Millard Fillmore

Raised in modest circumstances in upstate New York, he had little formal schooling at first and largely educated himself while apprenticed in his youth. He became a lawyer, served in the New York legislature and the U.S. House of Representatives, and built a reputation as a careful, practical Whig rather than a dramatic public figure.

He entered the presidency in July 1850 when President Zachary Taylor died in office. Fillmore backed the Compromise of 1850, a package of measures meant to ease tensions between free and slave states, but his support for enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act made him deeply unpopular in much of the North and helped damage his party.

After leaving office, he never returned to the presidency, though he ran again in 1856 with the Know Nothing, or American, Party. He spent much of his later life in Buffalo, New York, where he was active in civic and charitable work, and he remains one of the more debated and often overlooked presidents of the years just before the Civil War.