Political Career
Taylor appointed Bliss as Private Secretary to the President (he was able to take leave from the Army for this assignment).
As the President's wife took no part in formal social events, she delegated the social role to their daughter Mary Elizabeth Bliss, who effectively became the First Lady of the White House at the age of 22. The popular young couple seemed destined to become powerful figures in Washington.
The President died suddenly in July 1850. Bliss and his wife Mary accompanied her widowed mother to Pascagoula, Mississippi. She died there in 1852, at the home of another daughter.
Bliss was assigned as Adjutant-General of the Western Division of the Army. Following a summer visit to New Orleans on behalf of University of Louisiana, Bliss contracted yellow fever. He died at Pascagoula on August 5, 1853, aged 38. He was buried at Girod Street Cemetery, New Orleans. Mary Taylor Bliss lost her father, mother, and husband in little more than three years. Five years later, she remarried.
Read more about this topic: William Wallace Smith Bliss
Famous quotes containing the words political and/or career:
“... by and large, wife-changing and high office are not compatible. This inequity accounts for the many dull women in Washington and is the cause of much smug complacency on the distaff side of political marriages.”
—Barbara Howar (b. 1934)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)