*10 Cents Too Much To Pay To Be President*
Some people would spend every cent they had to be nominated for the U.S. Presidency. Not Zachary Taylor.When the Whig party nominated him as their presidential candidate in early June 1848, their letter officially notifying him carried no postage. When it reached Taylor's home he refused to pay the ten cents postage due. It was not until July that Taylor learned he was the Whig candidate.
Actually, the post office had issued it's first stamp only a year before Taylor's nomination, in 1847. Before that time, and continuing for a time afterwards, mail was paid by the recipient. Taylor, one of America's great heroes in the Mexican war, received volumes of of postage-due mail from across the country. Rather than pay a small fortune on unsolicited mail from total strangers, the hero of the Battle of Buena Vista routinely refused most of his mail. Thus, when the Whig presidential nomination letter came, it was turned away unread. Taylor, of course, won the Presidency in November 1848. He was the last Whig to ever be elected President.
Source: Joseph Kane, Facts about the Presidents, 2d ed. (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1968), p.83.
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