panlog πάντα διὰ πάντων
तत् त्वम् असि
جهان است ل
СакралSacral ФинансыFinances ЛитературыLiterature ИскусстваArt НовостиNews Eng / RusEng / Rus
СправкиInfo ОтраслиIndustries СоциомирыSocial world НаукиScience ДобавитьAdd МыWe


- Биографические и автобиографические материалы, интервью, дневники, письма и т.д. / Anbinder Tyler 1999. Fillmore, Millard http://www.anb.org/view/10.1093/anb/9780198606697.001.0001/anb-9780198606697-e-0400374 /

Anbinder Tyler 1999. Fillmore, Millard http://www.anb.org/view/10.1093/anb/9780198606697.001.0001/anb-9780198606697-e-0400374Anbinder Tyler 1999. Fillmore, Millard http://www.anb.org/view/10.1093/anb/9780198606697.001.0001/anb-9780198606697-e-0400374



Fillmore, Millardfree
(07 January 1800–08 March 1874)

Millard Fillmore.

Photograph by Mathew B. Brady.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC-USZ62-13013 DLC).
Fillmore, Millard (07 January 1800–08 March 1874), thirteenth president of the United States, was born in Cayuga County, New York, the son of Nathaniel Fillmore and Phoebe Millard, farmers. Like many tenant farmers on New York’s western frontier, Fillmore’s parents had difficulty earning a decent living, and his childhood was one of hard work, frequent privation, and virtually no formal schooling. When he was apprenticed to a textile mill in his teens, Millard began to educate himself, reading voraciously and attending classes when the mill periodically shut down. A local judge encouraged Fillmore to study law, and by clerking for him and teaching school as well, Fillmore managed to buy out his obligation to the mill. Following his family west, Fillmore continued to read law and teach in Buffalo, and he was admitted to the bar at age twenty-three or twenty-four. He opened a law office in the nearby village of East Aurora, and two years later he married Abigail Powers. The couple had two children.
Fillmore became the leading citizen of East Aurora, and when the Anti-Masonic movement swept through the region in 1828, that party elected him to the state assembly. Fillmore spent three terms in the assembly, playing a decisive role in passing legislation that abolished imprisonment for debt. Having moved his office and his family to Buffalo, Fillmore declined renomination in 1831, but the following year he was elected to Congress. Although he declined renomination in 1834, Fillmore remained active in politics, working diligently for the formation of the Whig party. He soon returned to Congress, however, winning election to the House in 1836, 1838, and 1840. Expressing special interest in the banking and tariff questions, his hard work and leadership increased his public stature. Consequently, during his fourth term Fillmore placed second in the balloting for Speaker and was chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, in which capacity he directed important increases in tariff rates through Congress in 1842. In that year, though, he again declined renomination.
In 1844 the Whig party nominated Fillmore as its candidate for governor of New York, but he was defeated by Democrat Silas Wright. Although he held no public office, Fillmore remained politically active, attacking the Democrats’ refusal to devote more funds to internal improvements as well as their incitement of war with Mexico. A growing split within the New York Whig party seemed to bode ill for his political future. The antislavery bloc, led by former governor William H. Seward, held a decided numerical advantage over Fillmore’s more conservative faction, and Seward’s group began monopolizing the more important nominations. Nevertheless, Fillmore was elected state comptroller in 1847 by a wide margin. In 1848, with an eye to the all-important state of New York, the Whig presidential nominating convention selected Fillmore as Zachary Taylor’s running mate. With Taylor’s victory, Fillmore became vice president in March 1849.
Fillmore spent most of his tenure as vice president fighting a losing battle with Seward’s faction over New York’s patronage appointments. Meanwhile, the country focused its attention on the growing sectional crisis and Henry Clay’s proposed compromise. Clay’s complex plan included the admission of California as a free state, organization of the Utah and New Mexico territories without prohibiting slavery, settlement of the Texas–New Mexico boundary dispute, outlawing the slave trade but not slavery in the District of Columbia, and a more rigorous fugitive slave law to return runaway slaves to their owners. Taylor opposed Clay’s comprehensive settlement, and it stalled in Congress. On 9 July 1850 Taylor suddenly died, and Fillmore, who had spent his sixteen months in Washington, D.C., as a political outcast, became the thirteenth president of the United States.
Fillmore, who supported the compromise proposal, immediately set to work to win its approval. First, he replaced Taylor’s cabinet with more conservative department heads who agreed with his position on the compromise. He then personally lobbied for enactment of the compromise bill. When these actions failed to secure the necessary votes, Fillmore endorsed Senator Stephen A. Douglas’s strategy of separating the compromise package into several smaller bills, allowing congressmen to vote against some portions of the proposal while endorsing others, which changed enough votes to enable the compromise to pass. Fillmore announced that the compromise represented the “final settlement” of the slavery issue.
The remainder of Fillmore’s presidency was relatively uneventful. His most notable accomplishment was to send Commodore Matthew C. Perry to Japan to open diplomatic relations. In other areas of foreign policy, Fillmore devoted most of his energies to the discouragement of various filibustering schemes. In 1851, for example, Fillmore made no protest when the Cuban government executed the American participants in a failed filibustering expedition, and despite the pleas of greedy American businesspeople, Fillmore refused to deploy U.S. troops to promote U.S. interests in Mexico and Peru.
Fillmore’s chances of winning the Whig presidential nomination in 1852 were damaged by his aggressive removal of Taylor’s appointees and their replacement with Fillmore supporters, which created enormous hostility toward the president within his own party. In addition, the candidacy of Fillmore’s own secretary of state, Daniel Webster, deprived the president of the support of many conservatives who otherwise would have endorsed him. Consequently, the Whig nomination went to General Winfield Scott, although Fillmore derived some sense of satisfaction from the fact that both Scott and Democratic nominee Franklin Pierce ran on platforms that endorsed the 1850 compromise measures.
Just days after Fillmore left office, his wife died of pneumonia, which she apparently contracted while attending the snowy inauguration of her husband’s successor. Fillmore’s grief was compounded in July 1854, when his daughter Mary passed away. Despite these devastating losses, Fillmore kept abreast of political developments, and he began to receive reports from his supporters that a new political organization, the Know Nothings, who sought to reduce the political influence of immigrants and Catholics, were determined to make him the next president. Inasmuch as Fillmore had never publicly expressed sympathy for any part of the Know Nothings’ nativist agenda, it might seem curious that the order would look to him as a potential presidential candidate. However, the earliest Know Nothings had emphasized patriotism and national unity as well as anti-Catholicism, and veteran nativists believed that Fillmore’s devotion to the Union would enable him to defuse sectional tensions. Although Fillmore was initially reluctant to link his political future with a nativist organization, he concluded that the American party (as the Know Nothings became known) represented the “only hope of forming a truly national party, which shall ignore this constant and distracting agitation of slavery.” In February 1856, while the ex-president toured Europe, his handlers secured for him the American party presidential nomination.
Fillmore’s campaign was a disaster from start to finish. In one of his first campaign speeches, the ex-president outraged most northerners by implying that the South would be justified in seceding should the Republican candidate, John C. Frémont, carry the election. Fillmore’s supporters emphasized that he was the only candidate capable of restoring harmony between North and South in the wake of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Yet that legislation, the caning of Massachusetts abolitionist senator Charles Sumner, and the “sack” of Lawrence, Kansas, by proslavery Missourians had convinced many northerners that compromise with the South was pointless. Consequently, most northern Know Nothings repudiated Fillmore and supported Frémont instead. Even in the South, where Fillmore’s message carried greater appeal, many members of the American party voted for Democrat James Buchanan out of fear that ballots cast for Fillmore’s apparently hopeless candidacy would lead to a Frémont victory. On election day Fillmore carried only Maryland, and although four other southern states eluded him by just a few thousand votes, the ex-president considered his popular tally of 22 percent an embarrassment. Fillmore’s defeat destroyed the American party as a national political force and marked the end of his political career.
In the years immediately following his defeat, Fillmore argued that, unless a conservative, national party could be created, the sectionalism of the Republicans and Democrats would surely produce civil war. When the war came, Fillmore enthusiastically supported the Union cause, although by 1864 he believed that Abraham Lincoln was creating a “military despotism” and consequently endorsed Democratic presidential candidate George B. McClellan (1826–1885). By this point, however, Fillmore devoted most of his time to philanthropic work, an undertaking made possible in part by his 1858 marriage to Caroline Carmichael McIntosh, a wealthy Albany widow. Fillmore died at his Buffalo home.
Fillmore assumed the presidency during a national crisis and helped diffuse sectional tensions with his support for the Compromise of 1850. Yet his refusal to sanction territorial expansion or boldly lead the Whig party once he became president created a public perception of Fillmore as a timid, indecisive individual, and as a result, he never generated any popular enthusiasm outside of conservative Whig circles.

Bibliography

The bulk of Fillmore’s papers is at the State University of New York at Oswego. The remainder, including most of Fillmore’s writings as president, is at the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society. The papers have been published by Frank H. Severance, ed., as The Millard Fillmore Papers (2 vols., 1907). Fillmore’s correspondence with social reformer Dorothea Dix can be found in Charles M. Snyder, ed., The Lady and the President: The Letters of Dorothea Dix and Millard Fillmore (1975). The only modern biography is Robert J. Rayback, Millard Fillmore: Biography of a President (1959), which suffers from its author’s lack of access to the papers at Oswego (which were discovered in the early 1970s). Fillmore’s presidency is described in Elbert B. Smith, The Presidencies of Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore (1988). For the feud between Fillmore and Seward, which played such an important part in shaping Fillmore’s career, see Harry J. Carman and Reinhard H. Luthin, “The Seward-Fillmore Feud and the Crisis of 1850” and “The Seward-Fillmore Feud and the Disruption of the Whig Party,” New York History 24 (1943): 163–84, 335–57. On Fillmore’s role in the Compromise of 1850 see Holman Hamilton, Prologue to Conflict: The Crisis and Compromise of 1850 (1964), while the American party’s 1856 presidential campaign is treated in Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s (1992).

See also

Related articles in Companion to United States History on Oxford Reference

Fillmore, Millardfree
(07 January 1800–08 March 1874)

Millard Fillmore.

Photograph by Mathew B. Brady.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC-USZ62-13013 DLC).
Fillmore, Millard (07 January 1800–08 March 1874), thirteenth president of the United States, was born in Cayuga County, New York, the son of Nathaniel Fillmore and Phoebe Millard, farmers. Like many tenant farmers on New York’s western frontier, Fillmore’s parents had difficulty earning a decent living, and his childhood was one of hard work, frequent privation, and virtually no formal schooling. When he was apprenticed to a textile mill in his teens, Millard began to educate himself, reading voraciously and attending classes when the mill periodically shut down. A local judge encouraged Fillmore to study law, and by clerking for him and teaching school as well, Fillmore managed to buy out his obligation to the mill. Following his family west, Fillmore continued to read law and teach in Buffalo, and he was admitted to the bar at age twenty-three or twenty-four. He opened a law office in the nearby village of East Aurora, and two years later he married Abigail Powers. The couple had two children.
Fillmore became the leading citizen of East Aurora, and when the Anti-Masonic movement swept through the region in 1828, that party elected him to the state assembly. Fillmore spent three terms in the assembly, playing a decisive role in passing legislation that abolished imprisonment for debt. Having moved his office and his family to Buffalo, Fillmore declined renomination in 1831, but the following year he was elected to Congress. Although he declined renomination in 1834, Fillmore remained active in politics, working diligently for the formation of the Whig party. He soon returned to Congress, however, winning election to the House in 1836, 1838, and 1840. Expressing special interest in the banking and tariff questions, his hard work and leadership increased his public stature. Consequently, during his fourth term Fillmore placed second in the balloting for Speaker and was chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, in which capacity he directed important increases in tariff rates through Congress in 1842. In that year, though, he again declined renomination.
In 1844 the Whig party nominated Fillmore as its candidate for governor of New York, but he was defeated by Democrat Silas Wright. Although he held no public office, Fillmore remained politically active, attacking the Democrats’ refusal to devote more funds to internal improvements as well as their incitement of war with Mexico. A growing split within the New York Whig party seemed to bode ill for his political future. The antislavery bloc, led by former governor William H. Seward, held a decided numerical advantage over Fillmore’s more conservative faction, and Seward’s group began monopolizing the more important nominations. Nevertheless, Fillmore was elected state comptroller in 1847 by a wide margin. In 1848, with an eye to the all-important state of New York, the Whig presidential nominating convention selected Fillmore as Zachary Taylor’s running mate. With Taylor’s victory, Fillmore became vice president in March 1849.
Fillmore spent most of his tenure as vice president fighting a losing battle with Seward’s faction over New York’s patronage appointments. Meanwhile, the country focused its attention on the growing sectional crisis and Henry Clay’s proposed compromise. Clay’s complex plan included the admission of California as a free state, organization of the Utah and New Mexico territories without prohibiting slavery, settlement of the Texas–New Mexico boundary dispute, outlawing the slave trade but not slavery in the District of Columbia, and a more rigorous fugitive slave law to return runaway slaves to their owners. Taylor opposed Clay’s comprehensive settlement, and it stalled in Congress. On 9 July 1850 Taylor suddenly died, and Fillmore, who had spent his sixteen months in Washington, D.C., as a political outcast, became the thirteenth president of the United States.
Fillmore, who supported the compromise proposal, immediately set to work to win its approval. First, he replaced Taylor’s cabinet with more conservative department heads who agreed with his position on the compromise. He then personally lobbied for enactment of the compromise bill. When these actions failed to secure the necessary votes, Fillmore endorsed Senator Stephen A. Douglas’s strategy of separating the compromise package into several smaller bills, allowing congressmen to vote against some portions of the proposal while endorsing others, which changed enough votes to enable the compromise to pass. Fillmore announced that the compromise represented the “final settlement” of the slavery issue.
The remainder of Fillmore’s presidency was relatively uneventful. His most notable accomplishment was to send Commodore Matthew C. Perry to Japan to open diplomatic relations. In other areas of foreign policy, Fillmore devoted most of his energies to the discouragement of various filibustering schemes. In 1851, for example, Fillmore made no protest when the Cuban government executed the American participants in a failed filibustering expedition, and despite the pleas of greedy American businesspeople, Fillmore refused to deploy U.S. troops to promote U.S. interests in Mexico and Peru.
Fillmore’s chances of winning the Whig presidential nomination in 1852 were damaged by his aggressive removal of Taylor’s appointees and their replacement with Fillmore supporters, which created enormous hostility toward the president within his own party. In addition, the candidacy of Fillmore’s own secretary of state, Daniel Webster, deprived the president of the support of many conservatives who otherwise would have endorsed him. Consequently, the Whig nomination went to General Winfield Scott, although Fillmore derived some sense of satisfaction from the fact that both Scott and Democratic nominee Franklin Pierce ran on platforms that endorsed the 1850 compromise measures.
Just days after Fillmore left office, his wife died of pneumonia, which she apparently contracted while attending the snowy inauguration of her husband’s successor. Fillmore’s grief was compounded in July 1854, when his daughter Mary passed away. Despite these devastating losses, Fillmore kept abreast of political developments, and he began to receive reports from his supporters that a new political organization, the Know Nothings, who sought to reduce the political influence of immigrants and Catholics, were determined to make him the next president. Inasmuch as Fillmore had never publicly expressed sympathy for any part of the Know Nothings’ nativist agenda, it might seem curious that the order would look to him as a potential presidential candidate. However, the earliest Know Nothings had emphasized patriotism and national unity as well as anti-Catholicism, and veteran nativists believed that Fillmore’s devotion to the Union would enable him to defuse sectional tensions. Although Fillmore was initially reluctant to link his political future with a nativist organization, he concluded that the American party (as the Know Nothings became known) represented the “only hope of forming a truly national party, which shall ignore this constant and distracting agitation of slavery.” In February 1856, while the ex-president toured Europe, his handlers secured for him the American party presidential nomination.
Fillmore’s campaign was a disaster from start to finish. In one of his first campaign speeches, the ex-president outraged most northerners by implying that the South would be justified in seceding should the Republican candidate, John C. Frémont, carry the election. Fillmore’s supporters emphasized that he was the only candidate capable of restoring harmony between North and South in the wake of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Yet that legislation, the caning of Massachusetts abolitionist senator Charles Sumner, and the “sack” of Lawrence, Kansas, by proslavery Missourians had convinced many northerners that compromise with the South was pointless. Consequently, most northern Know Nothings repudiated Fillmore and supported Frémont instead. Even in the South, where Fillmore’s message carried greater appeal, many members of the American party voted for Democrat James Buchanan out of fear that ballots cast for Fillmore’s apparently hopeless candidacy would lead to a Frémont victory. On election day Fillmore carried only Maryland, and although four other southern states eluded him by just a few thousand votes, the ex-president considered his popular tally of 22 percent an embarrassment. Fillmore’s defeat destroyed the American party as a national political force and marked the end of his political career.
In the years immediately following his defeat, Fillmore argued that, unless a conservative, national party could be created, the sectionalism of the Republicans and Democrats would surely produce civil war. When the war came, Fillmore enthusiastically supported the Union cause, although by 1864 he believed that Abraham Lincoln was creating a “military despotism” and consequently endorsed Democratic presidential candidate George B. McClellan (1826–1885). By this point, however, Fillmore devoted most of his time to philanthropic work, an undertaking made possible in part by his 1858 marriage to Caroline Carmichael McIntosh, a wealthy Albany widow. Fillmore died at his Buffalo home.
Fillmore assumed the presidency during a national crisis and helped diffuse sectional tensions with his support for the Compromise of 1850. Yet his refusal to sanction territorial expansion or boldly lead the Whig party once he became president created a public perception of Fillmore as a timid, indecisive individual, and as a result, he never generated any popular enthusiasm outside of conservative Whig circles.

Bibliography

The bulk of Fillmore’s papers is at the State University of New York at Oswego. The remainder, including most of Fillmore’s writings as president, is at the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society. The papers have been published by Frank H. Severance, ed., as The Millard Fillmore Papers (2 vols., 1907). Fillmore’s correspondence with social reformer Dorothea Dix can be found in Charles M. Snyder, ed., The Lady and the President: The Letters of Dorothea Dix and Millard Fillmore (1975). The only modern biography is Robert J. Rayback, Millard Fillmore: Biography of a President (1959), which suffers from its author’s lack of access to the papers at Oswego (which were discovered in the early 1970s). Fillmore’s presidency is described in Elbert B. Smith, The Presidencies of Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore (1988). For the feud between Fillmore and Seward, which played such an important part in shaping Fillmore’s career, see Harry J. Carman and Reinhard H. Luthin, “The Seward-Fillmore Feud and the Crisis of 1850” and “The Seward-Fillmore Feud and the Disruption of the Whig Party,” New York History 24 (1943): 163–84, 335–57. On Fillmore’s role in the Compromise of 1850 see Holman Hamilton, Prologue to Conflict: The Crisis and Compromise of 1850 (1964), while the American party’s 1856 presidential campaign is treated in Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s (1992).

See also

Related articles in Companion to United States History on Oxford Reference



Copyright © 2000-2022 Panlog Ltd.