awake"Millard Fillmore's legacy includes some visionary ideas that he could not accomplish: pushing for a transcontinental railroad (which Abraham Lincoln would begin); opening Japan to American diplomacy and trade (which Franklin Pierce would complete); maintaining a dominant American presence in Hawaii (allowing William McKinley to annex the islands); and pushing for a Central American canal (which Theodore Roosevelt would initiate).
"But on the central issues of the age his vision was myopic and his legacy is worse. He opened the west to slavery and destroyed the Missouri Compromise line. This total appeasement of the South only encouraged new demands for more land for slavery. His solution to the issue of slavery in the territories simply led to the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 and more conflict in the west. He signed and aggressively - indeed fanatically -implemented the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which was arguably the most oppressive law in American history. He ran for president on a ticket that openly attacked foreigners, immigrants and Catholics. In retirement, Fillmore opposed emancipation and campaigned for a peace that would have left millions of African Americans in chains. In the end, Fillmore was always on the wrong side of the great moral and political issues of the age: immigration, religious toleration, equality and, most of all, slavery."
I know some might accuse me of having a remarkable grasp of the obvious, but this sounds to me like what the internets would probably describe as an "epic fail."