Images and More: Passed Presidents - # 12

Zachary Taylor died 164 years ago today. The second president to die in office, he was replaced by VP Millard Fillmore and our string of lousy leaders continued to be pushed around by the slave states for another ten years until the nation fractured into Civil War.

Entrance to Zachary Taylor National Cemetery,

Louisville, KY (22 October 2006)

Zachary Taylor was a career soldier. Born into a Virginia plantation family, he moved to the frontier of Kentucky as a baby and grew up with little formal education. He entered the military in 1808 and fought in the War of 1812. He led troops in the Blackhawk and Seminole Wars before gaining national hero status in the Mexican War. He never even voted in an election, concluding his service was to the country and that was enough. He was politically naïve and had few positions to run on when the Whigs persuaded him to lead their ticket in 1848. Our enlightened electorate voted him in anyway because we prefer someone who is famous rather than smart.

He, along with Ulysses S. Grant and Dwight Eisenhower, are in that exclusive club of presidents who held no other elective office. They were popular because they were successful generals and we love our war heroes. Not that ‘Old Rough and Ready’ was a lousy president. He was on the job only 15 months before he passed. For a slave-owning Indian fighter, he had some decent qualities. He respected the Native Americans he defeated and worked hard to honor treaties and keep white settlers off their lands. Absent absolute proof of ownership, he also refused to return runaway slaves who lived with the Seminoles in Florida. And he was not going to let the South destroy the union and threatened to hang anyone who did. He opposed the Compromise of 1850 but died before it passed Congress and unlucky Number 13 gets credit for that next step toward secession and war.

Marker on the Louisiana State Capitol Grounds (21 June 2008)

While Huey Long planned to be president, an

assassin had other ideas. Zachary Taylor, who had

a plantation in Baton Rouge, remains the only

Louisiana resident who rose to the highest office.

The inscription reads:

TO HONOR

ZACHARY TAYLOR

U.S. ARMY GENERAL AND TWELFTH PRESIDENT

OF THE UNITED STATES

KNOWN TO AMERICANS AS

“OLD ROUGH AND READY”

AND WHO LIVED FOR A TIME SOME 200 YARDS

SOUTHWEST OF THIS SPOT

THIS MARKER PLACED IN 1951 BY

CAMPS OF LOUISIANA

WOOODMEN OF THE WORLD

The circumstances surrounding Taylor’s death are still debated. Some believe he was really our first assassinated president...poisoned by southern conspirators for his insistence that the union be preserved. Some publicity hound actually arranged to have Taylor’s remains exhumed in 1991 and tested for arsenic. The results confirmed he was not murdered...on purpose.

What we should understand is that the best American medicine in the 19th century was still abominable, medieval torture. The record shows that July 4th, 1850 was a hot one and the president sweltered in his black suit through hours of speeches at the groundbreaking for the Washington Monument. Upon returning to the White House, he ate fresh (?) fruit and chilled milk and got sick.

Like James K. Polk before him, many say they both died of cholera. One wonders. While many today consider Washington D.C. a fetid swamp of corruption and amorality, it was literally a fetid swamp back then. The city had no sewer system and the government maintained certain plots of land where “night soils” were deposited and left for the flies to digest. On top of that, the White House water supply originated between one of these poop marshes and the residence.

Add to that our sterling medical practices and it’s a wonder anyone lived to old age. The president was overheated and ate too much so his doctors ‘treated’ him with calomel (a mercury compound), opium and ipecac (actually a plant derivative that induces vomiting so pronouncing the name reminds you of its use).

Monument near Zachary Taylor Tomb (22 October 2006)

Among the Mexican War battles that General

Taylor fought and won, the last one is misspelled.

But wait; there’s more. No proper treatment was complete without bleeding and blisters. Really? Compromise his circulatory system and injure his skin at the same time. That’s the ticket. And historians have the nerve to say the president died of cholera. What ever happened to the medical dictum ‘First Do No Harm?’ In my presidential research, I’ve compiled a list of their causes of death. Heart failure, heart attacks and strokes lead the list, but murder-by-medical-malpractice-and-ineptitude should be right up there after that.

It was a quiet autumn Sunday morning and I was on a great solo road trip to Wisconsin. The time there would include my first Badger and Packer football games and Beck’s high school reunion. I had dipped down into Kentucky to visit Zachary Taylor in a cemetery that bears his name. The day ended in Springfield Illinois after a stop in Indianapolis to pay respects to Benjamin Harrison. It was a good day of presidential grave-hunting.