Why Every President Sucked

No. 13 · The Presidents

Millard Fillmore’s Biggest Failures

1850–1853

He signed the Fugitive Slave Act, lost his party, and then ran on a nativist ticket. The bathtub was a hoax.

Who was Millard Fillmore?

Millard Fillmore was the 13th president of the United States, serving from July 1850 to March 1853. Born in a log cabin in upstate New York in 1800, he was apprenticed to a cloth maker, taught himself law, and rose through the New York Assembly and Congress to become Zachary Taylor’s vice president in 1849. Taylor died on the night of July 9, 1850, and Fillmore was sworn in on July 10. Historians date his presidency from either day.

The rumor that Southerners poisoned Taylor has been tested. His remains were exhumed in June 1991, and Kentucky’s chief medical examiner reported that he had not been poisoned with arsenic. The levels were hundreds of times too low.

Why is Millard Fillmore considered one of the worst presidents?

Fillmore is a bottom-tier president in every major survey. C-SPAN’s 2021 survey of historians ranked him 38th of 44. Siena’s 2022 survey of presidential scholars also ranked him 38th of 45. The 2024 Presidential Greatness Project ranked him 39th, and scholars of both parties put him in the bottom five or six. His weakest categories in C-SPAN’s 2021 survey are public persuasion and vision, both 41st.

In short: he signed the Fugitive Slave Act and enforced it, lost his own party, and then ran for president on a nativist ticket. In my book, Fillmore’s entry is about the Compromise of 1850, which settled nothing. What follows is the record around it, with the song I wrote for him threaded through.

Chords: Bm, A, G, D

let's have a compromise
just ignore those cries you hear
it's nothing at all
just the sound of freedom giving way to fear

1. He took the South’s side in the Compromise of 1850

Taylor’s cabinet resigned and Fillmore accepted, naming Daniel Webster as Secretary of State. The Compromise of 1850 was five bills: California entered as a free state, Texas got a boundary settlement, Utah and New Mexico became territories, the slave trade (not slavery) was abolished in Washington, D.C., and a new Fugitive Slave Act passed. Henry Clay wrote the original omnibus, which failed in July. Stephen Douglas then passed the pieces one at a time. Fillmore signed them in September 1850.

2. He signed the Fugitive Slave Act

The Fugitive Slave Act, approved September 18, 1850, is one of the most hated laws in American history. The text is brutal. The alleged fugitive’s testimony was barred from evidence, and cases were heard “in a summary manner,” with no jury. A commissioner got a fee of ten dollars if he ruled a person was a fugitive, and five dollars if he ruled that the proof did not warrant it. Anyone who obstructed enforcement faced up to six months in prison and a $1,000 fine, plus $1,000 in damages for each fugitive lost.

let's have a compromise
just ignore those cries
runaway slave, you gotta come back now

3. He sent federal power into Northern towns

The Miller Center notes that Fillmore offended Northerners by enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law in their region. In February 1851, a Boston crowd rescued the fugitive Shadrach Minkins from a courtroom. In September 1851, at Christiana, Pennsylvania, free Black residents resisted slave catchers, and a Maryland slaveholder died. In October 1851, abolitionists freed a man known as “Jerry” in Syracuse.

One clarification: the famous Anthony Burns case in Boston came in 1854, under Franklin Pierce, not Fillmore.

it's a lose-lose, not a win-win-win
which we all know would be the best
but if we all give a little
we can all be miserable

4. His own party threw him out

The Whig Party split over the Compromise, and in 1852 it denied Fillmore the nomination. The Miller Center describes him as “rejected by his own dying party.” The Whigs chose General Winfield Scott, who lost badly to Pierce. The party did not survive.

5. He ran as the Know-Nothing candidate

In 1856, Fillmore ran for president as the candidate of the American Party, the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic “Know-Nothings.” He won 873,053 votes, about 21.5 percent of the total, and carried one state, Maryland, for 8 electoral votes. Historians disagree about how much he shared the party’s nativism. The Miller Center says he refused to take part in its anti-immigrant message, and the historian Allan Nevins said he had never attended a party meeting. Others, including Tyler Anbinder, show he joined a Know-Nothing lodge in 1855. What is not in doubt is that he took the nomination.

6. Foreign policy: Japan, Hungary and Cuba

Fillmore authorized Commodore Matthew Perry’s expedition to Japan, which sailed in November 1852 and arrived under Pierce in July 1853. He kept the United States neutral when Hungarian revolutionary Lajos Kossuth toured the country asking for support. In 1851, Cuban filibuster Narciso López was executed in Havana along with 50 Americans, an event that set off riots in New Orleans.

The bathtub that never was

Fillmore’s reputation as a joke owes a lot to H.L. Mencken. On December 28, 1917, Mencken wrote a mock history for the New York Evening Mail claiming Fillmore installed the first White House bathtub. It was a hoax, and Mencken admitted in 1926 that it was “pure buncombe,” but it spread. Harry Truman repeated it to visitors, and the Washington Post repeated it as fact in 2001. The real contribution was a library: Abigail Fillmore led the creation of the first permanent White House library. Another often-told story, that Fillmore declined an Oxford degree because he had “no learning,” has no contemporary source.

After the White House

Abigail Fillmore caught a cold at Pierce’s inauguration and died less than a month later. Fillmore returned to Buffalo, where he had helped found the University at Buffalo and served as its first chancellor. He opposed Lincoln, supported George McClellan in 1864, and died on March 8, 1874.

Millard Fillmore is my name
There's a reason you've never heard of me before

Hear the song

Read the full lyrics, browse all 43 songs, read more articles, or head to the book.

Sources

By Eric Olsen · Published