The Remarkable Millard Fillmore: The Unbelievable Life of a Forgotten President - Softcover

Pendle, George

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0307339629 ISBN 13: 9780307339621

Verlag: Crown, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

Millard Fillmore has been mocked, maligned, or, most cruelly of all, ignored by generations of historians--but no more! This unbelievable new biography finally rescues the unlucky thirteenth U.S. president from the dustbin of history and shows why a man known as a blundering, arrogant, shallow, miserable failure was really our greatest leader.

In the first fully researched portrait of Fillmore ever written, the reader can finally come face-to-face with a misunderstood genius. By meticulously extrapolating outrageous conclusions from the most banal and inconclusive of facts, The Remarkable Millard Fillmore reveals the adventures of an unjustly forgotten president. He fought at the Battle of the Alamo! He shepherded slaves to freedom on the Underground Railroad! He discovered gold in California! He wrestled with the emperor of Japan! It is a list of achievements that puts those of Washington and Lincoln completely in the shade.

Refusing to be held back by established history or recorded fact, here George Pendle paints an extraordinary portrait of an ordinary man and restores the sparkle to an unfairly tarnished reputation.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

George Pendle is the author of Strange Angel. He has written for The Times, The Sunday Times, the Financial Times, and the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. He lives in New York City.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1.

I, Fillmore (1800–1819)

A Noble Birth—The Family Tree—Piratical Melancholia—Edible Pants—The Forbidden Excitements of the Frontier—The Disease of Education—Signs of Presidential Fortitude

“I was born,” the first page of Fillmore’s first journal reads, “on the snowy night of the seventh day of January, 1800." The second child and eldest son in a family of nine, Fillmore would later recount that his birth was not “marked by any striking signs in the heavens above or the earth beneath calculated to alarm the superstitious fears of the scattered inhabitants of that howling wilderness.” Nevertheless, Johann Wilson, a neighbor of the family, chose the night of Fillmore’s birth to be convinced that men from the “outer depths of the sky” had come to “vanish me away,” and threw himself under his own plow.

Fillmore’s mother and father were simple dirt farmers, poor beyond their wildest dreams, and it showed in the naming of their son.Millard was his mother’s unused maiden name, and such was their poverty that they could not afford to bestow upon their eldest son a middle name (unlike the wealthy family of Thomas Jebediah Birchard Gamaliel Redondo Jefferson). Too honest to steal even a letter, as future president Harry S. Truman would do years later, their son would become known to the world simply as Millard Fillmore.

Fillmore would fondly remember his birthplace as being “completely shut out from all the enterprises of civilization and advancement.” The typical pioneer could often be seen clad in simple bearskin and deerhide, with leather jerkin, cowhide boots, britches made of guts, ties woven of pig hair, and carved wooden hats. Hairstyles were plain, manners unvarnished, and entertainments spare. It was all in sharp contrast to the conspicuous wealth on show in the cities of the East Coast, where styles aped those of a decadent Europe. While young Fillmore’s curly blond tresses were waxed down with wolverine fat, the “pussy-top” hairstyle, popularized by Marie Antoinette and involving the careful application of a dead cat to the crown of the head, was the most fashionable cut of the day in more elevated circles.

The inhabitants of the frontier may have lacked social graces, but they made up for it in robustness. In this landscape young children swiftly became excellent hunters and expert shots. Alas, Fillmore’s family was too poor to provide him with a gun, and even when he was gifted with an old musket by a neighbor, his natural timidity saw him spend much of his youth using it to measure mud holes, “to ascertain how their width compares with their length and whether their sides are perpendicular.” Thus firearms nurtured in him a gentle, contemplative side and spawned in him a lifelong love of bogs. But while the young Millard may not have been gifted with the certitude of aristocratic inbreeding and massive wealth, as most presidents are, he was bequeathed an even more important legacy—a thick adventurous streak.


It was Millard Fillmore’s great-grandfather who had first displayed a tendency for outrageous happenstance. The extraordinary tale of John Fillmore, “a good, stout, resolute fellow,” began in 1723, when at the age of twenty-one he heard the irresistible call of the sea. Signing on to work aboard the fishing sloop the Dolphin, he had barely left port when his boat was captured by the feared pirate Captain John Phillips, and John Fillmore was pressed into joining his crew.

Upon starting his new life as a scourge of the seas, Fillmore found that Phillips’ boat, the Revenge, was not a happy vessel, for its captain was a fiercely depressed man. On his good days, Phillips could be found with a maniacal gleam in his eye, bellowing at his terrified crew to “splice the main brace” and “make fast the bunt gasket.” On one day of particularly high spirits he had even ordered his crew to board a great white shark, with fatal consequences. More often than not, however, he slunk around belowdecks, his tricorn hat in his hand, tears smudging his temporarily tattooed cheeks. The fact was that Phillips had never really excelled at piracy. A carpenter by trade, his hooked hand had been gained not in battle but in an unfortunate cabinetmaking accident on land. He had lost an eye not while boarding another ship but to the eyepiece of his sextant on a day when the waves were particularly rough. He was forever complaining about his parrot, which was defiantly mute, and his ship’s monkey, which he said was “not mischievous enough.” When the lonesome sound of Phillips’ euphonium could be heard emanating from the captain’s cabin, it was a foolish man who dared disturb him.

After taking Fillmore captive, the Revenge circled the busy shipping lanes around Barbados. But for three months they failed to see another ship and as a result almost starved to death. Phillips’ deep melancholy was lifted only when his carpentry skills were called upon to saw off the leg of one of his crew, injured during a game of deck quoits. The subsequent death of his patient sent him into an even darker mood and left the Revenge still awaiting its first peg-legged sailor. The incident led to much whispered conversation around the water coolie.

Fed on this diet of mutilation, relentless intimidation, and hapless piracy, it was not long before John Fillmore grew restless and longed for his homestead once more. One day, while the other pirates were eating their daily serving of barnacles, Fillmore, who was in the crow’s nest, plunged his dagger into the mainsail and slid down its face, slicing it in two in the process. According to the statement he would later swear in court, he was greeted by “a smattering of applause” from the other crew members and a scream from the enraged Phillips, who was mad with jealousy at never having done anything so piratical in his life. The two fought across the ship, cutlasses flashing in the sunlight, swinging from ropes and rigging. The pirate captain seemed to have gained the upper hand when the duel reached the pristine plank that stuck out from the side of the Revenge, a plank no man’s feet had ever walked upon. As Phillips edged Fillmore toward its end with his sword, cackling demonically, he seemed for a moment to lose himself in a reverie. Turning to his astonished crew, he cried, “Look at me, boys, top of the world!” At which point Fillmore stepped forward and succinctly sliced the pirate’s head “in two.” Taking control of the ship, Fillmore sailed it to Boston, where he turned the body of Phillips over to the authorities. It was said that, despite the grievous wounds he had suffered, Phillips’ body had never looked so peaceful.

Millard Fillmore’s grandfather Nathaniel displayed equally heroic, if more landbound, qualities. At the age of seventeen he had enlisted to fight in the French and Indian War, one of the many conflicts that raged across North America in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.7 But Nathaniel Fillmore was no luckier than his father and, having been wounded in a woodland skirmish, was left for dead by his companions. In such a situation many other men would have resigned themselves to a slow and agonizing death by starvation, but not Nathaniel. As days turned into weeks and the last kernels of corn in his knapsack disappeared, Nathaniel turned to eating his shoes. When a rescue party stumbled upon him some weeks later he was described as being half naked and in the midst of roasting his blanket. When asked if he needed assistance, Nathaniel politely declined, asking only if he could eat his rescuers’...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Crown
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0307339629
• ISBN 13: 9780307339621
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland