The oddly named president whose shortsightedness and stubbornness fractured the state and sowed the seeds of civil war

In the summer time of 1850, the United States used to be at a negative crossroads. Congress was once in an uproar over slavery, and it was once now not transparent if a compromise can be came across. in the middle of the talk, President Zachary Taylor all at once took sick and died. The presidency, and the difficulty, now fell to the little-known vice chairman from upstate New York.

In this eye-opening biography, the felony student and historian Paul Finkelman unearths how Millard Fillmore's reaction to the hindrance he inherited set the rustic on a perilous direction that resulted in the Civil conflict. He exhibits how Fillmore stubbornly catered to the South, alienating his fellow Northerners and making a deadly rift within the Whig occasion, which might quickly disappear from American politics—as may Fillmore himself, after failing to regain the White apartment lower than the banner of the anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic "Know not anything" Party.

Though Fillmore did have a watch towards the long run, dispatching Commodore Matthew Perry at the well-known voyage that opened Japan to the West and at the primary problems with the age—immigration, non secular toleration, and such a lot of all slavery—his myopic imaginative and prescient ended in the destruction of his presidency, his celebration, and finally, the Union itself.