Millard Fillmore (1800-1874) was the thirteenth president of the United States. A member of the Whig Party, he was elected vice president in 1849 and assumed the presidency the following year after the death of his predecessor, Zachary Taylor. Fillmore is primarily remembered for presiding over the Compromise of 1850, which postponed the outbreak of the American Civil War for a decade, as well as for sending out the Perry Expedition, which opened isolationist Japan to the West. Although he served during a pivotal moment in US history, Fillmore is often regarded as a weak president and is barely remembered today at all by most Americans.
Early Life
Millard Fillmore was born on 7 January 1800, in a log cabin in the small town of Moravia, in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. He was the second of eight children born to Nathaniel Fillmore, a tenant farmer and occasional schoolteacher, and his wife, Phoebe Miller Fillmore. The Fillmores lived in poverty, and even in his earliest years, Millard had to do his part to help the family scrape by – at the age of six or seven, even as he was learning the alphabet, Millard had to learn "to plow, to hoe, to chop, to log and to clear land, to mow, to reap" (quoted in Hamilton, 106). Naturally, he grew weary of the backbreaking labor on the family farm and dreamed of going off on adventures.
During the War of 1812, the teenaged Millard longed to go off and fight but was persuaded against it by his father, who convinced him to learn a trade instead. At the age of 14, Fillmore was apprenticed to a clothmaker. He did not last long, however; relegated to menial tasks, he grew frustrated that he was not learning anything useful and soon left, finding employment in a textile mill. Over the next few years, as he worked the machines at the mill, he spent his free time teaching himself how to read and write, from a small dictionary he had purchased.
Seeking a more formal education, Fillmore soon enrolled himself in an academy that had just opened up in the nearby town of New Hope, all while continuing to work at the mill. His ambition, ingenuity, and drive soon paid off. Judge Walter Wood, the Fillmores' landlord and the wealthiest man in the region, noticed the young man's work ethic and was impressed by his potential. Suggesting that Fillmore study law, Wood took him under his wing and employed him as a clerk.
Again, Fillmore did not last long in the judge's employment. Wood barely paid him anything and, after a heated argument 18 months into the job, Fillmore abruptly quit. By 1821, Fillmore was teaching school in East Aurora, New York. His stint as Wood's clerk, however, had given him a taste for the law, which he satisfied by taking cases in justice of the peace courts, since these did not require practitioners to be licensed attorneys.
In 1822, he moved to Buffalo, New York, to study law. He was admitted to the bar two years later and returned to East Aurora to open his own law practice; later, Fillmore would admit that he made this decision because he lacked the self-confidence to practice law in a big city like Buffalo. On 5 February 1826, he married Abigail Powers, whom he had met several years earlier when they had both been students at the New Hope Academy. They would have two children: Millard Powers Fillmore (1828-1889) and Mary Abigail Fillmore (1832-1854).
Political Rise
Fillmore, according to historian Neil A. Hamilton, was "a strikingly handsome man, an impeccable dresser, good-tempered and intelligent, and committed to making sure he never again lived in poverty" (106). As his modest law practice steadily became more prosperous, he increasingly involved himself in local politics. In 1828, he joined the Anti-Masonic Party, a political party that sought to combat the growing influence of secret societies such as the Freemasons, which were seen as elitist and undemocratic. The Anti-Masons were also marked by their opposition to the new President Andrew Jackson, who was a Mason.
Fillmore attended Anti-Masonic meetings in Buffalo, where he first became acquainted with Thurlow Weed, a powerful political boss and powerbroker. Weed was impressed with Fillmore and, like Judge Wood before him, took him under his wing. In 1829, Fillmore won election to the New York State Assembly, serving three one-year terms. During his time in the state capital of Albany, Fillmore worked to reform the legal system and abolish imprisonment for debt. Weed continued to support him during this time, though their relationship was "best described as a working one rather than a close one" (Hamilton, 106).
In 1832, Fillmore was elected to the US House of Representatives. By then, he was a member of the new Whig Party, which supported policies such as internal improvements (i.e., the creation of new interstate highways and canals) as well as national banks. He worked with Weed to build a strong Whig voter base in western New York. However, the two men would soon have a falling out; among other things, they disagreed over the issue of slavery, with Weed taking a stronger antislavery stance than Fillmore. Eventually, Weed would drop Fillmore in favor of a new political protege, William H. Seward.
Fillmore left Congress in 1834 to spend more time with his wife Abigail, who hated life in Washington. However, he could not resist the allure of national politics for long and returned to the House in 1837. He became a fierce critic of Jackson's successor, President Martin Van Buren; Fillmore denounced Van Buren's plan to create an independent treasury of federal funds, believing that such an act would merely lock away money that could otherwise be used to stimulate the wavering economy. A severe economic depression that same year – known as the Panic of 1837 – led public opinion to turn against Van Buren and the Democratic Party.
As a result, the Whigs gained a majority in Congress and even won the presidency in 1840 with the victory of their candidate, William Henry Harrison. Fillmore hoped that some of the spoils of the Whig victory would fall in his lap, and sought the position of Speaker of the House. Though he did not get it, he did become chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee.
As chairman, Fillmore worked to alleviate the country's economic strife, supporting a bankruptcy act that allowed businesses to have their old debts forgiven. He also promoted a tariff designed to protect domestic manufacturing. The tariff proved controversial and was denounced by Southerners, who now had to pay more for Northern goods. It was initially vetoed by President John Tyler – Tyler had succeeded Harrison, who had died a month into his term – leading Fillmore to pen a more agreeable version, which was signed into law as the Tariff of 1842. Satisfied with this accomplishment, Fillmore announced he would not seek re-election. In April 1843, he left Congress and went to Buffalo, where he hoped to continue his law career.
Defeats & Victory
This time, Fillmore's respite from politics would last less than a year. In the run-up to the 1844 election, he was considered a strong candidate for the Whig vice presidential nomination, an idea that Fillmore quickly warmed to. He approached his old mentor, Thurlow Weed, to ask for the support of the New York delegation at the upcoming Whig National Convention in Baltimore. Though Weed promised to support Fillmore, he reneged at the last moment and threw his support behind his other protege, Seward; in the end, Senator Theodore Frelinghuysen of New Jersey ended up securing the nomination.
Despite the betrayal, Weed immediately turned around and offered to help Fillmore become governor of New York, arguing that he would have a much better chance of securing that office. Fillmore, putting aside his distrust of Weed, accepted and entered the race. However, he was defeated, losing to the Democrat Silas Wright.
"Accustomed as he was to winning," writes Hamilton, "the defeat stunned Fillmore [who] resumed his lucrative law practice" (108). Returning to Buffalo, he remained a public figure and denounced the Mexican-American War (1846-1848), which he considered little more than a plot by Southern Democrats to expand slavery into the West. In 1847, he was elected comptroller of New York State, an office that kept him busy superintending New York's banks and developing a state currency system.
In 1848, his name was once again offered as a possible vice presidential candidate; since the Whigs seemed likely to nominate General Zachary Taylor, a slaveholder, the presence of Fillmore would help balance the ticket by appealing to the antislavery vote. Both Taylor and Fillmore ended up securing their respective nominations and went on to win the general election against the Democrat Lewis Cass. Fillmore was therefore sworn in as vice president on 5 March 1849. After years of frustrating political defeats, he had finally achieved the pinnacle of his career – or so many would have thought.
Presidency
On 4 July 1850, a little over a year into his term, President Taylor attended the Fourth of July celebrations in which the cornerstone of the Washington Monument was laid. Sweating beneath the oppressive summer heat, Taylor refreshed himself with cold milk and cherries. The snack disagreed with him and likely gave him a case of gastroenteritis; only a few days later, on 9 July, he was dead.
Fillmore was informed of Taylor's death that night and was inaugurated as president the next day. "I have no language to express the emotions of my heart," he said. "The shock is so sudden and unexpected that I am overwhelmed" (quoted in Hamilton, 109). He did not retain Taylor's cabinet and built his own administration from scratch. Among his appointments was the prominent Whig senator Daniel Webster, who was named secretary of state.
Upon assuming the presidency, Fillmore was immediately faced with a great sectional crisis that threatened to tear the nation apart. In the aftermath of the Mexican-American War, vanquished Mexico had been forced to cede 529,000 square miles (1,370 km²) of Western lands to the US. Much as Fillmore had feared, the slaveocracies of the South wanted to expand their 'peculiar institution' into these territories while the 'free-soil' Northern states wished to prevent the expansion of slavery.
The debate had turned ugly, and by 1850, it seemed that the Union was on the precipice of dissolution. In a last-ditch effort to prevent civil war, Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky had offered a compromise: California would enter the Union as a 'free state' while New Mexico and Utah would organize territorial governments and be allowed to decide for themselves whether they wanted slavery or not (a concept known as popular sovereignty).
Clay's compromise would also ban the slave trade in Washington, D.C., but would strengthen fugitive slave laws that returned runaway slaves to their enslavers. President Taylor had been hostile to the compromise and had allowed it to languish on his desk, unsigned. But now Taylor was dead, and the responsibility of accepting or rejecting the bill fell to Fillmore.
Like Taylor, Fillmore disliked the bill. He had never liked slavery and did not wish to see its expansion into the West. However, he also believed that compromise was necessary to preserve the Union and prevent civil war. When the legislation was revised by Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois – who broke the single omnibus bill into five separate bills – Fillmore announced his support for the legislation, including the controversial Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required the federal government to aid in the capture and return of runaway slaves.
Despite his personal distaste for it, Fillmore pledged to use the military to aid in the enforcement of this statute if necessary. Fillmore signed the pieces of legislation into law, which were collectively known as the Compromise of 1850. Though both Northerners and Southerners grumbled at the compromise, it succeeded in diffusing tensions and staved off the outbreak of civil war for another decade. Fillmore's signature on the compromise was probably the most significant act of his presidency.
The second most important aspect of his presidency would come a few years later. At the time, the US was increasing its commercial relations in Asia but frustratingly found itself closed off from trade in Japan, which had long isolated itself from the outside world. As early as 1851, Fillmore and Secretary of State Webster worked to put together a naval expedition to Japan, seeking to induce the Japanese shogunate to open its doors to Western trade.
The expedition, commanded by Commodore Matthew C. Perry, set sail from Virginia in November 1852 and reached the shores of Japan on 14 July of the following year. With the might of the US Navy at his back – and all the implications that came with it – Perry compelled Japan to enter diplomatic and commercial relations with the US, cemented in the Treaty of Kanagawa. Thus ended 220 years of Japan's isolationist policies.
Post-Presidency
By the time Japan was opened to the West in 1853, Fillmore had already left the White House. The year before, he had hoped to win re-election, and sought the Whig nomination for a full term in his own right; however, he ended up losing the nomination to General Winfield Scott, who, in turn, was defeated in the general election by Democrat Franklin Pierce. Fillmore left office on 4 March 1853; he was not only the last Whig president but also the last president who was neither a Democrat nor a Republican.
No sooner had he returned home than he suffered a great tragedy. His wife, Abigail, had contracted a cold while attending President Pierce's inauguration. Her condition deteriorated until she died on 30 March 1853. A little over a year later, tragedy struck again when his daughter Mary died of cholera on 26 July 1854. Fillmore was bereft and grief-stricken over these two deaths, which took his beloved wife and daughter in such a short span of time. Yet even this was not enough to keep him from politics. In 1854, he joined the National American Party – better known as the Know Nothing Party – a nativist and anti-immigrant party that called for all Catholics and foreigners to be barred from office. On 1 January 1855, Fillmore penned a letter that warned against immigrant involvement in elections.
In the US presidential election of 1856, the Know Nothing Party nominated Fillmore for president. He thereby entered a three-way race against the Democratic candidate, James Buchanan, as well as the candidate of the new antislavery Republican Party, John C. Frémont. Despite his party affiliation, Fillmore barely spoke about nativism during the election, but instead focused on the need to preserve the Union; in the four years since his presidency, the sectional crisis over slavery had resumed and was once again threatening to tear the nation apart. It was soon clear, however, that the Know Nothing Party had no shot at the White House; seeing the writing on the wall, Fillmore threw his support behind Buchanan, fearing that a Republican victory would destroy the Union. In the end, Buchanan won the election, and Fillmore – who had placed last in the general election – returned to Buffalo, considering his political career to be over.
Fillmore remained in retirement for the next four years, during which time he married his second wife, Caroline Carmichael McIntosh. Yet a dark foreboding hung over him, as he was forced to watch the country slowly unravel. When Abraham Lincoln won the US presidential election of 1860, Fillmore's prediction that a Republican victory would herald the end of the Union came true; on 20 December 1860, South Carolina seceded from the Union, accusing the 'Black Republicans' of trying to abolish slavery. In the ensuing Secession Crisis of 1860-61, ten more Southern states left the Union, triggering the American Civil War (1861-1865). Fillmore remained a staunch Unionist during the war and even helped recruit volunteers for the Union Army.
He became disillusioned with Lincoln's presidency, accusing the Republican of "military despotism" and voted for George B. McClellan in the US presidential election of 1864 (Hamilton, 111). However, after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in April 1865, Fillmore headed a committee that escorted the slain president's funeral train as it passed through Buffalo. After the Civil War, Fillmore supported the controversial Reconstruction policies of President Andrew Johnson, believing they would be the fastest route to healing the country. He continued to live in Buffalo, serving as a proponent of the city's civic and cultural life, until 8 March 1874, when he died of a stroke at the age of 74. Though Fillmore is barely remembered today, he worked to preserve the Union in a time of crisis. His legacy is mixed, with some considering him weak for failing to solve the sectional divide, while others credit him for preventing the Civil War for as long as he could.
