Mexican-American War: The Conflict That Made Zachary Taylor President
Showing 7 Mexican-American War videos from Charlie Kirk's video collection.
The Mexican-American War transformed Zachary Taylor from an obscure career military officer into a national hero within months, according to this material's account of his path to the presidency. President James Polk sent Taylor into disputed border territory between Texas and Mexico in January 1846, intending American troop presence to pressure Mexico into selling California, and when Mexican forces fired on Taylor's men near Palo Alto, killing eleven soldiers, Polk used the clash to ask Congress for a formal declaration of war. Taylor's resulting battlefield reputation carried him directly into the 1848 presidential election despite what this material describes as a lifelong indifference to politics that had kept him from voting in any election before his own. Ulysses S. Grant, who would later command Union forces in the Civil War, served in the same war as a young officer and later described the experience as proof to himself that he was capable of military command, an early formative episode historian accounts credit with shaping the leadership instincts he brought to the Union Army roughly fifteen years later.