Born into a prominent Virginia family, Zachary Taylor grew up on the Kentucky frontier. He spent his first 23 years at Springfield, a prosperous plantation with 52 slaves, where he was schooled by tutors.

In 1808 he was commissioned as a First Lieutenant in the 7th U.S. Infantry. While on leave two years later, he was married at Springfield. He spent the next 40 years as a military man and a plantation farmer who eventually owned 10,000 acres of property in Kentucky, Mississippi, and Louisiana. A hero of the Mexican War, "Old Rough and Ready" was the first career army officer to attain the presidency.

Taylor died in office of a sudden illness. His descendants exhumed his body in 1991 to settle long-held suspicions that he had been murdered. The autopsy did rule out arsenic, but could not rule out death by an untraceable poison.