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 career, political and/or career:
“No wonder that, when a political career is so precarious, men of worth and capacity hesitate to embrace it. They cannot afford to be thrown out of their life’s course by a mere accident.”
—James Bryce (1838–1922)
“Do we call this the land of the free? What is it to be free from King George and continue the slaves of King Prejudice? What is it to be born free and not to live free? What is the value of any political freedom, but as a means to moral freedom? Is it a freedom to be slaves, or a freedom to be free, of which we boast?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The 19-year-old Diana ... decided to make her career that of wife. Today that can be a very, very iffy line of work.... And what sometimes happens to the women who pursue it is the best argument imaginable for teaching girls that they should always be able to take care of themselves.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)