MILLARD FILLMORE'S BURDEN

In 1993 or so, as I moved into the York House on Main Street in Moravia, NY, I recall being told about Millard Fillmore's burden. He had run nationally as a Vice Presidential candidate from New York on a Zachary Taylor New York-Kentucky ticket. Taylor got into Office as a hero of the Mexican-American War but was not sitting on his laurels.


He moved to end the Fugitive Slave Law enacted in a bitterly partisan Congress, then recently, and supported by the previous President. This made agents in the South worried, and the burgeoning Confederacy movement was given it catalysis then. Agents of the Southern Confederacy movement moved to try to assassinate Taylor in his stride. And he eventually was assassinated by poisioning with arsenic.


Millard Fillmore, who history has cast a shadow on, took office in 1850 and pledged to his closest associates that he would indeed, "work as a Taylor (tailor), not unlike when I was a boy in New York". And work like a Taylor he did, suffering from arsenic poisionings, like Taylor before him, throughout his Presidency as he stood his ground and tried to balance his interests in forwarding Taylor's abolitionist agenda in the White House, while trying to maintain order and prevent the USA from splitting apart.

Fillmore clearly was on the side of the Northern abolitionists and suffered greatly in Office from the periodic poisionings he endured, as he tried to work as a Taylor in Office. Fillmore was thus really an heroic President of the United States. His Presidential term ended in 1853, yet during his short tenure in office he managed to make the first official ties of the United States with the Far East, by establishing U.S. relations with Japan in 1852, as well as trying to abolish the Fugitive Slave Law in his stride during his term.


Later he would try in vain to make a political comeback in an organized party that was later sarcastically dubbed the "Know Nothing Party" because it was widely known that Fillmore had been poisioned in Office in the South, yet he and the US government had no knowledge of such poisionings. The label the "Know Nothing Party" will go down in the historical record as one of the most sarcastic moments in American History. Fillmore died a man satisfied by his life's work in Buffalo, NY in the 1870's.