[107] In the summer of 1849, Taylor toured the Northeastern United States to familiarize himself with a region of which he had seen little. He spent much of the trip plagued by gastrointestinal illness and returned to Washington by September.[108]

Sectional crisis
Daguerreotype of Taylor by Mathew Brady, 1849[109]
As Taylor took office, Congress faced a battery of questions related to the Mexican Cession, acquired by the U.S. after the Mexican War and divided into military districts. It was unclear which districts would be established into states and which would become federal territories, while the question of their slave status threatened to bitterly divide Congress. Southerners objected to the admission of the California Territory, the New Mexico Territory, and the Utah Territory to the Union as free states despite California's demographic and economic growth. Additionally, Southerners had grown increasingly angry about the aid that Northerners had given to fugitive slaves after Prigg v. Pennsylvania allowed slave catchers to capture alleged runaway slaves in free states, and that Northern authorities frequently refused to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. At the same time, northerners demanded the abolition of the domestic slave trade in Washington DC. 