Did You Know?

Did you Know?
The following, courtesy of Newspaper Metro, gives details and facts about our 13th President of the U.S. Millard Fillmore.

President’s Day spotlight- Millard Fillmore:
Millard Filmore was the 13th President of the United States, assuming the nation’s highest office when President Zachary Taylor died in office after serving a little more than a year as president.
Fillmore, a Whig lawyer from western New York who served as Taylor’s Vice President, was the last American president who was not affiliated with the Democratic or Republican parties.
An early member of the Whig party, in 1851, Fillmore became the only president in American history to appoint a Whig Supreme Court Justice after his recess appointment of Benjamin Robbins Curtis was confirmed by the United States Senate in December of that year.
Fillmore rose to occupy the White House after a humble upbringing in the Finger Lakes region of New York. At 15, the future president was apprenticed to a cloth dresser but was admitted to the bar in 1823 and soon became a successful lawyer in Buffalo.
Fillmore soon ventured into politics as well, using his Whig connections to run for the House of Representatives, where he served for eight years. By 1848, Fillmore was realizing even more ambitious pursuits, as he was elected to serve as Taylor’s Vice President.
He would not serve long in that role, as an illness that befell President Taylor on July 4, 1850, would claim his life just five days later. That thrust Fillmore into the presidency and right into the heart of heated debate surrounding the Compromise of 1850, a package of bills that aimed to defuse tensions and confrontations between the slave states of the south and the free states of the north.
Fillmore would ultimately sign all five bills in the Compromise of 1850 into law, but it was his support for the Fugitive Slave Act, a controversial element of the compromise that required all escaped slaves, upon capture, be returned to their masters and that officials and citizens in free states had to cooperate with the law.
Signing and enforcing the act would come back to haunt Fillmore in 1852, when he decided to run for a full term as President. The Whig Party, still upset that Fillmore supported the act, chose not to nominate Fillmore.
That decision effectively ended Fillmore’s political career, though he did make a memorable run as a third party candidate in the election of 1856. In that election, Fillmore was the presidential nominee of the American Party, winning 21 percent of the vote, which was one of the best showings a third-party presidential candidate ever produced.
Millard Fillmore passed away on March 8, 1874, from complications of a stroke.