Zachary Taylor exhumation

DATE: June 17, 1991

THE EVENT: The body of Zachary Taylor was exhumed after more than 140 years so that an autopsy could be performed to determine whether the twelfth president of the United States died of poisoning, as many had long speculated.

SIGNIFICANCE: The sudden death of Zachary Taylor in the sixteenth month of his presidency caused considerable speculation. If Taylor was poisoned, as many presumed he was, those who were responsible were never brought to account. Although the autopsy performed in 1991 was intended to settle the question of Taylor’s cause of death, the results failed to convince some historians that Taylor was not murdered.

The deaths of presidents, especially when sudden and unexpected, often give rise to conspiracy theories. On July 4, 1850, President Zachary Taylor attended a ceremony for the laying of the cornerstone for the unfinished Washington Monument. The day was hot and humid, but Taylor, presumably wishing to look presidential, dressed in a heavy coat and wore both a necktie and a hat. Ravaged by thirst, he consumed large quantities of warm water from a pitcher left in the sun. He also drank a large glass of cold milk and overindulged in some cherries and pickles.

Back at the White House, he shed his warm clothing and showed signs of an illness diagnosed as cholera morbus, a general classification of the digestive ills that plagued many Washingtonians during the sweltering summers. He spent a miserable night fighting nausea and diarrhea but was well enough the following day to work in his office. The following day, however, he fell ill again. The doctor who was summoned treated Taylor with opium and with a medication that contained mercury; both treatments were aimed at calming his digestive system and settling his upset stomach.

On July 9, Taylor’s condition worsened to the point that it was publicly announced that the president was probably near death. At ten o’clock on that Tuesday night, Taylor, aware he was dying, called his family to his bedside; within an hour, he died. Vice President Millard Fillmore succeeded him, taking the oath of office the following day.

Taylor was buried on July 13 in Washington’s Congressional Cemetery, where his remains rested until they were transferred to Louisville, Kentucky, on October 25, 1850. He remained buried there, with his wife’s remains interred beside him after her death in 1852, until the two were disinterred on May 6, 1926, and moved to a newly constructed mausoleum in the Zachary Taylor National Military Cemetery in Louisville.

During the late 1980s, historians began to speculate that Zachary Taylor had been poisoned—with either arsenic or strychnine—by supporters of slavery who had been outraged by Taylor’s support of the Compromise of 1850, which enabled California and New Mexico to enter the union as nonslave states. Two notable people who opposed the president’s stance on this issue were Senator Henry Clay and Taylor’s vice president, Millard Fillmore. Finally, in 1991, Taylor’s great-great-great-grandson, Dabney Taylor, encouraged the of Taylor’s remains for postmortem examination.

The Application of

On June 17, 1991, the body of Zachary Taylor was exhumed and transported to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Even though it had been interred for 141 years, it was reasonably well preserved. Two pathologists, Larry Robinson and Frank Dyer, conducted an autopsy on the remains, examining the bones and hair of the dead president for any toxic materials that might have contributed to his death. After Robinson and Dyer completed their work, the of Kentucky reviewed their autopsy report and, being in agreement with the findings, issued a statement declaring that Taylor had died from natural causes and that trace elements of arsenic found in his body were one-thousandth the quantity needed to kill anyone.

This was not the end of the matter, however. Michael Parenti and other historians questioned the validity of Robinson and Dyer’s autopsy findings. Parenti asserted that the pathologists did not test hair very close to Taylor’s scalp, hair that would have grown in the period during which the president was dying and that, had Taylor been poisoned, would have contained concentrations of toxic elements far in excess of what was found in the autopsy. Based on this argument, a request was made to the National Park Service in 1997 to exhume Taylor’s body a second time for a more thorough autopsy. The request was rejected.

Bibliography

Bauer, K. Jack. Zachary Taylor: Soldier, Planter, Statesman of the Old Southwest. Newtown, Conn.: American Political Biography Press, 1994.

Bumgarner, John R. The Health of the Presidents: The Forty-one United States Presidents through 1993 from a Physician’s Point of View. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1994.

Deem, James M. Zachary Taylor. Berkeley Heights, N.J.: Enslow, 2002.

Joseph, Paul. Zachary Taylor. Edina, Minn.: Abdo, 2002.

Kops, Deborah. Zachary Taylor: America’s Twelfth President. New York: Children’s Press, 2004.

Leach, Sara Amy. "Object 34: President Zachary Taylor’s Well-Traveled Remains." US Department of Veterans Affairs, 8 Dec. 2023, department.va.gov/history/100-objects/object-34-president-zachary-taylors-well-traveled-remains/. Accessed 16 Aug. 2024.

Parenti, Michael. History as Mystery. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1999.