Born today was Millard Fillmore.
When POTUS*, sedition’s voices grew shrill more.
On the issue of slavery he straddled the fence.
He isn’t remembered, ‘cept in the past tense.**
*A 2017 C-Span poll of historians ranked Fillmore as the seventh-worst president. In his profile of Fillmore for the Miller Center of Public Affairs, historian Michael Holt writes: From the modern perspective, Fillmore seems almost an invisible man among Presidents. Books on him are all but nonexistent.
**There used to be a Millard Fillmore Society whose members gathered on his birthday to remember him. Alas, it, itself, has been forgotten.
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