Was Abraham Lincoln related to Zachary Taylor?

Answer 1

Its said that Taylor and Lee were kinsmen, without much further specificity on the precise relationship. Both were born in Virginia, of prominent families with deep roots in the Old Dominion, so they were likely distant cousins. Taylor was a second cousin of James Madison and a descendant of William Brewster, who came over on the Mayflower.

Confederate President Jefferson Davis had been Taylors's son-in-law. When Davis was a young lieutenant in the army Taylor was his commander, and Davis fell in love with Colonel Taylor's daughter Sarah. Taylor discouraged this match because he regretted the hard life his own wife had led, having to make a home for them in one isolated, rough frontier army post after another, distant from civilization and polite society. He did not want that for his daughter, as wife of a young, underpaid junior officer. To overcome this problem Davis resigned from the army, and his much older wealthy half-brother, Joseph Davis, set him up with a plantation in Mississippi, where he took his new bride. Ironically, there she caught malaria and died within a few months.

Taylor's son Richard Taylor was one of only a few men without previous military experience who made it all the way to three star rank as a Confederate Lieutenant General (the others who come to mind are Wade Hampton and Nathan Bedford Forrest). Richard Taylor had served for a time as his father's civilian military secretary on the campaigns in the Mexican War. Richard Taylor was an excellent general and wrote one of the best memoirs of the war.

About fifteen years ago Zachary Taylor was exhumed so his bones could be tested for poison. Some crackpot had foisted a theory that, somehow, in 1851, some evil proto-Confederates had decided to kill Taylor, why was never really satisfactorily explained. This was ten years before the war started and no one saw it coming then, let alone had decided they would be Confederates and that Taylor was a threat to their cause, which did not exist yet. But somehow this theory gained enough traction that they dug up "Old Dad" Taylor, and, unsurprisingly, found no trace of poison in his bones.