Zachary Taylor enters the American story as a paradox—an unpolished professional, a planter who lived most of his life in tents, a man of few public sentences who nonetheless became, by sheer steadiness under fire, one of the most quoted names in the country. He did not seek office with arguments; he acquired it by reputation. Before he was a candidate, he was a contour on a map of the West, the officer whose columns appeared where the line between “frontier” and “country” was being drawn in real time. He spent forty years in service before he ever spoke as a politician. He learned on the Mississippi and along the Red River that logistics is the true sovereign of a campaign, that road and ration outrank most kinds of courage, and that men will forgive a general for almost anything except letting them go hungry. His nickname—Old Rough and Ready—wa ...