President Millard Fillmore, taken in 1850 by Mathew Brady

Millard Fillmore (January 7, 1800 – March 8, 1874) was the 13th President of the United States, serving from 1850 until 1853, and the last member of the Whig Party to hold that office. He was the second Vice President to assume the Presidency upon the death of a sitting President, succeeding Zachary Taylor who died of what is thought to be acute gastroenteritis. Fillmore was never elected President; after serving out Taylor's term, he failed to gain the nomination for the Presidency of the Whigs in the 1852 presidential election, and, four years later, in the 1856 presidential election, he again failed to win election as the Know Nothing Party and Whig candidate.

Fillmore was born in a log cabin in Cayuga County in the Finger Lakes region of New York State, to Nathaniel Fillmore and Phoebe Millard, as the second of nine children and the eldest son. (As this was three weeks after George Washington's death, Fillmore was the first U.S. President born after the death of a former president.) He later lived in East Aurora, New York in the southtowns region south of Buffalo, New York. Though a Unitarian in later life,Fillmore was descended from Scottish Presbyterians on his father's side and English dissenters on his mother's. His father apprenticed him to a brutal cloth maker in Sparta, New York, at age fourteen to learn the cloth-making trade. He left after four months but subsequently took another apprenticeship in the same trade at New Hope, New York. He struggled to obtain an education under frontier conditions, attending New Hope Academy for six months in 1819. Later that same year, he began to clerk for Judge Walter Wood of Montville, New York, under whom Fillmore began to study law.