Millard Fillmore

president millard fillmore
thirteenth president of the united states  

interesting facts  
Millard Fillmore, with his compromising politics helped ease the issue of slavery and postpone the Civil War. 

biography  
Born in New York in 1800, Millard Fillmore was the first president born in the 19th Century. He was the second child of nine. As a child, Fillmore did chores on his father's farm and attended school until the age of 17. He was, however, largely self-educated with the help of his teacher (Abigail Powers) and his bible, an almanac, and a hymnbook. At the age of 19, Fillmore began to study law with Judge Walter Woods. In 1823 he opened a law office in East Aurora. Three years later he married Abigail Powers. The couple had two children, Mary Abigail and Millard Powers. In the early years of their marriage, Mrs. Fillmore continued to teach school and to help her husband with his law studies.

Millard Fillmore soon found himself involved in politics in 1826, the same year he got married. Millard Fillmore had been winning respect and popularity in East Aurora. People admired his professional ethics, temperate habits, careful speech and dress, and good looks. These qualities caught the attention of the Anti-Masonic politicians, who were looking for vote-winning candidates. As an associate of the Anti-Masonic (later merged with the Whig Party) politician Thurlow Weed, Fillmore held state office and for eight years was a member of the House of Representatives.

In Congress, Fillmore was a great supporter of Henry Clay, the leader of the Whig Party. He was largely responsible for the Tariff of 1842 which raised rates as high as the Tariff of 1833 which caused the Nullification Crisis in South Carolina. Fillmore did not run for reelection in 1842. He hoped for the vice presidential nomination on Clay's Whig presidential ticket, but the party's national convention of 1844 gave that spot to Theodore Frelinghuysen of New Jersey. Fillmore then accepted the Whig nomination for governor of New York. In the election, however, Fillmore was beaten by his Democratic Party opponent, Silas Wright, and Clay lost the decisive New York vote.

In the election of 1848, Millard Fillmore was elected Vice President of the United States as running mate with Zachary Taylor. During the first half of 1850, Fillmore as vice president presided over the United States Senate (the upper chamber of Congress) as angry debates raged between Northern and Southern sectionalists over the status of slavery in the recently acquired lands. His fairness and sense of humor in the chair were not enough to restore peace among the contending senators. The antislavery faction, led by Senator Seward (the former governor of New York) and Senator Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, clashed with the Southerners, led by Senator James M. Mason of Virginia, Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, and Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina. Angry words figuratively rocked the Senate hall, as they did the chamber of the House of Representatives. Although President Taylor was a Louisiana slaveholder, he leaned more toward Seward's antislavery views. Determined to uphold the Constitution of the United States, the president threatened to send federal troops to protect disputed New Mexico territory from an invasion by proslavery Texans. Southerners countered that, if Taylor followed through with his threat, the act would be the signal for an armed Southern rebellion against federal power. Mississippi called for a convention to meet in June 1850 at Nashville, Tennessee, to consider secession.

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, (now) 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:

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

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. He died in 1874.