pplpod Episode 54 follows Millard Fillmore from Buffalo lawyer and Canal-era Whig to a vice president who inherited a nation on the brink. We trace the sudden 1850 handoff after Zachary Taylor’s death and the hard bet Fillmore placed on the Compromise of 1850—California statehood, Texas–New Mexico borders, territorial status for Utah and New Mexico, and the controversial Fugitive Slave Act he signed and enforced. We unpack the split between Union-preserving pragmatism and moral cost, the fracturing of the Whig coalition, and Fillmore’s foreign-policy forays—from backing Perry’s mission that opened the door to Japan to cracking down on private filibuster invasions of Cuba. Then the afterlife: a 1856 run with the American (Know-Nothing) Party, civic work in Buffalo, and a legacy still argued over—moderation as glue, or solvent, in a country coming apart.

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