Zachary Taylor isn’t one of the presidents who gets talked about most often… but we aren’t most podcasts. We have here a 150-year journey complete with a plotting pro-slavery quack doctor, piles of 'night soil', sudden illness, nuclear reactors, secret passages, and a poison cure no one was watching: 'Emetic of Tartar'.

Only in office for about fifteen months, the all-things-to-all-politicians Whig dropped dead in 1850 from a stomach ailment, and we all moved on to more exciting topics, like the civil war. But was Taylor’s death natural? For decades, there has been speculation that Taylor might have been poisoned when the general-turned-politician (and slaveholder) came out in favor of a ban on allowing slavery into new American territories, precisely the issue the slaveholders of the south would fight a massive war for a decade later. We l ...