You will recall our mission in the search for a conspiracy theory about each President of the United States: we are looking for old theories, not something somebody on the Interwebs made up last week, and we seek accusations which turned out to be untrue, or at least unproven. The mid nineteenth century was a time of serious division and hot rhetoric, so the theories can be found falling thick.
With ZACHARY TAYLOR, we start our assassination conspiracy theories. Taylor, not unlike some candidates before and after him, was not interested in politics. A career military man, he had never even voted when he was talked into running for President. He died in 1850 during a major recurrence of cholera, though some people blamed the a refreshing dish oof cherries and cold unpasteurized milk he refreshed himself with after a hot day and a long ceremony when the cornerstone of the Washington Monument was laid. Stories started at once that this was a cover-up: obviously, pro-slavery politicans and/or militant Catholics had administered arsenic. In the late twentieth century, his body was exhumed and tested for arsenic, and the verdict was that it had been cholera all along. A small group of historians DOES insist that the medical examiners botched the arsenic test, so the theory goes marching on.
I can find no hint that anybody regarded MILLARD FILLMORE as part of the plot to assassinate his predecessor. Apparently the thought of Millard Fillmore doing anything at all was considered ridiculous by the time he took office. (He DID dump Zachary Taylor’s entire Cabinet, unlike every other vice president who found himself catapulted into the top job. His attempts to keep peace in a rapidly polarizing country did lead to the abolitionist forces declaring he was part of a conspiracy to allow slavery to thrive and spread. Subsequent historians have absolved him of guilt in this: not that he DIDN’T allow all that, but because they feel he didn’t so much plan it as sit back and watch it happen.
FRANKLIN PIERCE’S legendary bad luck pursued him even after the White House. Horrified at the idea of a civil war, he worked hard to avert the catastrophe, urging that a committee made of all the living former presidents of the United States could patch things up. The idea of James Buchanan and Millard Fillmore helping out appealed to nobody, and all he got was a reputation among aboltionists of being a traitor to the Union. One writer published an article claiming Pierce was a member of a secret society dedicated to overthrowing the government, which spread to such an extent that the Secretary of State, William Seward, wrote to demand if this was true. Pierce denied it, and went on having to deny it, even after the original writer of the charges admitted it was a hoax.
JAMES BUCHANAN, occasionally named the worst President in U.S. history ran in 1856 against, among others, Millard Fillmore, even more often named the worst resident in US history. It was a match of titans. Thew problem with conspiracy theories about the fifteenth President is that so many of them turn out to have been true. He DID lean on the Supreme Court to decide things the way he thought they should be. He DID preside over an administration so based on bribery that a Congressional committee came THIS close to impeaching him (when the members decided not to go for impeachment, Buchanan immediately crowed that he had been absolved of all guilt.) However, back in the 1840s, a journalist made a sneering remark about his “better half”. Since Buchanan was not married, readers were expected to fill in the blank. The debate has raged on ever since. Was the bachelor president in lifelong mourning for a deceased fiancée, or covering up his same-sex relationships? The host of historians have come to no verdict, but there is one unpopular but tempting theory that Buchanan, also saluted as the only President we can be sure never cheated on his wife, simply wasn’t interested. The idea of a President being not only amoral but asexual is too strange for most.
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