Millard Fillmore by Paul Finkelman

Millard Fillmore by Paul Finkelman

The overlooked president whose shortsightedness and stubbornness fractured the nation and sowed the seeds of civil war

In the summer of 1850, America was at a terrible crossroads. Congress was in an uproar over slavery, and it was not clear if a compromise could be found. In the midst of the debate, President Zachary Taylor suddenly took ill and died. The presidency, and the crisis, now fell to the little-known vice president from upstate New York.

In this eye-opening biography, the legal scholar and historian Paul Finkelman reveals how Millard Fillmore's response to the crisis he inherited set the country on a dangerous path that led to the Civil War. He shows how Fillmore stubbornly catered to the South, alienating his fellow Northerners and creating a fatal rift in the Whig Party, which would soon disappear from American politics--as would Fillmore himself, after failing to regain the White House under the banner of the anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic "Know Nothing" Party.

Though Fillmore did have an eye toward the future, dispatching Commodore Matthew Perry on the famous voyage that opened Japan to the West and on the central issues of the age--immigration, religious toleration, and most of all slavery--his myopic vision led to the destruction of his presidency, his party, and ultimately, the Union itself.

Paul Finkelman is the President William McKinley Distinguished Professor of Law and Public Policy and Senior Fellow in the Government Law Center at Albany Law School. His many books include Slavery in the Courtroom (1985), which received the Joseph L. Andrews Award from the American Association of Law Libraries; His Soul Goes Marching On; Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid (1995), which was a History Book Club selection; and Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson (second edition, 2002); and he is the co-author of A March of Liberty: A Constitutional History of the United States (2002). He edited Dred Scott v. Sandford: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford/St. Martin's, 1997), another volume in the Bedford Series in History and Culture. Finkelman has also published numerous scholarly articles on American legal history and race relations, and he lectures frequently on these subjects. In 1995, he was designated Virginia Historian of the Year by the Virginia Social Science Association.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780805087154
ISBN 10	080508715X
Title	Millard Fillmore
Author	Paul Finkelman
Series	American Presidents Ser
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Times Books
Year published	2011-05-10
Number of pages	192
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.