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Zachary Taylor

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Zachary Taylor (1784-1850), the 12th President of the United States, was a military hero of both the Mexican War and the War of 1812.  On February 14, 1849, a delegation of ladies from Frankfurt, Kentucky presented President Taylor with a beautifully bound Bible and a copy of the Constitution of the United States.  He sent a message acknowledging their kindness, which was printed in the Frankfort Commonwealth, February 21, 1849:

"I accept with gratitude and pleasure your gift of this inestimable Volume.  It was for the love of the truths of this great Book that our fathers abandoned their native shores for the wilderness.  Animated by its lofty principles they toiled and suffered till the desert blossomed as a rose.

"The same truths sustained them in their resolutions to become a free nation; and guided by the wisdom of this Book they founded a government under which we have grown from three millions to more than twenty millions of people, and from being but a stock on the borders of this Continent we have spread from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

"I trust that their principles of liberty may extend, if without bloodshed, from the northern to the southern extremities of the Continent.  If there were in that Book nothing but its great precepts, 'All things whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so to them,' and if that precept were obeyed, our government might extend over the whole Continent.

"Accept... my sincere thanks for the kind manner in which you have discharged this duty; and expressing again my hearty gratitude to the ladies for their beautiful gift; I pray that health, peace, and prosperity may long be continued to them."  - February 14, 1849.  Frankfort Commonwealth, February 21, 1849.  Stephen Abbott Northrop, D.D., A Cloud of Witnesses (Portland, Oregon: American Heritage Ministries, 1987), p. 447-448.

 






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