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Millard Fillmore Presidential $1 Coin — 13th President, 1850 - 1853
• Born: 7 January 1800
• Birthplace: Cayuga County, New York
• Died: 8 March 1874
• Best Known As: President of the United States, 1850-53
Millard Fillmore came from poor, uneducated beginnings to become a New York lawyer who in 1833 was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. After serving in congress, Fillmore, a Whig, was Zachary Taylor's vice president. When Taylor died in office, Fillmore became the 13th president.
His attempts to compromise on the slavery issue left him with few fans on either side, and his stay in the White House was brief. In the election of 1852 Fillmore failed to get the nomination at the Whig convention (the candidate from the Democratic Party, Franklin Pierce, went on to win the election). In the election of 1856 Fillmore ran for president as a candidate of the Know-Nothing Party, but carried only Maryland.
Fillmore married his schoolteacher, Abigail Powers, in 1826; she died a month after he left office and in 1858 he married a wealthy widow, Mrs. Caroline C. McIntosh.
After President Lincoln's assassination, a mob, unforgiving of Fillmore's sympathy for the South, surrounded his house and draped it in black cloth, then splashed ink on it.
Millard Fillmore, the 13th U.S. President, was born in a log cabin on January 7, 1800, in Locke (now Summerhill), N.Y. The second of nine children, he worked on his father's farm as a boy and became an indentured apprentice to a cloth maker as a teenager. After studying with a county judge, he began to practice law in 1823.
In 1828 Fillmore entered politics, serving as a New York state assemblyman and later in the U.S. House of Representatives, where he chaired the powerful Committee on Ways and Means. While comptroller of New York, he was elected to serve as President Zachary Taylor's vice president in 1848 as a Whig. Upon Taylor's death in July 1850, Fillmore became President.
While Fillmore was in office, Congress passed the Compromise of 1850, a package of stop-gap measures which effectively postponed the Civil War for a decade. He also ordered Commodore Matthew C. Perry to lead a naval expedition in 1852 to convince Japan's shogunate government to open relations with the U.S. This paved the way for the 1854 Treaty of Kanagawa, the first between the two countries, thus ending Japanese isolationism.
After two unsuccessful bids for election to the presidency in his own right, he retired to Buffalo, N.Y. In 1862 former President Fillmore was named the first chancellor of the University of Buffalo, now the State University of New York at Buffalo. He died in Buffalo on March 8, 1874.