President James K. Polk Prepares to Convey the Thanks of Congress to General Zachary Taylor and His Army for Their Crucial Victory at Monterey

It also made Taylor a hero and talked-of presidential candidate, and he would assume the presidency not two years later

Presidential letters relating to conveying the Thanks of Congress to important military figures are great rarities, as in fact are any letters of Polk directly relating to the Mexican War

In the summer of 1845, General Zachary Taylor was ordered by the Polk administration to defend the recently annexed Texas Republic. Taylor moved his troops to Corpus Christi, and in March 1846 he went further south to the Rio Grande. When Mexican troops attacked U.S. forces in late April, President James K. Polk used the attack to ask Congress for a declaration of war. On May 18, though heavily outnumbered, Taylor defeated Mexican forces at Palo Alto; the following day he engaged the Mexican army again at Resaca de la Palma, driving it back to Matamoros. In September 1846, his army now numbering 6,500, Taylor marched south to lay siege to Monterey, Mexico’s largest northern city, which was garrisoned by the 5,000-man Army of the North, commanded by General Pedro Ampudia. After three days of fighting, Taylor took the city. Taylor then pushed further south, encountering the Mexican army at Buena Vista. There Taylor’s army repulsed several Mexican assaults on February 22 and 23, 1847. After that Taylor’s army remained firmly in control of northern Mexico, thus shielding the new state of Texas and paving the way for American annexation of Mexican lands in what is now the southwestern United States. It also placed the Mexicans at a disadvantage from which they never recovered. Taylor’s victories at Monterey and Buena Vista were the first great American triumphs of the war, and he was hailed as a hero in the press. This led directly to his name quickly being put forth as a potential Whig candidate for president in the upcoming 1848 election.

The Thanks of Congress is a series of resolutions passed by the U.S. Congress extending the government’s formal thanks for significant victories by American military commanders and their troops. The process was initiated during the Revolution, when the Continental Congress extended official thanks to George Washington, Nathanael Greene, John Paul Jones, Baron von Steuben, and a few others. Six people received Thanks in the period of the War of 1812, including William Henry Harrison and Andrew Jackson.

On March 2, 1847, Congress passed a resolution tendering the Thanks of Congress “to Major General Taylor and the officers and men under his command in the the late military operations at Monterey.” On May 12, President Polk drafted a letter to Taylor sending him “an authenticated copy of ‘Resolutions giving the Thanks of Congress to yourself, and the officers and men under your command in the late military operations at Monterey.’” Two days later he asked that the envelopes conveying the letters and resolutions be prepared, and made sure that he personally be given the opportunity to sign the envelopes with his free frank as a further endorsement of the resolution.

Autograph letter signed, as President and during the Mexican War, Washington, May 14, 1847, to Secretary of War William Marcy: “I have to request that you will cause the accompanying letters — and authenticated copies of the joint resolution of Congress ‘giving the thanks of Congress — to Major General Taylor; and the officers and men under his command in the the late military operations at Monterey’; be enveloped and addressed respectively to those officers. When enveloped return them to me, that I may place my frank upon them, before they are placed in the mail.”

Presidential letters relating to conveying the Thanks of Congress to important military figures are great rarities. In our thirty years in the field, we have just had one before – the Thanks conveyed by President Lincoln to Silas Stringham for naval victories in the Civil War, obtained by us back in 2005. And surprisingly, letters of Polk directly relating to the Mexican War are almost as rare, this being our fourth in all these years.