Immediately upon acceding to the presidency after the death of Zachary Taylor in July 1850, Millard Fillmore was thrust into the roiling debate over the extension of slavery to new territories gained in the Mexican War. This debate would result in the Compromise of 1850, a watershed event in the years leading up to the Civil War. in October of the same year, Fillmore wrote a letter to Dorothea Dix, the reformer and tireless advocate of state and federal construction of insane asylums. He expressed his horror at Dix's findings that large numbers of the insane were held in prisons and at the fact that the North contained disproportionately more lunatics than the South; but he professed himself pleased with the new asylum at Trenton, New Jersey, which had “forms more light and airy” than the one in Tennessee. What really fascinated him, though, was a specimen Dix had sent to him of a “lunatic's poetry to Jenny Lind, which,” wrote Fillmore, “is a very creditable production. I am not certain but the partition which separates madness from genius is much thinner than most of us suspect.”
Why would a president embroiled in the bitterest dispute in the history of the Republic take the time to comment on a lunatic's poem composed for a popular singer? of all the grounds for comparing New Jersey with Tennessee in 1850, why would Millard Fillmore choose the issue of ventilation and lighting in their insane asylums? From this vignette, Fillmore may come across as out of touch with reality, preoccupied by trifles. But what I hope to convey here is that Fillmore's interest in the poetic efforts of an antebellum “lunatic” is not evidence of an intellectual failing or a sentimental indulgence that distracted him from national affairs. the precise meaning of the . . .