Pastimes: Zachary Taylor

Zachary Taylor is the only Louisiana citizen to be elected president. He was a most unlikely candidate, and some believed he was assassinated for political reasons.

Taylor (1784-1850) was born in Virginia but grew up on a Kentucky plantation. After receiving a rudimentary education, he entered the army as a lieutenant and spent the next forty years serving his country.

In 1810, Taylor married Margaret Mackall Smith and had six children with her. When their daughter Sarah Knox, known as “Knoxie,” came of age, she disappointed Taylor by announcing her plans to marry a young army officer named Jefferson Davis.

Taylor had nothing against Davis personally but disapproved of the marriage because he knew how difficult military life was for an officer’s wife. Davis, therefore, resigned his commission, married Knoxie and took her to his Mississippi plantation. Three months later, she contracted a fever and died. 

Davis went on to become the president of the Confederate States of America. One of his most dependable generals was his former brother-in-law Richard Taylor, Zachary Taylor’s only son. 

 Known as “Old Rough and Ready,” Zachary Taylor fought Indians in the Black Hawk and Seminole wars and commanded an army during the Mexican War. In Mexico, his former son-in-law Jefferson Davis led one of his regiments and was wounded in battle.  

Taylor never lost a battle when he was in command of the troops, but he did not look like a successful general. Even though he served in the army for forty years, Taylor was so short-legged he could not mount a horse unless someone helped him up. He also disliked uniforms and usually wore civilian clothing and an old flop hat on the battlefield.

Taylor became an adopted son of Louisiana when he bought a house and plantation near Baton Rouge. A bit of a miser, he refused to accept a letter from the Whig Party that arrived at his home in 1848 because there was ten cents postage due. After a couple of weeks, Taylor got curious, paid the dime, and opened the letter to discover that he had been nominated for president.

The Whigs hitched their star to Taylor even though he had never been politically active, and, in fact, had never even voted in a presidential election. Nevertheless, Taylor won because his military success secured him votes in the north and being a slave owner made him popular in the south. 

As president, Taylor could not shake the habits he had acquired during his years in the army. He preferred riding horseback to a carriage and let his horse, Old Whitey, graze on the White House lawn. 

One of the greatest political issues Taylor faced was whether or not to allow slavery to spread to the western territories acquired from Mexico during the late war. Southerners needed new land to keep the plantation system alive and demanded the right to carry their slaves westward. 

Northerners, however, opposed allowing slavery to gain a foot hold in the west because they wanted to reserve the new land for small family farms.

Surprisingly, the slave-owning president declared that the fairest way to settle the dispute was to allow the residents of the new land to decide the slavery question themselves. When angry Southerners threatened secession, Taylor warned them that he would personally lead the army to crush any uprising and would hang any rebel he captured.

On July 4, 1850, Taylor attended the ground breaking ceremony for the Washington Monument. It was a blistering hot day, and he rushed back to the White House afterwards to cool off with cherries and milk.

Taylor soon began suffering from severe stomach cramps, vomiting, and diarrhea. Several doctors treated him with a variety of medications, including opium and mercury-based calomel, but he died on July 9.

Taylor’s physicians attributed his death to cholera, but historians later suspected heat stroke, food poisoning, or typhoid fever.

Some members of the Taylor family believed that his political enemies had poisoned him with arsenic; indeed, Taylor’s symptoms were consistent with arsenic poisoning. There was no proof of foul play, however, and the nation moved on—to Civil War

In 1991, novelist Clara Rising reopened the poisoning controversy and convinced the Taylor descendants to exhume his body for a modern forensic examination. 

Months later, the results were released. Although there were traces of arsenic in what little remained of Taylor’s body, it was no more than would normally be found in remains that had been buried for so long. Tests for mercury, lead and other components used in nineteenth century medicine also came up negative.

After 141 years of speculation, the tests put to rest the rumors of assassination but failed to discover what exactly killed Zachary Taylor.

Dr. Terry L. Jones is professor emeritus of history at the University of Louisiana at Monroe who has received numerous awards for his books and outdoor articles.