Millard Fillmore, Utah's Friend in the White House BY W A Y N E K .
HINTON
1850 VICE-PRESIDENT MILLARD FILLMORE succeeded to the presidency of the United States upon the death of Zachary Taylor. The timing of Fillmore's succession coincided with the great debate over territorial expansion and rising sectionalism in America. Part of that controversy involved the political status of the Mormons and their proposed state of Deseret. Fillmore's handling of the Mormons' political concerns won him acclaim in Utah, but America's thirteenth president has not been treated kindly by most professional historians. In 1948 and again in 1962 Arthur M. Schlesinger asked panels of historians and political scientists to rate past presidents of the United States in categories ranging from "great" on one end of the spectrum to "failure" on the other. In the 1948 poll rating twenty-nine past presidents, Millard Fillmore ranked twenty-fourth. Fillmore placed twenty-sixth among the thirty-one presidents considered in the 1962 poll.1 In 1970 Gary M. Maranell conducted a more complex poll that evaluated thirty-three former presidents in seven categories. Fillmore ranked twenty-ninth on prestige, thirtieth on strength of action, twentyeighth on presidential activeness, ninth on idealism, thirteenth on flexibility, twenty-ninth on accomplishments, and thirty-second on amount of information available. Historians had less information about only one president, Franklin Pierce.2 There are but tw7o biographies of Fillmore, William Elliot Grifns's Millard Fillmore: Constructive Statesman, Defender of the Constitution, President of the United States, a eulogistic biography of little IN
THE SUMMER OF
Dr. H i n t o n is professor of history at Southern U t a h State College and a member of the Board of State History. 1 Life, November 1, 1948; New York Times, July 29, 1962. 2 Journal of American History 57 (1970) : 104-13.
