Taylor Dies in Office: Fillmore Becomes President

President Zachary Taylor attended Fourth of July celebrations at the partially built Washington Monument on a blistering hot day in 1850, then returned to the White House and consumed large quantities of raw cherries and iced milk. Within hours he was violently ill with what his doctors diagnosed as acute gastroenteritis. Five days later, on July 9, he was dead, becoming the second American president to die in office and handing the presidency to Millard Fillmore at one of the most dangerous moments in the nation s history. Taylor was a career military officer with no political experience before winning the presidency in 1848 on the strength of his victories in the Mexican-American War. "Old Rough and Ready" was a slaveholder from Louisiana who nonetheless opposed the expansion of slavery into the territories acquired from Mexico, putting him at odds with Southern leaders who had assumed he would support their interests. His unexpected firmness on the territorial question pushed the country toward the crisis that the Compromise of 1850 was designed to defuse. Taylor s death was politically consequential precisely because he had opposed the Compromise. Henry Clay and Stephen Douglas had crafted a package of legislation intended to resolve the slavery crisis through mutual concession: California admitted as a free state, popular sovereignty in the remaining Mexican cession territories, a stronger Fugitive Slave Act, and abolition of the slave trade in Washington, D.C. Taylor had promised to veto the Compromise, threatening a confrontation between the president and Congress that could have accelerated secession by a decade. Fillmore harbored no such objections. He signed every element of the Compromise of 1850, including the Fugitive Slave Act, which required Northern states to return escaped slaves and imposed penalties on anyone who assisted fugitives. The act inflamed Northern opinion and contributed directly to the polarization that led to the Civil War. Persistent rumors that Taylor was poisoned led to his exhumation in 1991. Forensic analysis found elevated but not lethal levels of arsenic, consistent with the medications of his era rather than deliberate poisoning. The most likely cause of death remains acute gastroenteritis from contaminated food or water in a city where the sewage system routinely fouled the water supply.