Zachary Taylor inaugurated as president

On March 5, 1849, Zachary Taylor took the presidential oath in Washington, D.C., because March 4, 1849 fell on a Sunday. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney administered the oath, and Taylor entered office as a national war hero after his victories in the Mexican-American War at Palo Alto, Resaca de la Palma, and Buena Vista. The inauguration placed a Louisiana slaveholder with little prior elective experience at the head of the federal government just as Congress faced the territorial consequences of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

Taylor's inauguration intensified the constitutional struggle over whether Congress would permit slavery in the Mexican Cession acquired in 1848. Southern Democrats expected President Taylor to support slaveholding interests, but Taylor instead encouraged immediate statehood for California and New Mexico, hoping to bypass a prolonged congressional fight over territorial status. That position put Taylor on a collision course with John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay, and other national leaders who were already searching for a sectional settlement inside Congress.

The sectional deadlock that confronted Taylor after March 1849 led directly to the debates that produced the Compromise of 1850. Taylor's death on July 9, 1850 elevated Millard Fillmore to the presidency, and Fillmore signed the Compromise of 1850 in September 1850, including the Fugitive Slave Act that Taylor had not lived to approve or veto.