Zachary Taylor
president of the United States from 1849 to 1850
Zachary Taylor (November 24, 1784 – July 9, 1850) was the 12th president of the United States, serving from 1849 until his death in 1850. Before his presidency, Taylor was a career officer in the United States Army, rising to the rank of major general and becoming a national hero for his victories in the Mexican–American War. As a result, he won election to the White House despite his vague political beliefs. His top priority as president was to preserve the Union. He died 16 months into his term from a stomach disease. Taylor had the third-shortest presidential term in U.S. history.
Taylor was a descendant of the Lee Family of Virginia, and was born into a prominent family of plantation owners who moved westward from Virginia to Louisville, Kentucky, in his youth. He was the last president born before the Constitution of the United States was adopted. He was commissioned as an officer in the U.S. Army in 1808 and made a name for himself as a captain in the War of 1812. He climbed the ranks of the military, establishing military forts along the Mississippi River and entering the Black Hawk War as a colonel in 1832.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Zachary Taylor” is president of the United States from 1849 to 1850. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Zachary, Taylor and president, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q11896. VIAF identifies the subject as 27867826. The Library of Congress control number is n50008436. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1784, 1850, 1849 and 1808.
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This entry incorporates text from “Zachary Taylor” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.