There was not time in Polk's administration to dispose of it. General Zachary Taylor, the hero of Palo Alto, Resaca, Monterey, and Buena Vista, became President, March 4, 1849. He was wholly without political experience and had never even voted at an election. He was purely a professional soldier, and a Southerner by birth and training; was a patriot, possessed of great common sense, and knew nothing of intrigue, and was endowed with a high sense of justice, and believed in the rights of the majority. He belonged to no cabal to promote, extend, or perpetuate slavery, and, probably, in his conscience was opposed to it. His Southern friends could not use him, and when they demanded his aid, as President, to plant slavery in California, he not only declined to serve them, but openly declared that California should be free. In different words, but words of like import, he responded to them, as he did to General Wool, at a critical moment in the battle of Buena Vista. Wool remarked: "_General, we are whipped_." Taylor responded: "_That is for me to determine_."(65) (57) Lt.-Col. Henry Clay, Jr., fell at Buena Vista February 23, 1847, and Maj. Edward Webster died at San Angel, Mexico, January 23, 1848. (58) _Thirty Years' View_, vol. ii., p. 680. (59) _Ibid_., p. 681. (60) Taylor became President March, 1849, succeeding Polk, and died in office July 9, 1850. Scott was nominated by his party (Whig) in 1852, and defeated; Franklin Pierce, a subordinate General of the war, was elected by his party (Democrat) President in 1852. (61) _Thirty Years' View_, vol. ii., pp. 688-692. (62) _Hist. Ready Ref._, vol. i, p. 350. (63) Trist's letter to Buchanan, Secretary of State, Von Holst, vol. iii., p. 334. (64) Historical Ex., etc., _Dred Scott Case_, pp. 151-9. This is the first Congress where its sessions were continued after twelve o'clock midnight, of March 3d, in the odd years. _Ibid_., pp. 136-9. (65) _Hist. of Mexican War_ (Wilcox), p. 223. XVI COMPROMISE MEASURES--1850 The slavery agitation first began in 1832 on a false tariff issue, and precipitated upon the country in 1835, on the lines of nullification and disunion, and was again revived at the close of the Mexican War, and continued violently through 1849 and 1850. The year 1850 will be ever memorable in the history of the United States as a year wherein all the baleful seeds of disunion were sown, which grew, to ripen, a little more than ten years later, into _disunion_ in fact. Prophetically, a leading South Carolina paper in its New Year-Day edition, said: "When the future historian shall address himself to the task of portraying the rise, progress, and decline of the American union, the year _1850_ will arrest his attention, as denoting and presenting the first marshalling and arraying of those hostile forces and opposing elements which resulted in dissolution."