Basic Information
Name: Millard Fillmore
Nickname: Millard Fill-less
Born: January 7th, 1800
Died: March 8th, 1874
Nationality: American
Hometown: Moravia, New York
WORK & EDUCATION
Occupation: Lawyer and politician, vice president under Zachary Taylor, and 13th president of the United States
Education: Fillmore started out in the classic log cabin and had no formal schooling as a child. His father apprenticed him to a cloth maker, but the guy had him doing unskilled labor rather than learning to make cloth. Bummer.
Frustrated by this, Fillmore read a lot in order to educate himself. His father helped him get a job as a law clerk for the Fillmore family's landlord, which eventually led to him becoming a lawyer.
FAMILY & FRIENDS
Parents: Nathaniel and Phoebe Millard Fillmore
Siblings: Fillmore was the second eldest of eight children.
Spouse: Abigail Powers Fillmore (m. 1826-1853, until her death), Caroline McIntosh Fillmore (m. 1858-1874, until his death)
Children: Millard Powers Fillmore (1828-1889) and Mary Abigail Fillmore (1832-1854)
Friends: Thurlow Weed, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Northern Whigs, and Andrew Johnson
Foes: Zachary Taylor and Abraham Lincoln
Analysis
The POTUS Time Forgot
Millard Fillmore was the 13th president of the United States…which is a fact you may or may not have known. Poor Millard doesn't rank super high on "Most Memorable POTUS" lists. (He does, however, come in at a very respectable #12 on at least one "Hottest U.S. Presidents" list, though. Dude was a dead ringer for Alec Baldwin.)
He was elected to the vice presidency in 1848, with Zachary Taylor as president. Fillmore became president upon Taylor's death in 1850 and was in office on July 4th, 1852, when Douglass gave "The Hypocrisy of American Slavery."
Born into poverty to tenant farmers in a log cabin in New York, Fillmore had little formal schooling, but he eventually educated himself well enough to be admitted to the New York bar. In fact, his official White House biography says:
In his rise from a log cabin to wealth and the White House, Millard Fillmore demonstrated that through methodical industry and some competence an uninspiring man could make the American dream come true. (Source)
We're pretty sure Douglass would point out the fact that the White House biographers left out a few words:
Millard Fillmore demonstrated that through methodical industry and some competence an uninspiring white man could make the American dream come true…while at the time Black men were either a) slaves or b) lacked a whole slew of rights.
There. Fixed.
In short, Fillmore wasn't going to win any popularity contests, and he certainly wasn't the brains of the operation, but he got the job done. Sort of.
This Compromise Doesn't Make Anyone Happy, Millard
Fillmore came into national politics by way of several New York public offices, including several terms as governor. While he received the Whig Party's nomination for vice president under Mexican War hero Zachary Taylor in 1848, Taylor didn't think he was that cool and kind of ignored him and disagreed with him on a bunch of stuff. Most critically, the two men split over the Compromise of 1850, which Fillmore supported, while Taylor would have preferred holding the Union together by military force rather than legislative compromise.
The joke was on Taylor, though, because he died in office, and Fillmore stepped in.
The Compromise of 1850 was an attempt to relieve sectional tensions (in the North, South, and emerging West) about the spread of slavery. It was important to both pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions that new states and territories go their way because that directly affected their representation in the federal government. With the Compromise of 1850, Congress attempted to reconcile the irreconcilable: slave and free states.
Spoiler alert: it didn't work, ultimately.
Among other provisions, the Compromise of 1850 admitted California as a free state and outlawed the slave trade in the District of Columbia. Significantly, however, it provided for federal resources (in the form of officers of the law) to be expended to help slaveholders recapture escaped slaves. This strengthened the Fugitive Slave Act, and there's no question that Douglass is responding to this in his speech. More generally, Douglass attacks the very idea of compromise regarding the issue of slavery.
The Compromise of 1850 helped widen cracks in the Whig Party, which went the way of the dinosaur. Fillmore was the last president not to represent either the Republican or Democratic Party.
Partly because of concerns about electability, partly because of enemies made during the Compromise of 1850, and partly because of more ambitious men within the party, Fillmore didn't receive his party's nomination for the presidential election of 1852.
He traveled abroad for a while but returned to run for president on the nativist "Know-Nothing" or American Party ticket in 1856. He didn't win the presidency and retired to Buffalo, New York, where he supported Stephen Douglas against Abraham Lincoln in 1860. He did, however, support Lincoln and the Union during the Civil War, but he also supported Andrew Johnson's policies during Reconstruction. He died after suffering two strokes in early 1874. (Source)
There you go, folks: everything you never knew about America's most oft-forgotten president.