Millard Fillmore Totally Explained

Everything about Millard Fillmore totally explained

Supreme Court appointments

Fillmore appointed the following Justices to the Supreme Court of the United States:

Benjamin Robbins Curtis - 1851 (Associate Justice)

States admitted to the Union

Legacy

Some northern Whigs remained irreconcilable, refusing to forgive Fillmore for having signed the Fugitive Slave Act. They helped deprive him of the Presidential nomination in 1852. Within a few years it was apparent that although the Compromise had been intended to settle the slavery controversy, it served rather as an uneasy sectional truce.
Because the Whig party was so deeply divided, and the two leading national figures in the Whig party (Fillmore and his own Secretary of State, Daniel Webster) refused to combine to secure the nomination, Winfield Scott received it. Because both the north and the south refused to unite behind Scott, he won only 4 of 31 states, and lost the election to Franklin Pierce.
After Fillmore's defeat the Whig party continued its downward spiral with further party division coming at the hands of the Kansas Nebraska Act, and the emergence of the Know Nothing party.

Later life

   Fillmore was one of the founders of the University of Buffalo. The school was chartered by an act of the New York State Legislature on May 11, 1846, and at first was only a medical school. Fillmore was the first Chancellor, a position he maintained while both Vice President and President. Upon completing his presidency, Fillmore returned to Buffalo, where he continued to serve as chancellor.
   After the death of his daughter Mary, Fillmore went abroad. While touring Europe in 1855, Fillmore was offered an honorary Doctor of Civil Law (D.C.L.) degree by the University of Oxford. Fillmore turned down the honor, explaining that he'd neither the "literary nor scientific attainment" to justify the degree. He is also quoted as having explained that he "lacked the benefit of a classical education" and could not, therefore, understand the Latin text of the diploma, then joking that he believed "no man should accept a degree he can't read."
   By 1856, Fillmore's Whig Party had ceased to exist, having fallen apart due to dissension over the slavery issue, and especially the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. Fillmore refused to join the new Republican Party, where many former Whigs, including Abraham Lincoln, had found refuge. Instead, Fillmore joined the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic American Party, the political organ of the Know-Nothing movement.
   He ran in the election of 1856 as the party's presidential candidate, attempting to win a non-consecutive second term as President (a feat accomplished only once in American politics, by Grover Cleveland). His running mate was Andrew Jackson Donelson, nephew of former president Andrew Jackson. Fillmore and Donelson finished third, carrying only the state of Maryland and its eight electoral votes; but he won 21.6% of the popular vote, one of the best showings ever by a Presidential third-party candidate.
   On February 10, 1858, after the death of his first wife, Fillmore married Caroline McIntosh, a wealthy widow. Their combined wealth allowed them to purchase a big house in Buffalo, New York. The house became the center of hospitality for visitors, until her health began to decline in the 1860s.
   Throughout the Civil War, Fillmore opposed President Lincoln and during Reconstruction supported President Johnson. He commanded the Union Continentals, a corps of home guards of males over the age of 45 from the Upstate New York area, during the Civil War.
   He died at 11:10 p.m. on March 8, 1874, of the after-effects of a stroke. His last words were alleged to be, upon being fed some soup, "my only regret in death is that the Whig dies with me." On January 7 each year, a ceremony is held at his grave site in the Forest Lawn Cemetery in Buffalo.

Places named after Fillmore

Fillmore Glen State Park, New York

Fillmore County, Minnesota

Fillmore County, Nebraska

Fillmore, Utah

Millard County, Utah

Fillmore Avenue, on the East Side of Buffalo, New York

Millard Fillmore Gates Circle Hospital, Buffalo

Millard Fillmore Suburban Hospital, Williamsville, New York

Millard Fillmore Academic Center at the University at Buffalo's Ellicott Complex

Fillmore Street, in downtown San Francisco, California, after which, in turn, the Fillmore Auditorium was named

Fillmore Street, in downtown Phoenix, Arizona

Trivia

Fillmore Junior High School in the television series The Brady Bunch

The 1980s sitcom Head of the Class took place at the fictional "Millard Fillmore High School".

The comic strip Mallard Fillmore is named after the president.

In 2007, George Pendle wrote The Remarkable Millard Fillmore, a fake biography based on real events that happened in Fillmore's life.

In February 2008, a television commercial for a sales event by Kia Motors featured Millard Fillmore, referring to him as "Unheard of," claims he'd the first bathtub installed in the White House, and presented a Millard Fillmore bust as a 'Soap-On-A-Rope.' This story may have begun as a hoax by Henry Louis Mencken.

The myth that Millard Fillmore installed the White House's first bathtub was started by H. L. Mencken in a joke column published on December 28, 1917 in the New York Evening Mail. (See Bathtub hoax)

Millard Fillmore was the last U.S. president who was neither a Democrat nor a Republican (although Abraham Lincoln was re-elected in 1864 running on the National Union Party ticket with Democrat Andrew Johnson as his running mate).

Fillmore is the first of two presidents to have been an indentured servant. He was a clothmaker.

Friends of Millard Filmore, or FOMF, is an annual trivia hunt founded by Dr. Robert Hunter in 1967 at Carlmont High School, several schools in Northern California participate in this highly competitive event.

Electoral history

United States presidential election, 1848

Zachary Taylor/Millard Fillmore (Whig) - 1,361,393 (47.3%) and 163 electoral votes (16 states carried)

Lewis Cass/William Orlando Butler (Democrats) - 1,223,460 (42.5%) and 127 electoral votes (15 states carried)

Martin Van Buren/Charles Francis Adams, Sr. (Free Soil) - 291,501 (10.1%) and 0 electoral votes United States presidential election, 1856

James Buchanan/John C. Breckinridge (Democrats) - 1,836,072 (45.3%) and 174 electoral votes (19 states carried)

John C. Fremont/William L. Dayton (Republicans) - 1,342,345 (33.1%) and 114 electoral votes (11 states carried)

Millard Fillmore/Andrew Jackson Donelson (Know-Nothing/Whig) - 873,053 (21.6%) and 8 electoral votes (1 state carried)

Plaques to Fillmore

Image:Fillmore Home 2.jpg|Fillmore's East Aurora house was moved off Main Street. Image:Fillmore House NHL.jpg|The house is designated a National Historic Landmark. Image:Fillmore DAR.jpg|The DAR placed this plaque on the house in 1931. Image:Fillmore plot plaque.jpg|A memorial to Fillmore on the gate surrounding his plot in Buffalo. Image:Fillmore obelisk detail.jpg|Detail of the Fillmore obelisk in Buffalo. Image:Abigail Powers headstone.jpg|First Lady Abigail Powers is buried near her husband.

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