Margaret Taylor

This article is about the American First Lady Margaret Taylor. For the badminton player, see Margaret Taylor (Badminton) ; for the Italian actress with this pseudonym see Franca Parisi .

Margaret Taylor

Margaret "Peggy" Mackall Smith Taylor (born September 21, 1788 in Calvert County , Maryland , † August 14, 1852 in East Pascagoula , Mississippi ) was the wife of President Zachary Taylor and First Lady of the United States from March 1849 to July 1850.

Life

Peggy was born in September 1788 to Ann Mackall and Walter Smith, a Maryland tobacco grower . She was one of seven children and had three brothers and sisters each. She enjoyed a domestic, practical upbringing rather than a traditional school education. In 1804 she was an orphan and moved to Louisville, Kentucky , where she lived with a sister. In 1809 she met Zachary Taylor , who was a first lieutenant in the United States Army at the time and was recovering from yellow fever he had contracted while serving in the Orleans Territory . The two married on June 21 of the following year. As a wedding gift, the young couple received 130 hectares of land from Taylor's father.

By 1819 she gave birth to four daughters Ann Mackall, Sarah Knox, Octavia Pannel and Margaret Smith. In 1820, Octavia and Margaret fell ill with malaria. Although the mother survived the disease, the two daughters died. In 1824 Margaret gave birth to another daughter, Mary Elizabeth, and two years later their only son, Richard Taylor , who later became a politician and lieutenant general in the Confederate Army . Their second daughter, Sarah Knox Taylor, married Jefferson Davis , who had served under her father, in 1835 , but died of malaria just months after the wedding in Louisiana. Until she settled in Baton Rouge in the 1840s , she accompanied her husband on all stages of his military career, which were often border posts in the Wild West . She lived with him in Fort Knox near Vincennes (Indiana) , Kentucky , Mississippi , Minnesota , Wisconsin , Missouri and Florida, among others .

Taylor was a devout episcopalist and, as the first wife , attended mass almost every day in a church in Lafayette Park . Since her constitution was too weak for the long receptions and state dinners in the White House and she avoided large gatherings, her daughter Mary Elizabeth took on the role of the unofficial first lady on these occasions. Taylor was fond of inviting family members to the White House, making their living room on the first floor the center of presidential personal life. Had died when her husband in July 1850 she insisted that he laid to rest in the family cemetery in Louisville found and beat an offer from the City Council of Frankfort for a repräsentableres grave in the capital of the Federal State of. She stayed devastatedly away from the official funeral ceremony and procession on July 13th. She left Washington, DC, and never returned just nine days after the President's death . Via Baltimore and New Orleans she came to Pascagoula , where she spent the last years of her life.

literature

• Elizabeth Lorelei Thacker-Estrade: Margaret Taylor, Abigail Filmore, and Jane Pierce: Three Antebellum Presidents' Ladies. In Katherine AS Sibley (Ed.): A Companion to First Ladies. Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester 2016, ISBN 978-1-118-73222-9 , pp. 176-196.

Web links

Commons : Margaret Taylor  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

• Biography on the White House website (archived)
• Margaret Taylor in the Miller Center of Public Affairs of the University of Virginia (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ K. Jack Bauer: Zachary Taylor: Soldier, planter, statesman of the old Southwest. Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge 1985, ISBN 0-8071-1237-2 , p. 8.
   John SD Eisenhower : Zachary Taylor (= The American Presidents Series. Ed. By Arthur M. Schlesinger , Sean Wilentz . The 12th President). Times Books, New York 2008, ISBN 978-0-8050-8237-1 , pp. 5f.
   Elizabeth Lorelei Thacker-Estrade: Margaret Taylor, Abigail Filmore, and Jane Pierce: Three Antebellum Presidents' Ladies. In Katherine AS Sibley (Ed.): A Companion to First Ladies. Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester 2016, ISBN 978-1-118-73222-9 , pp. 176-196; here: p. 178.
2. ↑ K. Jack Bauer: Zachary Taylor: Soldier, planter, statesman of the old Southwest. Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge 1985, ISBN 0-8071-1237-2 , pp. 69f.
   Elizabeth Lorelei Thacker-Estrade: Margaret Taylor, Abigail Filmore, and Jane Pierce: Three Antebellum Presidents' Ladies. In Katherine AS Sibley (Ed.): A Companion to First Ladies. Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester 2016, ISBN 978-1-118-73222-9 , pp. 176-196; here: p. 179.
3. ↑ K. Jack Bauer: Zachary Taylor: Soldier, planter, statesman of the old Southwest. Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge 1985, ISBN 0-8071-1237-2 , pp. 258f.
4. ↑ K. Jack Bauer: Zachary Taylor: Soldier, planter, statesman of the old Southwest. Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge 1985, ISBN 0-8071-1237-2 , pp. 317-319.