Millard Fillmore enters the record without the thunder that posterity likes to lend its protagonists. He is the kind of American the nineteenth century produced in bulk and then too often forgot: a boy born in a cabin on land not yet steady in title, apprenticed to a cloth-dresser who worked the dye into homespun, self-taught enough to teach, then self-taught enough to read law by firelight, patient enough to wait for a borrowed book, and stubborn enough to return it with marginalia. His manners are plain; his clothes are tidy without being dashing; his sentences run straight and do not wink; his pride sits in the middle distance, visible but not gaudy. He is an upstate New Yorker before upstate becomes a political noun—a man who knows the feel of a winter road in shoes that leak and the sound a creek makes when it cheats a miller.

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