Past Pandemics: Zachary Taylor and the Cholera Outbreak of the 1840s
As was mentioned in the previous entry in this series, the third cholera pandemic of the 19th century began in 1846 and lasted until 1860. It was believed the be the cause of death of President James K. Polk, just as he was completing his term in office. It is also believed the be the cause of death of Polk's successor, Zachary Taylor.
There are two misconceptions about the death of Zachary Taylor in July of 1850. The first is that he died from a combination of cold milk and cherries. (I've been known to go to the Dairy Queen and ask for a "Zachary Taylor please". When the server gives me a puzzled look, I say "I'll have a cherry milkshake please.") While Taylor did have that combination at a Washington DC 4th of July picnic, it is doubtful that this proved to be a deadly combination. The second theory is that Taylor was actually poisoned, a theory kept alive by retired Florida professor Clara Rising. (I call this theory the "Arsenic and Old Hickory" hypothesis. Those familiar with Cary Grant films will know why.)
Taylor was elected President in 1848, much to the consternation of his predecessor. When Polk had gone to war with Mexico during his presidency, he faced an unexpected political problem: he didn't have any generals who were Democrats, none that were any good at least. He considered appointing a Democrat to lead his army in Mexico, but no suitable candidates were available. Polk's military efforts were led initially by Taylor, a career soldier who was not openly political (but believed to be a Whig), and Winfield Scott, who was known to be a Whig. Taylor soon became famous and admired back home following a series of military victories at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma. Fearing that Taylor would become a political threat, a big chunk of his army was sent to join that of Scott. Despite this, Taylor won yet another famous victory at Monterrey and later still at Buena Vista.
When he returned home from the war, Taylor was courted by both parties to become their candidate. He ultimately declared himself to be a Whig and reluctantly agreed to serve as their candidate in the 1848 election. He won the party's nomination on the fourth ballot at a convention that only took one day. The Democrats nominated another former general, Lewis Cass of Michigan, as their candidate, but Taylor was too popular. He appealed to voters in the South, because he was a slaveholder. He appealed to voters in the North because he was perceived as someone who would defer to Congress on major issues. (This proved to be a mistaken assumption).
Taylor began his journey to Washington in late January, a journey hampered by bad weather, delays, injuries, and sickness. Taylor finally arrived in the nation's capital on February 24. He met with the outgoing President Polk. Polk held a low opinion of Taylor. In his diary he described Taylor as a well-meaning old man, but as someone who was in over his head. Polk wrote that Taylor was someone who was "without political information" and "wholly unqualified for the station" of President. Taylor spent the following week meeting with some of the more prominent politicians, some of whom were unimpressed with the new president. But as Henry Clay and others would soon find out, Taylor intended to be his own man. With less than two weeks until his inauguration, he met with Clayton and hastily finalized his cabinet.
Zachary Taylor's sudden death shocked the nation. It came amidst the debate over what would become known as the Compromise of 1850. Taylor had attended the Fourth of July orations for most of the day. He walked along the Potomac River before returning to the White House. Hot and tired, he was also famished. Taylor was reported to have eaten a meal composed of a variety of raw vegetables — cucumbers, cabbage, and corn. He finished with a jug of iced milk and an enormous bowl of cherries. An hour later, the President fell violently ill.
His troubles began with nausea, and soon transitioned into severe bouts of diarrhea and vomiting. By the next morning, he had developed a fever. He was attended to by four doctors. Each offered various treatments that would be thought of as quackery today. Taylor was force-fed calomel (a mercury chloride solution meant to induce regurgitation). He was also given quinine (a fever reducer), and opium. None of these treatments helped. His symptoms persisted for five days later. Then on July 9th, just 17 months into his Presidency, Taylor uttered his last words: “I regret nothing, but am sorry I am about to leave my friends”. The cause of Taylor’s death was listed as gastroenteritis, or “cholera morbus,” a term commonly ascribed to those who died from indeterminable causes in the 19th century. The diagnosis of cholera is consistent with the poor water quality from the mosquito infested waters of the city.
Taylor's funeral took place on July 13. An estimated 100,000 people traversed the funeral route in the nation's capital. The presidential hearse was drawn by eight white horses accompanied by grooms dressed in white and wearing white turbans. The hearse was followed by Washington dignitaries, military units, the President's beloved horse "Old Whitey," riderless of course, and then by the President's family. Behind them a line of military units, officials, and common citizens stretched in procession for over two miles. His final resting place was in Louisville, Kentucky, the site of the Zachary Taylor National Cemetery and Monument today.
Almost immediately after Taylor's death, rumors began to circulate that Taylor was poisoned by pro-slavery Southerners. Despite being a slaveholder himself during his life, as well as a southerner, Taylor was opposed to the spread of slavery in the territories obtained from Mexico during the Mexican War. Nothing much was done to follow up on these theories, and it wasn't until the latter part of the 20th century that conspiracy theories began to gain traction again, perhaps because of distrust of governments in the wake of Watergate.
In 1978, Hamilton Smith wrote a scholarly article in the Journal of the Forensic Science Society, theorizing that Taylor had been assassinated. Smith based his assassination theory on the timing of drugs, the lack of confirmed cholera outbreaks, and other reasons. Then, in the late 1980s, Clara Rising, a former professor at University of Florida, persuaded 84 year old John McIlhenny of Baton Rouge Louisiana, then Taylor's closest living relative, to agree to an exhumation of Taylor's body so that his remains could be tested for possible arsenic poisoning. She was able to obtain the necessary consents and court order and on June 17, 1991, Taylor's remains were exhumed and transported to the Office of the Kentucky Chief Medical Examiner. Samples of Taylor's hair, fingernail, and other tissues were removed, and radiological studies were conducted. The remains were returned to the cemetery and reinterred, with appropriate honors, in the mausoleum shown in the photo above.
Taylor’s symptoms, Rising surmised, were exactly those exhibited by arsenic poisoning. She reasoned that the possibility of an assassination wasn’t so unreasonable: with America on the brink of civil war, Taylor’s death had come just months before he was expected to veto several bills proposing the expansion of slavery. Plenty of Southerners had wished him dead. This was what caused Dr. Rising to embarked on her long, strange journey, which involved convincing Taylor’s distant relatives, and the U.S. government, to exhume the decomposed body of the long-dead President. It was her hope that modern technology could answer one critical question of whether or not President Zachary Taylor murdered.
After Taylor had died, Vice President Millard Fillmore assumed office and enabled the passage of the Compromise of 1850, allowing slavery in several Western states, the very thing that Taylor had worked against. Though there were quiet murmurings that the President had been poisoned, none of these suspicions were medically investigated.
Rising, a retired University of Florida humanities professor, was dining with a history buff friend when Zachary Taylor’s death came up. She recalled him saying, “It is a bit suspicious, isn’t it? I wouldn’t be surprised if he was poisoned.” This piqued Rising's curiosity, causing her to do some research. While pouring over records of the White House at the time, she was at first struck by the utter lack of security. In an interview with C-Span, Rising said, “In those days, there was no FBI, no Secret Service. Mrs.Taylor often complained that there were strangers wandering around in her bedroom.” Digging deeper into the medical reports of Taylor’s death, she discovered that his reported symptoms were almost identical to those of arsenic poisoning. She learned that if she could get her hands on sample of Zachary Taylor's hair, she could send it into a lab to test for arsenic, a substance which can remain present in the human body for centuries. She searched far and wide for existing hair samples, and found two: one at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC, and the other in New Orleans. But both failed to be useful: the first had been “compromised” by pesticides years earlier, and the second turned out to belong to Andrew Jackson, not Taylor.
Rising realized that, in order to conclusively determine whether or not Taylor had been poisoned, her only option was the exhuming of Taylor's body to procure a sample directly from his body. To do so, she needed permission from his distant relatives. She said, “I wrote to every address, every ‘Taylor,’ and hounded every source I could find, and finally, I found his closest relative, a man named John McIlhenny.” McIlhenny, at 84 years old, was the great-great-great grandson of President Taylor (on his mother’s side). If you're wondering, yes, he was also, coincidently, a relative of the inventor of Tabasco sauce. After four days of sit-down interviews with Rising, McIlhenny concluded that “Zachary would be delighted to be exhumed if it meant getting to the bottom of the truth.”
Rising presented her evidence to Jefferson County, Kentucky Coroner, Dr. Richard Greathouse, who then had to obtain the consent of the Department of Veterans Affairs, the administrator of Zachary Taylor National Cemetery, where Taylor is entombed. On June 17, 1991, Rising, accompanied by several forensic pathologists and 200 witnesses, opened Taylor’s musty crypt, removed his heavy, black walnut casket, and wheeled it into a nearby hearse. Opening the coffin proved to be more difficult than expected. The wood had decomposed, and all that remained was a sealed, metal sarcophagus, which the staff had to open using a power saw.
It was the duty of Kentucky State Medical Examiner George "Dr. Death" Nichols, to collect and analyze samples from the body of President Taylor. Nichols quipped in an interview: “We finally got the lid off, and there were Zachary Taylor’s fully dressed remains. I’d never met a president before...he didn’t offer much in the way of conversation.” To test for the arsenic, Nichols collected various dental, bone, and hair samples, and sent them to three different facilities. The samples were tested using colorimetric analysis (the use of a color agent to detect trace elements). A second batch of samples were scanned with an electron microscope equipped with x-ray diffraction analysis (allowing for close-up molecular views of the follicles). The final batch was taken by Nichols on an airplane to Oak Ridge National Lab for neutron activation analysis, a fairly new technique in which a sample is “bombarded with neutrons, causing the elements to form radioactive isotopes.”
Several weeks later, Nichols released his final opinion in a brief report entitled “Results of Exhumation of Zachary Taylor”. He conclided:
“The symptoms which he exhibited and the rapidity of his death are clearly consistent with acute arsenic poisoning, [but] it is my opinion that Zachary Taylor died as the result of one of a myriad of natural diseases which would have produced the symptoms of gastroenteritis. Final Opinion: The manner of death is natural.”
The tests on Taylor’s remains yielded trace amounts of arsenic (1.9 parts per million in the hair samples, and 3 ppm in the fingernails), however Nichols concluded that these amounts would’ve had to be “at least 200 to 1,000 times higher” if foul play had been present. He said that humans naturally have anywhere from 0.2 to 0.6 ppm of the element present in their bodies at any given time, as it’s naturally present in the environment. While Nichols’ ruled out arsenic poisoning, he acknowledged the possibility that another type of poison might have taken Taylor's life. He said: “I’ve investigated at least a dozen other deaths due to arsenic, and I’ve seen it used in everything from Hershey’s Chocolate Syrup to Big Red chewing gum. It’s entirely possible Taylor was poisoned — but it certainly wasn’t arsenic.”
The results resulted in criticism of Clara Rising. A 1991 editorial in the New York Times read: "Sometimes there are good reasons for tampering with a grave; serious historical evidence establishing the possibility that President Taylor was assassinated would be one. But Ms. Rising has produced no such evidence, only a hypothesis. All that's been revealed is a cavalier contempt for the dead." In a similar vein, a writer at The Washington Post labelled Rising as a “conspiracy theorist,” and the New Republic called Rising’s effort a “sacrilege.” Presidential biographer Elbert Smith called Rising's plan “sheer nonsense,” and historian Shelby Foote dubbed her effort as a “pointless engagement.”
Rising herself disagreed with these assessments. She said, "We found the truth. Certainly, the 628,000 [who died in the Civil War] would say it was worth looking into." In 2007, Rising published “The Taylor File,” chronicling her quest. Meanwhile, the most feasible explanation for his untimely death seems to be bacterial in nature. Taylor's death, many experts believe, suggests cholera, salmonella or some similar bacteria, possibly from contaminated water used to wash the cherries he had eaten, or to make ice used to chill the unpasteurized milk he drank.
There are two misconceptions about the death of Zachary Taylor in July of 1850. The first is that he died from a combination of cold milk and cherries. (I've been known to go to the Dairy Queen and ask for a "Zachary Taylor please". When the server gives me a puzzled look, I say "I'll have a cherry milkshake please.") While Taylor did have that combination at a Washington DC 4th of July picnic, it is doubtful that this proved to be a deadly combination. The second theory is that Taylor was actually poisoned, a theory kept alive by retired Florida professor Clara Rising. (I call this theory the "Arsenic and Old Hickory" hypothesis. Those familiar with Cary Grant films will know why.)
Taylor was elected President in 1848, much to the consternation of his predecessor. When Polk had gone to war with Mexico during his presidency, he faced an unexpected political problem: he didn't have any generals who were Democrats, none that were any good at least. He considered appointing a Democrat to lead his army in Mexico, but no suitable candidates were available. Polk's military efforts were led initially by Taylor, a career soldier who was not openly political (but believed to be a Whig), and Winfield Scott, who was known to be a Whig. Taylor soon became famous and admired back home following a series of military victories at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma. Fearing that Taylor would become a political threat, a big chunk of his army was sent to join that of Scott. Despite this, Taylor won yet another famous victory at Monterrey and later still at Buena Vista.
When he returned home from the war, Taylor was courted by both parties to become their candidate. He ultimately declared himself to be a Whig and reluctantly agreed to serve as their candidate in the 1848 election. He won the party's nomination on the fourth ballot at a convention that only took one day. The Democrats nominated another former general, Lewis Cass of Michigan, as their candidate, but Taylor was too popular. He appealed to voters in the South, because he was a slaveholder. He appealed to voters in the North because he was perceived as someone who would defer to Congress on major issues. (This proved to be a mistaken assumption).
Taylor began his journey to Washington in late January, a journey hampered by bad weather, delays, injuries, and sickness. Taylor finally arrived in the nation's capital on February 24. He met with the outgoing President Polk. Polk held a low opinion of Taylor. In his diary he described Taylor as a well-meaning old man, but as someone who was in over his head. Polk wrote that Taylor was someone who was "without political information" and "wholly unqualified for the station" of President. Taylor spent the following week meeting with some of the more prominent politicians, some of whom were unimpressed with the new president. But as Henry Clay and others would soon find out, Taylor intended to be his own man. With less than two weeks until his inauguration, he met with Clayton and hastily finalized his cabinet.
Zachary Taylor's sudden death shocked the nation. It came amidst the debate over what would become known as the Compromise of 1850. Taylor had attended the Fourth of July orations for most of the day. He walked along the Potomac River before returning to the White House. Hot and tired, he was also famished. Taylor was reported to have eaten a meal composed of a variety of raw vegetables — cucumbers, cabbage, and corn. He finished with a jug of iced milk and an enormous bowl of cherries. An hour later, the President fell violently ill.
His troubles began with nausea, and soon transitioned into severe bouts of diarrhea and vomiting. By the next morning, he had developed a fever. He was attended to by four doctors. Each offered various treatments that would be thought of as quackery today. Taylor was force-fed calomel (a mercury chloride solution meant to induce regurgitation). He was also given quinine (a fever reducer), and opium. None of these treatments helped. His symptoms persisted for five days later. Then on July 9th, just 17 months into his Presidency, Taylor uttered his last words: “I regret nothing, but am sorry I am about to leave my friends”. The cause of Taylor’s death was listed as gastroenteritis, or “cholera morbus,” a term commonly ascribed to those who died from indeterminable causes in the 19th century. The diagnosis of cholera is consistent with the poor water quality from the mosquito infested waters of the city.
Taylor's funeral took place on July 13. An estimated 100,000 people traversed the funeral route in the nation's capital. The presidential hearse was drawn by eight white horses accompanied by grooms dressed in white and wearing white turbans. The hearse was followed by Washington dignitaries, military units, the President's beloved horse "Old Whitey," riderless of course, and then by the President's family. Behind them a line of military units, officials, and common citizens stretched in procession for over two miles. His final resting place was in Louisville, Kentucky, the site of the Zachary Taylor National Cemetery and Monument today.
Almost immediately after Taylor's death, rumors began to circulate that Taylor was poisoned by pro-slavery Southerners. Despite being a slaveholder himself during his life, as well as a southerner, Taylor was opposed to the spread of slavery in the territories obtained from Mexico during the Mexican War. Nothing much was done to follow up on these theories, and it wasn't until the latter part of the 20th century that conspiracy theories began to gain traction again, perhaps because of distrust of governments in the wake of Watergate.
In 1978, Hamilton Smith wrote a scholarly article in the Journal of the Forensic Science Society, theorizing that Taylor had been assassinated. Smith based his assassination theory on the timing of drugs, the lack of confirmed cholera outbreaks, and other reasons. Then, in the late 1980s, Clara Rising, a former professor at University of Florida, persuaded 84 year old John McIlhenny of Baton Rouge Louisiana, then Taylor's closest living relative, to agree to an exhumation of Taylor's body so that his remains could be tested for possible arsenic poisoning. She was able to obtain the necessary consents and court order and on June 17, 1991, Taylor's remains were exhumed and transported to the Office of the Kentucky Chief Medical Examiner. Samples of Taylor's hair, fingernail, and other tissues were removed, and radiological studies were conducted. The remains were returned to the cemetery and reinterred, with appropriate honors, in the mausoleum shown in the photo above.
Taylor’s symptoms, Rising surmised, were exactly those exhibited by arsenic poisoning. She reasoned that the possibility of an assassination wasn’t so unreasonable: with America on the brink of civil war, Taylor’s death had come just months before he was expected to veto several bills proposing the expansion of slavery. Plenty of Southerners had wished him dead. This was what caused Dr. Rising to embarked on her long, strange journey, which involved convincing Taylor’s distant relatives, and the U.S. government, to exhume the decomposed body of the long-dead President. It was her hope that modern technology could answer one critical question of whether or not President Zachary Taylor murdered.
After Taylor had died, Vice President Millard Fillmore assumed office and enabled the passage of the Compromise of 1850, allowing slavery in several Western states, the very thing that Taylor had worked against. Though there were quiet murmurings that the President had been poisoned, none of these suspicions were medically investigated.
Rising, a retired University of Florida humanities professor, was dining with a history buff friend when Zachary Taylor’s death came up. She recalled him saying, “It is a bit suspicious, isn’t it? I wouldn’t be surprised if he was poisoned.” This piqued Rising's curiosity, causing her to do some research. While pouring over records of the White House at the time, she was at first struck by the utter lack of security. In an interview with C-Span, Rising said, “In those days, there was no FBI, no Secret Service. Mrs.Taylor often complained that there were strangers wandering around in her bedroom.” Digging deeper into the medical reports of Taylor’s death, she discovered that his reported symptoms were almost identical to those of arsenic poisoning. She learned that if she could get her hands on sample of Zachary Taylor's hair, she could send it into a lab to test for arsenic, a substance which can remain present in the human body for centuries. She searched far and wide for existing hair samples, and found two: one at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC, and the other in New Orleans. But both failed to be useful: the first had been “compromised” by pesticides years earlier, and the second turned out to belong to Andrew Jackson, not Taylor.
Rising realized that, in order to conclusively determine whether or not Taylor had been poisoned, her only option was the exhuming of Taylor's body to procure a sample directly from his body. To do so, she needed permission from his distant relatives. She said, “I wrote to every address, every ‘Taylor,’ and hounded every source I could find, and finally, I found his closest relative, a man named John McIlhenny.” McIlhenny, at 84 years old, was the great-great-great grandson of President Taylor (on his mother’s side). If you're wondering, yes, he was also, coincidently, a relative of the inventor of Tabasco sauce. After four days of sit-down interviews with Rising, McIlhenny concluded that “Zachary would be delighted to be exhumed if it meant getting to the bottom of the truth.”
Rising presented her evidence to Jefferson County, Kentucky Coroner, Dr. Richard Greathouse, who then had to obtain the consent of the Department of Veterans Affairs, the administrator of Zachary Taylor National Cemetery, where Taylor is entombed. On June 17, 1991, Rising, accompanied by several forensic pathologists and 200 witnesses, opened Taylor’s musty crypt, removed his heavy, black walnut casket, and wheeled it into a nearby hearse. Opening the coffin proved to be more difficult than expected. The wood had decomposed, and all that remained was a sealed, metal sarcophagus, which the staff had to open using a power saw.
It was the duty of Kentucky State Medical Examiner George "Dr. Death" Nichols, to collect and analyze samples from the body of President Taylor. Nichols quipped in an interview: “We finally got the lid off, and there were Zachary Taylor’s fully dressed remains. I’d never met a president before...he didn’t offer much in the way of conversation.” To test for the arsenic, Nichols collected various dental, bone, and hair samples, and sent them to three different facilities. The samples were tested using colorimetric analysis (the use of a color agent to detect trace elements). A second batch of samples were scanned with an electron microscope equipped with x-ray diffraction analysis (allowing for close-up molecular views of the follicles). The final batch was taken by Nichols on an airplane to Oak Ridge National Lab for neutron activation analysis, a fairly new technique in which a sample is “bombarded with neutrons, causing the elements to form radioactive isotopes.”
Several weeks later, Nichols released his final opinion in a brief report entitled “Results of Exhumation of Zachary Taylor”. He conclided:
“The symptoms which he exhibited and the rapidity of his death are clearly consistent with acute arsenic poisoning, [but] it is my opinion that Zachary Taylor died as the result of one of a myriad of natural diseases which would have produced the symptoms of gastroenteritis. Final Opinion: The manner of death is natural.”
The tests on Taylor’s remains yielded trace amounts of arsenic (1.9 parts per million in the hair samples, and 3 ppm in the fingernails), however Nichols concluded that these amounts would’ve had to be “at least 200 to 1,000 times higher” if foul play had been present. He said that humans naturally have anywhere from 0.2 to 0.6 ppm of the element present in their bodies at any given time, as it’s naturally present in the environment. While Nichols’ ruled out arsenic poisoning, he acknowledged the possibility that another type of poison might have taken Taylor's life. He said: “I’ve investigated at least a dozen other deaths due to arsenic, and I’ve seen it used in everything from Hershey’s Chocolate Syrup to Big Red chewing gum. It’s entirely possible Taylor was poisoned — but it certainly wasn’t arsenic.”
The results resulted in criticism of Clara Rising. A 1991 editorial in the New York Times read: "Sometimes there are good reasons for tampering with a grave; serious historical evidence establishing the possibility that President Taylor was assassinated would be one. But Ms. Rising has produced no such evidence, only a hypothesis. All that's been revealed is a cavalier contempt for the dead." In a similar vein, a writer at The Washington Post labelled Rising as a “conspiracy theorist,” and the New Republic called Rising’s effort a “sacrilege.” Presidential biographer Elbert Smith called Rising's plan “sheer nonsense,” and historian Shelby Foote dubbed her effort as a “pointless engagement.”
Rising herself disagreed with these assessments. She said, "We found the truth. Certainly, the 628,000 [who died in the Civil War] would say it was worth looking into." In 2007, Rising published “The Taylor File,” chronicling her quest. Meanwhile, the most feasible explanation for his untimely death seems to be bacterial in nature. Taylor's death, many experts believe, suggests cholera, salmonella or some similar bacteria, possibly from contaminated water used to wash the cherries he had eaten, or to make ice used to chill the unpasteurized milk he drank.