How to Fight Presidents: Defending Yourself Against the Badasses Who Ran This Country (11 page)

It was said that Zachary Taylor didn’t fear things he had not personally experienced, which, as a career soldier, proved to be a valuable asset; until such a time as death would prove to be worth fearing, Taylor would court instead of run from it.

Nicknamed “Old Rough and Ready” by his fellow soldiers, due to his alleged roughness and readiness, Taylor achieved fame and praise for his impressive military career. He first landed on America’s radar in the War of 1812. In September of that year, Taylor was ordered to escort the eighty men, women, and children under his care (some soldiers, some settlers) from Fort Knox to Fort Harrison, where he would assume command. Unfortunately, the group was struck by malaria; twenty-four of Taylor’s people died, and almost everyone else, including Taylor himself, was very ill. In an apparent cosmic test of one man’s ability to handle one goddamn thing after a-goddamn-nother, just a day or so after Taylor and his people
arrived at Fort Harrison, tired and sick and haggard, he got word that hostile Indian forces were planning an attack on the fort.

Of Taylor’s remaining men, only about fifteen of them were able soldiers; the rest were either civilian settlers or soldiers who were too ill to fight. Without skipping a beat, Taylor recruited five random settlers and turned them into temporary soldiers. He gave all twenty of the men sixteen rounds each of firepower. On September 4, 1812, Taylor and his men were woken up at midnight when an invading horde of six hundred Indians set fire to their camp. The soldiers panicked (two of the experienced ones, in fact, fled the fort as soon as the flames started). Taylor was disoriented and outnumbered but apparently he must have accidentally left all of his fucks back at Fort Knox, because by the time the battle started, he had none left to give. So while almost anyone else in the world would have seen two choices (death by fire, death by Native Americans), Taylor, with a handful of troops and a bellyful of malaria, chose a third option: The Taylor Way.

After informing his men that “Taylor never surrenders,” Old Rough and Ready calmly ordered some of his men to fix the fort’s fire-damaged roof, and told the rest to attack the invaders. Taylor saw the flaming fort as a great opportunity, because the flames lit up the sky and revealed the attackers, and because he was crazy. A small chunk of Taylor’s men put out the fire and worked to repair the roof while the
other
small chunk of his men held back the six hundred Indian attackers and provided cover. By morning the fire was gone, the damage was repaired, and the invaders had retreated. It was the first American military victory in the War of 1812, and Taylor pulled it off with a twenty-man army of soldiers and civilians.

Taylor’s entire military career is full of similar stories. The Battle of Resaca de la Palma saw a victory under Taylor’s command despite the fact that he had 1,700 men to Mexico’s 4,000. He beat back General Santa Anna’s army of 20,000 with just 4,500 men and what, at this point, we can only assume is a comical inability to understand how numbers and odds work.

Taylor was a great commander and soldier, if you asked his men (despite his high rank, he was always willing to march through
swamps or woods or deserts alongside his troops, and pound on his enemies), but not if you asked his superiors. He had problems with authority that influenced every decision he made. Even in battle, Taylor refused to dress like a normal soldier and instead dressed like an angry old rancher, complete with a straw hat and duster. Every other soldier wore a sharp, well-kept standard uniform, but Taylor dressed like a gruff, furious soldier-cowboy because when he stumbled out of the womb, he was
already
grizzled and fed up with kids these days. Taylor was described as having a permanent scowl, half-closed eyes, wild hair, and coarse features—which, incidentally, is exactly how one could describe Clint Eastwood—which, double incidentally, is
awesome
.

Taylor’s problem with authority earned him a lot of powerful enemies. When he was given direct orders (either in the War of 1812 or later in the Black Hawk War, or later at the Second Seminole War, or later at the Holy Shit Zachary Taylor Sure Fought in a Lot of Wars), he often treated them not as commands but as “suggestions,” which he was always happy to “completely ignore.” Taylor’s gruff, no-nonsense, too-old-for-this-shit attitude, coupled with his reputation as a rebellious loose cannon, makes him, quite astoundingly, one of the only men in history who is at all times both Riggs
and
Murtaugh. He’s his own buddy-cop movie.

After forty years of military service, Taylor retired from fighting and reluctantly accepted the Whig nomination for presidency. And I do mean “reluctantly”; Taylor once said that the idea of him being president would never “enter the head of any sane person.” But we made him president anyway, because he was just so damn good at killing people (our requirements have since broadened). As president, he was hyper-aware of the fact that the slavery issue was very quickly going to drive the nation apart. He opposed extending slavery and publicly vowed to personally stomp anyone who disagreed. Literally. Half of the nation vehemently wanted to hold on to their slaves and revolt, and the president of the United States said that he would hang anyone who rebelled against America—and do so, according to his biographers, “with less reluctance than he had hanged deserters and spies in Mexico.”

I know he sounds tough,
unstoppable
even, but everyone has a weakness, and Taylor’s is adorable. Taylor died sixteen months into his presidency, not because he had angered slaveholders in the South, and not because he had angered the Whig party bosses who nominated him (they were hoping to use him as a puppet, while Taylor
maintained that they were free to look upon his mighty crotch and “puppet this,” whenever they felt so inclined). No, Zachary Taylor died by eating too many cherries.

On July 4, 1850, Taylor was at a fund-raising event at the Washington Monument. It was a particularly hot day and, to beat the heat, Taylor decided to eat some cherries—but, like, a
lot
of cherries.
Too
many cherries. More cherries than a person is supposed to eat. Historians aren’t sure exactly how many cherries he ate, but the very fact that historians are even disputing the exact number of cherries consumed should tell you that it’s a pretty freaking serious amount. Taylor got hot and ate an impossible amount of cherries and then washed it town with
way
too much chilled milk.

We will never know why President Zachary Taylor did this. No one has ever prescribed cherries as a solution to overheating, and no one has ever prescribed eating every available cherry in a five-mile radius for fucking
anything
. But Taylor was heating up and sincerely believed that the cherries and milk combination would cool him down. Almost immediately after he ate his weight in tiny fruits, Taylor became sick with a mysterious digestive illness and died.

To this day, no one knows exactly what killed Taylor. His doctor diagnosed him with “cholera morbus,” which is
barely
a diagnosis. Cholera morbus was a nineteenth-century catchall for a wide spectrum of stomach-related illnesses, including diarrhea and dysentery and, thanks to Taylor, whatever disease is birthed by the union of digestive fluids and a metric ton of cherries. It was basically his doctor’s way of saying “His stomach’s fucked up and I don’t know why.” In 1991, his body was exhumed and examined but all tests for poison came back negative; but anyone with a slightly functioning brain has concluded that it probably had something to do with the lifetime supply of cherries he shoved down his throat on a hot afternoon.

Get a fistful of cherries and shove them down Zachary Taylor’s damn throat. That’s your only chance. And remember, Taylor does better when he’s outnumbered or outmatched, so try not to be a better fighter than him (though that’s probably not much of a problem for you, Guy Who Is Reading a Book About Fighting Presidents).

Millard Fillmore is, hands down, the most under-appreciated and ferociously badass president we have ever had. His parents, paranoid to an insane degree, wanted their son to be mentally and physically prepared should the British ever come back to attack America (an eventuality Fillmore’s parents were
certain
would happen in their lifetime). While most parents sent their children to school, Fillmore’s started training him for battle from a very early age. They didn’t teach him
standard
warfare; Fillmore’s father was well versed in the ancient and mystical art of the ninja, and decided to pass it on to his ambitious and powerful son.

That’s right. Millard Fillmore was a trained ninja at
eight years old
.

His parents would often blindfold him and drop him off in the woods with no food or clothes and leave him alone to find his own way home, which Fillmore
always
did. Regardless of how unfamiliar and unfriendly the woods were, Fillmore would find his way out, usually within the first twenty-four hours.

Still, Fillmore wasn’t
just
a ninja; he was also unbelievably brilliant. He built his first robot when he was just nineteen years old, and when the government offered a handsome sum for his design, he destroyed it and burned all of his research. The government wanted to turn his robot into a robotic soldier, and Fillmore refused to let his ideas be used for death and destruction. He was the first president in space and is largely credited with the discovery of penicillin. For his first campaign speech, Fillmore did backflips until his opponents
wept and surrendered
. He is (so far) the only American president who had a tattoo, and, if you’re wondering, yes, it was a sick dragon that occupied his entire back. He could pee lightning. Only like six people in the world can do that, and Millard Fillmore was one of them.