First of First Ladies to hold a job after marriage, Abigail Fillmore was helping
her husband's career. She was also revealing her most striking personal
characteristic: eagerness to learn and pleasure in teaching others.

She was born in Saratoga County, New York, in 1798, while it was still on the
fringe of civilization. Her father, a locally prominent Baptist preacher named
Lemuel Powers, died shortly thereafter. Courageously, her mother moved on
westward, thinking her scanty funds would go further in a less settled region,
and ably educated her small son and daughter beyond the usual frontier level
with the help of her husband's library.

Shared eagerness for schooling formed a bond when Abigail Powers at 21 met
Millard Fillmore at 19, both students at a recently opened academy in the
village of New Hope. Although she soon became young Fillmore's inspiration, his
struggle to make his way as a lawyer was so long and ill paid that they were not
married until February 1826. She even resumed teaching school after the
marriage. And then her only son, Millard Powers, was born in 1828.

Attaining prosperity at last, Fillmore bought his family a six-room house in
Buffalo, where little Mary Abigail was born in 1832. Enjoying comparative
luxury, Abigail learned the ways of society as the wife of a Congressman. She
cultivated a noted flower garden; but much of her time, as always, she spent
reading. In 1847, Fillmore was elected state comptroller; with the children
away in boarding school and college, the parents moved temporarily to Albany.

In 1849, Abigail Fillmore came to Washington as wife of the Vice President; 16
months later, after Zachary Taylor's death at a height of sectional crisis, the
Fillmores moved into the White House.

Even after the period of official mourning the social life of the Fillmore
administration remained subdued. The First Lady presided with grace at state
dinners and receptions; but a permanently injured ankle made her Friday-evening
levees an ordeal--two hours of standing at her husband's side to greet the
public. In any case, she preferred reading or music in private. Pleading her
delicate health, she entrusted many routine social duties to her attractive
daughter, "Abby." With a special appropriation from Congress, she spent
contented hours selecting books for a White House library and arranging them in
the oval room upstairs, where Abby had her piano, harp, and guitar. Here, wrote
a friend, Mrs. Fillmore "could enjoy the music she so much loved, and the
conversation of...cultivated society...."

Despite chronic poor health, Mrs. Fillmore stayed near her husband through the
outdoor ceremonies of President Pierce's inauguration while a raw northeast
wind whipped snow over the crowd. Returning chilled to the Willard Hotel, she
developed pneumonia; she died there on March 30, 1853. The House of
Representatives and the Senate adjourned, and public offices closed in respect,
as her family took her body home to Buffalo for burial.