Zachary Taylor: the president who fell ill after eating cherries
The 12th US president ate a huge amount of cherries at a Fourth of July celebration, fell ill and died days later — and some people still suspect he was poisoned.
On 4 July 1850, the president of the United States spent a hot, humid day outdoors and ate a very large amount of cherries. He washed them down with iced milk and several glasses of water. Within days he was dead, and people still argue about whether the fruit killed him or whether someone poisoned him.
A very large bowl of cherries
The president was Zachary Taylor, the 12th man to hold the office. He had spent 40 years in the army before being elected in 1848, with no political experience at all. On that Fourth of July he joined the celebrations at the site where the Washington Monument would later be built. It was a hot and humid day, and according to the story that grew up around his death, he ate a huge volume of cherries and drank iced milk, plus several glasses of water.
Severe stomach pain followed. So did cramps, diarrhoea and fever. Taylor died on 9 July 1850, aged 65, after only 16 months in the White House. That makes him the third shortest-serving president, behind the assassinated James Garfield and William Henry Harrison, who died just a month after his inauguration. His reported last words were that he regretted nothing, but was sorry to be leaving his friends.
What the doctors blamed
Taylor's doctors did not blame the cherries. They diagnosed "cholera morbus", an old name for a severe illness of the stomach and bowels. The more likely cause, according to the account of his death, was the state of Washington DC's sewage at the time. Waste contaminated the drinking water, and the city suffered regular outbreaks of cholera. The ninth president, William Henry Harrison, is said to have died from the same cause.
The poison rumours
Not everyone accepted that explanation. Rumours spread that Taylor had been poisoned, and he had no shortage of enemies. He was a slaveowner born on a Virginia plantation, yet he opposed letting slavery spread into the western territories taken from Mexico, and he urged California and New Mexico to join the Union as free states. Southerners who wanted slavery to expand were furious and threatened to leave the Union. Others disliked him over his role in the war against Mexico, which left him associated with anti-Catholic feeling.
The poisoning claims grew louder after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, and they lasted through the 20th century. In the early 1990s, Taylor's remains were dug up and tested for arsenic, a well-known poison. No evidence of poisoning was found. The contaminated water remains the more likely explanation, though the argument has never quite gone away.