After Taylor’s early victories over the Mexicans he invaded Mexican territory and captured Monterey, and these victories made his name a household word throughout the country. Instead of permitting Taylor to proceed with the war that he had so successfully conducted up to that time, the administration decided to practically retire him. General Scott was called to plan an independent campaign from Vera Cruz to the capital of Mexico. It was openly charged that the administration feared the popularity of “Old Zach,” as Taylor was generally called by the people, and that it had little fear of Scott as a Presidential candidate. Scott planned his campaign; was furnished with an independent army, and when he arrived at Vera Cruz he stripped General Taylor of nearly all his regulars, leaving him an army of but little over 4000, most of them volunteers. Santa Anna, whose return to Mexico had been sanctioned by our Government, made himself Military Dictator. He gathered an army of 22,000 of the best Mexican troops and made a rapid movement to strike and crush General Taylor at Buena Vista. The history of that battle is well known. Taylor not only defeated but routed the Mexicans, and thereby made himself the next President of the United States. General Scott made a most brilliant campaign, fighting repeated battles, and finally captured the City of Mexico, when the administration involved him in bitter controversy, as was easily done with General Scott, and had him tried by a court of his inferiors in the Capitol of the enemy he had conquered. Brilliant as was his military campaign he returned home with little if any increased prestige, and every schoolboy in the land was huzzaing for “Old Zach,” or for “Old Rough and Ready.” There seems to be poetic justice in the marvellous historical fact that with the large amount of territory conquered from Mexico, and the additional territory afterward purchased by the Gadsden treaty, the South did not gain a single Slave State, and it quickened the issue of slavery that greatly hastened its destruction just when it hoped to attain omnipotence.