A Peek Inside The Home of the President and First Family
By Stuart Mitchner
This White House Book Scene features a remarkable first couple who bonded through books and reading, a shared interest that led to the creation of the first White House library. Equally remarkable is the rags to political riches back story of one of the most obscure American presidents, Millard Fillmore (1800-1874), whose personal history has a backwoods, born-in-a-log cabin, reading-by-candlelight charm that prefigures the story of Abraham Lincoln, who moved into the White House a decade later.
As Princeton University history professor Sean Wilentz points out in the lead essay in Catherine M. Parisian’s The First White House Library (Penn State University Press 2010), Fillmore “had a greater appreciation for literature and letters than most presidents.” Having grown up in rural poverty, he “prized books and libraries as the chief vehicles of his own ambitions,” and his courtship of his “doted on” teacher Abigail Powers (1798-1853) was “nourished by books.” On his various business and political journeys as a self-made lawyer and member of Congress, Fillmore “made it a point to bring books back to his wife, carton loads at a time, as presents; and well before he became president in 1850, “he had accumulated an impressive library of his own.” During his brief time in office (1850-1853), the Fillmores entertained cultural celebrities of the day, including Washington Irving, the visiting English novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, and the Swedish nightingale Jenny Lind. more