President MILLARD FILLMORE
Biography from Grolier Online: The American Presidency
Millard Fillmore, (1800-1874), fil'mor, 13th PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. A power in New York state politics, he was the successful Whig candidate for VICE PRESIDENT in 1848 and became president on the death of Zachary TAYLOR in 1850. As chief executive he showed a lack of leadership, and he failed to secure the WHIG presidential nomination in 1852. Then, running on the Know-Nothing ticket in 1856, he was roundly defeated.
Early Life
Millard Fillmore was born in a frontier cabin in Cayuga county, N. Y., on Jan. 7, 1800. He was the second child and the first of five sons of Nathaniel and Phoebe Millard Fillmore. The family was miserably poor, and the boy was almost entirely self-educated. His father thought Millard should learn a trade and apprenticed him to a firm of carders and cloth-dressers, from whom the youth later purchased his release.
Deeply desirous of an education, Millard, during a slack time at the mill in 1819, enrolled in an academy at New Hope, N. Y., where he met his future wife, Abigail Powers, daughter of the Rev. Lemuel Powers of Moravia and sister of a local judge. In that same year Nathaniel Fillmore obtained for his son a clerkship in the office of Judge Walter Wood in Montville, N. Y., where he began the study of law.
During the next few years young Fillmore taught school from time to time and also clerked in a Buffalo law firm. He was admitted to the bar in 1823, set up a law office in East Aurora near Buffalo, and on Feb. 5, 1826, married Miss Powers. As his legal business expanded he took on as a student clerk in his office his future law partner and political associate, Nathan Kelsey Hall.
Rise in New York Politics
Fillmore's political predilections lay with the National Republican party, but before 1826 he took little interest in politics. That year the Anti-Masonic excitement occasioned by the abduction of William Morgan, a Mason known to be publishing an exposé of the order, swept over western New York, and Fillmore, along with many National Republicans in that region, joined the Anti-Masonic movement. As a rising Anti-Masonic politician he became closely associated with the party's principal leaders, Thurlow Weed, William H. Seward, Francis Granger, and Albert Haller Tracy. In 1828, Fillmore went to Albany as an Anti-Masonic member of the state assembly, where he served three terms. He took a prominent part in securing the abolition of imprisonment for debt in the state.
In 1830 the Fillmores moved to Buffalo, where a year or two later they joined the Unitarian Church. Fillmore formed a law partnership with Hall and developed a thriving practice. His massive frame, benign air, dignified mien, and conciliatory temper commanded respect and admiration. His popularity in Erie county marked him as one of the outstanding political leaders in western New York, and in 1832 he won election to Congress on the Anti-Masonic ticket.
Two years later Fillmore moved into the Whig party under the leadership of Weed, but refused the Whig congressional nomination, probably because he feared defeat at the hands of irate Anti-Masonic extremists in his district. Shortly thereafter he obtained for his friend Dr. Thomas A. Foote the position of editor of the Buffalo Commercial Advertiser, thus ensuring for himself a local newspaper organ.
In Congress
Elected to CONGRESS as a Whig in 1836, Fillmore held office for three consecutive terms, declining renomination in 1842. He was a thorough-paced protectionist and, as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee (1840-1842), he marshaled the Whig tariff of 1842 through the HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES.
While in Congress he became increasingly restive under Weed's leadership of the New York Whig party. Fillmore supported Granger for the Whig gubernatorial nomination in 1838 and was disappointed when Seward, Weed's protégé, received the nod. He later declined Governor Seward's appointment as state comptroller, but complained when denied the post of vice chancellor of New York. He was instrumental in placing Granger in President William Henry HARRISON's cabinet as postmaster general.
During the 1840's Weed led the New York Whig party's liberal wing, which was hostile to slavery. Fillmore disliked slavery but deplored attacks on it, for he regarded the South's peculiar institution as untouchable in the states where it existed. The influx of foreigners into New York state posed another political issue, and Fillmore sympathized with those who were hostile to the recently naturalized citizens. Here, too, he differed from Weed and Seward, who hoped to attract the newcomers into the Whig party.
Fillmore wished to be Henry Clay's running mate in the presidential election of 1844, but reluctantly yielded to Weed's desire that he accept the Whig nomination for governor instead. In the election he ran ahead of Clay by some 3,000 votes in the state, but lost the governorship to Democrat Silas Wright. He attributed his defeat to "the Abolitionists and foreign Catholics," but he also felt that Weed and Seward had maneuvered him into a hopeless race.
State Comptroller
Elected state comptroller in 1847, Fillmore fostered internal improvements and devised a currency system that was the forerunner of the National Banking Act of 1863. His opportunity to achieve the national office he had coveted in 1844 came in 1848. At the Whig national convention that year the nomination of Gen. Zachary Taylor for president angered the supporters of Clay and the opponents of slavery extension in the territory gained by the Mexican War. The practical Whig politicians nominated Fillmore for vice president, feeling that he would heal party wounds and carry New York state.
In the ensuing national election the Whigs won a narrow victory. Throughout the country controversy was rising over slavery in the new territories and in the District of Columbia, but Fillmore felt that the success of the Whig ticket had "put an end to all ideas of disunion."
Vice President and President
As vice president, Fillmore presided over the SENATE in capable fashion. The senators generally bowed to his admonitions, but Seward, who had been elected to the Senate in January 1849, regarded him with unrelenting hostility. A bitter struggle over patronage in New York state developed between the two men. Seward won President Taylor's confidence, and his control over the New York state appointments became virtually complete. Seward and Fillmore also differed over the proper method of dealing with the slavery crisis. Fillmore favored the Compromise of 1850, but Seward opposed it as granting too much to the South and supported Taylor's plan for the prompt admission of California and possibly New Mexico as states.
The Compromise made little progress during the spring and early summer of 1850, but on July 9, Taylor died, and Fillmore became president of the United States. His choice of Daniel Webster as secretary of state and John J. Crittenden as attorney general indicated his pro-Compromise stand, and his message to Congress (Aug. 6, 1850) proposed indemnification of Texas for surrendering its claim to New Mexican territory. The support Fillmore and his cabinet gave to the Compromise helped to ensure the passage of its various bills, including the stringent fugitive slave law, which the President strove wholeheartedly to enforce. His first annual message (Dec. 2, 1850), contained an affirmation of states' rights.
Aside from its stand on the Compromise, Fillmore's administration was chiefly noteworthy for its interest in the nation's economic development. Fillmore had earlier cooperated with Senator Stephen A. Douglas in arranging the first federal land grants for railroad construction, and as president he encouraged internal improvements and the expansion of foreign commerce. His administration authorized Commodore Matthew C. Perry's expedition to Japan in 1852-1854. In the distribution of patronage, Fillmore strongly favored conservative Whigs and, prodded by his friend Hall, whom he made postmaster general, he did what he could to weaken the power of Weed and Seward in New York state.
Fillmore was a candidate for the Whig presidential nomination in 1852. He had strong Southern support, and the dying Clay advocated his nomination. However, as Webster also was put forward, the conservative and moderate Whigs were divided, and Gen. Winfield Scott, the candidate of the antislavery faction, became the Whig standard-bearer.
Later Political Role
At the close of his term of office Fillmore retired to Buffalo, but he still had political aspirations. Accompanied by Hall, he made political tours of the South and West in the spring of 1854. His reception on these journeys, together with the swift rise of the nativist Know-Nothing party, kept his presidential hopes alive. He received the Know-Nothing presidential nomination in 1856, but ran a poor third to Democrat James BUCHANAN and Republican John C. Frémont, carrying only the state of Maryland. This catastrophic defeat ended his pretensions to a further political career.
Fillmore was distrustful of the new Republican party and its leaders and had little hope of abating the crisis that came with the election of Abraham LINCOLN in 1860. Late that year he refused the plea of New York merchants that he go to South Carolina to urge temperate action, saying that the trip would do no good. Although he supported the national government during the Civil War, he felt that the conflict was unnecessary and was highly critical of the Lincoln administration. In the 1864 presidential election he supported Democrat George B. McClellan. During the Reconstruction period his sympathies were with President Andrew JOHNSON.
Civic Functions and Personal Life
In private life Fillmore devoted much of his time to civic activities. He was the first chancellor of the University of Buffalo, serving in an honorary capacity from 1846 until his death. He also was a founder of the Buffalo General Hospital and a founder and the first president of the Buffalo Historical Society.
Before 1856 he had accumulated a competence probably in the neighborhood of $100,000, the income from which was scarcely adequate to maintain him in the style he felt suitable for an ex-president. His wife having died in 1853, he married a wealthy Albany widow, Caroline Carmichael McIntosh, in 1858. The income from her estate, added to his own, enabled them to purchase a huge, ornate Gothic mansion on Niagara Square in Buffalo. Mrs. Fillmore embellished this with numerous portraits and busts of her husband, and, as long as her health permitted, it was a center of generous hospitality. She became a chronic invalid in the 1860's, but her husband's health remained good until a paralytic stroke, on Feb. 13, 1874, gave warning of the end. Following a second stroke, death came on March 8, 1874.
Assessment
Suave, courteous, and handsome in a rather stodgy fashion, Fillmore was by nature a kindly and modest individual. Characteristically, while traveling in Europe in 1855, he declined an honorary degree offered by Oxford University. He did so partly because he was reluctant to accept a degree in Latin, which he could not read, and partly because he feared that the Oxford students would make jokes at his expense. He was an omnivorous reader, but in the field of politics his talents were limited.
As chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and as comptroller of New York, he displayed real ability, but he was unfortunately shortsighted on the major issues of his time, most notably on slavery and nativism. His general tendency to seek the path of least resistance betokened a lack of self-confidence, a characteristic in which he differed markedly from his rival, Seward.
Glyndon G. Van Deusen
University of Rochester
Much information about Fillmore may be gained from his papers in the Buffalo Historical Society and from the Millard Fillmore Papers, vols. 1 and 2, ed. by Frank H. Severance, in the Buffalo Historical Society Publications, vols. 10 and 11 (1907)
Biographies include Barre, W. L., Life and Public Services of Millard Fillmore (1856; reprint, B. Franklin 1971), and Crawford, John E., Millard Fillmore (Meckler Pub. 1988)
© 1996 Grolier Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved
From: Kane, Joseph N. "Facts About the Presidents." NY: H.W. Wilson Company, 1989
--According to contemporary reports, when President Millard Fillmore took office, the White House had no books, not even a Bible. His wife, Abigail Powers Fillmore, a former schoolteacher and a voracious reader, converted a large room on the second floor into a library, and the appropriation act of March 3, 1851 (9 Stat. L. 613) authorized "for purchase of books for library at the Executive Mansion two hundred and fifty dollars to be expended under the direction of the President of the United States."
In his rise from a log cabin to wealth and the White House, Millard Fillmore demonstrated that through methodical industry and some competence an uninspiring man could make the American dream come true.
Born in the Finger Lakes country of New York in 1800, Fillmore as a youth endured the privations of frontier life. He worked on his father's farm, and at 15 was apprenticed to a cloth dresser. He attended one-room schools, and fell in love with the redheaded teacher, Abigail Powers, who later became his wife.
In 1823 he was admitted to the bar; seven years later he moved his law practice to Buffalo. As an associate of the Whig politician Thurlow Weed, Fillmore held state office and for eight years was a member of the House of Representatives. In 1848, while Comptroller of New York, he was elected Vice President.
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, he intimated to him that if there should be a tie vote on Henry Clay's bill, he would vote in favor of it.
Thus the sudden accession 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. 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."
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.
As the Whig Party disintegrated in the 1850's, 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.

• Married: 5 FEB 1826 in Monrovia, New York