Know-Nothings. Fillmore and his running mate, Andrew Jackson Donelson (the homicidal maniac’s nephew), believed that there was nothing wrong with America that persecuting all its German, Irish, and Catholic immigrants couldn’t fix. As dumb as Fillmore sounds, the winner on Election Day might have been even dumber: James “Old Buck” Buchanan. Though Buchanan failed to avert the Civil War, he sprang into action to defuse a military confrontation with the British over the shooting of a solitary pig in Canada. (This skirmish actually happened; google “Pig War.”) The following year, the American
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