On July 10, in Dayton, Tennessee, the trial of John T. Scopes got under way. Scopes was a high school teacher who had told his students about the theory of evolution. That violated a state law against teaching stories of human origins that disagreed with the Bible. Scopes’s lawyers, led by the famous liberal activist Clarence Darrow, attacked this law by questioning the doctrine underlying it: that the Bible is literally true.

Opposing Darrow as the prosecution’s chief adviser was William Jennings Bryan, a three-time unsuccessful candidate for President as a populist and a hero to the nation’s rural folk. He had not tried a case in court since 1897, but his rustiness was no problem. Scopes’s guilt was uncontested; he had volunteered to be prosecuted in order to test the validity of the law. Both sides spent most of the “trial” quibbling over legal points and making stump speeches to the assembled reporters and spectators (the jury was in the courtroom for a total of about two hours).

The climax came on July 20, when Darrow put Bryan on the witness stand as a supposed expert on creationism. As opposing counsel, Bryan was not obligated to testify, and even after he had agreed to do so, he was not required to submit to hostile questioning, since technically he had been called as a friendly witness. But Bryan, a practiced orator who was secure in his convictions, voluntarily submitted to Darrow’s grilling.

The result was a memorable example of the immovable object meeting the irresistible force. The force was Darrow’s rationalist onslaught, which used scientific evidence and purported contradictions in the Bible to show the untenability of a literal interpretation. The immovable object was Bryan’s religion—strong, simple, and pure. In Darrow’s world-view whatever did not comport with logic and established fact had to be rejected. Bryan saw things the opposite way: The Bible was unquestionably true, so anything to the contrary must be false, whether man could explain it or not.

Intellectuals generally saw Bryan’s inability to answer Darrow’s questions as proof of the weakness of his argument. To them the confrontation demolished any credibility that creationism might have had. By impressing the highbrows, however, Darrow was preaching to the choir, for fundamentalists understood Bryan’s don’t-knows and never-thought-about-its as statements of faith and humility. He saw no need to seek explanations, because the Bible gave him all the answers he would need. In the eyes of Bryan’s supporters—who frequently interrupted his testimony with cheers, applause, and appreciative laughter—Darrow never laid a glove on him.

The jury took less than ten minutes to find Scopes guilty, an outcome both sides had requested. Darrow appealed, and in January 1927 the Tennessee Supreme Court upheld the anti-evolution law but nullified Scopes’s conviction on the ground that his hundred-dollar fine had improperly been imposed by the judge instead of the jury. On that inconclusive note the case limped to an end. By then Scopes had left teaching to pursue graduate study in geology. Bryan was gone too, having died suddenly in his sleep five days after the trial ended (and a day after addressing eight thousand cheering fundamentalists at Jasper, Tennessee). The Tennessee law stayed on the books until 1967, though it had long since become a dead letter.

Buoyed by Bryan’s triumph at Dayton, fundamentalists spread their campaign to other states, passing anti-evolution laws in Mississippi in 1926 and Arkansas in 1928. To this day anti-evolution sentiment remains strong in many states, with school boards across the country prohibiting mention of the theory or mandating equal time for “scientific creationism.” In an irony Darrow might not have appreciated, activists quote the pleas for tolerance and acceptance of diverse viewpoints that he made at the Scopes trial to argue in favor of teaching the creationist views he mocked so vituperatively.

On July 4 President Zachary Taylor attended Independence Day festivities at the incomplete Washington Monument. It was a very hot day, and the President sat in the sun for more than two hours. During his forty years in the Army, Taylor had learned to brave the elements, so he bore the heat stoically. After the ceremonies the sixty-five-year-old Taylor strolled the banks of the Potomac before returning to the White House very hungry. He dined heartily on cherries, cucumbers, and possibly other fruits or vegetables, washing them down with plenty of cold milk and ice water.

Taylor, who had long been subject to digestive disorders, was not at his best the next day, though he did manage to write two letters and sign some papers. On July 6 the President’s intestinal pains grew worse. His family sent for a doctor, who administered calomel and opium. These provided a respite, but it was only temporary. On July 7 the aches and fever became severe, with brief spells of improvement failing to lift Taylor’s spirits. “In two days I shall be a dead man,” he declared.

At noon on July 9 a messenger brought word of the President’s critical condition to Congress, which immediately adjourned. The cabinet and Vice President Millard Fillmore gravely assembled at the White House as ordinary citizens thronged outside. Late that evening came the dreaded announcement: Zachary Taylor, Old Rough and Ready, who had withstood enemy fire from Fort Harrison, Indiana, in 1812 to Buena Vista in 1847 and led a conquering army across the Mexican desert, had died from eating bad cherries. The official diagnosis was cholera morbus, or what today would be called gastroenteritis.

Once the nation had gotten over its grief, it found itself with a new leader and perhaps a new outlook for resolving the sectional crisis. Despite being a slaveowning planter himself, Taylor had shown little sympathy for Southern concerns. He had favored admitting California and New Mexico as free states and excluding slavery from the rest of the vast new territories acquired in the Mexican War. The new Chief Executive was a New Yorker, the first President besides the Adamses who had never owned a slave. Would he be any more sensitive to the needs of the South? Could he stand up to the leaders of his own Whig party, let alone the Democratic-controlled Congress?

As great as were the political issues that Fillmore faced, a potentially bigger crisis loomed squarely ahead. On the day Taylor died, newspapers were filled with war talk about a border dispute between Texas and New Mexico. Such quarrels were not uncommon in the nineteenth century, and after the occasional stray bullet or two, they were usually settled by negotiation. This one, however, had gotten caught up in the same dispute that was poisoning virtually every other public question, for Texas was a slave state and New Mexico might be made free.

While Texas trained troops to defend the disputed area, a Richmond paper warned that the quarrel might “involve the whole Union in the dire calamity of civil war.” The threat was real, for many Southern hawks advocated coming to the aid of the Texans if the U.S. Army opposed them. It was easy to imagine General Taylor, the conqueror of Santa Anna, standing firm against the rebellion—even leading the Army in person, as he had threatened to do. But Millard Fillmore, a Buffalo lawyer? If he wanted to have a country left to preside over, he would have to learn his new job very fast.