Millard Fillmore

by Robert Scarry

From the time he left office in 1853, President Millard Fillmore has become increasingly shrouded in mystery and stereotyped by anecdotes with slender connections to facts. The real Fillmore was not the weak and boring figurehead many Americans believe he was. This account of Fillmore's life is drawn largely from his family's personal papers, many of which have previously been suppressed or were unavailable or believed lost. It presents Fillmore as his own letters do, and as his friends, family members, and contemporaries saw him, as a distinguished and honorable man who was also a strong and effective president. This comprehensive work includes photographs, a genealogy of the Fillmore family, a chronology, a bibliography, and an index.

Genres: Presidents, Biography, Nonfiction, History

432 pages, Paperback

First published January 26, 2010

Reviews

[Elyse · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this book. The style was a bit choppy. It seems as if the author, upon finding an interesting bit of info during his research, would add it to his manuscript with no rhyme or reason. He just threw it in because it was a "fun fact". I am attempting to read a biography of every president in chronological order. I dreaded reading about Millard Fillmore because I had heard he was a dull and inadequate president. Not so! I was surprised when I read this book. He was stong willed when he had to be. Like Lincoln, he was born in a log cabin and was mostly self-taught until his late teens. Also like Lincoln, he would do anything needed to preserve the Union. He was from upstate New York and against slavery. Even though he knew it was morally wrong, he signed into law the Fugitive Slave Act. It was his strategy to settle down the southern states and prevent civil war. Plus he was a stickler about following the dictates of the US Constitution. At the time there was still no constitutional law preventing slavery. He believed it was the job of the president to strictly follow the Constitution and thus northern states were required to return runaway slaves with his signing of this law. This stance was one of the basic reasons he was not re-elected. He was a much more complicated character than I had anticipated.

[Bill · Rating 3 out of 5]

Robert Scarry’s biography of Millard Fillmore is positively encyclopedic. And by that, I mean that it reads like an extremely long encyclopedia entry - right down to the odd decision to publish it in a two-columns-per-page format.

It would be ungracious to characterize Scarry as a Fillmore fanboy, since this earnest effort is admirable in its aim to rescue Fillmore from historical obscurity. Scarry was a high school history teacher in Fillmore’s birth town of Moravia, New York, who apparently decided to write a book about Fillmore out of a mix of historical curiosity and hometown pride. "I did not approach Fillmore with reverence,” he explains in his introduction, “but with sympathy as a much maligned and misunderstood individual who served at a critical time in our history."

While Robert Rayback’s 1959 work stands as the definitive scholarly account of Fillmore’s life and presidency, Scarry had access to an abundance of Fillmore documents and correspondence released after Rayback wrote his book. But nobody did much with any of it in the decades since it became available. So while under any other circumstance, an amateur biographer’s attempt at telling the life story of a president might be easily dismissed, Scarry gets props for taking it upon himself to do what no professional historian or academic seemed inclined to do.

As a result, Scarry manages to fill in a lot of gaps and gives us a good sense of Fillmore as a person - using letters from Fillmore and others to describe his personality, his family, everyday life in the White House, and so on. Some of this devolves into minutiae - what his kids studied in school, what was on the menu at nearly every banquet he attended - which contributes to what often gives this book an encyclopedic feel.

This recurs throughout the book, as endless trivial facts and details often detract from whatever story Scarry is trying to tell, as when he describes Fillmore’s law office as “a one story frame structure of the early Greek revival with two fluted Doric columns at each end which supported a plain cornice and large pediment above the portico and columns," and the seating arrangements in Congress, where "Fillmore sat near the center of the chamber in the fourth circular row behind his mahogany desk #87, the third armchair seat from the center aisle." Later, he goes on for several pages about whether Fillmore had the White House’s first bathtub installed (the short answer: no).

So what this book lacks in lyricism it certainly makes up for in thoroughness. And some of the personal stories seem shoehorned into out-of-place chapters that disrupt the narrative and the timeline of events - all of the color and personality that might have been better interspersed throughout the narrative is instead unloaded into discrete chapters.

But despite the uneven structure and often uninspired writing, the book is thoroughly researched, with meticulous end notes, so Scarry clearly did his homework. And if he hadn’t brought these stories to light, they might still be sitting in dusty archives waiting for some other biographer to do so.

Scarry’s fondness for Fillmore is apparent throughout the book. He credits Fillmore for trying to compromise and keep the peace in the years leading up to the Civil War, he liberally quotes Fillmore’s contemporaries who praised him, and frequently criticizes historians who have been too "negative" in their assessment of Fillmore. He gets a bit more defensive as the book progresses - instead of demonstrating why Fillmore is unjustly dismissed, he often resorts to merely telling us again and again that others have simply gotten it wrong.

So it’s curious, in his epilogue, that he concludes Fillmore wasn't "a great or near-great president," but deserves to be ranked "at least high in the average category." Writing and so thoroughly researching a revisionist biography to prove that a president wasn’t bad but was instead thoroughly average, seems like an awfully modest goal. But at least Scarry is honest in not overstating his case, as he merely calls for a mild reassessment of Fillmore’s legacy.

This book is far from perfect, and a chore to read at times. But there are so few Fillmore biographies available, and Scarry made good use out of material that wasn’t available to Rayback, so his book is a worthy addition to the Fillmore scholarship, such as it is. As a result, just like his subject, I can wholeheartedly praise Scarry’s book as being thoroughly average - which, considering the alternative, is not too bad of an assessment at all.

[Jonathan Brown · Rating 2 out of 5]

Millard Fillmore is one of those American presidents about whom most people know very little, despite the fact that he assumed the presidency at an extraordinarily tense moment in the nation’s history. When Zachary Taylor died in the summer of 1850, Fillmore was suddenly elevated to the office just as the country was fracturing over sectional tensions that would eventually lead to the American Civil War.

Biographies of Fillmore are surprisingly few, particularly modern ones, so I decided to pick up this older volume to learn more about the man and his times. In many respects, it was an interesting read. The book takes a traditional cradle-to-grave approach, tracing Fillmore’s life from his modest beginnings through his political career, presidency, and long post-presidential years.

One aspect I appreciated was the attention given to Fillmore’s life after leaving the White House. Many presidential biographies rush through the post-presidency, but this book spends a meaningful amount of time exploring that later period, which I found both informative and engaging.

At the same time, the narrative itself felt somewhat uneven. The structure occasionally jumps forward and backward in time, and certain themes and events are repeated more often than necessary. As a result, the book sometimes feels a bit disjointed, and it seems as though a stronger editorial hand could have helped tighten the story and improve the overall flow.

Another unusual feature of the book is its formatting. Rather than using full-width pages of text, the book is printed in columns. Some readers have mentioned finding this distracting, but I personally did not find it nearly as problematic as I expected. After a few pages, it became fairly easy to adjust to.

In the end, while this biography may not be the most polished or modern treatment of Fillmore’s life, it still fills an important gap in a field where scholarship on this lesser-known president remains relatively limited. For readers particularly interested in obscure corners of presidential history, it provides a serviceable overview of a man who briefly stood at the center of a nation in crisis.

Overall, I would rate it about 2.5 stars—not a standout biography, but still a worthwhile read for those interested in learning more about one of America’s most overlooked presidents.

[Elaine · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a longer book than I intended to read and when some of the early chapters began describing the number and types of flowers that bordered the eastern (?) side of the house, I wondered if I would make it through. The attention to detail later made the difference in a better understanding of this man who always acted with integrity and tried to raise his children to be better than himself. I came away with great admiration for this president. I chose this biography because it was written after correspondence that was to be burned upon his death were found in an attic of the house where his executor had lived and decided the letters were too valuable to burn.

[Diane]

This biography is very detailed, sometimes exhaustively and without discernible organization, but I found it valuable for its frequent use of Fillmore’s letters. Offers a lot of insight into the man, and while it is decidedly slanted in evaluating his political career, it does provide a balance to the many dismissals you read elsewhere.

[Jeremy Maddux · Rating 3 out of 5]

This president is just not too terribly exciting. Authors like Rayback and Scarry have certainly given noble efforts at telling his story, though.