of the war by historians such as K. Jack Bauer and Amy S. Greenberg—or in the letters by Taylor and his contemporaries when our volume comes out. To summarize, though, in 1846 and 1847 Taylor commanded at battles near the Rio Grande while General Winfield Scott led an invasion of southern Mexico that culminated in the capture of Mexico City. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed on February 2, 1848, ended hostilities and transferred half of Mexico’s territory—everything from Texas to California—to the United States. Taylor’s military success made him a national hero, leading to his election as, well, you know. Debate over whether to extend slavery into the new US possessions escalated the debate over slavery, eventually leading to Southern secession and, well, you know.

 

When mentioning the war in earlier blog entries, I have noted its connections with race, constitutionalism, and electoral politics. But Taylor, Polk, and their Mexican counterparts also faced other questions as they determined and executed war policy. Those included questions prominent in the wars on our televisions today.

For one, what role would religion play? The United States, a majority Protestant nation, was fighting (invading, from the Mexican perspective) an officially Catholic one. With many native-born Americans resentful of Catholic immigrants, people in both countries wondered if the United States would use this war to weaken or overthrow the Catholic Church in Mexico. The Polk administration tried to quash that speculation, to some nativists’ dismay, appointing Jesuit priests to accompany the army and ordering Taylor to proclaim in June 1846 that Mexicans’ religion and Church property would be protected. “[W]e come to overthrow the tyrants who have destroyed your liberties,” the Americans explained, “but we come to make no war upon the people of Mexico.” (Copies of the proclamation, in Spanish and English, are at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Huntington Library, and the National Archives.) Some Mexicans remained unconvinced. The Mexican revolutionary Hilario de Mesa told Taylor on February 2, 1847, of his compatriots’ concerns that their northern neighbors would attempt “the entire conquest of Our race, [and] of our religion” (National Archives).

Whatever their policies, neither civil nor military authorities could control every soldier. Taylor’s letters are littered with reports of and frustrations over war atrocities. A series of crimes that particularly irked him began when US volunteers near Agua Nueva raped several Mexican women on Christmas Day 1846. Retaliatory murders of US soldiers and Mexican civilians led to an investigation by Taylor and other officers. Unable to identify the guilty men, Taylor punished their entire companies. On February 18 he told Eduardo Gonzalez, a local Mexican politician, “those outrages could not have caused you a deeper regret than it did myself.” Citing “the interests of humanity,” he expressed a determination “to punish them as severely as the laws will permit” and to “prevent . . . such scenes in future.” He added, however, that in other instances Mexicans had attacked or killed US soldiers “without provocation” (National Archives).

Taylor also corresponded regularly with Mexican leaders about prisoners of war. After the US surrender at the Carricitos Ranch, the Mexicans incarcerated nearly the entire US scouting party. When Taylor’s forces captured cities, such as Monterrey in a major battle in September 1846, they likewise took prisoners. After each such event, the commanding officers discussed whether, when, and how to exchange POWs. Both sides wanted their people back, but ironing out the details sometimes required a long exchange of letters. Those details sometimes extended beyond the release of captured soldiers. Francisco de Paula Morales, governor of Nuevo León, wrote to Taylor on September 23 that poor families in Monterrey had lacked the resources to leave before the battle. He asked Taylor either to let them evacuate or to order US troops to “respect” them. Taylor, answering the same day, chose the latter but with a caveat: “the rights of individuals, who are not hostile, particularly women and children, will be respected as much as is possible in a state of warlike operations.” (Morales’s letter is in the National Archives; Taylor’s was published in the Washington Daily Union, Nov. 10, 1846.)

Given the privations and tragedies faced by those living amid the Mexican-American War—both soldiers and civilians—it is perhaps unsurprising that the lifelong officer Taylor often yearned for peace. He wrote to Congressman Truman Smith on March 4, 1848, “I am a peace man, and . . . I deem a state of peace to be absolutely necessary to the proper and healthful action of our republican institutions” (Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer, Aug. 2, 1848). Once he became president, he was surely happy to report in his Annual Message to Congress (what we today call the State of the Union Address) on December 4, 1849, that “We are at peace with all the other nations of the world.” The claim was an exaggeration, given the continuing violent removal of Indigenous peoples. From his perspective, though, a brighter day had dawned.

Earlier in this blog, I discussed our processes for locating Zachary Taylor’s and Millard Fillmore’s letters and for transcribing and proofreading them. Those tasks continue, as we are always finding more documents in libraries, archives, and private collections. Our database now includes over 4,500 letters by or to the twelfth and thirteenth presidents, plus hundreds of enclosures and cover letters.

Mostly, though, we’ve moved on to the next stages of documentary editing. As you may recall, we intend to publish three print and digital volumes of Taylor’s and Fillmore’s letters from 1844 to 1853, the decade preceding and including their presidencies. Volume 1, which we will send off to the publisher next winter, will cover from January 1844 to June 1848, ending just after the Mexican-American War and the two men’s nomination for president and vice president. By last summer we had located nearly all surviving letters from that period (but please tell us if one’s in your attic!) and transcribed and proofread those that will appear in the volume.

Today I want to tell you what we’ve been up to lately. It’s time to discuss what documentary editors do after finalizing the transcriptions.

I’ve subtitled this entry “Translating the Past.” For some letters, the next stage is literal translation. Because most people studying US history read English, that will be the language of the edition. Both Taylor and Fillmore were native speakers, and we have yet to find any letter than either man wrote in another language. But they received letters from diverse people around the United States and beyond. Many immigrants and their US-born children continued to use continental European tongues, many Native Americans used those of their own nations, and diplomats often wrote in French, the literal lingua franca of their profession. During the Mexican-American War, Taylor corresponded with Mexican leaders and citizens who wrote in Spanish. So the incoming letters, unlike the outgoing ones, are a linguistically diverse corpus.

Our first volume will include two dozen letters originally written in Spanish and one originally written in French. For some of those, we have contemporary translations. Taylor’s aide-de-camp (and later son-in-law) William W. S. Bliss, for example, was a talented linguist who translated for the general. In those cases, we will publish the English version that the future president read. But if we only have the Spanish or French, we will translate it for our readers. Editorial colleagues and American University students are helping us with that process. Thus we can include letters by such people as Mariquita Lopez, of Matamoros, Mexico, who sought Taylor’s help to support her indigent family (the letter’s held here), and Ynocenio Leyba, likely a Mexican soldier, who had lost his right foot and was lying in a hospital destitute of money and clothing (here).

 

Having found the letters, transcribed and proofread them, and, if necessary, translated them into English, we’re ready to publish, right? No. Of course not. My blog entries are rarely this short. Besides, I’ve titled this one “Annotation.”

Our goal is to make original documents from US history widely accessible. Accessible means more than available. Please pardon what may sound like semantic hairsplitting. We editors often use available to mean “in a place where readers can find them” and accessible to mean “in a condition in which readers can use them.” Under these definitions, we could make the letters available by publishing images of handwritten manuscripts. Or, to be kinder to users’ eyes and screen readers, we could do so by publishing transcriptions and translations. But would those be accessible—would they be usable?

Consider an example I cited in my blog entry on transcription. Here’s the beginning of a letter that Thurlow Weed wrote to Fillmore on September 19, 1844:

 

Weed’s handwriting was terrible (or, as editors say, “a fun challenge”), so publishing just the image would be cruel. But say we were to publish a transcription:

Dear Fillmore,
I found your Letter last night on my return from Auburn, where I was called to arrange some matters that would permit Seward to get off to his fulfil his appointments in the Northern Counties.

Now you can read the text. But what does it mean? Someone reading The Correspondence of Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore, and with access to its introduction, probably knows who “Fillmore” was. But who was “Seward”? Who, for that matter, was Weed? Which letter of Fillmore’s is he referencing? To understand Weed’s letter and to use it to study history, you need to know these things. Sure, Wikipedia will reveal that William H. Seward was New York’s former governor and that Weed was an Albany journalist and Whig Party manager. But do you trust Wikipedia without checking it against reliable primary sources and historical research? I don’t recommend that. Fact checking is important and takes time. And we’ve only gotten through the first of thirteen paragraphs in the letter.

Besides, most people and events aren’t famous. They aren’t on Wikipedia or other freely available (let alone trustworthy) websites. Let’s move on from Weed. Consider a letter that Amy Larrabee Cotz and I have been working on recently (held here). Anthony Bracklin wrote this to Taylor on June 4, 1846:

I was sent to the, Genl Depot at Fort Columbus and from their^re^ assigned to Company ‘H’ 1^st Arty which Company I joined at Eastport, where, as the Company ^was^ over the number of laundresses alowed by law, my wife lost her rations on account being the youngest.- Impossible to support a family with $600^””^ dollars a month, and a single ration per day, separated hundreds of miles from my family; I tried to find a chance for transfer to a Company where a laundress is wanted

To understand this letter, we need some background. Bracklin tells us that he’s a soldier in a particular army unit and that he served at Fort Columbus and then Eastport. But additional information on him would be nice. Where was he from? What years did he live? Did he have much military experience? Where were Fort Columbus and Eastport? Most important to the letter, who was Anthony’s wife? He doesn’t name her. What’s this business about “laundresses alowed by law”?

Wikipedia or a Google search will not answer most of these questions. We spent significant time going through other historians’ research and through primary sources beyond Anthony’s letter. We then wrote footnotes, which we will include with the letter when we publish it, telling readers that he was a longtime soldier from New York (where Fort Columbus and Eastport were); that his wife was Mary A. Bracklin, who later lived independently while working as a washerwoman; and that the army hired women as laundresses from 1802 to 1883. Military enlistment records, city directories, and historical newspapers, most of them neither freely available to nor easily navigable by our readers, were especially helpful in researching this letter’s annotation.

In short, we editors provide readers with the knowledge that a letter’s author assumed the recipient had, plus additional information that helps put the letter in its historical context. Or, as Bianca Swift wrote in her excellent introspective essay about digitizing the works of Charles W. Chesnutt, “We try to make his world a formula we can understand.” This is how I think of annotation: even if a letter is in English, we editors are responsible for translating references such as “Seward,” “my wife,” and “laundresses alowed by law”—perfectly clear, perhaps, to the letters’ original recipients—into explanations meaningful to people today. We identify people, institutions, events, and other topics in the letters so that twenty-first-century readers can use them to learn nineteenth-century history without all the preliminary work needed to understand the letters themselves. That doesn’t mean we find everything. Swift, when reading Chesnutt’s reflections on the challenges of a Black lawyer and writer, finds herself “wonder[ing] if he cried” and unable to answer the question for her readers or herself. We share the basic (but often hard-to-find) background so that readers can mine the letters for what they reveal about the nineteenth-century world.

Sometimes the references we must identify (or translate, in this figurative sense) verge on the comical or the maddening. Zachary Taylor, when discussing various relatives in letters to his daughter, often refers to two of them as “M^r. & M^rs. Taylor.” The family, of course, included quite a few couples by that name. From the context and comparisons among the letters, we were able to determine which couple he meant. The dreaded “Mr. Smith” reference presents a similar challenge. And, as a leader of a society that threatened to divide Black families and in which Black family names were uncommon, Zachary Taylor referred to people he enslaved only by first names—as “Mary,” for example, even though he enslaved multiple women named Mary. We do our best, using records behind online paywalls, in physical archives and libraries, and on our own bursting bookshelves, to translate the “Taylors,” “Smiths,” and “Marys” into real individuals with real stories that give the letters meaning.

 

Before I go, I want to share a conversation I recently had about (surprise, surprise) Millard Fillmore. The American History Hit podcast kindly invited me to speak with Don Wildman about him as part of a series on all the presidents. (Dr. Cecily Zander did the one on Taylor.) We covered quite the gamut of Fillmore topics, from slavery’s expansion to controversy over Freemasonry to trade with Japan and China. You can listen to our conversation and find the rest of the series here or, as they say, wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you, Don and the History Hit team, for this fun opportunity.

Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, and I were on television this week. Well, one of us was, talking about the other two. But I should back up.

When I started this blog in 2020, I noted the context and impact of the Taylor-Fillmore project’s beginning during a pandemic. American University’s campus was minimally staffed, everyone who could was working at home, and visits to archives and libraries were indefinitely postponed. I relied heavily on the generosity of archivists and librarians who located, scanned, and shared the manuscript letters in their care. When Associate Editor Amy Larrabee Cotz, undergraduate and graduate students, and other contributors joined the project, we interacted entirely via Zoom, email, and telephone.

A lot has changed. Americans still suffer from COVID-19, much as they still suffered from cholera after the pandemic’s height in 1848–49. But 2023 is not 2020. I want to update you on how we work now and on our first big in-person event.

In late 2021, we began returning to archives and libraries in person. As I wrote, we initially did so between COVID surges and under strict pandemic protocols. Things eventually got easier and more consistent. In 2022, research consultant David Gerleman and I hunted for Taylor and Fillmore letters in the Library of Congress and the National Archives amid relaxed capacity limits and appointment requirements. We appreciated both the opportunity to see the documents directly and to discuss sources with experts such as Michelle Krowl of the Library of Congress’s Manuscript Reading Room. Our database of letters from 1844–53 thus has grown rapidly. We now have more than 4,600. (Once we get to the presidential years of 1849–53, in about a year, that will double or treble.) Meanwhile, I had the pleasure of getting to know David Barker and Hannah Purkey, my colleagues at American University’s Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies, in person. As I’d expected, they are as kind and as committed to the project’s success in person as they had seemed from our respective remote bunkers.

The next steps after finding letters, as I’ve noted before, are choosing which to publish, transcribing those, and proofreading the transcriptions. Those tasks, which depend on digitized images and are often solitary, suit themselves well to remote collaborations. Little, therefore, has changed in how our editors and student contributors go about them.

Then comes annotation. This year we reached the stage in editing our first volume—the pre-presidential one—when we write notes identifying the people, events, organizations, laws, and other topics that show up in the letters. The notes help make the letters not only available to readers in print and online but also accessible to those who aren’t familiar with everything happening in the 1840s (i.e., all of us). How we annotate is a large topic worthy of its own blog entry, so stay tuned. For now, I just want to point out how essential both remote and in-person resources are. The internet is vast, and we mine its seams—from Ancestry to fold3 to Google Books to FindaGrave to Chronicling America to the Handbook of Texas to other documentary editions like ours—for data on the famous and obscure people and topics featured in the letters. That was true before 2020, and during the pandemic some institutions (including the State University of New York, Oswego, home of the Millard Fillmore Papers) expanded their commitments to digitize historical data.

Yet, contrary to popular belief, not everything is online. We have actual books in our offices, and the libraries of American University and the Washington Research Library Consortium have far more. Still more books on paper and manuscripts on microfilm (including many held by the National Archives) are available to us via interlibrary loan. Our student editorial assistants, particularly Jamshid Mohammadi this semester and Nicholas Breslin last semester, have joined Ms. Larrabee Cotz and me in perusing those, um, ancient artifacts of print culture. Thanks to today’s relative safety of entering libraries, we thus can draw on all available sources to track down elusive references in the letters. In 2020 I thanked the workers in healthcare, education, and other essential industries who made remote work possible for some of us. Now I thank them and all others who have enabled a return to something closer to normal.

Speaking of normal, how about a conference? In 2020 our own staff didn’t meet in person, let alone invite a hundred others to come see us. I was involved with the Association for Documentary Editing (ADE), which each year since 1979 had held a meeting of people who produce editions of historical and literary documents. But even the ADE canceled its 2020 meeting and moved the next two to Zoom.

With the ADE hoping again to gather in person in 2023, it seemed the right time for a special location. So, we thought, why not the nation’s capital? Why not American University? Our staff volunteered to plan the conference, along with fellow Washington-area editors including those at the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project. On June 22–25, the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies hosted over one hundred creators and users of documentary editions for a successful return-to-in-person conference. We streamed most of it, so several dozen more joined us on Zoom, a few even presenting remotely from around the country and the world.

Those of us on-site celebrated our return to conferencing with an opening reception at the Katzen Arts Center. That was sponsored by our Center, the University of Virginia Digital Publishing Cooperative (of which we’re a member), and the Primary Source Cooperative at the Massachusetts Historical Society. We thank them and the conference’s other sponsors: the University of Tennessee Press; the University of Virginia Press; the First Ladies Association for Research and Education (FLARE), based here at American; the National Humanities Alliance; the National Coalition for History; the Organization of American Historians; the Society for History in the Federal Government; and the Southern Historical Association. We also thank our colleagues at Katzen, the Washington College of Law, University Conference & Guest Services, and throughout American for their hard work to make the event happen.

Four days of sessions covered the diverse work that documentary editors do. You can read the program here and watch recordings of several sessions here. Highlights—to pick a few out of many—included a roundtable of current and former student interns on editing projects, a FLARE-organized session on “The Documentary Legacies of First Ladies,” and a breakfast presentation by Mia Owens on the “History of Slavery and Its Legacies in Washington, DC.” Ms. Owens, now of the 1882 Foundation and the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, worked with the White House Historical Association as the inaugural fellow on that subject while she earned her public history degree at American. Between sessions, attendees enjoyed tours of the National Gallery of Art’s Archives, the Library of Congress’s Preservation Directorate, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture, the Department of the Interior, and Eleanor Roosevelt–related sites around the city.

I mentioned TV, didn’t I? Well, we’re especially proud of two sessions. I joined editors from the Emma Goldman Papers, the Mary Baker Eddy Papers, and the Jane Addams Papers in a roundtable titled “Still Important Today: Recognizing Historical Patterns in the Present.” My colleagues discussed their efforts to engage audiences in learning about the present and the past. I talked about doing that through this very blog. Then we welcomed two very special guests: Shelly C. Lowe, Chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Linh Anh Moreau, Coordinator of International Programs on the Memory of the World at UNESCO. These humanities leaders held a fascinating keynote conversation, facilitated by Christopher Brick of George Washington University, on “Public Humanities and Indigenous Voices.”

Those two sessions, especially the keynote, spoke to an audience well beyond the ADE and our university community. C-SPAN, wishing to share them with viewers across the country, recorded them and recently began showing them on its cable/satellite networks and its website. You can see the schedule of TV broadcasts or stream them online anytime here. Enjoy!

Beyond the practical benefits of in-person activities, for both our editorial progress and interproject collaboration, getting together helps remind us of the value of a professional community. I mentioned how nice it was, after the worst of the pandemic, finally to meet my colleagues at our research center face-to-face. At the conference, Amy Larrabee Cotz and I got to meet two of our student editorial assistants, Mercedes Atwater and Cameron Coyle. Both have contributed mightily to the Taylor-Fillmore project, and their hard work will be reflected in the volume of letters that we send off to the publisher a year from now. It was lovely finally to see them not on Zoom.

This summer, a new national conversation emerged over the teaching of history. On July 19, the Florida Department of Education approved updated standards for social studies courses. These are the first in Florida to include a distinct curricular strand on African American history. One requirement for middle school lessons attracted widespread attention: “Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

Some politicians, teachers, and others criticized what they saw as a defense of slavery. Last week protesters marched to the school board’s headquarters in Miami in an attempt to prevent the standards’ implementation in Miami-Dade County. The political scientist William Allen and the documentary historian Frances Presley Rice, members of the task force that wrote the standards, defended them against the criticism. They wanted students “to learn how slaves took advantage of whatever circumstances they were in to benefit themselves and the community of African descendants.” Omitting this information, they feared, “reduce[s] slaves to just victims of oppression [and] fails to recognize their strength, courage and resiliency.”

The debate caught my eye in part because Dr. Allen and Dr. Rice invoked a family I had mentioned in this blog. They named sixteen examples of “slaves [who] developed highly specialized trades from which they benefitted,” including Lewis H. Latimer. That draftsman and inventor was never in fact enslaved. But his parents, Rebecca and George W. Latimer, were. As I noted in January, Millard Fillmore received a letter about their 1842 flight from Virginia enslavers. They settled in Massachusetts, where Lewis was born. It is not clear that the parents found a use in freedom for skills developed under slavery; George, assigned by his enslavers to drive a dray and to run a grocery store, found work as a paperhanger once free. But thinking about the educational controversy and this connection with our letters got me wondering how else the letters can shed light on the skills of enslaved people. That question led me away from Fillmore and toward Taylor.

 

Zachary Taylor grew up around the Black men, women, and children whom his parents enslaved at their plantation outside Louisville. As an adult, he inherited or purchased well over a hundred enslaved people. They served him in many capacities and locations. The writer Walt Bachman, in The Last White House Slaves, uncovers the stories of those forced to work as personal servants for him and his White family at frontier army posts. They included children whom Taylor fathered with a woman he enslaved. Later, Taylor brought enslaved people to Washington to work in the White House. He was the last president to do so.

Most of the people whom Taylor enslaved lived and worked on his plantations in Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi. In his letters to Thomas W. Ringgold, a White man he employed as overseer, he often discussed the tasks he wanted them to complete at Cypress Grove Plantation in Mississippi. (We haven’t yet found Ringgold’s replies.) From those letters, we can learn about what skills those people developed—and why.

As in much of the antebellum Deep South, the chief product at Cypress Grove was cotton. Taylor often instructed Ringgold to have the enslaved people plant, harvest, gin, pack, and transport the cash crop. On June 18, 1845, he summed up his goal: “I have no fears if you have your health, & the servants keep pretty well . . . you will make fully as much cotton as you can secure, in a neat & proper manner.” Difficult work that drew on Eli Whitney’s recent invention of the cotton gin (which renewed cotton’s profitability and promoted the continuation of chattel slavery—another point made in the Florida standards), the forced cultivation of cotton created fortunes for many plantation owners.

Taylor also had the people at Cypress Grove grow other crops. In the same letter to Ringgold, he mentioned corn and “a small parcel of Muskeet grass seed” that he had ordered “sent to you, with directions how to propagate it, which I wish most carefully done.” Ringgold probably relayed the instructions, but enslaved people certainly did the “careful” job of growing grass to feed the livestock.

When discussing other agricultural tasks, particularly those involving timber, Taylor more explicitly recognized the skill of those whose labor he exploited. On December 16, 1845, he directed Ringgold to “select eight or ten good axmen, & keep them getting wood & tumber [i.e., timber or lumber], such as picketts, hogshead & barrel staves, or shingles after ascertaing which was the most profitable.” On February 23, 1846, he stressed the need to cover plantation expenses by selling wood. He directed Ringgold “to put six good axmen to cutting wood & keep them at it & hauling, until you want them for cotton picking.”

In referencing “good axmen,” Taylor acknowledged a skill that certain men at Cypress Grove had learned, presumably from each other. But only to the White overseer did he explicitly ascribe intelligence, telling Ringgold on September 15, 1845, “I feel easy . . . in confiding the management of my affairs to your good management-” Enslaved Black people, in his eyes, performed skilled manual labor. White managers determined what labor should be done, when, and how.

Enslaved people did not learn these skills by choice or because they derived a personal benefit. Those whom Taylor claimed as his property learned to pick cotton, fell trees, serve meals in the army, or decorate the White House because he deemed that work profitable to himself or to the government. They did receive compensation of sorts. Taylor allowed them housing (which they built), telling Ringgold on July 11, 1845, “to have their Houses dry & airy, frequently white-washed, & thoroughly cleaned.” He allowed them food (which they grew), often writing of the importance of their adequate sustenance. As he noted in the first letter I quoted above, he wanted “the servants keep pretty well.” Their basic physical wellbeing benefited both them and him.

Sometimes he gave them more than the basics. On June 18, 1845, he directed Ringgold to give ten dollars to enslaved people who had done extra work transporting cotton. That November 13 (as quoted in the Louisville Daily Courier, October 25, 1848), he had the overseer “DISTRIBUTE AMONG THE SERVANTS AT CHRISTMAS . . . FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS.” But Taylor granted them basic survival needs and occasional gifts within the context of their enslavement. Black people followed the directions of those who considered them property and received back a minute portion of the wealth they created when the self-described owners chose to give it. Never were they given the option of leaving their enslavement to use their skills elsewhere.

As you’ve probably noticed, all the letters I’ve mentioned are by White men: Taylor’s surviving letters and Ringgold’s missing ones. None are by the enslaved Black people themselves. There’s a reason for that. Literacy was not among the skills that enslavers valued among Blacks. Many associated the ability to read and write (and particularly the ability to study the Bible) with the potential for rebellion. Colonial Georgia, in 1770, passed a law forbidding anyone to teach enslaved people to read or write. In the 1830s, motivated by antislavery rebellions led by literate Blacks, other states followed suit. Although Mississippi, the location of Taylor’s Cypress Grove, did not, enslavers there nonetheless discouraged Black literacy.

Yet some Americans forced into servitude did gain an education. Frederick Douglass began learning “the A, B, C” from one of his enslavers and continued studying after her husband ended the lessons. A British visitor to Cypress Grove in 1849 met a “very remarkably intelligent-looking youth” who “had taught himself to read and to write.” According to Taylor’s son, who had spied on the young man, he had “saved every candle-end he could find, and deprived himself of sleep night after night to accomplish his design.” Linking literacy with rebellion and invoking the name of a Haitian revolutionary, the Briton speculated that this man might “become a Toussaint l’Ouverture in time.” Some enslaved people even wrote letters. James K. Polk, Taylor’s presidential predecessor and a fellow Mississippi planter, received one shortly after his election from Long Harry, a blacksmith he enslaved. Likely dictating to an amanuensis, Harry reported on November 28, 1844, that he had campaigned for Polk, winning him “some votes,” and had won money and goods by betting on the White man’s election.

So, yes, Americans who were considered property and forced into lives of perpetual servitude did develop skills. They learned and taught each other agricultural and mechanical skills that profited those claiming to own them and that preserved the institution that deprived them of freedom. But the lessons came about neither by the Black people’s choice nor for their benefit. Enslavers dictated them for their own purposes and rewarded them as they unilaterally deemed fit. (Refusal to perform the skills, as when a man repeatedly escaped from Polk’s plantation, was rewarded with an instruction to “beat him well.”)

Learning to read—or, for that matter, to escape—was, indeed, Black Americans’ choice. They did hope to benefit from those skills, whether as free men and women who could earn an independent living or as enslaved ones who could spread religion and perhaps start an uprising. Those chosen and potentially beneficial lessons, however, were not the purposes of slavery. They were its antithesis. Enslavers and lawmakers—even those, such as Taylor, who expressed a commitment to enslaved people’s health and contentment—had an interest in those people’s staying put and developing skills that cultivated cotton and timber, not ideas and rights.

Eventually, slavery ended. Most who lived under it never saw that happen. A few, including Douglass, successfully escaped. For the rest, it ended when Union troops went south and masses of Blacks joined their camps during the Civil War. Thereafter, within the strict limits of an incipient sharecropping economy, formerly enslaved Americans could use their abilities for purposes of their choosing. We know little, so far, of the postwar fate of those whom Taylor had enslaved. Matilda Graham died in Cincinnati in 1875 (Cincinnati Daily Times, June 22), and C. A. Combs died in St. Paul, MN, in 1896 (at the age of 112, according to the Ely Miner, April 22), but they left few records of their activities. Bachman, in The Last White House Slaves, concludes that Taylor’s theretofore enslaved son William H. Taylor was sent to Ontario, Canada, and became a farmer when his father became president.

Beyond the Taylor communities, freedpeople could now potentially use their skills for “personal benefit.” But the emancipation that enabled this, like reading and fleeing during slavery, was antithetical to the system that had taught those skills. Besides, the vast numbers of formerly enslaved Americans who built and attended schools and colleges, so they could learn new skills, shows that they considered those acquired under slavery to be wholly inadequate. Slavery, unintentionally, had helped teach them the benefits of the skills they were denied.

Today, for the first time, we present a joint entry with the Massachusetts Historical Society’s blog, The Beehive. Neal Millikan, a historian and editor at the society’s Adams Papers, looks at where Fillmore shows up in John Quincy Adams’s diary. In a postscript, I look at where Adams appears in Fillmore’s letters. Enjoy! Also note that Dr. Millikan will be speaking about Adams and his diary at the online and in-person conference we’re hosting on June 22–25 (see my recent mini-entry for details), so register (it’s free) by June 5 to hear more!

Neal Millikan

Series Editor, Digital Editions, The Adams Papers

Massachusetts Historical Society

The Adams Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society has been editing the John Quincy Adams Digital Diary since 2016. Adams kept his diary for 68 years, starting when he was twelve and continuing until his death. In total it comprised 51 diary volumes and over 15,000 pages. As you can imagine, his diary mentioned lots of people: some famous and some obscure. As we have been transcribing the diary for digital publication, we have also been identifying and tagging individuals at their first mention within each date entry. Millard Fillmore and Zachary Taylor both appeared in the diary; we have tagged Fillmore’s name 211 times and Taylor’s name 20 times. In this post I want to highlight some of the mentions of Fillmore, all of which occurred after Adams’s (1825–1829) and before Fillmore’s (1850–1853) presidencies and focus on their years serving together in the U.S. House. This blog pairs nicely with a recent post on Fillmore, Taylor, and Congress.

Apart from the fact that both men served as president, Adams and Fillmore had some other things in common: they were both Unitarians, both members of the Whig party (after each had briefly flirted with the Anti-Masonic party), and both represented northern states in Congress (Adams Massachusetts, Fillmore New York). While there was an age gap between the two congressmen—Fillmore was born about the same time as Adams’s eldest son (George Washington Adams, 1801–1829)—they served together in the U.S. House during the 23d, 25th, 26th, and 27th congressional sessions.

Carte de visite of daguerreotype of John Quincy Adams by Brady’s National Photographic Portrait Galleries. Massachusetts Historical Society.

Fillmore first showed up in Adams’s diary on 7 December 1833, where Adams recorded his first name as “Mellerd” in the list of individuals with whom he visited on that date. This was not unusual, as Adams often wrote a name one way (how he believed it was spelled) and then adjusted his spelling in later diary entries. Interestingly, while he started spelling Fillmore’s first name correctly, Adams used the spellings of “Fillmore” and “Filmore” interchangeably. Beginning in January 1834, Fillmore routinely appeared in the diary as Adams reported on congressional activities.

The next significant mention of Fillmore was on 25 December 1837 when Adams noted that he, along with three other representatives from New York (Richard Marvin, Charles Mitchell, and Luther Peck), “came and requested me to draw up a paper to address to their Constituents assigning their reasons for voting against the resolution for laying all abolition petitions on the table.— They said they wished to guard against the amputation of favouring abolitionism, but to adhere inflexibly to the right of Petition,” one of Adams’s pet congressional causes, as he waged his years’ long fight against the gag rule. “I drew up accordingly a sketch of an address to the People of the State of New-York—according to their ideas.” Adams gave the document to Fillmore on 26 December.

Photograph of Millard Fillmore by Frederick De Bourg Richards. Library of Congress.

Over the next several years Fillmore is consistently mentioned in the diary. Adams noted that he, like other representatives, championed the causes and concerns of his constituency in the U.S. House. On 12 March 1838, Fillmore “presented a Memorial from a meeting of Inhabitants of his District, where the capture of the Steam boat Caroline took place, complaining of that act, and praying for defensive military force.” This memorial was about the Caroline affair, an international incident during which an American vessel was destroyed by Canadian militia in December 1837.

Adams was critical of Fillmore’s attitude toward the Seneca Nation of New York, stating his belief on 23 May 1838 that Fillmore “had by some unnatural influence been induced to assume the defence of Schermerhorn’s swindling practices.” This comment related to John Schermerhorn’s part in the 1832 Treaty with the Seneca and Shawnee Nations. The following day his diary entry compared Fillmore to James Graham, a North Carolina representative who supported Cherokee removal from that state. According to Adams, while Fillmore and Graham’s “judgment and feelings” were “fair, just and humane in all cases which touch not the immediate interests and passions of their Constituents,” they were “unseated when Cherokee or Seneca Indians are parties concerned in the question.”

Not all the references to Fillmore dealt with political issues; he is mentioned in the diary for other reasons as well. For example, on 18 May 1838, Adams recounted that he returned a book to the Library of Congress—an English edition of Father Louis Hennepin’s Description de la Louisiane—because Fillmore had requested to check it out. By the 1840s, the two men were on friendly terms with each other. When Adams visited Niagara Falls in July 1843, now former congressman Fillmore invited him to also tour Buffalo, New York, while he was in that state. When Adams arrived in Buffalo on the 26th, Fillmore introduced him to a gathered crowd, and the two men then rode around the city together. When Adams again visited Buffalo that October, Fillmore “invited us to tea at his house . . . and offered us seats in his pew at the unitarian church,” both of which the former president accepted. Adams’s last mention of the future president was on 20 August 1847, when Fillmore visited Boston and they had dinner together. Adams died on 23 February 1848, so he did not live to see Fillmore’s presidency.

One of the interesting aspects of the work of documentary editing is analyzing primary sources like Adams’s diary and learning that the sixth and thirteenth presidents were well acquainted with each other. From Adams’s diary and from Fillmore’s letters, we get a sense of how the lives of these two presidents intertwined in the nineteenth century.

The Adams Papers editorial project at the Massachusetts Historical Society gratefully acknowledges the generous support of our sponsors. Major funding for the John Quincy Adams Digital Diary was provided by the Amelia Peabody Charitable Fund, with additional contributions by Harvard University Press and a number of private donors. The Mellon Foundation in partnership with the National Historical Publications and Records Commission also supports the project through funding for the Society’s Primary Source Cooperative.

Postscript: Millard Fillmore on John Quincy Adams

Michael David Cohen

Editor and Project Director, The Correspondence of Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore

American University

Millard Fillmore’s relationship with John Quincy Adams continued after their time together in Congress. The Correspondence of Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore, at American University’s Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies, has been locating and editing Taylor’s and Fillmore’s letters since 2020. Our forthcoming edition is more temporally constrained than the John Quincy Adams Digital Diary. We are preparing a three-volume, print and digital edition of letters that the two men wrote or received between 1844 and 1853. That decade began with General Taylor’s preparing to lead U.S. troops into the Republic of Texas, continued through the Mexican-American War, and concluded with Taylor’s and Fillmore’s presidencies. Taylor entered the White House in 1849 but died in 1850; Fillmore, his vice president, completed the term.

During those years, until his death in 1848, Adams continued to serve in the U.S. House. Not surprisingly, his fellow Whig and former House colleague Fillmore exchanged occasional letters with or about him. But let’s start with Taylor.

Although Taylor ran for president as the Whig Party’s nominee in 1848, he had never served in civil office before and often foreswore any partisan identity. He may never have voted. Before his candidacy he corresponded with a few national politicians, including Senators John J. Crittenden (a Whig) and Jefferson Davis (a Democrat and his son-in-law), but not with many. Of the more than 1,300 letters our project has found by or to Taylor between 1844 and Adams’s death, none was exchanged with Adams. Only one mentioned him.

Taylor’s single reference to Adams came in a letter of August 10, 1847, to F. S. Bronson. Answering Bronson’s request for “my views on the questions of national policy now at issue,” Taylor denied being a presidential candidate and mostly refused to disclose his opinions. But he did repeat Bronson’s praise for a list of Whig and Democratic politicians. As amended by the Washington Daily National Intelligencer, which published the letter on October 5, Taylor shared “your high and just estimate of the virtues, both of head and heart, of the distinguished citizens [Messrs. Clay, Webster, Adams, McDuffie, and Calhoun] mentioned in your letter.” So, apparently, he respected Adams.

Adams showed up a bit more often in Fillmore’s correspondence. Of nearly 1,000 letters between 1844 and Adams’s death, four involved Adams or his close family. On June 5, 1844, the Washington, D.C., artist Elizabeth Milligan wrote to Fillmore about her recent work. Reflecting on her experience painting Dolley Madison, she remarked that the former White House hostess “and J. Q. Adams seem to be the links that connect ours with a past age” (SUNY-Oswego/Millard Fillmore Papers). A year later Fillmore received a letter from Charles Francis Adams, John Quincy Adams’s son, reporting a Massachusetts convention’s opposition to the annexation of Texas. (We published that letter last year as part of our teaching guide on Texas annexation.)

The remaining letters came near the end of Adams’s life. On February 10, 1848, Fillmore wrote to Adams himself—the letter is now preserved in the Massachusetts Historical Society’s Adams Papers—to introduce a friend “to the ‘Old Man Eloquent.’” Fillmore expressed pleasure that Adams continued to serve in Congress “in this great national crisis.” Thirteen days later, Representative Nathan K. Hall informed his friend Fillmore that “M^r Adams cannot survive many hours” (SUNY-Oswego/Fillmore Papers). Indeed, having suffered a stroke on the House floor, John Quincy Adams died that day.

Fillmore and Adams’s relationship ended with the latter’s death. Fillmore, Taylor, and others were left to carry on the brief political career of the Whig Party. We at the Taylor-Fillmore project are proud to be contributing, along with the Adams Papers, to expanding access to primary sources from both prominent and obscure individuals in that pivotal era of U.S. history.

The Taylor-Fillmore project at American University thanks the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) and The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, our current sponsors. We also thank our past contributors: Delaplaine Foundation Inc., the William G. Pomeroy Foundation, the Summerlee Foundation, and the Watson-Brown Foundation. The Mellon Foundation in partnership with the NHPRC supports our project through funding for the University of Virginia Digital Publishing Cooperative.

Photograph of picnic dinner by Joseph John Kirkbride [1889]. Library of Congress.

Over the past three years, I’ve kept you up to date on the Taylor-Fillmore project via this blog and Twitter. I will continue to do so. But next month, for the first time in our project’s history, we will host an in-person (and virtual) event! On June 22–25 you can come visit us, and our colleagues on other documentary editing projects, either at American University in Washington, DC, or on the screen of your favorite electronic gadget.

Our project, and more generally AU’s Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies (CCPS), will host the annual conference of the Association for Documentary Editing (ADE). I’ve mentioned this organization before. It connects professionals who locate and publish historical and literary documents—from Adams to Einstein, from Mary Baker Eddy to Martin Luther King Jr. At their annual conference, last held in-person in 2019, they share what they’ve found in the documents, what techniques they use to edit them, and what it’s like to do that work. This year’s hybrid event, with the theme “Modalities of Text and Editing,” will highlight both the variety of documents that editors are making accessible and the variety of technologies and strategies that they’re employing.

Please register here to attend either in person or virtually. Because the ADE wants this conference to be welcoming and equitable for all attendees, it is not charging registration fees and is using ADE funds to keep the banquet and breakfast fees as low as possible.

Sessions will include a roundtable with Shelly Lowe, chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and other federal and international leaders in the humanities; a panel on first ladies’ papers by the First Ladies Association for Research and Education (FLARE); and a breakfast talk by Mia Owens on her experience as AU’s inaugural graduate fellow on the History of Slavery and Its Legacies in Washington, DC. You may even get to hear me talk a little about this very blog. The evening of June 22, CCPS will co-sponsor an opening reception, along with digital publishing cooperatives at the University of Virginia and the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Please preregister by June 5. This is not required but will greatly aid our planning. Preregistration is required for the banquet, the breakfast, and housing; to guarantee spots on tours; and to receive the virtual sign-in links. Sessions will be held at AU’s Katzen Arts Center, AU’s Washington College of Law, and the Embassy Suites Chevy Chase Pavilion.

A limited number of assistantships, with free meals at the banquet and the breakfast, are available for students who assist at the registration desk.

You can read more about the conference, including housing options for those traveling and an outline of the program, here. (Note that the conference hotel rate is available until May 22. Residence hall reservations are open until June 5.) If you have any questions or are interested in an assistantship, please contact me at mdcohen@american.edu.

The death of Tyre Nichols and the charges of murder against five Memphis police officers have reignited debates about policing in America. Amid other African Americans’ deaths following actions by law enforcement, including those of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, this tragedy involving a Black victim and mostly Black officers again brings questions of race to the fore. Earlier in this blog I discussed Taylor’s and Fillmore’s roles in the history of racial oppression. They participated in the enslavement of Blacks and the violent expulsion of Native Americans from the East. But it is worth getting more specific. Both men made key decisions about the policing of People of Color.

Taylor’s relationships with Native Americans did not end with the US-Indian wars in which he commanded troops. Assigned to a succession of western army posts, he was responsible for keeping peace among the various Indian and White inhabitants on the frontier. Sometimes that meant contributing to major negotiations, as when, in 1829, he attended a council at Fort Crawford in what is now Wisconsin. It ended with Ojibwe, Ottawa, and Bodewadmi leaders’ ceding eight million acres of their peoples’ land to the United States.

More often, Taylor and his subordinates settled local disputes through diplomacy or military force. After overseeing the construction of Fort Scott in 1842, for example, he dealt with the conflicts that arose among Native peoples as Whites pushed them from their previously expansive separate territories into a confined space in today’s Kansas. In 1844, while commanding the Second Military Department, he resisted an effort by an Arkansas sheriff to arrest two Cherokee men for the 1839 murder of another. Despite a grand jury’s indictments, he told Adjutant General Roger Jones on February 14, he feared that pursuing the old case would “cause great excitement in the [Cherokee] nation.” Over the next three years, while in Texas and Mexico, Taylor occasionally received complaints from White residents about violence or theft by Native peoples. When able, he responded by trying to arrest the offenders. On July 25, 1844, for instance, he reported to Jones on an “expedition” he had sent against a “small party of Indians who committed an outrage.” His soldiers had destroyed a camp, but the targets had escaped. Taylor considered that result adequate. (Both letters are in the National Archives.)

Back in the East, police efforts often targeted African Americans. The historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has argued that the United States’ tradition of gun ownership rights developed from the perceived needs to expel (or exterminate) Natives and to enslave Blacks. Regardless of the causality, Whites expended much time, ink, and weaponry on Indian removal and the enforcement of slavery. Taylor regularly corresponded with Thomas W. Ringgold, whom he employed to oversee the people he enslaved on his Mississippi plantation. His instructions did not mention punishment. He noted what tasks the enslaved people should do and insisted that Ringgold “preserve . . . the health of every se[r]vant on the establishment.” But the overseer was there to force them to stay and work. He was successful, as no one is known to have escaped. Men and women did escape from the plantations of Taylor’s presidential predecessor, James K. Polk. Polk regularly paid Whites to capture and return them, and he instructed his overseer, on retrieving an escapee, to “beat him well.”

Curiously, Fillmore more explicitly involved himself in the policing of Black people than Taylor. The New Yorker who privately called slavery a “curse” (to Hiram Ketchum, May 9, 1848, SUNY–Oswego) built his career and his legacy in part on support for using force to control the lives of African Americans. Advocating a popular plan among Whites, known as “colonization,” he hoped that Blacks eventually would be freed from bondage and sent—voluntarily or forcibly, he did not say—to their “native Africa.” More immediately, he promoted the use of federal police forces and White civilians to return those who had escaped from servitude back to their enslavers.

The Constitution’s Fugitive Slave Clause, enacted in 1789 when the national charter took effect, required that enslaved people who escaped to other states be returned. Congressional legislation laid out the details. Enslavers, such as Polk, could pursue their human property or pay other private actors to do so. Federal, state, and local judges were responsible for certifying the escapees’ capture and return. Of the thousands of people who fled slavery each year, a few attracted legal and popular scrutiny. Over time Fillmore played increasing roles in those debates.

Friends of Fillmore wrote to him about one fugitive case while he was seeking the Whig vice-presidential nomination in 1844. In 1842 George W. and Rebecca Latimer, a husband and wife owned by different enslavers in Norfolk, Virginia, had fled together to Boston. James B. Gray, who owned George, pursued them and notified Boston authorities. George, though not Rebecca, was arrested and charged with larceny. Protests erupted across Massachusetts, and Black men surrounded the courthouse to prevent his return south. A legal battle ended with his release as a free man. Virginia’s governor nonetheless called on Massachusetts governor John Davis to return him to slavery. Davis’s refusal upset Southern Whites and hurt Davis’s prospects of being nominated as vice president. The Washington publishing firm Gales & Seaton, on May 1, 1844, advised Fillmore that this could work in his favor: not having taken a stance against the re-enslavement of escapees, he might be a more acceptable nominee to Southern Whigs (SUNY–Oswego). That hope did not pan out—neither Fillmore nor Davis got the nod—but the affair did influence Massachusetts politics. The state legislature passed the Latimer Law, which forbade state officers to aid the arrest or return of those claimed as fugitives from slavery.

Four years later, the fugitive slave question impacted Fillmore more significantly and prompted him to address it. Opponents of slavery, by then, were helping escapees to reach Canada and freedom through a network labeled the “Underground Railroad.” Soon after his nomination as vice president in June 1848, Fillmore’s critics accused him of having aided or at least “countinanced” that network. He responded with disgust. The charge that he had allowed Black people to become free, he told his friend Nathan K. Hall on June 15, was “infamous” and clearly false. “I should as soon think,” he wrote, “of denying the charge of robbing a hen roost.”

Once in the White House, Fillmore put his support (or at least acceptance) for re-enslaving escapees into practice. In 1850 Congress and the president—first Taylor and then, after his July death, Fillmore—were developing legislation to create state and territorial governments in the West. Most Southern politicians wanted slavery permitted there; most Northern ones wanted it banned. The final compromise made California a free state but allowed slavery in the territories of New Mexico and Utah. It also banned most slave trading in the District of Columbia. Finally, to gain Southern support, it included a new and stronger Fugitive Slave Act. The act assigned federal commissioners to enforce it and, most controversially, enabled them to force private bystanders to help arrest people suspected of having escaped from slavery. State provisions such as the Latimer Law, designed to shield both state officers and Black Americans from the enslavement process, were thus circumvented.

President Fillmore promoted the Fugitive Slave Act during the congressional debate. Some biographers have inferred his reluctance from his waiting two days before signing it; he signed the other compromise bills without delay. But his known writings (our project is always hunting for more) reveal few if any moral qualms. During the remainder of his presidency, he enforced the law and opposed its repeal. Late in his term, as a lame duck unconcerned with reelection prospects, he did pardon two White men convicted of aiding a large-scale escape from slavery years earlier. Some thought this showed another side of his mindset. But for the men and women who were returned—or, if falsely charged as fugitives, sent for the first time—to slavery, the Fugitive Slave Act was Fillmore’s most important legacy. It also contributed to the escalation of sectional political tensions that led to the Civil War. A police force of the United States, and even its private citizens, had been officially deployed to keep Black people in perpetual servitude.

The removal of Native Americans and the enslavement of Blacks were major uses of the US government’s police power before the Civil War. But the law enforcement choices by Taylor and Fillmore that I just narrated are vignettes in a complex and multifaceted history. Many now, after watching the news, want to learn about the goals and decisions that shaped the policing practices Americans variously depend on, admire, question, and fear today. Books by historians such as Laurence Armand French and Robert C. Wadman and William Thomas Allison trace that history, including its racial facets. Bryan Vila and Cynthia Morris edited a collection of historical documents on The Role of Police in American Society; as a fellow editor, I particularly invite readers to explore those primary sources. For a quick introduction, though, one might begin with another blog. Ten years ago Gary Potter, at East Kentucky University, wrote a handy six-part “History of Policing in the United States.” It covers the story succinctly but far more broadly that I can do here.

A new Congress, elected last November, takes office this week. This seems a good time for a post about Taylor’s and Fillmore’s thoughts on Congress. Other documentary editions, such as The Papers of Henry Clay, The Papers of Daniel Webster, and the Correspondence of James K. Polk (the only House Speaker to become president) feature the writings of nineteenth-century politicians while they served in Congress. Ours does not. But it does document two candidates and then presidents who paid close attention to Capitol Hill.

Fillmore began his national political career in the US House. After three years in the New York legislature, he served in the House (initially as a member of the Anti-Masonic Party and then as a Whig) from 1833 to 1843. During his last two years there, he chaired the powerful Committee on Ways and Means. Perhaps his most notable accomplishment in Congress was shaping the tariff of 1842, a protective tariff that aided US producers by charging high taxes on foreign goods.

Our series begins in 1844. By then, Fillmore’s congressional days were behind him. He could not have been more pleased. Several friends wrote that year congratulating him on his freedom from the cares of a legislator. As the Washington artist Elizabeth Milligan put it on January 22, “How much you must congratulate yourself on your absence from Washington during this session of Congress, especially as the sett of men now assembled I should think were any thing but congenial to you.” Kate Williams added from Boston, on May 26, that both Millard and Abigail Fillmore must be “rejoiced . . . that you are not a member of Congress while that miserable John Tyler rules.” Certainly Tyler, a Whig president whose political views diverged from most Whigs’, was no ally of Fillmore. (Both letters are at SUNY–Oswego.)

We have not found Fillmore’s reply to Williams, but on March 10 he agreed with Milligan: “I have seen nothing that induced me to regret that I was not a member of congress this winter. I feel that I have enjoyed myself much better in my own domestic circle with my family around me” (Princeton University). On December 17, 1846, he elaborated to Oliver L. Barbour on his post-congressional attitude: “When I left Congress I determined to pursue my profession, and not suffer myself, to be diverted from that object by the prospect of any political preferment whatever- I have seen so much of political life & partizan strife that I am wearied with its excitiment” (SUNY–Oswego).

As pleased as he was not to be in Congress, Fillmore kept in touch with those who were. He wanted, and they furnished, insider news. Nathan K. Hall, his former law partner and a current congressman, was among his most regular correspondents. Hall updated him on both the progress of legislation and the electoral conversations among House Whigs. Eventually, Hall came to share his old friend’s perspective. Hall’s “experience here,” he wrote on March 5, 1848, “makes me more and more inclined to think I shall get enough of Washington in this Congress” (SUNY–Oswego). Indeed, he did not run for reelection.

Fillmore even stayed involved, from the periphery, in congressional politics. Invited to a local Whig congressional convention in Upstate New York in February 1844 (SUNY–Oswego), he obliged (auctioned letter). He was vocal on some issues facing the national government, especially Texas annexation. Although he expressed his opposition to it in the context of presidential politics, supporting the anti-annexation candidate Henry Clay in 1844, he thereby took a stance on how both Congress and the president should govern.

Taylor viewed Congress from a very different perspective. He had never served there or in any other civil office. He may—this is uncertain—never even have voted in a congressional race. Still, he was a general in Texas during its annexation by the United States and in Mexico during the Mexican-American War. In those positions and as a candidate for the presidency, he had good reason to monitor activities at the Capitol.

Throughout his time at the southern border, Taylor watched and reacted to relevant legislation. At the beginning of 1844 he was in Louisiana waiting for Congress to act on Texas annexation. His troops’ movements, he wrote his brother Joseph on January 29, depended on that congressional decision. One day earlier he wrote to Edmund B. Alexander about how much money Congress might allocate to certain Cherokees. Taylor spent most of his life in regions populated largely by Native Americans, where US policy toward them helped dictate his military decisions. Though he stayed far from the Pacific Northwest, he told his daughter Mary Elizabeth on January 9, 1846, that he was following newspaper reports about the border dispute with the United Kingdom (which controlled Canada). “Judging from the excitement throughout the Country & particularly in Congress,” he concluded, “war with Great Britain is almost reduced to a certainty in less than twelve months” (Morgan Library & Museum).

Taylor occasionally commented on specific legislation that Congress had passed or that he thought it should. On February 9, 1847, for example, he wrote his son-in-law Robert C. Wood that he doubted “the propriety” of the bill Congress was passing to create ten new army regiments (Huntington Library). A year later, on February 16, 1848, he made a more general criticism of the nation’s legislators. That election year, he told Senator Jefferson Davis, they were spending too much time on “President making. I would greatly prefer seeing them attending to their appropriate duties in making . . . appropriations . . . as well as passing such laws as were necessary for the good of the country” (Boston Daily Evening Traveller, Sept. 30, 1863).

Indeed, in 1848, Taylor watched what members of the House and Senate were saying about his own run for the White House. He reported to Joseph Taylor on March 10 that he had received letters “from distinguished members of Congress, saying there had been a great falling off & fluttering among my Whig friends in Congress.” Having often denied any interest in becoming president, he did not seem concerned. When pressured to weigh in on campaign issues, he gave the constitutional and noncommittal response about the separation of powers that I mentioned earlier in this blog. Congress alone, he asserted, crafted legislation. A president might suggest laws, but that officer played such a small role in the process than a presidential candidate needed not reveal his political beliefs.

Then, of course, Taylor became president. Fillmore became vice president and president of the Senate. Both constantly dealt with Congress in those roles. Our project is still in the earlier years, but we’ll get there.

 

In case you’re looking for something to watch, we have two new additions on our Videos page. First is the roundtable on “Editing Documents in US Political History” at last June’s American Political History Conference. Jack McKivigan, Neal Millikan, William diGiacomantonio, Michael E. Woods, and I discussed the process of editing, primary source editions’ value to understanding history, and our projects’ relationships with students and the public. Second is November’s Symposium on Constitutionalism at the University of St. Thomas School of Law. I spoke about Taylor and the Constitution in the session on “Constitutional History,” but I encourage you to watch all the sessions. Although most were outside my own field, I found them fascinating.

 

Oh, in case you’ve been watching the news and wondering, it was around this time that the House set its record for the most ballots required to elect a Speaker. In 1855–56, as Fillmore ran for a second term as president, the House voted 133 times—over two months—before choosing its leader.

With Americans getting ready to vote, it seems a good time for another post about Zachary Taylor’s and Millard Fillmore’s letters discussing elections. Two years ago I wrote about the process of choosing a president in 1848 and Taylor’s reluctance to seek the White House. But he, Fillmore, and their correspondents had much more to say about elections in general. Some of their concerns mirror those expressed by politicians and citizens today.

For one thing, Taylor wasn’t the only politician who hesitated to run for an office. Candidates’ protests against their own nominations are a recurring theme in the letters. Fillmore, in the years before he joined Taylor’s presidential ticket, resisted fellow Whigs’ efforts to nominate him for statewide office in New York. In 1844, when they promoted him for the governorship, he insisted that they find someone else. In a letter to the politician and journalist Thurlow Weed, published in Weed’s Albany Evening Post on May 21, he announced his “unwillingness” to run “for reasons partly of a public and partly of a private character”—including his lack of “ability.” In a private letter to the former congressman Francis Granger, he was more frank. Fillmore accused his opponents within the party of “killing me with kindness”: they were pushing him as governor, he believed, to keep him away from the vice presidency, which he wanted (Library of Congress). In the end he was nominated as governor but lost to the Democrat.

Three years later, Fillmore again won the Whig nomination for an office he said he didn’t want. His party called on him to become comptroller, New York’s highest financial officer. He swore to State Senator Gideon Hard on September 23, 1847, that his legal business kept him too busy (SUNY-Oswego), but he got the nod anyway. This time he won the election. He grudgingly embarked on its duties, still writing on January 7 to Albert Gallatin, a former US Treasury secretary whom he asked for advice, that he was “too young and inexperienced to rely upon my own judgment” (New-York Historical Society).

In other letters, politicians discussed strategies to win rather than avoid office. Those were largely concerned with getting out their party’s message. As accelerating immigration grew the United States’ diverse ethnic communities, parties needed to campaign in languages besides English. Several of Fillmore’s letters stressed the need to promote Whig candidates in the German-language press. In January 1844 the Whig operative Samuel Lisle Smith put him in touch with a young politician by the name of Lincoln to discuss setting up German newspapers in New York and Illinois (SUNY-Oswego). In New York, meanwhile, although Whigs as a group by no means opposed slavery, they wanted to attract votes from the small minority of White men who did. So Fillmore worked with his colleagues to bring in Cassius M. Clay, a famous Kentucky abolitionist, to speak in towns where he could help.

Campaigning wasn’t only about educating voters on a party’s policies. It also involved getting them to the polls, sometimes by unscrupulous or allegedly illegal means. Alcohol, used as a lure by both Democrats and Whigs, was a big part of nineteenth-century election days. The Whig judge Thomas C. Chittenden warned Fillmore on October 29, 1844, that Democrats would make good use of “the productions of the distillery” to bring out voters (SUNY-Oswego). Other Whigs, who paradoxically both courted immigrant voters and engaged in nativism, accused Democrats of winning elections with noncitizens’ votes. Taylor, on February 18, 1848, complained to his son-in-law Robert C. Wood that an “immense influx of foreigners . . . are carried to the polls & are permitted to vote immediately on their arrival, naturalized or not.” Of those, he asserted, “nineteen out of twenty if not more, vote the democratic ticket” (Huntington Library). Unlike today, some states’ laws then allowed unnaturalized White male immigrants to vote, though usually not “immediately on their arrival.”

Politicians also discussed the basic mechanics of voting. Not until the 1880s did US jurisdictions begin printing their own ballots, a protocol adopted earlier in Australia and England. Before then, Americans voted either by voice (as required, for example, by Virginia’s constitution) or, more often, by bringing their own ballots to polling places. Parties and their affiliated newspapers were only too happy to distribute ballots listing their candidates’ names. Fillmore and his allies had to ensure that those were ready and in the correct form. On November 2, 1844, Alexander Kelsey wrote to him frantically that some of the ballots that New York’s Whig Party had printed might not pass legal muster. They needed to be quickly replaced (SUNY-Oswego). One couldn’t vote for Whig candidates if he didn’t have the right ballot in hand.

When Americans show up at the polls this November 8 (or before, for early voting), they can expect to find government-issued print or electronic ballots. Those, unlike the partisan tickets of the nineteenth century, will list all candidates for each office. Taylor, who despite his Whig proclivities often lamented the parties’ control of politics, may have appreciated that change had he lived to see it. In any event, he and Fillmore would surely encourage you, whichever boxes you check off on your ballot, to—shameless plug—click the button on the left side of your screen now and subscribe to this blog.