“Instead of a self-serving politician, the person who emerged from the sources was a quiet, almost modest, man who had no desire for power and who wanted to do good and make good according to the best conventions of the day. And he succeeded.” Robert Rayback
“Why doesn’t anyone have a copy of Millard Fillmore’s biography!?!” I suspired in exasperation. Of course I immediately had to cut short my melodramatic antics when I realized that the answer to the question was actually in my question. Maybe I should have asked instead whether anyone knew who Millard Fillmore was at all or if, indeed, there even was a Millard Fillmore biography. A good friend of mine incredulously repeated his name and then laughed, “I didn’t even know that he was a president of ours.” So good luck, Vanya, finding something to read on this guy.
I knew the pickings were slim when I became a member of two separate county libraries for this project only to find that neither county contained a biography on this president. Let me qualify that: all the biographies I did find were straight out of the children’s department and of no particular use to me. So I did what I always do when I have trouble finding something: I went straight to the Ultimate Source of All That is Good, Amazon.com, and bought Millard Fillmore: Biography of a President by Robert J Rayback (Newtown, CT: American Political Biography Press, 1992). It gave me a keen sense of pleasure to note that even the author has to advise us as to whom Millard Fillmore really was—a United States President.
And just for your information, I am not going to complain every single time I have to buy a book, although you must admit that it’s extremely frustrating having to do so. Of course, I can then hear you say that if it’s this frustrating why would I choose to read about the presidents in the first place? And I would have to end this imaginary exchange in a huff because I would become embarrassed upon the realization that there is just no rebuttal for that argument.
Whoa. Did I just have an entire conversation with myself? Awkward. Who knew that Millard Fillmore was such a controversial topic?
The book I read was four hundred and thirty pages so just bear with me, okay? Millard was born to an extremely poor family in upstate New York. The Fillmores had just moved south from Vermont presumably for a better life, but unfortunately for them, life did not get better. In fact, it seemed to get worse. “For Nathaniel [Fillmore senior] the birth of Millard was a brief distraction from mounting misfortune” (p. 3). Millard was born on January 7, 1800 amidst extreme economic hardship for his family. His parents had purchased a farm in New York, but along with a severe loss of crops, they discovered that their farm was a phony purchase and they were henceforth evicted. Millard’s father hated farming but with the future looking bleak, he was forced to move the family and assume tenancy of a farm in Sempronius, NY. Millard, you can say, started life as one of the poorest future Presidents in history.
Nathaniel’s hatred of farming would be the unwitting means of moving his son further up the economic ladder though it started humbly enough. At age 14, Nathaniel apprenticed Millard to a cloth-dresser and this allowed the young boy to come into contact with society, of a sort. Millard realized that he was pretty ignorant, not having had any real formal schooling, so he enrolled in a new academy during the slow season. (Does cloth-dressing have a slow season!?!) “For the first time he heard a sentence parsed, for the first time saw a map, and for the first time he began to experience the pleasures of female society” (p. 6). “Female society” devolved into Abigail Powers, the youngest daughter of a reverend, and whom Millard resolved to marry one day.
Just as Millard’s father was the method of furthering the young boy’s entrance into a marketable job, he was also the instrument for ultimately introducing his son to the law profession. In 1819, Nathaniel persuaded the judge whose land he tenanted to take Millard on as a law clerk. The judge agreed and Millard began his long and distinguished career as a lawyer. After serving the judge for four years, Millard quit and moved to the thriving but still new city of Buffalo in an effort to broaden his experience. “Bit by bit he impressed himself on the community. Modulated speech, meticulous dress, serious attitude, carefully selected words, orthodox opinions, decorous bearing, correct manners, temperate habits—all gained the approval of his associates” (p. 12). On February 8, 1826, he was doing well enough to finally marry Abigail Powers.
In that same year an unusual political phenomenon developed—the Anitmason Party. In western New York, an Arch Mason, William Morgan, disappeared after he published a book bearing the secrets of the Masonic order. Public opinion rose against all masons thereafter and a political party sprang up in the meantime, promising the demise of the Masons. Millard jumped on the bandwagon and by 1828, he was voted to the state assembly on the Antimason ticket. “He shed his protective cocoon of anonymity and with increasing frequency took the floor of the assembly” (p.34). Through his passionate efforts for the Antimason cause, he was then elected to Congress.
It makes sense to me that the Antimason Party was doomed to be short-lived. The furor over the Masons’ secret order very soon was eclipsed by the Panic of 1837 and while Millard continued to work as a lawyer in Buffalo during the off season, he began to move into the Whig Party camp. Through his zeal, he was able to help get William Henry Harrison elected in the 1840 campaign and he was sent to Congress yet again, but this time as a Whig. He lost the 1841 Speaker of the House election but he was instead sent to assume leadership of the very powerful Ways and Means Committee.
In 1842, he retired from Congress for local Whig reasons but, in his heart he wanted the Vice Presidential nomination. “He reasoned that he could do more good during the next two years back in New York, where political fences were in need of much repair, than to continue serving in Congress” (p. 146). While he was waiting for the next presidential election, he was prevailed upon by the local Whigs to run for Governor of the state of New York. He lost but was given the important job of comptroller for the state, which also was a vital position because it dealt with the New York’s finances. He did not receive the nomination for vice president in 1844.
However, with the election of 1848 right around the corner and Zachary Taylor’s campaign picking up speed, the Whigs realized that the vice president really needed to come from the North (since Taylor was of the West). Millard was then nominated as the vice presidential candidate to run on the Whig ticket. When Taylor won the presidency, Millard found himself returning to Washington and to Congress but this time as Vice President and head of the Senate.
Unfortunately, it was Millard being sent to Washington that eventually split the Whig party and ultimately destroyed it. While Fillmore was away, William Seward, a New York politician, and Thurlow Weed, a Whig newspaper editor, combined to do everything in their power to thwart Millard’s influence in the state, causing a very bitter intrapolitical rivalry. Weed and Seward caused Fillmore’s political recommendations to be blocked and they even went so far as to cozy up to Zachary Taylor’s ear. These issues were to cause great distress in the Whig ranks.
All these machinations were moot, however, when, in 1850, Taylor died and the office of President of the United States felll upon Millard Fillmore. “Most Presidents have four months before taking office to form their policies. He [Millard] had one night. He was fully aware of the taut condition of the bonds of the union. No President has ever taken office in the face of such impending disaster” (p. 240). The impending disaster referred to here was the future Compromise of 1850. Taylor had died amidst huge political upheaval as California and New Mexico wanted to enter the Union as free states and the South was simply livid over it. The Compromise of 1850, which was actually four or five separate bills, was only voted into law because Millard Fillmore placed his entire presidential force behind it. The bills established Texas’ boundary with New Mexico, California and New Mexico would be admitted to the Union as free states, the slave trade was abolished in the district of Columbia, and there were new, harsher measures affixed to the Fugitive Slave Law. And, of course, no one was happy with it.
Other than the overwhelming suffocation of the slavery issue during his presidency, Millard’s presidency was distinguished by a laidback, gentlemanly feel. He was a conservative at heart and dealt with the various situations in that light. “His foreign policy was simplicity itself: promote, by honorable means only, every legitimate interest of Americans. This meant that bellicose action or unwonted greed on the part of either foreigners or Americans must be restrained. He cared neither to flaunt the power of America nor to test the strength of others. And when his term of office was over, his record would be remarkably clear of bluff, bombast, or aggression” (p. 301.) He was not a huge proponent of “manifest destiny” but he would not allow foreign powers to come tramping in either.
The slow schism that developed in the Whig Party grew ever broader as the election of 1852 grew nearer. Millard wished to retire but his Whig cronies demanded that he keep his hat in the race because the Southern Whigs trusted him. However, behind Fillmore’s back, Weed and Seward were promoting the presidency of General Willard Scott and between them, they split the party right down the center. Scott eventually won the nomination after a long and emotion-filled convention, but with Franklin Pierce becoming the next president, the Whigs would soon break up into other political parties.
It was unfortunate that Abigail Fillmore died in 1853 just as Millard began his long retirement from office, thereby making his time at home worse than it should have been (after being abandoned by his own political party). Also, the office of President did not pay very well and so Millard was forced to resume his law profession afterwards just to keep his financial situation stable.
However, politics would simply not go away and Millard found himself in the thick of things as usual. “In his eyes the preservation of the Union had become the highest goal of statesmanship” (p. 386). Because he felt this way, Millard decided to go on an extended tour of the Union promoting unity. It was during this tour that his young daughter, only 22 years old, died suddenly.
In grief, Fillmore traveled throughout Europe only to return to the United States to join yet another political party, the Know Nothings. The Know Nothings were a random group of people (some were old Whig adherents) that were anti-immigrants, anti-Catholics, and anti-party incumbents and they nominated Millard Fillmore as their 1856 presidential nominee.
Millard did not win the election but life was not over. In 1858, he married a wealthy widow, Mrs. Caroline C McIntosh, which took care of his financial situation, and allowed him to devote even more time, now that the Civil War had begun, to effecting internecine peace. “With armed conflict at hand Fillmore made restoration of the Union his sole war aim” (p. 423). He supported the war from the northern side and even put together the Union Continentals, a “company in the home guard—that portion of the New York militia composed of mean too old to be subject to the call by the federal government but prepared to act in a local emergency” (p. 424).
It was unfortunate for Millard Fillmore that his remarkable career did not end right there because his sterling reputation was eventually tarnished by his criticism directed to the Republican Party and Lincoln in particular. The media honed in on this seeming “treason’ by the ex-President and for the rest of his years, Millard would be branded a traitor.
After the war was over, Millard was placed on the board of directors for the newly built University of Buffalo medical school and he was chairman for the local Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. “Upon his personal world he could smile benignly. It had been kind to him and generous with its material and spiritual wealth. The years passed in unhurried, comfortable living” (p. 443). On the morning of February 13, 1874, Millard was shaving when his hand went numb, soon followed by the left side of his face. This paralysis occurred again two weeks later and on March 8th, he died.
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