Fellow Western New Yorker Bill Kauffman's Triumvirate

"The three best presidents have been, not surprisingly, Upstate New Yorkers: Grover Cleveland, Martin Van Buren, and Millard Fillmore," he writes in this NRO complitation — The Good, the Bad, and William Henry Harrison. His contibution focuses on the third:

Millard Fillmore, usually a punch line, is the sore thumb in that trio. He erred badly in signing the Fugitive Slave Act and he ought not to have dallied with the Know Nothings, but, to his credit, Fillmore ranks with the Quaker Herbert Hoover as the most pacific president in our history. Before going oval, Fillmore had opposed the disgraceful Mexican War. As president he resisted, with grit and principle, the Democrat expansionists and proto-imperialists who wished the U.S. to annex Cuba. And in retirement, he was a Peace Whig, opposed to both Lincolnian warmaking and the tantrums of Southern fire-eaters. Alas, standing against war is the best way to sink to “below average” or “failure” in those Schlesingerian polls that measure “greatness” by how effectively a president consolidates power in the executive branch and the imperial city.

Fillmore was a superb ex-president. He founded the Buffalo Historical Society and read Shakespeare to toiling shop hands. Queen Victoria is said to have remarked that Millard Fillmore was the handsomest man she had ever met. But then we men of the Niagara Frontier do incline to a certain comeliness.

Readers of this blog will remember my fondness for Grover Cleveland, about whom I blog whenever I can — The Tao of Grover Cleveland. I need to do more research into the life of Martin Van Buren, with whom I share a common ethnicity and about whom I did my first serious piece of scholarship in elementary school. He was "the first president who was not of British (i.e. English, Welsh or Scottish) or Irish descent," "the first president to be born an American citizen (his predecessors were born before the revolution)," and "the only president not to have spoken English as a first language, having grown up speaking Dutch."