MILLARD FILLMORE—THE PRESIDENT BETRAYED BY HIS JUDGMENT

By Edwin Cooney

He was America’s President between Wednesday, July 10, 1850 and Friday, March 4, 1853. He made one of the major decisions in our history, yet few Americans today even know his name.

There is a scene in a 1969 comedy album called “I Am the President” featuring comedian David Frye as President Richard Nixon where, out of the blue, we hear Millard Fillmore’s name and have a good laugh at it.

In this comedy scene, President Nixon is at his desk working on the nuclear proliferation agreement with the Soviet Union when he is interrupted by a White House maid. As she flits around the office dusting and straightening things, President Nixon engages her in conversation. He discovers that she has worked at the White House since the days of Calvin Coolidge. Acknowledging that she’s obviously known a lot of presidents, he naturally wants to know what people are saying about him in comparison to past chief executives. The maid obviously doesn’t want to be impolite or inappropriate, but eventually President Nixon forces her to be responsive.

“Well, they say you’re better than some and worse than others,” she says.

Pressed by the president to say who he’s better than, she blurts out “Millard Fillmore,” which, of course, draws a big laugh.

“Why,” you may well ask “was that answer funny?” Had she replied John Tyler or Andrew Johnson, it’s a good bet that the line wouldn’t have been nearly as humorous. Perhaps the response Rutherford B. Hayes would have been as amusing. After all, how many people do you know who are named either Rutherford or Millard?

Born, raised, largely self-educated, apprenticed to two sets of cloth makers, and drawn toward the practice of law, young Fillmore moved to East Aurora near Buffalo in 1821. Admitted to the bar in 1823, he began dabbling in politics in 1824 and by 1828 was elected to the state Assembly as an Anti-Mason. The Anti-Mason party was started in New York State in the wake of the 1826 kidnapping and murder of William Morgan, a bricklayer from Batavia, New York, who had left a local Masonic lodge and divulged the Masonic Order’s secrets in a subsequent publication. Ironically, Millard Fillmore entered public life opposed to secret societies of any sort.

Always a strong supporter of American commerce, Millard Fillmore supported measures to expand American enterprise as a State Assemblyman from 1829 until1832, as a Whig Party Congressman between 1833-35 and 1837-43 and, ultimately, as our thirteenth President. Between 1841 and 1843, Millard Fillmore was chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee. As such, he supported high protective tariffs to assist business’ recovery from the depression of 1837 and supported a federal grant to assist Samuel Morse in the development of his telegraph.

Suddenly without explanation, Congressman Fillmore decided to return to Buffalo and thus he did not seek election to a fifth term in Congress in 1842. Speculation has it that he desired to be elected to the U.S. Senate or perhaps to be the Whig Party Vice Presidential nominee in 1844.

Tall, ruggedly handsome with clear blue eyes, a high forehead, and somewhat thick unruly hair, he had a deep masculine voice. (It is said he spoke slowly in short sentences and could be humorous on occasion.) Fillmore -- with his attractive family and pristine personal reputation of constructive civic involvement and personal integrity -- was one of the most popular and desirable candidates for public office in 1844. Hence, he was urged by Thurlow Weed, a prominent Albany, New York newspaper editor and Whig Party boss, to run for Governor of the Empire State. A loyal party man, Millard Fillmore did run that fall, but lost the first election of his life by some ten thousand votes to a popular democrat Silas Wright.

In 1848, Millard Fillmore, who had been recently elected Conptroller of New York State, was nominated for Vice President on the Whig Party ticket headed by Mexican War hero General Zachary Taylor. Having accepted the vice presidential nomination against the wishes of Thurlow Weed and former New York Whig Governor William Seward, Vice President Fillmore was eased out of his position of influence during the Taylor Administration by those two powerful Whig leaders. (William Seward would ultimately serve as Secretary of State under Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson from 1861 to 1869.)

In 1849, a border dispute broke out between Texas and New Mexico territory which had been acquired from Mexico as part of the spoils of the late war. Zachary Taylor, the stubby-legged, bushy-haired, tobacco-chewing, slave-holding but pro-Union President, announced his intention to have the Supreme Court settle the Texas-New Mexico border dispute which he would back with federal troops. This angered the South which threatened retaliation if one federal gun were fired against Texas.

Hence, as Vice President Fillmore presided over the Senate throughout the late winter and spring of 1850, he witnessed the efforts of Daniel Webster and Henry Clay to work out a compromise to keep the South in the Union and sufficiently mollify northern moderates to prevent a seemingly certain civil war. President Taylor let it be known that he opposed federal intervention in the moral question of slavery and that he would veto any legislation that dealt with the slavery issue pro or con.

Suddenly there arrived the three months that would forever change Millard Fillmore’s life. Just before the Vice President adjourned the Senate for the Fourth of July recess, he paid a visit to President Taylor and informed him that if the Senate vote became tied on the issue of what was being called “The Compromise of 1850,” he would vote in favor of its passage. He assured President Taylor that this decision in no way represented his hostility to the administration but rather represented what he regarded as being in the best interest of the country. Exactly what the plainspoken but nevertheless genial President Taylor had to say in response was not recorded.

The Fourth of July is always hot in Washington and Thursday, July 4th, 1850 was no exception. President Taylor attended the obligatory celebration at the unfinished Washington Monument and listened to patriotic speeches for two hours under the unrelenting sun. Returning hungry and thirsty to the White House after a stroll, “Old Rough and Ready” apparently wolfed down a large bowl of cherries and drank a pitcher of ice milk. Within hours he was ill. Throughout the next five days he rallied and then worsened. Doctors diagnosed cholera and he died about 10:30 p.m. on Tuesday, July 9, 1850.

Having visited President Taylor earlier that day, Millard Fillmore knew he would soon be President. Informed of the President’s passing, the Vice President sent a message to the seven cabinet members who had ignored or shown him only polite courtesy. He then locked himself in his room at the Willard Hotel and spent a sleepless night writing a long letter to his beloved Abigail back in Buffalo while contemplating the future.

At noon on Wednesday, July 10, Millard Fillmore became our thirteenth President. He was sworn in before a joint session of Congress by Judge William Cranch, Chief Justice of the Circuit Court for the District of Columbia. President Fillmore asked and got the resignation of President Taylor’s cabinet. He asked them to remain in their positions for a month. They agreed on a week.

The rest of July and part of August was largely taken up replacing Taylor administration, cabinet members and other personnel. President Fillmore’s major assistant in this necessary task was the veteran politician Senator Daniel Webster, who, for the second time in his long but now waning life, accepted the position of Secretary of State.

Then came September and time to sign or veto the Compromise of 1850. The final legislation had five acts:
(1.) The admission of California as a free state and the adoption of popular sovereignty for the remaining territories won in the recent Mexican War;
(2.) Settlement of the Texas-New Mexican border dispute (Texas was given $10,000,000 to pay its debts and New Mexico became a U.S. territory);
(3.) Utah became a U.S. territory;
(4.) The fugitive slave law allowing the capture without trial and return of slaves, and sometimes even free blacks, to the South; and, finally,
(5.) The end to the slave trade—although not slavery itself—in the District of Columbia.

Warned by his wife Abigail that signing of the Fugitive Slave Act would be political suicide, President Fillmore nevertheless signed it. He believed the rule of law under the Constitution took greater precedence over anything he personally believed or didn’t believe. Thus he was forced to send federal troops into the North to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law and into the South to put down occasional threats of insurrection. America was discontented and President Fillmore was destined, despite his efforts on behalf of American commerce at home and abroad, to be a most unhappy President and man.

During his administration, President Fillmore sought to take some very positive measures to increase American commerce by mending past quarrels and conflicts. He sought to mend relations with Mexico by authorizing the building of a railroad across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec which connects the Gulf of Mexico with the Pacific Ocean. (It is located in the Mexican state of Oaxaca). He also authorized plans to cut a canal across Nicaragua, pressured the French out of Hawaii, and sent Commodore Matthew C. Perry to open up trade with Japan. At home, President Fillmore cooperated with Stephen A. Douglas, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, to finance the building of railroads in different regions of the country.

As laudable as all of this was, President Fillmore seldom got credit for his administration’s accomplishments. He was invariably overshadowed by Secretary of State Webster and even Attorney General John Crittenden. Hence, he would be denied nomination by the Whig Party in 1852 which merely marked the beginning of more tragedy in his life.

Abigail Powers Fillmore, once his teacher back in New Hope, New York, had been his wife since Sunday, February 5, 1826. Ill and unable to stand for extended periods of time during her husband’s presidency, Abigail’s health was extremely delicate. Her entertainment obligations as First Lady were largely taken over by their daughter Mary Abigail Fillmore. She was beautiful and intelligent (she spoke French, Italian, Spanish and German) and played the piano, harp and guitar thus providing much of the musical entertainment herself. (The Fillmore’s son Millard Powers Fillmore served his father as private secretary during his administration.) Abigail Fillmore attended the outdoor inaugural ceremony for Fillmore’s successor Franklin Pierce on Friday, March 4, 1853 and became chilled. The following day, she contracted a fever. By Wednesday, March 30, she was dead, never having left her room at the Willard hotel in Washington. A little more than a year later, Millard Fillmore’s beloved daughter, Mary Abigail Fillmore, was also dead of cholera in Buffalo. Many believe the former president sought to stifle his grief by getting back into politics. However, he had another problem: his Whig Party was gone.

In early 1855, Millard Fillmore -- the man who entered elective politics opposed to secret Masonic societies -- joined ( and there’s no adequate explanation for this) the Order of the Star Spangled Banner, a secret political order that was anti-Catholic, and anti-foreigner. The Order’s political party was the American Nativist or “Know Nothing” party. Fillmore received news of his nomination by that party while traveling in Europe. He accepted its nomination, although he avoided anti-Catholic or foreigner rhetoric throughout the 1856 campaign. He got about twenty percent of the vote, but won only the state of Maryland’s eight electoral votes.

With all his faults and misjudgments, Millard Fillmore was a decent man and a pretty good administrator. His obscurity, I think can be laid to two causes.

First, had he vetoed the Compromise of 1850 (as President Taylor would have done ) with its clearly wretched Fugitive Slave provision plus if he perhaps had used the federal treasury (as was clearly done to mollify Texas in the Compromise’s second act), war still might have been prevented. Slavery, after all, was doomed as a profitable institution and President Fillmore lacked the imagination to insure that the very death of slavery might be realized by southern planters as profitable in its own right;

Second, like his two immediate successors, Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan, President Fillmore chose law over morality. Unlike Abraham Lincoln, who almost instinctively knew when to bend the law to match his moral obligation, President Fillmore was unable to apply his finest traits as a public servant to his presidency which he almost always did do as a public-spirited citizen of Buffalo, New York.

Millard Fillmore possessed good looks—he’s easily one of the ten most handsome of our presidents. Legend has it that Britain’s Queen Victoria saw him as one of the most handsome men she’d ever met. His attractiveness was such that he won the heart of Caroline Carmichael McIntosh, a wealthy widow, whom he married on Wednesday, February 10, 1858.

He frequently used good judgment as well. Offered a degree by Oxford University while traveling in Europe in 1855, he turned down the honor because, as he put it: “…no man should accept a degree that he is incapable of reading.”

One of his early admirers in Washington was former President John Quincy Adams who deeply lamented Congressman Fillmore’s decision not to run for election to Congress in 1842.

Millard Fillmore, a man of law, ultimately left America a legacy of bad law—made so because its main provisions substituted morality with mere expediency. If only he had allowed himself to display the force and magnitude of his personal morality, history may well have been different and his genuinely good name would have been well-known as well as highly honored to this day.

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY