The Exhumation of President Zachary Taylor in 1991.
Zachary Taylor was born in 1784 in Virginia, but he grew up on the Kentucky frontier, in a country still thick with forest and danger. He joined the army at twenty-three, and he stayed for forty years.
He fought the Shawnee, the Black Hawk, and the Seminole. The men called him Old Rough and Ready, because he dressed like a farmer, slept on the ground, and never asked them to do anything he would not. In 1846, on the dry plains of northern Mexico, he won four battles in a row against armies twice his size, and the country fell in love with him.
He had never voted in a presidential election. He had no party, no platform, and no patience for politicians. They nominated him anyway, and he won.
On July 4, 1850, Taylor sat through hours of speeches at the celebration on the National Mall, in brutal Washington heat. When he came back to the White House, he ate a large bowl of cherries (some accounts say raw vegetables as well) and washed them down with cold milk. Within hours, he was violently sick. His doctors diagnosed cholera morbus, a nineteenth-century catch-all term for severe gastrointestinal illness — not the epidemic cholera of the era, but a similar set of symptoms.
The most likely cause was contamination. Washington in 1850 had the same sanitation problem that probably killed Harrison nine years earlier: no real sewer system, water sources tainted with human waste, and food sold from open-air markets in summer heat. Cherries rinsed in bad water, or milk from an unrefrigerated jug, could deliver typhoid, cholera, or any number of bacterial infections.
His doctors made it worse. They dosed him with calomel (a mercury compound), opium, ipecac, and quinine, and bled him. None of it helped. He died on July 9, 1850, sixteen months into his term. A man so beloved, so universally liked, his funeral procession stretched for a mile.
Now the strange part. For more than a century, a rumor circulated that Taylor had actually been poisoned — that Southern partisans, furious at his refusal to allow slavery’s expansion into the new western territories, had murdered him with arsenic. A historian named Clara Rising championed the theory in the 1980s, and in 1991, with the permission of Taylor’s descendants, his body was exhumed in Louisville. Samples of hair and fingernail were tested for arsenic.
The results came back negative. Arsenic levels were normal. The conspiracy theory collapsed, and Taylor was reinterred.
So the verdict stands: a sitting president, the hero of the Mexican War, was killed by cherries, milk, and the water supply of his own capital — and by doctors whose treatments may have finished what the bacteria started.
