Millard Fillmore

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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 that office. He succeeded from the Vice Presidency on the death of President Zachary Taylor, who died of acute gastroenteritis, becoming the second U.S. President to assume 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.

Early life

Fillmore was born in poverty to Nathaniel Fillmore and Phoebe Millard Fillmore in Summerhill, New York as the second of nine children and the eldest son. See also:[link] He was first apprenticed to a fuller to learn the clothmaking 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 was elected to the New York legislature and served from 1829 to 1831.

Early political career

Fillmore was elected as a Whig to the 23rd Congress (1833-1835); he was also elected to the 25th, 26th and 27th Congresses (1837-1843). He declined to be a candidate for renomination in 1842. He was an unsuccessful candidate for governor of New York in 1844. He was state comptroller of New York from 1847 to 1849.

Vice-Presidency

Having worked his way up through the Whig Party in New York, Fillmore was selected as Zachary Taylor's running mate. (It was thought that the obscure, self-made candidate from New York would complement Taylor, a slave-holding military man from the south.)

Taylor and Fillmore disagreed 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 as a means of appeasing 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 the president that, should there be a tie vote on Henry Clay's bill, he would vote in favor of it.

Presidency 1850–1853

Policies

Fillmore ascended to the presidency upon the sudden and unexpected death of President Taylor in July 1850. The sudden change in leadership also signalled 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 to the Union 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 his support 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 shift 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 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 the state for lost lands.
• Grant territorial status to New Mexico.
• Place Federal officers at the disposal of slaveholders seeking escapees—the Fugitive Slave Act.
• 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 sending of Commodore Matthew C. Perry to open Japan to Western trade, though Perry did not reach Japan until Franklin Pierce had replaced Fillmore as president.

Administration and Cabinet

OFFICE	NAME	TERM
President	Millard Fillmore	1850–1853
Vice President	None
Secretary of State	Daniel Webster	1850–1852
	Edward Everett	1852–1853
Secretary of the Treasury	Thomas Corwin	1850–1853
Secretary of War	Charles Magill Conrad	1850–1853
Attorney General	John J. Crittenden	1850–1853
Postmaster General	Nathan K. Hall	1850–1852
	Samuel D. Hubbard	1852–1853
Secretary of the Navy	William A. Graham	1850–1852
	John P. Kennedy	1852–1853
Secretary of the Interior	Thomas McKennan	1850
	Alexander Stuart	1850–1853

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 – 1850

Legacy

Some 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

Fillmore was one of the founders of the University of Buffalo. The school was chartered by an act of the New York State Legislature on May 11, 1846, and at first was only a medical school [link]. Fillmore was the first Chancellor, a position he maintained while both Vice President and President. Upon completing his presidency, Fillmore returned to Buffalo, where he continued to serve as chancellor.

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 National American) Party.

On February 10,1858, he married a widow Mrs. Caroline Carmichael McIntosh.

Throughout the Civil War, he opposed President Lincoln and during Reconstruction supported President Johnson. He commanded a corps of home guards during the Civil War.

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

Trivia

• 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)
• Having found the White House devoid of books, Millard Fillmore initiated the White House library.
• As of 2006, Millard Fillmore remains the last U.S. president who was neither a Democrat nor a Republican (although Abraham Lincoln was re-elected in 1864 running on the Union Ticket instead of as a Republican with Democrat Andrew Johnson as his running mate).
• Fillmore, Utah, located in Millard County was named after this president.

References

See also

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

External links