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Was this US president poisoned? The truth about Zachary Taylor’s ‘cherry overdose’

Was this US president poisoned? The truth about Zachary Taylor’s ‘cherry overdose’

The 12th president did indeed fall ill after gorging on cherries at a Fourth of July celebration, but that does not tell the whole story – or stop the conspiracy theories of sinister assassinations

Oil painting portrait of an older man with graying hair and sideburns, wearing a dark coat and a tied patterned cravat against a dark background

Jonny Wilkes

Published: October 30, 2026 at 3:00 PM

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In the history of the United States, eight presidents have died in office, four from assassination. The names of the killers have gone down in infamy: John Wilkes Booth (shot Abraham Lincoln in 1863), Charles Guiteau (shot James Garfield in 1880), Leon Czolgosz (shot William McKinley in 1901) and Lee Harvey Oswald (shot John F Kennedy in 1963).

But there is another assassin that could be added to that list: cherries, the surprise killer of the 12th president, Zachary Taylor, in 1850.

Who was Zachary Taylor?

Following a 40-year career in the military, Taylor – or ‘Old Rough and Ready’, as he was called – became a national hero for his remarkable victories in the Mexican-American War (1846-48). As a major general, he drove the Mexican forces out of the new state of Texas.

Undoubtedly skilled on the battlefield, he had no experience whatsoever in the political arena when he found himself elected to the highest office in 1848. His presidency would be defined by controversy, particularly over the issue of extending slavery into the new territories in the west that had been acquired from Mexico after the war.

Close-up of a person's cupped hands holding a double handful of fresh, ripe red cherries, with a crate filled with cherries in the blurred background.

Could something as seemingly innocuous as cherries really have killed Zachary Taylor? | Credit: Getty Images

Although a slaveowner himself born on a Viriginia plantation, Taylor opposed the extension and instead called on California and New Mexico to join the US as free states. This angered Southerners, who threatened to secede. It seems that the old general seemed willing to go to war over the matter (11 years before the outbreak of the American Civil War).

Before the issue could be resolved, however, Taylor died suddenly on 9 July 1850, at the age of 65. Supposedly, his last words were: “I regret nothing, but am sorry that I am about to leave my friends.”

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His 16 months in the White House makes him the third shortest-serving president to date, behind the assassinated Garfield and William Henry Harrison, who died just a month after his inauguration.

How did Zachary Taylor die?

The exact cause of Taylor’s death remains a disputed topic today. He suffered from severe stomach pain in the days beforehand after consuming a huge volume of cherries and iced milk as part of the Fourth of July celebrations. He had spent most of the hot and humid day outside at the site where the Washington Monument would be built, so washed down the fruit with several glasses of water.

As the story goes, the acidity of the cherries caused a fatal bout of cramps, diarrhoea and fever. But was it actually the cherries that killed Taylor?

Historical black-and-white engraving depicting a man lying on his deathbed, surrounded by grieving women weeping into handkerchiefs and several solemn men in 19th-century attire standing around the room

A lithograph depicts the death of US president Taylor at his home, 1850. The true cause of his death is still debated | Credit: Getty Images

His physicians diagnosed him with “cholera morbus”, a term for acute gastroenteritis. Rather than being caused by a surfeit of cherries, the more likely culprit was the appalling sewage in Washington DC at the time, which contaminated the drinking water and led to regular cholera outbreaks. That’s what killed the ninth president, William Henry Harrison.

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Could he have been assassinated?

Many people were not satisfied with the official explanation for Taylor’s death and rumours spread that he had been poisoned.

He certainly had enemies, whether a political rival, an irate slaveowner who saw Taylor as a hurdle to the extension of slavery, or a disgruntled Catholic (due to his role in the war against Mexico, he was sometimes associated with an anti-Catholic sentiment).

Such claims especially gained traction in the years after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and persisted throughout the 20th century. In the early 1990s, Taylor’s remains were even exhumed and tested for arsenic, although no evidence of poisoning was discovered.

Authors

Jonny WilkesFreelance writer

Jonny Wilkes is a former staff writer for BBC History Revealed, and he continues to write for both the magazine and HistoryExtra. He has BA in History from the University of York.