EDITOR’S CORNER
In honor of the election season we’ve just had—and there are much more on the way—here’s the strangest election story I’ve ever found.
A major party candidate for president of the U. S. did not know he had been nominated because he refused to pay 10 cents postage on the letter telling him so and asking him to accept it.
The joke is...that there’s no joke. This actually happened and Zachary Taylor went on to win the presidency 170 years ago.
Taylor was not a politician. He was a general, a hero of the recently concluded war with Mexico.
His nickname was “Old Rough and Ready” and he earned it. Taylor often looked like he had slept in his uniform, when he bothered to wear it.
Taylor often commanded in street clothes because he found uniforms too restricted and uncomfortable.
When the war was over he simply went home, back in the bayous of Louisiana.
Taylor had never even voted in his life. But the Whigs, meeting in Philadelphia, nominated him for the nation’s highest office and dutifully fired off a letter telling him of the honor and asking him to accept.
They waited. And waited. And waited six weeks.
Finally Whig Chair John Morehead investigated. The envelope was in the “dead letter file” at the Baton Rouge Post Office.
Ten cents postage due.
It’s not quite as crazy as it sounds. In the 1840s much correspondence was sent postage-due. Taylor, as a national hero, got so much of it the thrifty general had advised his postman not to accept any mail that would require him to pay postage.
Apparently even “Dear Zach, how would you like to be president?” letters.
The Whigs ponied up a dime. Taylor accepted and he won the election. He didn’t vote. Again.
But the strangeness of Zachary Taylor’s political career was not over.
Sixteen months into his presidency, on the Fourth of July, 1850, he went to an open air Independence Day fundraiser for the Washington Monument, then under construction.
The president consumed “copious amounts of iced milk and fruit.” Washington had open sewers and contamination was widespread.
Taylor developed a serious digestive problem. He died five days later.
Over 100 years later, conspiracy theories developed that the president was poisoned. They were taken seriously enough Taylor’s body was exhumed in 1991.
No poison evidence was found. It was noted the president’s doctors may have removed any chance Old Rough and Ready had for recovery by treating him with opium, “bleeding and blistering him.”
I don’t know what blistering is. I don’t want to know.
This ended all the conspiracy theories.
Of course it didn’t. They’re still flourishing, including one that concludes Taylor was shot from a grassy knoll.
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