Margaret Taylor
Margaret Taylor's husband, two daughters, two sons-in-law, and four grandchildren were the primary focus of her brief tenure as a president's wife living in the White House. There seems to have been some sort of estrangement between her son Dick and the President, and the young man was not encouraged to visit the White House, making only one brief attempt to do so. Instead, he remained in Louisiana, overseeing the family's cotton investments. Her daughter Ann and grandchildren John, Bob, Sarah and Anna, lived in nearby Baltimore and visited the White House often. Her daughter Betty had wed Colonel William Wallace Bliss, General Taylor's aide, and they lived in the mansion with her parents, he continuing his work but now as the president's aide.
To what degree, if any, Margaret Taylor influenced the President on matters is unknown. Although it is unlikely that she took any interest in public affairs, it was clear that President Taylor highly respected her. At an 1849 White House dinner, Varina Davis (the second wife of Jefferson Davis with whom the Taylors had by then reconciled) records that Taylor told her husband, "You know my wife was as much of a soldier as I was."
For almost her first full year as First Lady, Margaret Taylor focused her attention on the maintenance of the executive household - ordering food for family meals and most likely public entertaining as well, overseeing the slaves and servants duties, supervising the gardens, the dairy and the kitchen. Most of all, she took charge of the well-being of Zachary Taylor as she always had, looking after his diet, health and apparently an increasingly appropriate wardrobe, he having earned a reputation as something of a sloppy dresser.
The one element of her role as First Lady that Margaret Taylor refused to engage herself in was presiding over any public functions as hostess. That was a task she gladly passed to her popular and young daughter, known to the general public and the press by the nickname "Miss Betty."
At the bedside of the President when, after a sudden gastric illness of five days, he died on 9 July, 1850. Margaret Taylor could not accept the reality of his demise as it became inevitable within a matter of hours. She became hysterical and repeated that he had survived worse threats to his life on the battlefield and in the primitive forts where they had lived.
Margaret Taylor begged him not to leave her and upon his death insisted that the ice preserving his body be removed on three occasions just so she could look upon his face one more time. She was unable to attend his funeral in the East Room. Instead, according to Varina Davis, she listened to the funeral dirges and drum marches lying upstairs on her bed, shaking and sobbing in shock.
It had long been believed that there existed no extant picture of Peggy Taylor and in the years after her death, her daughter Betty stated that her mother had not sat for a portrait, suggesting a painting.
