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Nov 16, 2009 · On July 9, 1850, after only 16 months in office, President Zachary Taylor dies after a brief illness. The exact cause of his death is still disputed by some historians.
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- Zachary Taylor
Zachary Taylor’s Sudden Death. On July 4, 1850, Zachary...
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Taylor died suddenly of a stomach disease on July 9, 1850, with his administration having accomplished little aside from the ratification of the Clayton–Bulwer Treaty and having made no progress on the most divisive issue in Congress and the nation: slavery.
Zachary Taylor's sudden death shocked the nation. After attending Fourth of July orations for most of the day, Taylor walked along the Potomac River before returning to the White House. Hot and tired, he drank iced water and consumed large quantities of cherries and other fruits.
- Overview
- Early life and military service
- Presidency and death
- Cabinet of President Zachary Taylor
Zachary Taylor (born November 24, 1784, Montebello plantation, near Gordonsville, Virginia, U.S.—died July 9, 1850, Washington, D.C.) 12th president of the United States (1849–50). Elected on the ticket of the Whig Party as a hero of the Mexican-American War (1846–48), he died only 16 months after taking office.
Taylor’s parents, Richard Taylor and Mary Strother, migrated to Kentucky from Virginia shortly after Zachary, the third of their nine children, was born. After spending his boyhood on the Kentucky frontier, Taylor enlisted in the army in 1806 and was commissioned first lieutenant in the infantry in 1808. In 1810 he married Margaret Mackall Smith (Margaret Taylor), with whom he had six children. His daughter Sarah Knox Taylor married Jefferson Davis, the future president of the Confederate States of America, in 1835, and his son, Richard Taylor, fought in the Civil War as a lieutenant general in the Confederate Army.
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Taylor served in the army for almost 40 years, finally advancing to the rank of major general (1846). He commanded troops in the field in the War of 1812, the Black Hawk War (1832), and the second of the Seminole Wars in Florida (1835–42), in which he won promotion to the rank of brigadier general for his leadership in the Battle of Lake Okeechobee (1837). In 1840 he was assigned to a post in Louisiana and established his home in Baton Rouge.
Having thus won the north of Mexico, Taylor emerged as a hero and began to be seen by Whig politicians as a possible presidential candidate. At the Whig Party convention in 1848 Taylor gained the nomination on the fourth ballot. He defeated the Democratic candidate, Lewis Cass, in the general election, winning the electoral college vote 163 to 127.
Taylor’s brief administration was beset with problems, the most perplexing of which was the controversy over the extension of slavery into the newly acquired Mexican territories. By 1848 Taylor had come to oppose the creation of new slave states, and in December 1849 he called for immediate statehood for California, whose new constitution explicitly prohibited slavery. Southerners in Congress, who feared a permanent majority of free states in the Senate, fought bitterly against the proposal, and the controversy was not finally resolved until September of the following year (two months after Taylor’s death), with the adoption of the Compromise of 1850. A further problem was the revelation in mid-1850 of financial improprieties on the part of three members of Taylor’s cabinet. Deeply humiliated, Taylor, who prided himself on honesty, decided to reorganize his cabinet, but before he could do so he died suddenly of an attack of cholera. He was succeeded by Millard Fillmore.
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The table provides a list of cabinet members in the administration of President Zachary Taylor.
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Oct 29, 2009 · Zachary Taylor’s Sudden Death. On July 4, 1850, Zachary Taylor attended a ceremony at the unfinished Washington Monument; temperatures were blistering, and he reportedly ate only raw...
Apr 2, 2014 · Death. After only 16 months in office, Taylor died on July 9, 1850, after complaining of severe stomach pains five days prior. Physicians diagnosed him as suffering from a gastrointestinal...
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Jul 9, 2016 · On this day in 1850, Zachary Taylor, the nation’s 12th president, died at age 65. Taylor had fallen mortally ill five days earlier, some 16 months into his term.
