An "inept, vacuous, doughface" American President After being virtually ignored for 16 months as U.S. Vice President to POTUS 12 Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore (1800-1874) suddenly and unexpectedly became POTUS 13 on July 9, 1850, when Taylor died in office. His presidency was unremarkable, and his legacy includes such abominations as The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which mandated that even free states must capture and return escaped slaves to their masters in slave states. Toward the end of his inherited term of office, his own party refused to nominate him as their candidate in the 1852 election. According to one of his biographers, George Pendle, Fillmore was dubbed by his contemporaries as “inept,” “vacuous” and “doughface.” Pendle wrote: “Fillmore reminds us that the platitude that ‘anyone can be president’ is as much a threat as a promise.” I wrote about Fillmore last year in "Lessons from the Nineteenth Century: Immigration, Xenophobia and an Inept President" (https://wp.me/p8m4Hu-2c). Image: Daguerreotype potrait of Millard Fillmore, 1949, by M.B. Brady & H.E. Howland, courtesy Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University Library (https://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Record/3438513?image_id=1070228). #History #USPresidents #MillardFillmore #POTUS13 https://www.instagram.com/p/Bot8x_rg5F1/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=lo7v5wkkdph6
