A “Posthumous” Ship’s Passport Signed by President Zachary Taylor, Dated Four Days After He Died

On July 9, 1850, after only 16 months in office, a seemingly healthy Taylor died after a sudden illness of four days duration. The cause of his death is still disputed, and although his doctors blamed cholera morbus or gastroenteritis, rather general diagnoses, many suspected that he had been poisoned. He had certainly made some very powerful political enemies in the months leading up to his demise.

The issue of whether to allow slavery into the new territories taken in the Mexican War exploded in 1848, with Northerners opposed and Southerners in favor. The resulting confrontation became known as the Secession Crisis of 1850, as some Southern states threatened secession and went so far as to hold conventions to discuss separation from the Union. Taylor was a slave-holding Southerner and was expected to be a strong defender of Southern rights, but he instead angered Southerners by strongly opposing the expansion of slavery into the new territories. In January 1850, trying to ward off the crisis, congressional leaders led by Henry Clay came up with a number of provisions that became known as the Compromise of 1850. This set of bills hoped to placate both North and South, and included a fugitive slave act and the admission of California as a free state, and contained no exclusion against slavery in the other territories. Taylor responded in February by holding a stormy conference with Southern leaders who threatened secession, where he told them that if necessary to enforce the laws, he personally would lead the army South and persons “taken in rebellion against the Union, he would hang…with less reluctance than he had hanged deserters and spies in Mexico.” Clay’s bills faced oblivion.

A few months later Taylor died with no clearly appropriate diagnosis, but with symptoms consistent with arsenic poisoning. Though his body was exhumed in 1991 to test for arsenic and found an insufficient amount to be fatal, that test methodology and result have been disputed. We will never know for sure what killed Taylor, but we do know that his death made a difference in the history of the country. His successor, Millard Fillmore, signed the Compromise of 1850. The Civil War was just 11 years away.

In the early years of the Republic, when American vessels engaged in foreign trade left the United States, they carried passports with them. These were large, impressive documents and contained their text written in four languages – English, Spanish, French and Dutch. The president and secretary of state both signed them through Monroe’s presidency, but after 1825 fewer and fewer were signed by chief executives. Thus, presidentially signed ship’s passports become scarcer from that time forward, and die out altogether in the Civil War era. When the president and secretary of state signed the ship’s passports, they did so in blank, and the executed passports, not yet filled out, were sent on to American ports. When a ship was ready to head to sea, the port collector at that port, or one of his deputies, would fill in the specific details details for that ship and give the paper to the captain.

In the 19th century, New Bedford, Mass., was the home of the whaling industry, which was then a huge one because people lit their lamps using whale oil. The Bark Platina of New Bedford was a whaling ship that came into service in 1847, and used nearby Westport as its port. It continued to sail until 1876. A whaler bound for the fertile seas of the Pacific Ocean would be gone for years, so it had to be well provisioned and ready for any exigency.

Document signed, Washington, July 13, 1850, being a ship’s passport for the Bark Platina, Thomas J. Lee, Captain, with home port of Westport and lying at New Bedford, Mass., “of the burden of 266 33/95 tons”, laden with “provisions, stores and utensils for a whaling voyage”, and bound for the Pacific Ocean. The Great Seal of the United States is intact, and the document is countersigned by Secretary of State John M. Clayton. Deputy Port Collector James Freeman has also added his authorization.

A search of public records for the past 40 years turns up only one other ship’s passport signed by Taylor having reached the market, so this is a great rarity. But what makes it even more remarkable is that Taylor died on July 9, and this document is dated July 13, so that Taylor seems to have signed it after his death. In reality, although one of a president’s first tasks after taking office was to sign new passports, at times the new documents failed to reach the ports on time for a particular ship to leave. Experience shows us that port collectors very seldom used one of the blank passports with the signature of the former president, apparently issuing other paperwork in the interim. However, once in a blue moon, we see a passport dated after the signing president has died or left office. This is the first such document of Taylor we have seen.