NOVEMBER 24 — 1784 Happy Birthday Zachary Taylor; 1971 Highjacker extorts $200G and parachutes out of plane into hurricane
NOVEMBER 24
1784 Happy birthday Zachary “Old Zack” Taylor, #12.
…Born in Orange County, VA in 1784, Taylor was a distant cousin of James Madison. He grew up in Kentucky and raised on a plantation. In 1810 he married Margaret Smith and they had six children together. A career officer in the Army, Zack Taylor fought in the War of 1812, the Black Hawk War against the Native Americans in 1832, the Second Seminole War in Florida in 1837 through 1840, and served as brigadier general in the Mexican War. In fact, General Taylor was there when it started. President Polk had sent him and some troops to Texas, where there was a skirmish leading to the deaths of several American troops, leading to the war in Mexico. It is often believed that Polk sent them there to provoke the war in the first place.
During the Mexican War, he won major victories in Buena Vista and Monterrey. He was known as Old Rough N Ready, partly because of the way he dressed. His uniform was sloppy most of the time, and one soldier said He wore an oil cap, a dusty green coat, a frightful pair of trousers, and on horseback he looked like a toad. He was mainly known as Rough N Ready because of his reputation forswearing the field duty with his soldiers. In politics, he’s a prominent but independent member of the Whig party. Northerners liked him because of his success in being a huge war hero, and southerners like him because he owned about 100 slaves on his various plantations in Louisiana, Kentucky and Mississippi. After the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican War in 1848, Taylor emerged as a leading candidate for the Whig Party, and in the Presidential election he barely defeated Democrat Lewis Cass and Free Soldier martin Van Buren. This was the first time Old Zack voted. His explanation was that he did not want to vote against any potential commanders, and because since he moved so much being in the Army, he was technically not a resident in any state.
As president, even though he was a slave owner himself, Taylor was vehemently against the expansion of slavery into new territories. When this angered Southerners, President Taylor urged settlers in New Mexico and California write their own state constitutions and apply for statehood, correctly predicting they would do so banning slavery. However he avoided other key slavery issues, angering the northerns regarding the slave operations in Washington D.C., as well as the southerners who wanted a stronger fugitive slave law. In 1850, things got heated when southerners threatened to secede from the Union at a conference. Taylor threatened that if that happened, he would personally lead the Army to fight them. In fact, he said, and I quote, “People taken in rebellion against the Union would hang with less reluctance than he had hanged deserters and spies in Mexico.” And he meant it. Meanwhile, inside the Executive Mansion, now called the White House, President Polk had other talents. He chewed tobacco and was a sure shot when spitting, and legend has it, he never missed the White House sawdust box when hawking a tobacco lugy. Whoa, TMI.
President Taylor also coined the phrase “First Lady”, referring to Dolly Madison when she died at age 81. Other than that, there’s not much to Old Rough N Ready Taylor’s presidential term, since he only served 16 months in office before dying of a stomach-related illness. He had had a diet of raw vegetables, cherries and milk, and became sick on July 4, 1850. He died five days later. Conspiracy theorists believed he was poisoned, but his body was exhumed in 1991, killing that theory. No pun intended. Rather, it was probably a heat stroke that killed him combined with germs in the milk he drank. He was 65 years old. On his deathbed, he told Margaret not to cry, saying “I have always done my duty. I am ready to die. My only regret is the friends I leave behind.” Another great quote from Zachary Taylor, when Mexican General Santa Anna told him to surrender, he replied, “Tell him to go to hell.” Happy birthday Zachary!
1971 – Hijacker parachutes out of plane into a thunderstorm. Man man who called himself DB Cooper hijacked a Northwest Orient Airlines 727 extorted $200G, or over 1.5million today and jumped out of the plane right into a thunderstorm with winds blowing over 100MPH. His body was never found, but in 1980 when an eight year old boy found some of the cash, the mystery deepens. It remains the only unsolved air piracy in American aviation history.