Today in History
What went down and why you should care.
mar 05 Learn More Zachary Taylor Sworn in as President
Did you know that for just $1,200 you can have a former president's corpse exhumed for chemical analysis? That's what happened to the remains of Zachary Taylor, who was sworn in as the 12th president of the U.S. on this day in 1849. So why'd they dig him up? In 1991, historian Clara Rising was working on a book about Taylor and wanted to confirm her theory that he had been poisoned. At the time, Taylor's cause of death was unclear. If Rising was right and Old Rough and Ready was poisoned, it would mean that Taylor was the first president to be assassinated, not Lincoln (and would undoubtedly make Rising a tidy sum of cash for her book). Ultimately, tests proved that Taylor wasn't poisoned, and his cause of death still remains a mystery.
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