So here we are. We're doing this whole thing again. When we last celebrated the presidents birthdays, it was 2015. I had a love for politics, and a bright shiny "America's just the best-no democrat is all bad- no republican is all good" attitude. I had a new found love for Democracy and Politics.
And then, Donald Trump was elected. And my optimism has turned into counting down the days until the new election hoping we'll restore some kind of normalcy to the world.
But then, I thought, is this not normal? Maybe I missed something in all of my reading and studying of history. I mean, history is long... and sordid. It's not as patriotic and clean as we like to believe it is. So when Hayden asked do to this project again (he was only 9 on our last go around- and he doesn't remember it as well as he'd like), I decided to look at it all with fresh eyes. Where do all this presidents rank.. they must fall somewhere between a Dumpster Fire and a National Treasure.
It's an election year, so lets study elections. Let's learn about those guys who came oh-so-close to the office of the presidency but didn't quite make it. How did their loss shape our country? How were those elections compare to elections of today. Where would we rank them on the Sleaze-O-Meter.
And how bout those first ladies? They have to matter somewhere too, right? Maybe we could give them a shout out. Or, maybe we could pick out the very best ones and assembly our very own First Lady Dream Team. We'll need one with Brains, one with heart, one who seeks adventure, one with some political savvy, and of course one who is just an all around-badass.
So, we're doing this all again. Look at my birthdays sign. It's kind of amazing! It just came today.
Unfortunately, our first president is still Millard Fillmore, and he's still pretty uninteresting.
But, I think I've written as exciting as a story as I could abotu the guy. Read on if you please. Or just fondly remember the last go around. Or, just check out the book I made from last time. That's also on display!
The Story of Millard Fillmore
2020 Edition By Corinne Waterstraut
Two-hundred and twenty years ago today, the future 13th president of the United States of America was born in a log cabin on a farm in upstate New York. Named in honor of his mother’s maiden name, Millard- no middle name- Fillmore was the second of eight kids and the oldest boy in the Fillmore household.Millard’s family was wildly poor, and they often didn’t have enough food to feed all the Fillmore’s mouths. His dad was a dirt farmer. Dirt farmers didn’t actually farm dirt, instead it was a term for a farmer who didn’t have enough money for any hired help or any sort of irrigation. So while the Fillmore’s didn’t farm dirt, they were as poor as dirt.
The answer to their severe poverty? Sell their first-born son off to work for a cloth maker as an apprenticeship. It was one less mouth to feed on the farm, and his father was paid in exchange for Millard’s work. Eventually, Millard was sick of being exploited, borrowed $30 to pay the cloth maker off, and to make it dramatic, walked 100 miles back home.
Without any formal education and now without a job, Millard taught himself to read by reading the dictionary. But he knew the answer to making something of himself was learning to do more than just read the dictionary. So at the age of 19, he finally tried his hand at formal education. And there his fate would collide with the future Mrs. Fillmore.
Abigail Powers was also from the Finger Lakes region of New York. Her father had died shortly after she was born but would still have a profound effect on her life. Books can transcend generations, and Abigail’s father had left the family a whole library of books. Using those books, she taught herself how to read and write, and by the age of 16 Abigail was teaching other people how to do the same, when in walked her new student.
Millard didn’t know much, but he had found a good teacher in Abigail. She taught him literature, geography, and history. Her brains coupled with Millard Fillmore’ hunger to learn would introduce him to a world that would eventually pluck him out of obscurity and forge him into presidential material.
Cash poor, but rich in good looks, Millard Fillmore might have been clueless in the classroom, but he sure knew how to make a girl swoon. After all, he did pick up some tips working for the cloth maker, and he had become quite the snappy dresser. Queen Victoria once called him “the handsomest man I’ve ever met”.
Abigail was smitten with her new student. From then on, Abigail would have two loves her life: books and Millard Fillmore. Her family, however, were unimpressed. They found him rather underwhelming, and beneath their prized Abigail.
After seven years of writing each other, and hardly being together, Abigail and Millard were married. She was self-made and self-educated before she even met Millard. If anyone married up, it was Millard. He would owe his success in life, in part, due to a supportive educated wife.
What followed next is the usual rags to presidency story. Millard teaches himself to be a lawyer. He goes off to DC to be a fancy pants in the House of Representatives, and he works his way up the political ladder.
Abigail, a “rare bird”, a “modern woman of her time”, gave up teaching when they had two kids: a boy, Millard Powers, and a girl, Mary Abigail. She would still be given the distinction of being the first First Lady to have ever worked outside the home.
Millard becomes accustomed to the ways of Washington and buys his family a house in Buffalo. It’s a nice place to come home to, with many luxuries neither of the Fillmore’s were afforded in their childhood. Abigail stays behind to raise the kids, and every time Millard returns home he has a new stack of books for her.
But eventually, Abigail just can’t stand to be away from Millard, who spends 4 terms in Congress (though not all consecutive), and she heads to DC leaving the kids with family.
While Millard is working in Congress, Abigail tried to embrace Washington D.C. She went to lecture halls, and concerts, and she did what she did best- she stuck her nose in a book to learn. She began studying politics intently to help guide Millard’s decisions. And he would listen. Until he didn’t, and it would cement his underwhelming legacy as a president (but we’ll get to that). Abigail found the pomp and circumstance of Washington exhausting, though.
Lucky for Abigail, Millard turned down the opportunity to run for re-election in Congress (though the Whigs nominated him anyway). Millard had been a strong supporter of a William Henry Harrison presidency, but he was over the chaos of the John Tyler presidency and had other plans.
He would run for Governor of New York. New Yorkers, however, would prove to be as unimpressed with Millard as Abigail’s family had been with him, choosing to go with the other candidate. Fillmore blamed his loss on “foreign Catholics”. Historians blame his loss on his hostility to immigrants and his weak position on slavery. Remember this- it comes back up later.
Most presidents end up suffering losses, though. It’s the way they pick themselves up and dust themselves off that ultimately gets them into the White House, and in this respect, Millard Fillmore is no different. New York might not have wanted them as their governor, but a few years later they had no qualms about making him Comptroller (a newly elected position in the NY cabinet heading up the Department of Audit and Control). With a united party, Fillmore won by the largest margin a Whig candidate for statewide office would ever achieve in New York.
1848 was an election year. James Polk had done all he came there to do, and opted not to run for re-election so the Democrats were looking for their candidate. Martin Van Buren threw his hat in the ring, but the Democrats were over him and his mutton chops. They were ready to move on to Lewis Cass, a Senator from Michigan. (So MVB stormed off to make his own party).
The Whigs were almost certain to nominate a Stalwart Whig, a Henry Clay kind of guy, specifically: Henry Clay. A real Whig, with a clear vision for the country. But, Henry Clay was not a flashy guy. And the Whigs, fresh off the death of their first Whig president, William Henry Harrison, and the political party disaster of John Tyler’s presidency, needed a flashy guy to bounce back. They needed a celebrity, especially in 1848- the first election where the whole country would be voting on the same day.
Federal Legislation passed three years earlier that fixed the date of presidential elections in an attempt to deter voter fraud. Popular vote was becoming more, well, popular. Most states had given up their elitist electors only votes, in favor of the popular vote. (Though in 1848, South Carolina was a hold out; They still chose its electors by state legislature.) With the people actually voting, the candidates would need to give those people reason to get out to vote.
Enter General Zachary Taylor, fresh off his victory in the Mexican-American War. You’ll learn more about this war later, but basically it’s what it sounds like- a war between Mexico and America over the territory of Texas. What you need to know now, is from that war, a hero (with no clear political affiliations) emerged: Zachary Taylor.
General Taylor seemed uninterested in politics all together. He had never so much as voted in an election before. It’s worth noting Old Zach’s apolitical reputation and friendly relations with Andrew Jackson made Democrat James Polk pick him as his general. His heroics during the war, caused the national press to compare him to George Washington & Andrew Jackson. His voting base wouldn’t be contained to just one party. He’d appeal to a wide range of voters. He was like the Eisenhower, just a mere 100 years before Eisenhower was Eisenhower.
But Zach played hard to get for the Whigs. He denied any interest in running for office. "Such an idea never entered my head," he remarked in a letter, "nor is it likely to enter the head of any sane person.” But, eventually a reluctant Zach agreed to be the Whig candidate. I guess he figured there was enough insane people in the United States to vote for him.
General Taylor was a slave holder from Louisiana. He was a “rough around the edges” kind of guy, who was uneducated and lacked a certain sort of status. Basically: he was short, fat, grubby and crude. He needed someone on the ticket to balance him out. Veeps are almost exclusively picked to balance out the president. They aren’t chosen for their popularity or their policies. 4
So now, the Whigs needed someone to balance out their southern cowboy- a pro-business northerner would help counteract Old Zach’s brashness. It wouldn’t hurt if he was athletic, handsome and polite either. Someone those snobby Northern Whigs would get behind. Enter Millard Fillmore, the perfect northeastern fancy boy. Basically, Millard Fillmore’s addition to the ticket wasn’t so much a geographic balance as it was an aesthetic one.
And so pretty boy Millard Fillmore was chosen as a dark horse pick for Vice-President under the Mexican-War hero, Zachary Taylor. The stage was set for the Election of 1848: Lewis Cass vs. A Zachary Taylor/Millard Fillmore ticket
MVB would run as a third-party Free-Soil candidate. The Free Soil party had split from the Democrats, with the major platform of opposing the expansion of slavery into the newly acquired territories. Martin Van Buren earned 10 percent of the vote, possibly stealing votes from Lewis Cass, and giving the edge to Zachary Taylor. 146 Electoral votes were needed to win, and the Taylor/Fillmore ticket would rack up 163.
One problem though, Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore had never actually met each other. And once they did, they weren’t exactly chums. Taylor basically ignored Mr. Fancy pants and left him out of every decision. Millard Fillmore, meanwhile, held his nose to the grindstone, taking his job as president of the Senate seriously.
The biggest issue for the Taylor presidency was what to do with the new land they had acquired out west after the war that made Taylor famous. There was much argument over if those states should be free states, or slave states. During the war, Congressman David Wilmot introduced the Wilmot Proviso, a proposal to ban slavery in any new territory acquired from Mexico. The measure passed in the House of Representatives but failed in the Senate.
After the failure of the Wilmot Porvisio, it was back to the drawing board. Zachary Taylor, for his part, wanted to just admit California as free state and call it a day, for now. Henry Clay, who was trying to earn his nickname of the “Great Compromiser” might not have been president, but he did have a proposed solution: a series of Bills he would call “The Compromise of 1850”.
The Compromise of 1850 was a patchwork of legislation including a couple of different bills. The Compromise had five major points:
1. Admit California in the Union as a new free state
2. Organize New Mexico and Utah as territories on the basis of “Popular Sovereignty”, meaning the people would vote on if they wanted to be a free state or a slave state
3. Readjust the disputed boundary between Texas and New Mexico
4. Abolish the slave trade in Washington DC
5. Establish a FUGITVE SLAVE LAW that guaranteed that runaway slaves apprehended anywhere in the United States would be returned to their owners
Henry Clay figured he threw something in this bill for everyone. He answered Zachary Taylor’s request to admit California into the Union as a free state, but he added the Fugitive Slave Law to appease the southern slave holders. He figured everyone got a little something in the bill, except, slaves of course. Let’s not lose sight that this was a bunch of old white guys making laws over other people.
The bill brought out the heavy hitters in politics at the time. And just like the politics of today, everyone had an opinion. If there was a CNN and Fox News they could all go on and scream about the bill, and spin it their way, they would have.
So lets talk about some of those heavy hitters.
First off, we have a deathly ill John C. Calhoun, of Andrew Jackson-wants-to-kill-you fame. He was too sick to get up there and rant, so he made a friend deliver a scathing speech saying the bill was “endangering Southern rights and prosperity.” He didn’t think the Fugitive Slave Law went far enough, and said the South would rather leave the Union than deal with the Northerners putting limitations on what they can do with their slaves.
Then we have Massachusetts Whig senator Daniel Webster. He called for national unity, famously declaring that he spoke “not as a Massachusetts man, not as a Northern man, but as an American.” Webster wasn’t for slavery, but he figured it was a necessary evil to keep the union together.
Finally we have another Whig senator, William H. Seward. You know that little part of the Declaration of Independence that says “all men are created equal”? He pointed out the hypocrisy between those five words Americans like to tote out, while *gasp* not ACTUALLY treating everyone equally. He said if we were to base our country on that, slavery must be “extinguished”. He said that American’s should have a “higher moral law” than the contradictions in the Constitution. He might not have had success in shooting down slavery in 1850, but he would help to bring the idea of abolishing slavery to the mainstream. Spoiler Alert: Seward would go on to become Abraham’s Lincoln Secretary to State (and even be targeted in a knife attack the night of Lincoln’s assassination).
Zachary Taylor, himself owned more than 100 slaves. But as president, he prioritized national unity over sectional interests. Though he agreed with parts of the bill (like admitting California as a free state), but he ultimately strongly opposed the bill.
But his veep, Millard was all for it, even telling Taylor privately that he would vote for the bill to pass if there was a tie in the Senate (since the veep is the leader of the Senate, he gets to vote in the event of a tie). Zachary Taylor’s best course of action was to stall the bill until it lost steam in Congress.
But Zachary Taylor lost steam first. On the fourth of July in 1850, he scarfed down cherries and gulped down iced milk, and four days later President Zachary Taylor was dead. The second elected Whig president had suffered the same fate as the first Whig president. At least Taylor had made it a year and a half- infinitely longer than William Henry Harrison’s thirty days.
Old Zach had died before the bill. And so, without the threat of a presidential veto, the bill would find new support with the newly sworn in President Millard Fillmore.
Millard, for his part, had no idea just how sick Zachary Taylor had become. Still being basically ignored by the Taylor administration, Millard was told how dire the situation was just a few hours before the president died. The next day he was being sworn in as the 13th president of the United States in the House of Representatives.
President Taylor’s cabinet were horrified at the development. They knew Millard would now be free to publicly support the Compromise of 1850, and as a result the entire cabinet resigned.
They weren’t the only ones upset Millard had been thrust into the presidency. Abigail was horrified. She had not gone to DC with a Veep Fillmore. She didn’t want to move all her books and reorganize her library. She was tired of DC how inadequate she had felt among the Washington elites.
So when she got word in Buffalo she was the new First Lady of the United States, it was no surprise that she had no interest in her new position. She was so worried about it, Abigail became sick, and depressed, and even had premonitions of death.
But, she’d always been a dutiful wife, so she went off to D.C. and did what Abigail did best- she continued to teach herself by reading up on everything political. She was advising Millard, and he was listening. Until she advised him not to sign the Compromise of 1850.
A-now-President-Fillmore claimed the Compromise would “heal sectional divides”. He said he hated slavery, but he loved the Constitution, and he claimed slavery was protected in the Constitution. He didn’t get the memo from Seward that the Constitution may not be perfect and may actually display some pretty hefty contradictions.
Millard claimed it was his duty to support slavery, since the Constitution did. After all, if Millard, defender of the Constitution, didn’t hold up the rights of people to own slaves, according to him he would “destroy the last home of free government in the world.”
He was unwilling to touch slavery in the states it already existed for the sake of preserving our founding documents and the union. That was bad enough. But the worst part of the Compromise of 1850, and possibly one of the worst laws in American History, was the Fugitive Slave Law.
The Compromise was terrible. Slavery was Horrific. But the Fugitive Slaw Law takes the cake. Under the Fugitive Slave Act, accused runaway slaves were denied trial by jury, or even the right to testify in court. There were no rules or regulations here. No documentation was required. A slaveholder could just point to any black person they wanted and be like “that guy used to be my slave but he ran away!”
That was it. The courts need nothing more than a slaveholders word. And slaveholders weren’t the most virtuous, honest people in the world. Kidnapping and forcing free blacks into slavery ran rampant.
Even if a “slave” managed to escape and make it to the north, into a free state, the slave could be picked up and hauled back to their owners. All citizen’s, even in the north, were by law, supposed to aid in the tracking and retrieval of fugitive slaves. If they didn’t, they’d face fines and punishment.
If an officer caught a “fugitive slave” they were offered bonuses and promotions. Judges were encouraged to rule in favor of the slaveholders, earning more money if they did so.
All of this led to the largest treason trial in the United States. When a slaveholder, with the help of a US Marshall, was attempting to capture a fugitive slave in Pennsylvania. A crowd of on-lookers formed, siding with the slave and refusing to help the slaveholder and the marshal. A small fight broke out, and in the chaos the slave shot and killed the former owner.
Millard Fillmore demanded that all forty-one bystanders be arrested and charged with treason. They were, although eventually a judge dismissed all the charges.
While tempers flared about the Compromise of 1850, and the Fugitive Slave Act, President Fillmore went on with the business of running the country.
• He focused on expanding America’s economy. The best way to do that? By bringing us bird poop from Peru, of course! Who wouldn’t want bird poop from Peru? At the time bird poop was a great fertilizer. It was cheap, and it was abundant. So the Fillmore administration secured American Businessmen access to Peru’s offshore giant bird reserve to harvest bird droppings for big cash money.
• He favored support for the transcontinental railroad. After all, with all that new land out west, you needed a way to get out there.
• He opened markets abroad, resorting diplomatic relations with Mexico, and sending Commodore Mathew Perry to open trade with Japan.
• He also took a strong stand against Napoleon III when France attempted to violate Hawaii’s independence.
If there’s anything this house loves it’s a good trip out west, visiting Hawaii without a passport, and any and all things Japanese.
And then there was his love of books.
Without Abigail Fillmore, we wouldn’t have a White House library. When she got to the White House, she learned that there weren’t any books there! So Abigail got Congress to give her $2,250 to start the first White House library. She personally oversaw the purchase of all the books, everything from maps to reference works, to history books, to novels. The first three added to the library: The bible, an atlas, and a dictionary. (She also added a music room, and three pianos).
While Abigail was acquiring books, Millard was saving them! A fire broke out at the Library of Congress on a fateful Christmas Eve in 1851. Millard and his cabinet rushed down to help the fire firefighters. They formed an assembly line of water buckets to help put the fire out. Two thirds of the books were gone. But they saved some of the books Thomas Jefferson had donated.
Books could teach you a lot in the mid 1800s, but they weren’t particularly great for keeping you up on the newest technology. When the White House switched from cooking over an open fire to a stove, nobody knew how to work it- and it went mostly unused during Fillmore’s presidency.
The election year of 1852 couldn’t get here soon enough. The Whigs were over Millard Fillmore. He wasn’t their guy to begin with, General Taylor was. So the Whigs tried to pick another famous General: Winfield Scott (also of Mexican-American War fame). Ultimately, the Whigs were a dying breed. The party was splintered and fractioned. Fillmore had killed them, essentially guaranteeing Democrat Franklin Pierce of victory.
The Whigs weren’t the the only one over Millard being president. Abigail was ready to go home. She never loved the job of hosting people at the White House. She had hurt her ankle, which never healed properly and standing for long periods of time was painful, which wasn’t good for her duties as First Lady.
And while you’d think well educated-doesn’t need a man’s money- work outside the home professional-Abigail would have been a champion for women’s causes, she was no feminist. Instead, when she was invited to speak and dedicate a building, she thought the idea that a woman had any business giving a speech was absurd. Her incredible intellect and abilities had gone mostly unused during her time as First Lady.
Franklin Pierce’s inauguration was like her birthday and Christmas all rolled into one! Not only was she going to be heading home to Buffalo, but she got to bring guests with her: her favorite authors! She made witty banter with Washington Irving (of Rip Van Winkle short story fame) and William Makepeace Thackeray (of Vanity Fair fame- the novel, not the magazine), all while watching her nightmare end with Franklin Pierce taking the reigns from her husband.
But in all her studies, Abigail must not have learned from William Henry Harrison and the importance of staying warm. She caught pneumonia and died, just 26 days later. She never even made it home to Buffalo. Adding insult to injury for Millard, two years later, the Fillmore’s daughter, Abby, suddenly died.
Millard was now an ex-president and a widow. He was also a man without a party, since he had effectively killed the Whigs. He wasn’t on board with the new, Republican party that was endorsing a strong antislavery platform, instead he hopped on over to possibly the worst named political party in the history of our country, the Know-Nothings.
The Know-Nothings were a fusion of the Whigs, and the anti-immigrant American party. They held a couple of platforms- and none of them were good. They were anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, and eventually anti-Abraham Lincoln. It was full of a bunch of xenophobic, hostile to immigration, white men that started originally as a secret society.
The secret society was known as the Order of the Star Spangled Banner (OSSB). There were rules about joining, and an initiation rite called “Seeing Sam.” Know-Nothings had to memorize passwords, learn hand signs, and recite a pledge never to betray the order. The strictest of requirements applied: they had to have a pureblooded pedigree of Protestant Anglo-Saxon pedigree (No Catholics allowed!).
And above all, members of the secret society weren’t allowed to talk about the secret society. If asked anything by outsiders, they would respond with, “I know nothing.” The first rule of being a Know-Nothing, is you do not talk about the Know Nothings. The Know-Nothings were the 1850’s Fight Club.
They called for deportation of criminals, including beggars on the street. They wanted immigrants to go through a 21-year naturalization period. They wanted to require mandatory Bible reading in schools while apparently skipping that pesky little part in the Bible that says love your neighbor as you love yourself, because at the same time they wanted to eliminate of all Catholics from public office. They didn’t even want Catholics to be teachers. Slavery wasn’t really on their radar, they were much more focused on keeping immigrants out of the country.
And the Know-Nothings were the new home of Millard Fillmore. In 1856, the party offered Millard Fillmore their nomination for president, and Millard accepted. Millard shared the ticket with Andrew Jackson Donelson. The name might sound familiar: Andrew was the nephew of former president Andrew Jackson.
Know- Nothing Millard and Andrew Jackson’s nephew would win 23% of the popular vote and carry one state, Maryland, with eight electoral votes in the 1856 election. James Buchanan would become the 15th President of the United States, and America would inch ever so closer to splintering. As for the Know-Nothings, the short-lived party would decline after the election. Millard had essentially killed another party.
Some historians say Millard wasn’t all in on the Know-Nothing party- that he simply went along with being their nominee. Either way, the Know-Nothings make it into more of a notable place in history than Millard Fillmore. They were the American political system’s first major third party, which also taught us third parties might not really have a chance: Millard would go on to become the last president who was neither a Democrat or a Republican.
The Know-Nothings may have been unsuccessful, but they were the first party to raise concerns about immigrants’ effects on the economy- an issue that remains in America today, long outlasting the party itself.
The other fraction of the Whig party would go on to be much more successful. Out of the Whigs was born the first Republican president. An icon for not only the Republican party, but all of America: Abraham Lincoln.
Millard Fillmore and Lincoln had a wildly similar upbringing. They were both raised poor, in a log cabin. They were both self-taught, both lawyers, and at one point of another both part of the Whig party. They both became president.
But while Millard claimed the Constitution upheld slavery, Abraham Lincoln, like Senator Seward, saw the errors in our founding documents. Lincoln found all of it absurd- from Millard’s stance on slavery, to the Know-Nothing Party: “As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equals, except negroes and foreigners and Catholics."
Millard went about his life in Buffalo. At least there, he was somewhat of a hometown hero. Millard Fillmore saved the animals of Buffalo from abuse, when he founded the Buffalo, New York chapter of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. He had served as the first Chancellor of the University of Buffalo, helped found the Buffalo Historical Society, and had been commended for his community work.
Buffalo, after all, is presidential famous (and it all started with Millard Fillmore). Grover Cleveland would be mayor there. Teddy Roosevelt passed through, and William McKinley would die there. Today, if you swing through make a stop at the downtown “Founding Fathers” Pub. You’ll find history themed memorabilia, trivia and even presidential themed sandwiches!
But there were some that never forgave Millard for his support of the Fugitive Slave Law. Millard criticized President James Buchanan for not taking immediate action when South Carolina seceded from the Union, as if he had done better avoiding a Civil War.
When the Civil War finally broke out Milliard sided with the Unionists, helping to organize enlistment and war-financing drives. He formed a militia of 45 men, but they never saw any action beyond parade marching. You’d think if he was a Unionist, him and Lincoln could find some common ground. But, instead he strongly opposed President Lincoln's unconditional policies toward the South during the Civil War, and let everyone know about it.
You really you never end up on the right side of history if you disagree with Lincoln, and after Lincoln was assassinated, an angry mob let Millard know just how they felt about his Anti-Lincoln rhetoric. They descended on Fillmore’s mansion and smudged black paint on the building.
Millard was not thrilled with the way he was being treated. He was a president for Christ sake! He said it was a “national disgrace that our presidents, after having occupied the highest position in the country, should be cast adrift, and perhaps be compelled to keep a corner grocery store.’
Millard Fillmore would keep no such store though. Instead, he married again, and this time he married rich. Caroline McIntosh was a widow herself. She was retiring, fragile, and most importantly loaded. Millard may have been raised on a dirt farm, but he had since become accustomed to a certain fancy pants style and he was not about to give that up.
When the couple got married, Millard had her sign a prenup, that may have kept the money in Caroline’s name, but essentially gave him all the power to do with it what he wanted. Don’t feel bad for Caroline, though. She relished in Millard’s “noble status” as a former president. The couple moved into a giant mansion that Caroline adorned with busts and portraits of the ‘13th president’, where they threw elaborate lavish parties. They were the center of Buffalo’s elite society.
Millard Fillmore lived out his days with Caroline in Buffalo. He died unceremoniously at the age of 74 after suffering a stroke and uttering the famous (at least in the Waterstraut household) last words “The nourishment is palatable.”
Ultimately, the Compromise would end up defining Millard Fillmore’s presidency. Like so many men, Millard should have listened to his wife. Abigail was right. The Compromise of 1850 was just a band-aid on the growing divide in the country. The only unifying he did was, unifying people in something to hate. The Compromise didn’t diffuse the situation. It didn’t resolve the issue of the expansion of slavery. Instead, it just further polarized the North and the South and continued to hurtle the Union toward the Civil War.
Overall, Millard Fillmore is a forgettable president. Sure the Fugitive Slave Act and the Compromise of 1850 led to the Civil War- but there were so many things that led up to that, and so many failed attempts to stop it, that ultimately “The Compromise of 1850” is something you read in your middle school text book, study for your test because you have to, and file it away somewhere with “mitochondria is the power house of the cell”: you know that it was important, but who really remembers how.
There’s a psychology professor at Washington University in Saint Louis that researched how- and even if- we remember presidents. His claim is that our brains remember presidents “like we would recall a list someone gave us for the grocery store”. George Washington and Abraham Lincoln are the milk and eggs of the grocery list. You probably remember what you went for when you need an Abraham Lincoln or a Thomas Jefferson. But James Polk? He’s more like the obscure ingredient you were also supposed to remember for dinner tonight. You better write it down, or you might forget.
According to the professor (his name is Henry Roediger- but if you can’t remember Franklin Pierce, you’re not going to remember him), our brains will remember presidents during our lifetime, and maybe a few before that. Most people can get the early presidents, plus Benjamin Franklin who for some reason a lot of people think was president. And then, of course, plucked out of the mess of presidents 4 through 39 is Abraham Lincoln.
The professor has actually been tracking how quickly we’re forgetting presidents. For most presidents, they’ll live in modern history for 50 to 100 years, and then they’ll fall into the void of presidents nobody actually remembers. That means someday once-towering figures like Dwight Eisenhower and Harry Truman might be just as remembered as a Chester Arthur or a Benjamin Harrison.
So what does get them remembered? There has to be something really distinctive: like a war, or a major history changing piece of legislation. Lincoln had a war, a major piece of legislation, and was assassinated. But even an assassination won’t necessarily get you remembered. Most people can’t pick James Garfield or William McKinley out of a line-up.
Millard Fillmore doesn’t have anything flashy to help us remember him. He barely has anything interesting you can even throw in ‘fun facts about presidents’ books. He had now known bad habits or quirks. He had no pets. Some historians have said he was the first to have a bathtub in the White House to come up with anything even remotely interesting or funny about him. (Martin Van Buren was actually the first to have a bathtub in case you were wondering).
He might be considered the most obscure president, if he weren’t part of “cult obscurity”, which ironically gains him some notoriety.
In the 1960s Millard Fillmore Society was created. The Society once held a meeting every year on his birthday to celebrate Millard’s anonymity. They sponsored an annual birthday party, an essay contest, and published a magazine called “Milestones with Millard.” But, much like the Whig party, the Millard Fillmore Society fell apart and ceased to exist.
Millard Fillmore, would have been completely lost to history if it wasn’t for one thing: he was president, a position held by the likes of George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln.
He gets his names on schools, and buildings, and streets for one reason: he’s part of a set. And while the set might include some throw aways, they also include icons. Even if you become a throw-away, only 44 men have even been called President of the United States, so you’re still part of that very limited-edition set.
A congresswoman and writer in the 1960’s (who again, you won’t remember, but her name is Clare Booth Luce) used to say presidents would be remembered in one sentence. She’d often asked LBJ and JFK what their sentence would be. It got so bad, JFK would avoid her at parties.
Whatever you think Millard Fillmore’s sentence might be, plenty of authors, historians and even former presidents have had their say. In my research of Millard Fillmore I’ve seen him called a lot of things:
Undistinguished
Second-Hand
A Snooze-Fest
Mediocre
Common Place
A Walking Door Mat
A Smorgasbord of Blah
The Charlie Brown Christmas Tree of presidents
The most Incompetent non-entity ever to hold the position of president
Even his own White House Biography calls him uninspiring.
His birthplace has been called a pile of rubble.
And current still towering figure- Harry Truman had a scathing review calling him a “do nothing president” and a “man that swayed with the slightest breeze”
A presidential legacy has more to do with the circumstances surrounding your years in office than your accomplishments as a person. What if Zachary Taylor had lived? What if he would have stopped the Civil War? Would it have just happened sooner? What if the Whig party never split? Would Millard ever have been president? Would Abraham Lincoln ever been thrust into the spotlight?
We’ll never know the answer to any of these questions because Zachary Taylor decided to gobble down a bunch of disease infested cherries and iced milk. And because of those cherries and iced milk, you can’t have a presidential set of pez dispensers without Millard Fillmore.
So that's the story, folks. Hayden rather enjoyed it, Peyton and Calib showed up for it (but Calib took the pictures, and they're mostly terrible), but we've got one down.
Calib's pictures might be terrible, but you can check out all the guys who had a cameo.
We saw Henry Clay (played by Fix-it Felix of course), Seward showed up (played by Dr. Dufenshmitrz), Lewis Cass will make another appearance for Zachary Taylor's birthday (he's played by one of the old frat guys from Monster's Univeristy).
Hayden chose to leave up the Scathing Review of Millard Fillmore, as opposed to the 'Through Rose Colored Glasses'.
We added him to the presidential tally of accidental presidents, or Vice Presidents who ascended to the office by "accident"
He chose to put Abigail Fillmore on his dream team with heart. I personally would have picked brains, but it's his dream team, not mine.
And he placed Millard rather close to the dumpster fire, and pretty far from the National Treasure. He might move a little, though, depending on future president placements.
We're having Millard's dinner tomorrow night, because tonight is Anime Club, so I'll try and remember to post pictures tomorrow.
Hayden also made a page in his sketch book, but he hasn't colored that in yet, so I'll wait and update with that later too.
Next Up: Richard Nixon's birthday is Thursday! I've got all my notes, but I still have to write the story and print out Pat Nixon's trading card.
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