Millard Fillmore

Millard Fillmore (January 7, 1800 – March 8, 1874) was the 13th president of the United States, serving from 1850 to 1853. He was the last president to be a member of the Whig Party while in the White House, and the last to be neither a Democrat nor a Republican. A former member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Fillmore was elected vice president in 1848, and succeeded to the presidency when Zachary Taylor died in 1850. Fillmore was instrumental in passing the Compromise of 1850, which led to a brief truce in the battle over the expansion of slavery. Fillmore was born into poverty in the Finger Lakes area of upstate New York. He had little formal schooling, but studied to become a lawyer. Fillmore became prominent in the Buffalo area as an attorney and politician, and was elected to the New York Assembly in 1828 and the House of Representatives in 1832. Fillmore initially belonged to the Anti-Masonic Party, but became a member of the Whig Party as it formed in the mid-1830s. He was a rival for the state party leadership with Thurlow Weed and his protégé William H. Seward. Throughout his career, Fillmore declared slavery evil but said it was beyond the federal government's power to end it. Conversely, Seward argued that the federal government had a role to play. Fillmore was an unsuccessful candidate for Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives when the Whigs took control of the chamber in 1841, but was made chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. Defeated in bids for the Whig nomination for vice president and for New York governor in 1844, Fillmore was elected Comptroller of New York in 1847, the first to hold that post by election. As vice president, Fillmore was largely ignored by Taylor; even in dispensing patronage in New York, Taylor consulted Weed and Seward. In his capacity as president of the Senate, Fillmore presided over its angry debates as the 31st Congress decided whether to allow slavery in the Mexican Cession. Unlike Taylor, Fillmore supported Henry Clay's omnibus bill, the basis of the 1850 Compromise. Upon becoming president in July 1850, he dismissed Taylor's cabinet and pushed Congress to pass the compromise. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, expediting the return of escaped slaves to those who claimed ownership, was a controversial part of the compromise. Fillmore felt duty-bound to enforce it, though it damaged his popularity and also the Whig Party, which was torn between its Northern and Southern factions. In foreign policy, he supported U.S. Navy expeditions to open trade in Japan, opposed French designs on Hawaii, and was embarrassed by Narciso López's filibuster expeditions to Cuba. Fillmore failed to win the Whig nomination for president in 1852. As the Whig Party broke up after his presidency, Fillmore and many in its conservative wing joined the Know Nothings and formed the American Party. Despite his party's emphasis on anti-immigration and anti-Catholic policies, during the 1856 presidential election he said little about immigration, focusing on the preservation of the Union, and lost to Democrat James Buchanan. During the American Civil War, Fillmore denounced secession and agreed that the Union must be maintained by force if necessary, but was critical of Abraham Lincoln's war policies. After peace was restored, he supported President Andrew Johnson's Reconstruction policies. Fillmore remained involved in civic interests after his presidency, including as chancellor of the University of Buffalo, which he had helped found in 1846. Historians usually rank Fillmore among the worst presidents in American history, largely for his policies regarding slavery, as well as among the least memorable. ### Early life Millard Fillmore was born on January 7, 1800, in a log cabin, on a farm in what is now Moravia, in the Finger Lakes region of New York. His parents were Phoebe Millard and Nathaniel Fillmore; he was the second of eight children and the oldest son. The Fillmores were of English descent; John Fillmore arrived in Ipswich, Massachusetts, during the colonial era. Nathaniel Fillmore was the son of Nathaniel Fillmore Sr., a native of Franklin, Connecticut, who became one of the earliest settlers of Bennington, Vermont. Nathaniel Fillmore and Phoebe Millard moved from Vermont in 1799 and sought better opportunities than were available on Nathaniel's stony farm, but the title to their Cayuga County land proved defective, and the Fillmore family moved to nearby Sempronius, where they leased land as tenant farmers, and Nathaniel occasionally taught school. The historian Tyler Anbinder described Fillmore's childhood as "one of hard work, frequent privation, and virtually no formal schooling." Over time Nathaniel became more successful in Sempronius, but during Millard's formative years, the family endured severe poverty. Nathaniel became sufficiently regarded that he was chosen to serve in local offices, including justice of the peace. Hoping that his oldest son would learn a trade, he convinced Millard, who was 14, not to enlist for the War of 1812 and apprenticed him to clothmaker Benjamin Hungerford in Sparta. Fillmore was relegated to menial labor, and unhappy at not learning any skills, he left Hungerford's employ. His father placed him in the same trade at a mill in New Hope. Seeking to better himself, Millard bought a share in a circulating library and read all the books that he could. In 1819 he took advantage of idle time at the mill to enroll at a new academy in the town, where he met and fell in love with a classmate, Abigail Powers. Later in 1819 Nathaniel moved the family to Montville, a hamlet of Moravia. Appreciating his son's talents, Nathaniel followed his wife's advice and persuaded Judge Walter Wood, the Fillmores' landlord and the wealthiest person in the area, to allow Millard to be his law clerk for a trial period. Wood agreed to employ young Fillmore and to supervise him as he read law. Fillmore earned money teaching school for three months and bought out his mill apprenticeship. He left Wood after eighteen months; the judge had paid him almost nothing, and they quarreled after Fillmore had, unaided, earned a small sum by advising a farmer in a minor lawsuit. Refusing to pledge not to do so again, Fillmore gave up his clerkship. Nathaniel again moved the family, and Millard accompanied it west to East Aurora, near Buffalo, where Nathaniel purchased a farm that became prosperous. On January 7, 1821, Fillmore turned 21, reaching adulthood. He taught school in East Aurora, New York, and accepted a few cases in justice of the peace courts, which did not require the practitioner to be a licensed attorney. He moved to Buffalo the following year and continued his study of law, first while he taught school and then in the law office of Asa Rice and Joseph Clary. Meanwhile, he became engaged to Abigail Powers. In 1823 he was admitted to the bar, declined offers from Buffalo law firms, and returned to East Aurora to establish a practice as the town's only resident lawyer. Later in life, Fillmore said he had initially lacked the self-confidence to practice in the larger city of Buffalo. His biographer, Paul Finkelman, suggested that after being under others' thumbs all his life, Fillmore enjoyed the independence of his East Aurora practice. Millard and Abigail wed on February 5, 1826. He was 26 years old, and she was 27. They had two children, Millard Powers Fillmore and Mary Abigail Fillmore. ### Presidency === Succession amid crisis === July 4, 1850, was a very hot day in Washington, and President Taylor, who attended the Fourth of July ceremonies to lay the cornerstone of the Washington Monument, refreshed himself, likely with cold milk and cherries. What he consumed likely gave him gastroenteritis and he died on July 9, aged 65. Nicknamed "Old Rough and Ready", Taylor had gained a reputation for toughness through his military campaigning in the heat, and his sudden death shocked the nation. Fillmore had been called from his chair presiding over the Senate on July 8 and had sat with members of the cabinet in a vigil outside Taylor's bedroom at the White House. He received formal notification of the president's death on the evening of July 9 in his residence at the Willard Hotel. After acknowledging the letter and spending a sleepless night, Fillmore went to the House of Representatives, where, at a joint session of Congress, he took the oath as president from William Cranch, the chief judge of the federal court for the District of Columbia, and the man who swore in President Tyler. The cabinet officers, as was customary when a new president took over, submitted their resignations but expected Fillmore to refuse and allow them to continue in office. He had been marginalized by the cabinet members, and he accepted the resignations though he asked them to stay on for a month, which most refused to do. Fillmore is the only president who succeeded by death or resignation not to retain, at least initially, his predecessor's cabinet. He was…