Sold – Autographic Survey of the Executive Administration of Zachary Taylor

President Taylor took office on March 4, 1849 and his administration ended with his death on July 9, 1850. When he took office, the most pressing issue was the extension of slavery into the territories newly conquered from Mexico. Taylor had his own strategy to resolve sectional strife and strongly opposed the proposed Compromise of 1850, which he saw as opening up partisan competition to settle and control the territories, leading the nation into constant slavery/anti-slavery agitation. This, he felt, would yield plenty of trouble but no benefit. But he died before he could pursue his plan.

This is a large autograph book bound in leather, with the neatly rendered title page, President Taylor’s Administration. The first page contains Taylor’s autograph and the second page contains that of his Vice President, Millard Fillmore, who dates his signature October 16, 1849, and identifies himself as being from Buffalo, New York. Excepting only the Attorney General, all of Taylor’s Cabinet members have signed the book, as follows: Secretary of State John M. Clayton, Secretary of the Treasury William M. Meredith, Secretary of War George W. Crawford, Secretary of the Navy William B. Prefston, the nation’s first Secretary of the Interior Thomas Ewing, and both present and future Postmasters General Jacob Collamer and N.K. Hall. The U.S. Supreme Court is well represented, with eight of the nine justices signing. They are Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, John McLean (who dissented in the Dred Scott case), James M. Wayne, John Catron, Peter Daniel, Samuel Nelson, Levi Woodbury and Robert C. Grier.

This is followed by an extensive survey of the Executive Departments, with many hundreds of signatories including such officials as Commissioner of Patents Thomas Ewbanks and his clerks in the Patent Office, the first clerks of the Interior Department, virtually the entire Treasury Department with its auditors and clerks, customs officials, officials in the Indian Department, Navy Department, and War Department. Familiar Civil War names include future Generals Lorenzo Thomas and E.D. Townsend, Unon Admiral Samuel F. Dupont, and likely sitting in the same room if not at the next desk from him, later Confederate Captain Franklin Buchanan, who commanded the CSS?Virginia (Merrimac).

Despite all the significant officials in the book, its focus is unlike any other autograph album we have seen. Rather than a list of great names on the surface of events, it delves deep into the government to afford as extensive an autographic survey of the Executive branch as it can. It is truly a chronicle of its times.