On June 9, 1848, the Whig National Convention nominated Zachary Taylor as president and Millard Fillmore as vice president. The next day, Boston engineer John E. Gowen wrote to Fillmore. He asked two questions. First, did Fillmore support changing naturalization laws and, in particular, “excluding Foreigners from participating in the elective franchise until they have been here at least Twenty one years”? Second, did the nominee support taxing future immigrants “to such an extent as to protect the American mechanic from Foreign competition in the labor market”? Fillmore responded a week later but refused to answer the questions (Boston Daily Evening Traveller, Sept. 23, 1848).

Immigration was big news in the 1840s. Britons and other Europeans had been arriving on American shores throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Slave traders had forcibly brought Africans there until 1808, when Congress banned the international slave trade, and occasionally even thereafter. The discovery of gold in California, just before the United States acquired that province from Mexico in 1848, attracted fortune-seekers from Latin America, Asia, Europe, and Australia. Finally, and most remarked upon in US political debates, many thousands of Catholics immigrated to the largely Protestant United States in the 1840s. They came from the various independent German states and, to avoid starvation amid the potato famine, from Ireland.

Taylor’s and Fillmore’s correspondence includes voices of immigrants and their families. In the volume that we’re publishing this year, for example, you’ll find David M. Nagle. He had led a rebellion in his native Ireland before settling in New York City. On November 3, 1847, he thanked Fillmore for the latter’s “unremitting regard” on behalf of “my adopted fellow citizens.” Three years earlier, Fillmore had heard from Nicholas Carroll, “the son of an Irishman.” Carroll wrote on September 8, 1844, of his family’s support for the US Revolution and of the impact of his Catholic religion on his voting choices.

Writers born in the United States often discussed the politics of immigration. Those politics differed greatly from today’s, partly owing to two legal differences. First, US law did not then distinguish between legal and illegal (or undocumented) immigration. Only in 1875 did Congress begin passing laws that banned certain people’s entry. It excluded Chinese prostitutes in 1875, nearly all Chinese people in 1882, and other specific groups thereafter. In 1924 it passed the first general law limiting immigration from each country. During the United States’ first century, essentially all immigration was legal.

Second, America did not consistently restrict voting to citizens. Many states (and, under federal law, territories), during parts of the nation’s first 150 years, allowed unnaturalized immigrants to vote. Six states did so in the 1840s. The provisions varied but generally extended suffrage to White men who had lived in the state a defined period of time. Only in the 1920s did the last states end the policy. As a result, Americans in most of the nineteenth century did not debate the presence of illegal immigrants, a yet-to-be-created category, but did debate the propriety of noncitizens’ voting.

Taylor, Fillmore, and the Whig Party both made use of and bristled at immigrants’ votes. They paid particular attention to “Germans”: immigrants from the German states and their US-born and German-speaking children. Because many of those people could vote, Whigs campaigned to them. Chicago’s Samuel Lisle Smith wrote to Fillmore and other Buffalo Whigs on January 17, 1844, to coordinate the development of pro-Whig, German-language newspapers in Illinois and New York. (Smith mentioned “my colleague M^r Lincoln,” a young Illinois politician who participated in the effort and who would become rather famous.) On April 26, Alfred Babcock observed in a letter to Fillmore that New York Whig leaders “have been . . . courting all foreigners and especially the Irish and Catholic forigners.”

Though Whigs sought immigrants’ votes, they weren’t necessarily happy that immigrants—especially recent ones—did vote. John C. Hamilton opined to Fillmore on October 11, 1844, that immigrants should have “immediate access to all social rights” but not “political privileges.” Taylor, the year he ran for the presidency, expressed annoyance at “the immense influx of foreigners into to our Country.” He complained to his son-in-law Robert C. Wood, on February 18, 1848, that they “are carried to the polls & are permitted to vote immediately on their arrival, naturalized or not,” and that “nineteen out of twenty if not more, vote the democratic ticket” (Huntington Library, Zachary Taylor Papers). During the campaign, some accused Taylor of opposing the rights of naturalized citizens. He sharply denied that charge.

Democrats tended to welcome immigrants from Europe, including Catholics, more wholeheartedly. President James K. Polk was particularly supportive. During the Mexican-American War, he appointed two Jesuit priests to accompany General Taylor’s army. He hoped that they, besides conducting services for Catholic US soldiers, could convince Catholic Mexicans of the United States’ good intentions. When a Presbyterian minister opposed the appointments, Polk labeled him “a hypocrite or a bigotted fanatic.” The Polk administration also argued, during a dispute with the United Kingdom over the status of Irish-born Americans, that US naturalization made one not only a citizen but “a natural born” one.

Some politicians, on the other hand, made opposition to immigration and vilification of immigrants centerpieces of their platform. In the late 1830s and early 1840s, committed nativists coalesced into an organization called both the Native American Party and the American Republican Party. (It had nothing to do with either Indigenous people or the as-yet-unestablished Republican Party.) It aimed to reduce immigration and to reduce immigrants’ and Catholics’ political influence. At its convention on September 10, 1847, it recommended Taylor for the presidency (without his having sought the endorsement and long before his nomination by the Whigs). John E. Gowen, who wrote to Fillmore with policy questions in June 1848, did so on that party’s behalf. Its Massachusetts branch wanted to know whether Taylor’s running mate shared its views.

Fillmore’s refusal to answer, given his past efforts to win German immigrants’ votes (and his and Taylor’s general refusals to reveal policy positions), is unsurprising. Later, though, Fillmore moved to the center of nativist politics. In the 1850s, the Native American Party gave way to the American Party, also called the “Know Nothings.” The political arm of the Order of the Star Spangled Banner, a secretive fraternal organization, it promoted the same anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic message. In 1856, the Whig Party having collapsed, ex-president Fillmore accepted that group’s nomination for the presidency. The connection with the secret order was ironic. Fillmore had first entered politics in the 1820s under the Anti-Masonic Party, an organization founded on opposition to secret orders. But his acceptance of the nativist message, one that in the mid-nineteenth century crossed party lines and often had been embraced by Whigs, made pragmatic political sense.

This spring, I announced that we had completed the manuscript of volume 1 of The Correspondence of Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore. Now I can share a few more details. (I’ll add other project news at the end of this entry.) The volume, featuring letters of January 1844 to June 1848, is scheduled for release in hardcover on August 18, 2026. The University of Tennessee Press has a summary of the contents here. Online retailers feature it here and here, and you may order it at your favorite local bookshop. Rotunda (at the University of Virginia Press) will release the digital version as part of its American History Collection around the same time.

With publication nearing, I should explain what we editors do in the final months. Earlier in this blog, I outlined four major stages of editing primary documents: locating the documents, transcribing them (and translating if necessary), proofreading the transcriptions, and annotating the content. Those stages occupy the bulk of our time. But they are neither the beginning nor the end of the editorial process. At the beginning, we define the scope of the project—which historical actors, topics, years, and document types it will feature—and build a work plan and collaborative team. Later, perhaps, I’ll look back and reflect on those initial tasks. Today, I will outline the last stages of our process.

Years of work by editors and student contributors result in a series of computer files. Those contain hundreds of transcribed letters and thousands of notes identifying the people and topics therein. Before considering them complete, we do some final checks. Because we transcribed from scans, photocopies, and microfilm copies of the letters, some letters include words that we could not read with certainty but which we suspect may be clearer in the original manuscripts. In such cases, we visit the repositories—mainly the National Archives and the Library of Congress—to see the originals. Handling (carefully!) the papers to which Taylor, Fillmore, and others set their pens is a thrill for a historian. Having deciphered or confirmed a few more words, we return to our desks and proofread the whole volume, fact-checking the annotations to ensure that we give readers trustworthy and helpful context for the letters.

We next write the sections of the book that precede and follow the annotated letters. At the front of the book are the dedication, acknowledgment, and sponsor pages, where we get to thank the many people and organizations that made the volume possible. Next comes the introduction, which briefly chronicles Taylor’s and Fillmore’s lives, especially during the years covered by the volume, and outlines the major topics in the letters. It describes our editorial practices, such as how we reproduce handwritten text in print form and what information we include in the notes. The introduction, in sum, both whets readers’ appetites for the letters and enables them to navigate the book. It ends with a bibliography of suggested further readings. After the introduction come tables of abbreviations used in the annotation, genealogies of Taylor’s and Fillmore’s families, and tabular chronologies of the two presidents’ lives.

At the end of the volume appears what we call the “calendar.” Taylor, Fillmore, and their correspondents wrote more than three thousand letters in the four and a half years covered by volume 1. Lacking space to include them all, we selected the 371 (plus 5 enclosures) that we thought readers would find most interesting and useful. But some readers may want to consult others. So we compile a calendar: a table of all surviving letters. It lists their dates, authors, recipients, repository locations, and major topics. People interested in, say, German-language newspapers or army courts-martial will, therefore, know where to find relevant letters beyond those that we publish.

With those sections written and proofread, the volume is whole. After making some final formatting adjustments, we send it the University of Tennessee Press. We also send images to illustrate it. Daguerreotypes (early photographs) of Taylor and Fillmore go on the cover, as shown in the lovely design above by the press’s design expert. Inside, images of manuscripts accompany several transcriptions to show what the original documents look like. They include a hand-drawn map of the Rio Grande warfront that Taylor enclosed with a letter and Mexican woman Mariquita Lopez’s Spanish letter that we publish in translation.

The press then gets to work finalizing the text. They copyedit the front matter to guarantee clarity and proper style, then send the revised version to us for approval. We return it to them, and they begin creating “proofs” or “pages.” (The press is in that process now.) This means turning Microsoft Word documents into book pages. When finished, the press sends us an image of how each page of the published book will look. That way, both the press and us editors can review those pages and ensure that every paragraph, every line, every word, every punctuation mark, and every page number is exactly as it should look—before printing the book copies. We notify them of any errors, they make the corrections, and they send us a second set of proofs so we can confirm that everything was fixed.

Finally, we write the index. I consider an index essential for any nonfiction book, but even more so for a documentary edition. Say you want to find letters in our volume written by the Mexican general and politician Santa Anna, or letters about the US movement promoting abstinence from alcohol. Paging through the whole book will take a while. But the index will direct you right to the relevant pages. In the digital version, of course, you can do a keyword search. But because writers may have referenced a topic without using the words you have in mind, or may have misspelled them, that may not bring up every relevant letter. So, even there, an index crafted by the editors who assembled the volume is an indispensable tool. We thus create one, more comprehensive and more specific in its entries than those in most books, using the text and pagination in the second proofs.

Then, at last, the press sends the volume—front matter, annotated letters, calendar, and index—to the printer. The printer, um, prints the books and binds them. Libraries stock them, and you, of course, can purchase your very own copy (an excellent gift for all occasions). The press also sends the indexed volume to the digital publisher, which converts it into a searchable edition matching the format of others in Rotunda’s American History Collection. On paper or online, readers everywhere can learn antebellum US history from the words of Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, and their contemporaries.

 

Besides the imminent volume 1, we’ve had several exciting developments at the Taylor-Fillmore project in the past few months. Two relate to our team. Amy Larrabee Cotz, associate editor of the project since 2021, was named its coeditor in September. The appointment recognizes her central role in publishing the presidents’ letters and the expertise she brings from both this and her earlier editorial work. Josie Hannah, a junior at St. Olaf College, joined us as an intern in October. A history and political science major, she has been transcribing letters from the election of 1848 that will appear in our second volume.

I, meanwhile, have had opportunities to share the project’s discoveries. On the August 1 episode of Kentucky Chronicles, a podcast of the Kentucky Historical Society, I discussed the Taylor letters in the society’s holdings with host Daniel Burge. On November 6, the Oklahoma Political Science Association welcomed me to its annual conference. I am grateful to Aaron L. Mason, a member of our advisory board and the new president of that association, for inviting me. I joined a panel on “Presidencies Past and Present” and gave the keynote address on “The Role of Presidential History.” I also joined the team of In Pursuit, a project to commemorate the United States’ 250th anniversary through essays about the presidents and first ladies. On its website, you can view the impressive list of contributors (who include three former presidents) and sign up to receive the free essays beginning on Presidents’ Day 2026.

Most exciting of all, on August 1, the National Endowment for the Humanities announced a major grant for our project. Part of the NEH’s Scholarly Editions and Translations program, the two-year, $197,322 award to American University will support our work expanding access to primary documents throughout 2026 and 2027. This is the Taylor-Fillmore project’s first grant from the NEH and its largest from any source. We are deeply grateful to the NEH, an independent federal agency that supports the humanities in every US state and jurisdiction, both for its essential financial support and for its recognition of our project’s value to education and research in American history.

Click above to listen to this article, read by Kate E. Hutchinson.

 

We at the Taylor-Fillmore project have something to celebrate. We just completed the manuscript of the first volume of Zachary Taylor’s and Millard Fillmore’s letters. Editors and student contributors transcribed and annotated 376 documents written by or to those powerful but little-known figures in nineteenth-century America. They stretch from 1844, when the United States was preparing to annex Texas, to mid-1848, after it had acquired half of Mexico. Now we will work with the publishers to finalize the print and digital volume. You’ll be able to read the letters, at your library or on your computer, next summer. We thank all who have made this possible, including the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) and our other sponsors committed to expanding readers’ access to original historical documents.

Two weeks ago, I got to share that good news with the folks at American POTUS. They kindly invited me to join their podcast about US presidents. My conversation with host Alan Lowe about Taylor and Fillmore is now available on the American POTUS website, on our website, and pretty much wherever you get your podcasts.

Now, let’s discuss bigger celebrations.

 

In 2026, the United States will commemorate its semiquincentennial: the 250th anniversary of its founding. All states and territories have established commissions to mark the occasion. At the federal level, Congress created the US Semiquincentennial Commission in 2016, and President Donald J. Trump issued an executive order creating Task Force 250, with him as chair, this February. Private organizations ranging from the Organization of American Historians to Black America 250 have assembled educational materials tied to the anniversary. I sit on the Semiquincentennial Committee of the Association for Documentary Editing, which aims to focus attention on key documents from the full span of US history. Commemorations will culminate next summer, when we reach 250 years after the adoption of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.

In the meantime, Americans have celebrated other specific anniversaries. This April 19 was the 250th of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, which launched the US Revolution. May 10 was the 250th of the convening in Philadelphia of the Second Continental Congress. And this Saturday will be the 250th birthday of the US Army. On June 14, 1775, the Second Continental Congress passed a resolution creating ten companies of riflemen and designating the colonists’ military organization “the American continental army.” It, under General George Washington’s command, became the official seed of the armed forces in which brave men and women have served their country in the two and a half centuries since.

A festival and parade in Washington, DC, will form the centerpiece of the national celebration of the army and of servicepeople past and present. The Association of the United States Army will hold another parade and related events in Philadelphia. By a historical coincidence, these happen to fall on Flag Day (precisely two years after creating the army, Congress adopted the Stars and Stripes). By another coincidence, they fall on President Trump’s seventy-ninth birthday (discussion of the commemoration began years ago, though the specific plan for a parade emerged this spring).

These political and military anniversaries got me thinking—as I tend to do—about Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore. As we’ve worked through their letters, we’ve come across discussions of anniversaries, military tributes, and, yes, parades. This seems a good time to share what types of celebrations they and their correspondents witnessed and what those Americans of an earlier era thought about marking dates on the calendar and honoring soldiers in the field.

 

As in the 2020s, Americans in the 1840s celebrated national anniversaries. Although no major ones arose in that decade—the nation’s seventy-fifth did in 1851, but our project hasn’t gotten there yet—Independence Day came each year. I wrote a little about that holiday earlier in this blog.

Some politicians used July 4 for partisan ends. In 1844, supporters of the Whig Party invited Fillmore to their festivities in Rushford, NY. He responded that he already had committed to attend an event elsewhere “on the anniversary of the Birth day of our nation.” But he took the opportunity, in his response, to equate the colonists who had rejected British rule—known in their time as “whigs”—with his nineteenth-century party: “The whig spirit of ’76 gave us Independence & freedom and the Whig spirit of 1844 must maintain that independence and freedom, or the blood of the Revolution was poured out in vain.”

Fillmore’s letters more often discussed celebrations planned for purely political, not commemorative, purposes. In August 1844, Whigs invited him to a “MASS CONVENTION” in Seneca Falls, NY. Beginning with a “procession” complete with “Banners and Music,” it promoted Henry Clay’s candidacy for the White House and the party’s support for a high tariff and opposition to annexing Texas. Four years later, Amos Brown wrote to Fillmore recounting Democratic presidential nominee Lewis Cass’s arrival home in Detroit. After “two brass pieces fireing” at the wharf, where Cass’s steamboat landed, he went to his house with a “possession [procession] which . . . consisted of a band of music five carriages one buggy and one too horse wagon and betwene one and two hundred fo[o]tmen in al the company about the house encluding locoes [i.e., Democrats] whigs and boys and in the possession there might have been one thousand.”

Around Taylor, who spent most of this time commanding troops in Texas and Mexico, festivities honored his army. He was not always happy about that. By the end of 1845, as Texas was becoming a state and his forces were defending it against Mexico and Indigenous peoples, he had tired of both the monotonous work and the noisy entertainment. He wrote to his daughter Mary Elizabeth, on December 15, about the “constant employment . . . what with instruction, mounting guards, reviews &c.” He acknowledged that “fine bands & excellen field music has made the pass tolerably rapidly; but,” he added, “all the pomp & parade of such things are lost on me, I now sigh for peace & quiet with my family around me-”

Later, when Taylor returned home as a presidential candidate, he developed mixed feelings about the political festivities to which he was constantly invited. He told Orlando Brown, on March 15, 1848, that he would have enjoyed visiting Kentucky at the state legislature’s invitation, seeing “many old & long cherished friends, all of whom I should have been delighted to have met.” But he was still an officer in the army (he didn’t resign until three months after his election). He worried that opponents would accuse him of spending his leave of absence “traveling about the country for eletioneering purposes; I therefore deemed it most prudent to decline all such invitations” (Kentucky Historical Society).

His reluctance to travel to celebrations, while at least partly rooted in political calculation, may also have accorded with his limited view of the presidency. Candidate Taylor determinedly refused to share his political opinions and argued that even a sitting president’s opinions “are neither important nor necessary” (ZT to Unknown, March 29, 1848, in Washington Daily Union, October 14, 1848) in a country where Congress took precedence in setting policy. Keeping out of the electoral limelight, perhaps, fit his electoral platform.

Taylor firmly supported, however, honoring the men with whom he served. He may not have loved “all the pomp & parade,” but he did not deny it to the officers and soldiers in his army. He also welcomed civilians’ recognition of the hardships that military personnel endured. He often wrote, as he did to Jefferson Davis on July 27, 1847, of “our young gallant respectable volunteer soldirs, who have volunteered in the cause of their country, who are daily falling victims to the hardships, privations &c common to a soldiers life, & to the diseases that accompany the march . . . under a tropical sun.” He appreciated written expressions of gratitude for their sacrifices.

Taylor also gratefully read about the “illuminations”—the lighting up of public and private buildings—organized in US cities to celebrate victories in Mexico. He wrote to Robert C. Wood, likely on June 4, 1847, “The brilliant illuminations in New Orleans, & elsewhere on acc^t. of the success of our arms, shewes that our Citizens duly appreciate the labors, privations & dangers encounted in the publis servants by those employed by them, which demonstations of respect & gratitude must be consoling in some degree to those who have lost relatives, health & friends during this contest” (Huntington Library). Those visual displays were not overseen by the national government. But Taylor and, presumably, many other officers, soldiers, and family members took heart from the local expressions of understanding and support.

Click above to listen to this article, read by Kate E. Hutchinson.

 

When documentary editors begin a project, we expect it to cover certain topics. I was confident, when I started preparing Zachary Taylor’s and Millard Fillmore’s letters for publication, that the letters would cover topics I associated with America in the 1840s and 1850s. They would discuss the Mexican-American War, the expansion of slavery, the cholera pandemic, tariff reform, immigration from Germany and Ireland, and the forced removal of Indigenous peoples. On a more personal level, they would discuss Taylor’s and Fillmore’s families, the day-to-day lives of those Taylor and others enslaved, and specific political and diplomatic relationships.

Other topics come as surprises. Presidents wrote and received thousands of letters. We’ve already located nearly five thousand from the decade ending with Fillmore’s administration. Those embrace a wide variety of correspondents and interests, both within and outside the anticipated. I knew the war would show up, but I didn’t know that Taylor corresponded with engineers about setting up a line of flags to communicate across Mexico by semaphore (the letters appeared in the Baltimore Commercial Journal, and Lyford’s Price-Current, November 6, 1847). I might have expected letters about art, but I didn’t know that Fillmore corresponded with Elizabeth Milligan about her miniature painting of the former first lady Dolley Payne Todd Madison (Milligan’s letter of June 5, 1844, is in SUNY–Oswego’s Millard Fillmore Papers).

I also did not expect to find much about Haiti. Perhaps I should have known better. Through a violent revolution that lasted from 1791 to 1804, Haiti’s enslaved Blacks overthrew the French colonial government. They set up an independent government and excluded Whites from citizenship. Haitians’ success prompted fears among US Whites that the people they enslaved would launch similar uprisings. Those fears, which persisted for decades, helped motivate state laws restricting US Blacks’ freedom and literacy. (You can read more about Haiti in this era in books by Steeve Coupeau, Philippe Girard, and Robert Debs Heinl et al.) So I might have expected to read about Haiti in letters of the 1840s and 1850s, or at least about US perceptions of it.

Personal relationships, though, are key. Both Taylor and Fillmore, it turns out, had close ties with White Americans who spent time in Haiti. Taylor’s second cousin William Taylor, whom he often mentioned in letters, served as agent or consul at Port-au-Prince and Cape Haytien in the 1810s. More important for our period, Millard and Abigail Powers Fillmore were close friends with the Manhattan couple Joseph C. and Julia A. Mason Luther. Millard corresponded with both. Joseph, as it happened, served as US commercial agent at Port-au-Prince from 1843 to 1849.

Joseph Luther wrote Fillmore detailed letters about politics and culture in Haiti. He was there during a tumultuous period. A series of new revolutions rocked the country beginning the year he arrived, as did a major earthquake and fire. Luther recounted the formation of a new constitution and the succession of political and military figures who tried to establish control.

Luther didn’t want to be there. He shared the day’s racist assumptions about People of Color and low esteem for a Black-ruled nation. He told Fillmore on February 21, 1844, that he would rather “have obtained an appointment to some prominent port in Europe, or even in South America, but their being no vacancy of that discription, . . . I was compelled to accept of such as there were, or get none at all.” With Julia back in the United States, furthermore, “I am . . . most wretchedly lonesome out here amongst the negroes.”

Luther’s criticisms of Haitians ranged from the political to the cultural. He described the constitutional convention, in the same letter, “as somewhat of a sumary way of forming Governments” by US standards, “but it goes down here as perfectly orthodox.” He conceded that lighter-skinned Haitians included “many well educated and talented men” but insisted that “the commonality of the people, are quite uneducated, and exist in the lowest state of moral degradation that it is easy to conceive.” He described Carnival, Haiti’s February celebration, as embracing “caps and cocked hats of gaudy appearance” and “instruments for making noises of the strangest and most heathenish sounds possible.”

A week after Luther wrote that letter, another revolution arrived. Since 1822, Haiti had comprised the entirely of the island of Hispaniola. Now eastern residents declared themselves the independent Dominican Republic. War ensued, but Luther reported on June 10 that the Dominicans had prevailed. In what remained of Haiti, he predicted “that the whole government will become dismembered, and formed into small districts or tribes, similar to those of the Indians on our Western Frontiers.” On September 15, 1845, he added that the government remained “in a deplorable condition” and observed that, with most men recruited as soldiers, “nearly all the produce which has come to market . . . have been the fruits of female labour.”

Joseph Luther still wasn’t happy about his assignment. Neither was Julia. She asked Fillmore on November 4, 1846, to use his influence to get Joseph a job in New York, “so he may hereafter be at home.” If Fillmore tried, he failed. But the Luthers’ discontent redounds to history students’ benefit. Joseph continued writing to his friend from Haiti until 1849. The transcribed and annotated letters, published in our digital and print volumes, will become new sources both for events in that country and for US attitudes toward it. The Correspondence of Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore will shed light on both expected and surprising facets of life in the mid-nineteenth century.

 

Speaking of those volumes, I have an update on our progress. Longtime readers of this blog may recall my forecast that we editors would send our first volume to the publisher this winter. Research, though, sometimes yields an overabundance of riches. We’ve found even more letters and even more sources to annotate them than we’d expected. So we’ve planned some extra research trips to make the volume as complete and informative as possible. I was at the National Archives just this month. We’ll be completing volume 1, which will cover January 1844 to June 1848—and include all the Luthers’ letters quoted here—in the spring. You can expect to see it online and on bookshelves in the spring or summer of 2026. It will be an exciting new source for US history as the nation celebrates its 250th birthday.

Click above to listen to this article, read by Kate E. Hutchinson.

 

We wish those who celebrate a belated merry Christmas, an ongoing happy Hanukkah or Kwanzaa, and, of course, a joyous new year! Furthermore, why not a grievous Festivus? Seinfeld introduced that made-up holiday to television audiences in 1997, but we’ve encountered the word in the nineteenth-century press. The New York Herald of August 2, 1867, announced a “Festivus Tournament” at the Bowery Theatre. The paper didn’t give details, so I can’t confirm whether it involved sharing of grievances and feats of strength.

As we celebrate and look forward, this seems a good time to relate one of the more humorous tales from Zachary Taylor’s political life. It comes from the presidential election of 1848. Because it revolves around developments in mail delivery, I’ll begin with some background on how the post office worked back then.

 

Postal service in the United States stretches back to the nation’s earliest days. The Second Continental Congress, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution all authorized it. But postage stamps are newer. None existed before the 1840s. In the first seven decades, Americans paid to receive rather than to send mail. They went to local post offices, collected letters addressed to them, and paid associated costs. Those costs varied according to origin, destination, and size. (Certain government officers, including members of Congress and the president, received mail for free—a privilege known as franking.) Writers did have the option of prepaying postage at the post office, saving recipients the money, but they rarely exercised it.

For those of us studying history through presidential letters, that old system is a boon. Because Americans didn’t need to pay for stamps, they could more affordably write to the president. Many people with limited resources wrote to the White House about their lives and the state of the nation. Had doing so cost money, some probably would not have.

In 1845, the system started to change. First, President John Tyler signed a law simplifying postage rates. Second, Postmaster General Cave Johnson authorized local postmasters to issue adhesive stamps. His action came five years after the introduction of stamps in the United Kingdom. Cities including New York City and St. Louis began printing these “postmasters’ provisionals,” making it easier for letter writers to prepay postage. The vast majority of communities, however, continued to rely on postpayment or special arrangements for prepayment at the local office.

Two years later, on March 3, 1847, President James K. Polk signed a law authorizing the federal government to print stamps. This law opened to all Americans the modern way of sending mail. The Post Office Department introduced two stamps, one worth five cents with Benjamin Franklin’s image and one worth ten with George Washington’s. (Officeholders’ franking privilege came to mean sending, rather than receiving, mail for free.) Even so, the law did not require correspondents to use the stamps. They still could choose between affixing those or leaving letters’ recipients responsible for the postage. Sending mail postage-due, not postage-paid, remained the more common practice. Not until 1855 did Congress mandate prepayment.

 

As postage stamps appeared on the scene, so did presidential candidate Zachary Taylor. In 1847, while he won battles in the Mexican-American War, supporters began promoting him as Polk’s successor. Many wrote to him expressing their support and urging him to run. After he returned in December from Mexico to his home in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, stacks of letters about his electoral prospects began arriving there. In his own letters he often repeated his reluctance to serve in Washington, but he allowed allies to introduce his name at the Whig National Convention in Philadelphia.

On June 9, 1848, the convention nominated Taylor as president of the United States. The convention’s president, John M. Morehead, wrote to him the next day announcing his nomination and requesting his acceptance.

Taylor did not respond.

Morehead waited a week. Then another. Then most of another. But no word came from the presidential nominee. So, on June 28, Morehead wrote another letter. He enclosed a copy of his first.

 

Taylor had learned of his nomination, but not from Morehead’s letter. Telegraph wires, unknown in the United States five years earlier but rapidly laid down since, carried the news to Memphis. From there, a steamboat—named, of all things, the General Taylor—brought the news down the Mississippi River to its namesake’s Cypress Grove Plantation. The crew fired guns, and the passengers shouted congratulations to the nominee when they spotted him. Taylor, according to a biographer, displayed no emotion. He noted in some private letters that he had heard the news. But, he added, he was still waiting for an official notification.

What had happened to the letter? Well, Morehead had sent it the old way: postage-due. So, throughout the spring, had many of those writing unofficial letters of support to Taylor. When he went to the Baton Rouge post office and saw the volume of his postage-due mail, he decided not to pay for it all. He glanced through the letters, accepted those whose handwriting or senders’ names he recognized, and refused receipt of the rest. The refused letters totaled forty-eight from April to June. They included Morehead’s announcement of Taylor’s nomination for the presidency. The local postmaster sent it, along with the other forty-seven, to Washington for deposit in the dead letter office.

Taylor soon heard what had happened. He requested the letters’ return, and the Baton Rouge postmaster relayed that request to Washington on July 8. The Post Office Department sent them back on July 22. But before they arrived (if they ever did—we haven’t found the original Morehead letter), Morehead’s second letter with the enclosed copy of the first one did (they’re now in the University of Kentucky’s Zachary Taylor Collection). Perhaps guessing what had gone wrong, he had paid the postage on that one. Apparently not having an adhesive stamp available, he’d had a postal employee stamp it in ink. Finally getting the official notification of his nomination on July 14, Taylor responded, accepting it, the next day.

Newspapers around the country reported the mishap. Whig papers either blamed the post office for the letter’s delay, before learning otherwise, or praised Taylor for his thrift and priorities. According to the Plaquemine (LA) Southern Sentinel of August 10, he had chosen wisely to spend his money on “objects of charity . . . more deserving” than unpaid letters from people he didn’t know. Democratic papers portrayed him instead as a miser. The Washington Daily Union, the Democratic Party’s chief organ, issued regular reports on the developing story of the missing missive. After learning why Taylor had not received it promptly, the Union on July 25 charged him with “miserable petty economy” in not “taking all his letters.”

After the delay and drama, Taylor had gotten Morehead’s letter. We are as yet unsure of the other forty-seven letters’ fate. Taylor formally accepted his nomination for the presidency, journalists turned the incident to partisan purposes, and the campaign carried on. The story, if nothing else, highlights the value of that invention of the 1840s, the postage stamp.

 

Before I close this post and this year, I want to highlight some project news. The National Historical Publications and Records Commission and The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation recently awarded generous grants to American University’s Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies to support our work in 2025–26. We are deeply grateful to the NHPRC and the Delmas Foundation, both of them multiyear supporters, for their commitment to expanding access to historical documents. The NHPRC award of $124,097, the largest grant ever made for our project, is one of many awards announced in a National Archives press release and the latest NHPRC newsletter.

 

Oh, one more thing! The Taylor-Fillmore project is now on LinkedIn. We’re sharing project updates, nineteenth-century tidbits, and news from others who edit and publish historical documents. If you’re on the site, please consider following @taylorandfillmore.

Click above to listen to this article, read by Kate E. Hutchinson.

 
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.

Click above to listen to this article, read by Kate E. Hutchinson.

 

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.