Zachary Taylor: Soldier in the White House

Zachary Taylor: Soldier in the White House by Prof. Holman Hamilton

Imagine you’re having a conversation with someone and they’re telling you about a 30-minute television show that they just watched. How long should it take the person to summarize the show? 30 seconds? 1 minute? 5 minutes?  What if they described every single line of dialogue?  In addition to that, they described every piece of clothing that each character wore, along with a detailed analysis of all the camera angles. Then, they gave you a detailed biography of every single person that worked on the production of the show. I would challenge you that it would take this person several hours to describe this 30-minute show.  The real question then becomes, “If they took 8-10 hours to describe a 30-minute show, how soon would you become bored out of your skull?”

This is how I felt while reading this dreary, overlong biography.  The author simply doesn’t know how to summarize, tell a good story, nor just shut his mouth. I can’t believe the excruciating detail that he finds necessary to slog his reader through. This is actually a two-volume set. I read the first one and had similar reservations. The first one, however, was twice as short and about four times as interesting.  Even that book was weighted down, so the author goes from mediocre to awful.  Had he combined these two books and cut about 75% of the material, I probably would have endured better.

When one looks at the life of Zachary Taylor, the twelfth U.S. president does seem to have a more colorful life as a military general as opposed to a politician.  Taylor joins the ever-growing list of presidents who mainly became president because of their record in battle.  When reading both of these volumes, the question that begs to be asked is, why is the man’s 16-month presidency (he died in office) detailed in a much longer book than the first one that details his many military escapades?  I really do think the author was forced to write this book. Maybe he signed a bad contract or something.  He finds it necessary to quote Taylor’s entire inaugural address as well as devote an entire chapter to a party at the executive mansion where he feels obligated to describe every guest’s features as well as the outfits they wore. 

The one significant event that happened during Taylor’s presidency was the ongoing debate of The Compromise of 1850. From what I understand, the author is a bit of an astute expert on the Compromise – he wrote an entire book on it – but, sadly, that doesn’t mean he does a good job translating it into a somewhat bearable narrative.  By the time I arrived at the last 100 pages or so of this book, I confess that I basically just skimmed through the remainder.  This was an unbearable read.  In fact, I’ve probably read about 40 biographies of U.S. Presidents and other key stately figures, and most I’ve enjoyed (4 to 5-star reviews on Amazon), yet this one was by far the worst I’ve ever read.  Since the author was a professor (this is a 75-year-old book), I can only imagine how unbearable it was to have to sit through one of his lectures at the university where he taught.

From what I know about Zachary Taylor, he deserves a better account of his life than this.