Millard Fillmore

Categories: 1800 births | People from New York | 1874 deaths | Members of the U.S. House of Representatives | Vice Presidents of the U.S. | Presidents of the United States

Millard Fillmore (January 7, 1800 – March 8, 1874) was the thirteenth President of the United States, serving from 1850 until 1853, and the last member of the Whig Party to hold the nation's highest office. He succeeded from the Vice Presidency on the death of President Zachary Taylor, who died of acute indigestion, becoming the second U.S. President to gain the office in this manner. Fillmore was never elected President in his own right; after serving out Taylor's term he was not nominated for the Presidency by the Whigs in the 1852 Presidential election, and in 1856 he failed to win election as President as the Know Nothing Party candidate.

Biography

Early life

Fillmore was born in extreme poverty to Nathaniel Fillmore and Phoebe Millard in Summerhill, New York as the second of eight children and eldest son. He was first apprenticed to a fuller to learn that trade. He struggled to obtain an education under frontier conditions. Several years later, Fillmore moved to Buffalo, New York to continue his studies. He was admitted to the bar in 1823 and began his practice of law in Aurora. In 1828 he served in the New York legislature. He worked his way up through the Whig party, eventually being selected as Zachary Taylor's running mate. During that time he served in the House of Representatives and was Comptroller of New York. It was thought that the obscure, self-made candidate from New York would complement Taylor, a slave-holding military man from the south.

The Vice-Presidency

Nevertheless, the two men came to a head on the slavery issue in the new western territories taken from Mexico in the Mexican-American War. Taylor wanted the new states to be free states, while Fillmore supported slavery in those states in order to appease the South. In his own words: "God knows that I detest slavery, but it is an existing evil ... and we must endure it and give it such protection as is guaranteed by the Constitution."

Fillmore presided over the Senate during the months of nerve-wracking debates over the Compromise of 1850. He made no public comment on the merits of the compromise proposals, but a few days before President Taylor's death, Fillmore suggested to him that if there should be a tie vote on Henry Clay's bill, he would vote in favor of it.

Presidency

Thus the sudden ascension of Fillmore to the Presidency in July 1850 brought an abrupt political shift in the administration. Taylor's cabinet resigned and President Fillmore at once appointed Daniel Webster to be Secretary of State, thus proclaiming his alliance with the moderate Whigs who favored the Compromise.

A bill to admit California still aroused all the violent arguments for and against the extension of slavery, without any progress toward settling the major issues.

Clay, exhausted, left Washington to recuperate, throwing leadership upon Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois. At this critical juncture, President Fillmore announced in favor of the Compromise of 1850. On August 6, 1850, he sent a message to Congress recommending that Texas be paid to abandon her claims to part of New Mexico.

This helped influence a critical number of northern Whigs in Congress away from their insistence upon the Wilmot Proviso — the stipulation that all land gained by the Mexican War must be closed to slavery.

Douglas's effective strategy in Congress combined with Fillmore's pressure from the White House to give impetus to the Compromise movement. Breaking up Clay's single legislative package, Douglas presented five separate bills to the Senate:

• Admit California as a free state.
• Settle the Texas boundary and compensate her.
• Grant territorial status to New Mexico.
• Place Federal officers at the disposal of slaveholders seeking fugitives.
• Abolish the slave trade in the District of Columbia.

Each measure obtained a majority, and by September 20, President Fillmore had signed them into law. Webster wrote, "I can now sleep of nights."

Another important legacy of Fillmore's administration was the opening of Japan to American trade under Commodore Matthew Perry.

Some of the more militant northern Whigs remained irreconcilable, refusing to forgive Fillmore for having signed the Fugitive Slave Act. They helped deprive him of the Presidential nomination in 1852.

Within a few years it was apparent that although the Compromise had been intended to settle the slavery controversy, it served rather as an uneasy sectional truce.

Later Life

Upon completing his presidency, Fillmore returned to Buffalo, where he served as chancellor of the University of Buffalo. As the Whig Party disintegrated in the 1850s, Fillmore refused to join the Republican Party; but, instead, in 1856 accepted the nomination for President of the Know Nothing, or American, Party. Throughout the Civil War he opposed President Lincoln and during Reconstruction supported President Johnson. He died at 11:10 p.m. on March 8, 1874 of the after effects of a stroke, with his last words alleged to be, upon being fed some soup, "the nourishment is palatable."

To this day Millard Fillmore remains the last U.S. president who was neither a Democrat nor a Republican.

The myth that Millard Fillmore installed the White House's first bathtub was started by H. L. Mencken in a joke column published on December 28, 1917 in the New York Evening Mail. See Bathtub hoax for more. More factual is, having found the White House devoid of books, Millard Fillmore initiated the White House library.

On January 7 each year a ceremony is held at his gravesite in the Forest Lawn Cemetery in Buffalo.

Cabinet

Supreme Court appointments

Fillmore appointed the following Justices to the Supreme Court of the United States:

• Benjamin Robbins Curtis - 1851

States Admitted to the Union

• California – September 9, 1850

See also

• Mallard Fillmore
• U.S. presidential election, 1848
• U.S. presidential election, 1856
• List of places named for Millard Fillmore

External links

• First State of the Union Address
• Second State of the Union Address
• Third State of the Union Address
• White House Biography
• Works by Millard Fillmore at Project Gutenberg

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