Millard Fillmore

President of the United States (1850-1853)

• Born: January 7, 1800
• Birthplace: Summerhill, New York
• Died: March 8, 1874
• Place of death: Buffalo, New York

Fillmore’s record as the thirteenth president of the United States is generally regarded as undistinguished; however, his push for legislation to resolve a deadlock between northern and southern states over the admission of California to the Union and the extension of slavery into new territories may have postponed the Civil War for a decade.

Early Life

Millard Fillmore was born in a log cabin on the farm that his father, Nathaniel, and his uncle Calvin had purchased in 1799. Nathaniel and his wife, Phoebe Millard Fillmore, had come to the western frontier from Vermont, prompted by the prospect of more fertile land in the Military Tract set aside by New York State after the American Revolution in order to pay bonuses to veterans. In time, there were nine children in the Fillmore family; Millard was the second child and first son.

In 1815, Millard Fillmore was apprenticed to a wool carder and cloth-dresser at New Hope, near the farm in Niles, New York, that Nathaniel Fillmore had leased after title to the property in Locke proved invalid. He attended the district school in New Hope, teaching there and in Buffalo schools after 1818, and there he met his future wife Abigail Powers. Fillmore spent the years between this first acquaintance and their marriage, on February 5, 1826, establishing himself as a lawyer. He studied law from 1820 under Judge Walter Wood in Montville, New York, and in 1822 began work as a clerk in the Buffalo, New York, law firm of Asa Rice and Joseph Clary. Even though he had not completed the usual seven-year period of study, Fillmore was admitted to practice before the Court of Common Pleas and opened his own law practice in East Aurora, New York, in 1823. He moved to Buffalo in 1830 and in time went into law partnership with Nathan K. Hall and Solomon G. Haven.

Fillmore’s appearance and public manner marked him for a career in politics. Just under six feet tall, he had broad shoulders, an erect carriage, and bright blue eyes. His hair was thick and yellow, but by middle age it had turned snowy white. His voice was deep and masculine. Never an orator like Daniel Webster or Edward Everett, both of whom served him as secretary of state, Fillmore struck juries and audiences as carefully prepared, sincere, and unaffected. An associate of Thurlow Weed in formation of the Anti-Masonic Party, he was elected three times to the New York State Assembly (1829-1831). Fillmore’s chief accomplishment in the legislature was authorship of a law eliminating the imprisonment of debtors and providing for a bankruptcy law. Characteristic of his mature political style was the careful balancing of individual and business interests that this legislation achieved.

Life’s Work

Because the chief impetus behind the formation of the Anti-Masonic Party was reelection of John Quincy Adams and defeat of Andrew Jackson in the election of 1828, the party lost strength when Jackson was elected, although it retained local influence chiefly in New York, Pennsylvania, and New England. Fillmore was elected to the House of Representatives as an Anti-Mason (1833-1835), but he followed Thurlow Weed into the newly formed Whig Party in 1834. Subsequently, he was sent to Congress as a Whig (1837-1843) after William Henry Harrison was elected president in 1840. Fillmore served as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, and in that position he engineered congressional approval of protective tariff legislation in 1842.

Mentioned as a senatorial or vice presidential candidate prior to the 1844 election, Fillmore accepted Weed’s advice—perhaps intended to keep the vice presidential prospects of William H. Seward alive—that he run for governor of New York. He was defeated by the popular Democrat Silas Wright but came back in 1847 to win election as New York’s comptroller. Fillmore and Seward were both favorite son prospects for the Whig vice presidential nomination in 1848. The presidential candidates were Henry Clay, General Winfield Scott, and General Zachary Taylor .

When the convention chose Taylor, and some delegates objected to Abbott Lawrence of Massachusetts as his running mate, the antislavery Clay delegates put their votes behind Fillmore and assured him the vice presidential slot. He was not assured of influence within the Taylor administration itself when, having won the election, the new president took office in 1849. William H. Seward, Weed’s ally and the newly elected senator for New York, worked to minimize Fillmore’s influence on the new president. Unable to control party patronage in his home state, Fillmore was limited chiefly to his constitutional duty of presiding over the debates of the US Senate.

California had petitioned for admission to the Union. There were thirty states at the time, fifteen slave and fifteen free, and California would tip the balance in the debate over slavery. The same issue complicated discussion of territorial governments for Utah and New Mexico, acquired at the end of the Mexican War, and an outstanding Texas-New Mexico border dispute. Abolitionists and Free-Soilers campaigned to limit the expansion of slavery into new states and territories, even trying to prohibit the slave trade in the District of Columbia, while southern political leaders argued for the extension of slavery and for more vigorous enforcement of laws requiring the capture and return of fugitive slaves.

Senator Henry Clay, the support of whose delegates at the Whig convention of 1848 had assured Fillmore the vice presidential nomination, proposed an omnibus package of compromise legislation to deal with these issues. President Taylor, though a slaveholder from Louisiana, indicated that he would veto the bill if it extended slavery into the territories gained from Mexico. He also claimed he would use federal troops to resolve the Texas-New Mexico boundary dispute. Initially, Fillmore supported Taylor’s position on Clay’s omnibus bill, but in 1850, he advised the president that he would vote to accept the package if required to cast a tiebreaking vote in the Senate. Fillmore never had to cast that vote. Taylor became ill after attending ceremonies at the Washington Monument on July 4, and died on July 9, 1850, making Millard Fillmore the thirteenth president of the United States.

After taking the oath of office and accepting the resignations of Taylor’s entire cabinet, Fillmore moved to occupy a pro-Union political position. He appointed Daniel Webster as secretary of state and John Crittenden as attorney general, and he filled the rest of the cabinet with equally moderate men. Fillmore repeatedly insisted that slavery was morally repugnant to him, but he also said that he intended to be the president of the entire United States. He was prepared to make compromises in the interest of national unity.

When Senator Stephen A. Douglas, a Democrat, took over Senate management of Clay’s stalled “omnibus bill,” Fillmore indicated his willingness to sign the provisions of the omnibus as separate pieces of legislation. Between September 9 and September 20, 1850, he signed five measures designed to hammer out a compromise between northern and southern interests. California was admitted as a free state; Utah and New Mexico were given territorial status, with the citizens eventually to determine the status of slavery there; and Texas was compensated for the loss of territory in the adjustment of its border with New Mexico. Fillmore also signed a tougher law dealing with fugitive slaves and another prohibiting the slave trade, but not slavery itself, in the District of Columbia.

This reversal of Taylor’s position achieved a political solution to a conflict threatening to erupt into military action. Fillmore had to send troops into South Carolina to deal with threats of secession and threatened to use them in the North to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act before there was general acceptance of these measures. While moderate men of all political parties supported Fillmore’s position, both the southern and New England factions of his own Whig Party blamed him for those parts of the compromise package of which they disapproved. Therefore, Fillmore did not get the Whig presidential nomination in 1852 and retired to Buffalo in 1853, turning over the powers of the office to the Democrat Franklin Pierce.

In the face of the virtual dissolution of the Whigs as a national political party, Fillmore accepted the presidential nomination of the American, or Know-Nothing, Party in 1856. He attempted to distance himself from the proslavery, anti-Catholic, nativist principles of the party and to run his campaign on the Unionist basis he had advocated while president. The strategy did not work. In a three-way race against Democrat James Buchanan and Republican John C. Frémont, Fillmore came in a poor third.

With the election of Buchanan in 1856, Fillmore’s national political career came to an end. Abigail Powers Fillmore died in Washington, D.C., on March 30, 1853, only a few weeks after her husband had left the White House. On February 10, 1858, Fillmore married Caroline Carmichael McIntosh, a widow, in Albany, New York. He died in Buffalo, New York on March 8, 1874; Caroline McIntosh Fillmore died there on August 11, 1881.

Significance

During the Civil War and in the years following, the popular press depicted Millard Fillmore as a southern sympathizer. He supported the candidacy of General George B. McClellan in 1864, and he also expressed approval of Andrew Johnson’s efforts to achieve reconciliation with the South at the war’s end. Properly speaking, Fillmore’s positions were not so much pro-southern as conservative, exactly as they had been when he accepted the compromise legislation of 1850 in the name of preserving the Union. His role in passage of that legislation was the central achievement of his term as president.

Fillmore’s initiatives in foreign policy were modest, but they too reflected his unwillingness to adopt extreme positions. Fillmore resisted moves to annex Cuba and Nicaragua; he expressed disapproval of Austria’s handling of the Hungarian uprising led by Lajos Kossuth, and he blocked French attempts to make the Hawaiian Islands a protectorate. Fillmore’s administration moved to normalize relations with Mexico and opened negotiations to build a canal connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans through Nicaragua. He sent Commodore Matthew Perry on his mission to open the ports of Japan to merchant ships of the United States.

Like Taylor, Pierce, and Buchanan, Fillmore’s reputation has been diminished by the failure of nineteenth century American politics to avert the Civil War. The administration of each of these presidents struggled to control the forces that led to military conflict. The legislation passed in 1850 was the most significant attempt to defuse the sectional conflict, and Millard Fillmore’s role in its passage is his chief claim to historical importance.

Bibliography

Barre, W. L. The Life and Public Services of Millard Fillmore. New York: Franklin, 1971. Print.

Fillmore, Millard. Millard Fillmore Papers. Ed. Frank H. Severance. 2 vols. 1907. New York: Kraus Reprint, 1970. Print.

Goodman, Mark. High Hopes: The Rise and Decline of Buffalo, New York. Albany: State U of New York P, 1983. Print.

Holt, Michael F. The Political Crisis of the 1850s. 1978. New York: Norton, 1983. Print.

Holzer, Harold. "The Invisible Man." America's Civil War 23.1 (2010): 42. Print.

Potter, David M. The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861. Ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher. New York: Harper, 1976. Print.

Rayback, Robert J. Millard Fillmore: Biography of a President. Buffalo: Stewart, 1959. Print.

Scarry, Robert J. Millard Fillmore. Jefferson: McFarland, 2001. Print.

Smith, Elbert B. The Presidencies of Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore. Lawrence: UP of Kansas, 1988. Print.

Snyder, Charles M., ed. The Lady and the President: The Letters of Dorothea Dix and Millard Fillmore. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1975. Print.

Vinciguerra, Thomas. "Why He Gets the Laughs." New York Times 18 Mar. 2007: 5. Print.