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• Born: 7 January 1800
• Birthplace: Cayuga County, New York
• Died: 8 March 1874
• Best Known As: President of the United States, 1850-53

Millard Fillmore came from poor, uneducated beginnings to become a New York lawyer who in 1833 was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. After serving in congress, Fillmore, a Whig, was Zachary Taylor's vice president. When Taylor died in office, Fillmore became the 13th president. His attempts to compromise on the slavery issue left him with few fans on either side, and his stay in the White House was brief. In the election of 1852 Fillmore failed to get the nomination at the Whig convention (the candidate from the Democratic Party, Franklin Pierce, went on to win the election). In the election of 1856 Fillmore ran for president as a candidate of the Know-Nothing Party, but carried only Maryland.

Fillmore married his schoolteacher, Abigail Powers, in 1826; she died a month after he left office and in 1858 he married a wealthy widow, Mrs. Caroline C. McIntosh... After President Lincoln's assassination, a mob, unforgiving of Fillmore's sympathy for the South, surrounded his house and draped it in black cloth, then splashed ink on it.

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Fillmore, Millard (1800-74) 13th president of the United States (1850-53), born in Cayuga County, New York. Fillmore spent three terms in the state legislature and four terms (three consecutive) in Congress before being elected (1848) vice president on the Whig ticket that had Zachary Taylor at its head. He became president when Taylor died suddenly in 1850. As president, Fillmore won Congressional approval for the Compromise of 1850, which Taylor had opposed, and sent Commodore Matthew C. Perry to open diplomatic relations with Japan. Fillmore failed to win the Whig presidential nomination in 1852, but in 1856 he ran as the candidate of the American Party (also called the Know Nothing party). His disastrous defeat destroyed the party and ended his political career.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

The major contribution of Millard Fillmore (1800-1874), thirteenth president of the United States, was his signing of the Compromise of 1850.

Millard Fillmore was born in Cayuga County, N.Y., the son of a poor farmer. Although he held several legal clerkships, he was largely self-taught in the law. He entered politics in association with Thurlow Weed and William H. Seward, helping to organize the Anti-Masonic party as a major third party in the North. As one of the party's leaders in the New York Assembly, Fillmore sponsored reforms, including abolishing debtor imprisonment and a bankruptcy bill. As a member of the U.S. House of Representatives in the 1830s and 1840s, he led his party into the newly formed Whig party. He was elected comptroller of New York State in 1846.

In 1848 Fillmore was elected vice president of the United States under Zachary Taylor. This proved an unpleasant experience, as he was excluded from all patronage and policy-making decisions. He was unable to prevent Taylor's opposition to Henry Clay's proposals for ending the sectional crisis over the extension of slavery into territories acquired by the Mexican War; but before Taylor could veto Clay's compromise bill, he died. Fillmore, now president, quickly accepted the five bills which made up the Compromise of 1850. This was the high point of his administration and demonstrated his attempt to find a middle ground on the slavery question. However, he was attacked by antislavery groups, especially for his vigorous enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, which was part of the compromise. Fillmore believed that slavery was evil but, as long as it existed, had to be protected.

Fillmore's policies all aimed at turning the country away from the slavery question. His most important recommendation was that the U.S. government build a transcontinental railroad. His foreign policy, formulated with Secretary of State Daniel Webster, had similar goals. In marked contrast to the aggressive policy followed by the United States during the rest of the 1840s and 1850s (when Democratic administrations made every effort to acquire additional territory), Fillmore sought to encourage trade through peaceful relations. One of his major undertakings was to send Commodore Matthew Perry to open Japan to American commerce.

In 1852 Fillmore was repudiated by the Whigs. After he ran unsuccessfully for president in 1856 as the Know-Nothing party's candidate, he returned to Buffalo to devote himself to local civic projects. He died on March 8, 1874.

Further Reading

The definitive biography of Fillmore is Robert J. Rayback's objective Millard Fillmore (1959). For background on Fillmore's New York career see the books by Glyndon G. Van Deusen on the leaders of the Whig party in the Empire State: Thurlow Weed: Wizard of the Lobby (1947), Horace Greeley: Nineteenth-Century Crusader (1953), and William Henry Seward (1967).

For more information on Millard Fillmore, visit Britannica.com.

• Born: Jan. 7, 1800, Cayuga County, N.Y.
• Political party: Whig
• Education: six months of grade school; read law, 1822
• Military service: none
• Previous government service: New York State Assembly, 1829–33; U.S. House of Representatives, 1833–35, 1837–43; New York State comptroller, 1847–48; Vice President, 1849–50
• Succeeded to Presidency, 1850; served, 1850–53
• Died: Mar. 8, 1874, Buffalo, N.Y.

Millard Fillmore was the third and last Whig President, succeeding Zachary Taylor, who died in office. He was the first and only successor to the Presidency to appoint an entirely new cabinet. His support of the Compromise of 1850 preserved the Union for another decade but destroyed his own political career.

Fillmore was born on a frontier farm in upstate New York. He was apprenticed to a cloth maker at age 14, then became a schoolteacher. He read law with a county judge and became a lawyer in East Aurora, New York. He served three terms in the New York legislature, sponsoring legislation to close the debtors prison.

Fillmore began his career in national politics as an opponent of Andrew Jackson, joining the Whig Party during his first term in the House of Representatives in 1833 and becoming party congressional leader in 1841. He opposed the spoils system, under which government posts were filled according to the recommendations of party bosses, and was in favor of national funding for internal improvements. Two of the tariff bills he wrote as chair of the Ways and Means Committee were vetoed by President John Tyler, but a third was approved in 1842.

Fillmore lost the Whig nomination for Vice President in 1844 and was defeated in an election for New York governor that same year. In 1847 he was elected New York State's first comptroller. Fillmore received the Vice Presidential nomination in 1848 to appease Northern Whigs opposed to the nomination of slaveholder Zachary Taylor. As Vice President, he presided fairly and firmly in the Senate over the intense debates between Northern abolitionists and Southern slaveholders. When Fillmore became President, he broke his political alliance with New York State Whig party boss Thurlow Weed and appointed a completely new cabinet, including Daniel Webster as secretary of state. He reversed Taylor's opposition to Henry Clay's Compromise of 1850, a measure designed to effect a compromise over extension of slavery into the newly acquired territories. It admitted California to the Union as a free state, permitted slavery in the New Mexico and Utah territories, abolished slavery in the District of Columbia, and strengthened the fugitive slave law to allow Southern slaveholders to use Northern state courts and police in efforts to retrieve runaway slaves. Fillmore approved the compromise to avoid sectional conflict. His major accomplishment in foreign policy was the decision to send a fleet commanded by Commodore Matthew C. Perry to Japan, which resulted in an 1854 treaty that opened up that nation to U.S. trade.

As a result of his sectional compromises, Fillmore was discredited among Northern Whigs, and after 53 ballots he lost the bid for his party's Presidential nomination in 1852 to General Winfield Scott, the third war hero the Whigs had nominated for the Presidency. But the party destroyed itself over the slavery issue, and Fillmore turned the White House over to Democrat Franklin Pierce; he then retired to Buffalo to practice law.

Fillmore's 1856 Presidential campaign on the Know-Nothing ticket was an embarrassment; the party was opposed to foreigners and was strongly anti-Catholic, though Fillmore refused to endorse these prejudices in the campaign. He ran as a nationalist, attempting to preserve the Union from sectional divisions. He received 21 percent of the vote, a record for a third-party candidate until 1912. But after the election the party disappeared and he retired from politics.

Fillmore became active in local affairs in upstate New York. A man who had received only six months of schooling in his life, he had begun his political career in New York by developing the public school system. In later life he founded the University of Buffalo (becoming its first chancellor) and the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy.

Sources

• Elbert B. Smith, The Presidencies of Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1988)

(1800-1874), thirteenth president of the United States. Unlike most presidents, Fillmore knew poverty as a boy. Of old New England stock, he was born in western New York, where his father scraped out a living as a tenant farmer. In his youth he received only a limited education before being apprenticed as a clothier. His prospects brightened when he was offered the chance to read law with a local judge; after moving to Buffalo, he continued his legal training and in 1823 was admitted to the bar.

In 1828 Fillmore was elected to the New York legislature as an Anti-Mason and served three terms. He eventually joined the Whig party and served four terms in the U.S. Congress. As chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, he played a leading role in framing the tariff of 1842. Deciding to retire from Congress in 1844, he was selected as the Whigs' gubernatorial candidate but was narrowly defeated. In 1848, while serving as state comptroller, he received the Whig vice-presidential nomination and was elected in November.

Despite his support for President Zachary Taylor's policies, Fillmore had little influence in the new administration, and in 1850, after much hesitancy, he backed Henry Clay's compromise proposals rather than the president's plan for settling the sectional conflict. When he became president following Taylor's death in July, Fillmore, displaying rare decisiveness, threw his influence behind the compromise movement in Congress. By September, he had signed the various compromise measures into law, and in his annual message in December, he hailed them as a final settlement of the sectional controversy.

As part of his plan to purge the Whig party of its radicalism, Fillmore began removing opponents of the compromise from federal office. This ill-considered policy deepened party divisions and precipitated a bruising struggle for the 1852 presidential nomination. Fillmore was at best a reluctant candidate: though eager for the popular endorsement that the nomination would convey, he believed that no Whig could win in 1852. Despite Fillmore's strength in the South, the Whig convention eventually nominated Winfield Scott, who suffered a crushing defeat.

At the end of his term, Fillmore returned to Buffalo. He remained politically active and in 1855 joined the secret nativist American party, which nominated him for president in 1856. Hoping to transform the party into a national, conservative organization, Fillmore downplayed nativism in the campaign and emphasized the Union issue instead. His candidacy alienated both antislavery forces and fervent nativists, and he finished a distant third in the election.

Following his defeat, Fillmore devoted his energies to civic affairs. Alienated from the Republican party, which was controlled by his personal enemies, he opposed the Lincoln administration during the war and sympathized with Andrew Johnson in his clash with congressional Republicans during Reconstruction.

Although honest and hardworking, Fillmore manifested a habitual lack of self-confidence that significantly limited his political effectiveness. He was a pompous, colorless individual who rose far beyond his ability, and as such he left only a limited mark on his generation.

Bibliography:

Robert J. Rayback, Millard Fillmore: Biography of a President (1959); Elbert B. Smith, The Presidencies of Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore (1988).

Author:

William E. Gienapp

See also Anti-Masons; Elections: 1848 , 1856; Know-Nothing Party; Nativism; Whig Party. For events during Fillmore's administration, see Compromise of 1850; Fugitive Slave Law.

1800–1874, 13th President of the United States (July, 1850–Mar., 1853), b. Locke (now Summerhill), N.Y. Because he was compelled to work at odd jobs at an early age to earn a living his education was irregular and incomplete. He read law in his spare time and was admitted (1823) to the bar. After practicing law in East Aurora, N.Y., until 1830, he settled in Buffalo. Thurlow Weed made Fillmore a lieutenant in the Anti-Masonic party, and with Weed's support he served in the New York state assembly (1829–31) and in the U.S. House of Representatives (1833–35). In 1834 he joined the Whig party and was reelected three times (1836, 1838, 1840) to the House. When the Whigs came into national power in 1840, Fillmore became prominent in his party. As chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, he promoted the high tariff of 1842. He was considered (1844) for the vice presidential candidacy, but instead became Whig candidate for the governorship of New York. His defeat by Silas Wright in a close contest was caused by the split between proslavery and antislavery Whigs. With Henry Clay's backing, Fillmore was nominated (1848) for Vice President on the Whig ticket with Zachary Taylor. As Vice President, Fillmore presided with notable fairness over the Senate during the turbulent debates of 1850. Succeeding to the presidency upon Taylor's death, he encouraged and then signed the Compromise of 1850, which included the Fugitive Slave Act. He tried to enforce the measures despite the criticism his course evoked from the North. Cheaper postal rates were introduced during his administration. He appointed Daniel Webster Secretary of State, emphasized nonintervention in foreign disputes, and approved the treaty that opened Japan to Western commerce. He unsuccessfully tried to make the Whigs a national party that, by occupying middle ground on the issue of slavery, could conciliate North and South and prevent extremists from gaining power. Neither he nor Webster could win the support of the Whig convention in 1852, and the nomination went to Gen. Winfield Scott, representative of the more radical antislavery element. With the division of the Whigs over the slavery issue and the party's consequent rapid decline, Fillmore's political career came to an end. He joined the Know-Nothing movement in the vain hope that it might unite North and South, and he accepted (1856) the nomination of that group for the presidency, being endorsed also by the small remnant of the Whigs. He opposed Lincoln's election and his Civil War administration and supported Andrew Johnson's stand against radical Reconstruction measures, but he took no active part in the controversies over these issues.

Bibliography

See biographies by R. J. Rayback (1959), R. Scarry (1965, repr. 1970), and W. L. Barre (1856, repr. 1971).

Millard Fillmore was a Whig, a member of the New York Assembly, a member of the U.S. Congress, vice president of the United States under Zachary Taylor, and the thirteenth president of the United States. Despite a personal dislike of slavery, he signed into law the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, among other bills that originated in the Compromise of 1850. His administration supported trade with foreign countries, forging one of the first trade agreements with Japan, but Fillmore was opposed to expansionism and refused to support an attempted annexation of Cuba in 1851.

Fillmore was born June 7, 1800, in Locke, New York. His father, Nathaniel Fillmore, was a farmer who wanted Fillmore to escape a life of poverty. Fillmore left school at an early age to become apprenticed, but a judge recognized his talents and ambition and persuaded him to study law. He was admitted to the bar at the age of twenty-four and soon became a leading lawyer in the state of New York.

In 1828, Fillmore was elected to the New York Assembly, and in 1832, he was elected to Congress, where he served three terms. In 1844, he ran unsuccessfully for governor of New York State. In 1848, the Whig party nominated him for vice president to run with the Mexican War hero Taylor. Fillmore and Taylor won the election by appeasing both northern and southern voters, taking the position that although slavery was evil, it was a problem that had to be solved by the states.

Fillmore was disappointed with his lack of power and voice as vice president. The country was facing a crisis over the issues of slavery and the admittance of Texas, California, and New Mexico into the Union. The Compromise of 1850, written by Senator Henry Clay, was an omnibus that recommended that California be admitted to the Union as a free state, the rest of Mexican cession be formed without restrictions on slavery, Texas end its boundary dispute with New Mexico, and a new fugitive slave law be passed. As president of the Senate, Fillmore was involved in the debate over the compromise but found himself unable to influence its course.

President Taylor was seen as the greatest obstacle to the compromise because he refused to sign it as one comprehensive piece of legislation, wanting to consider separately the issue of California's admission into the Union as a free state. The South feared that if California was admitted as a free state, other western territories would eventually become free states, thereby giving the antislavery movement a more powerful voice in Congress. In the summer of 1850, Taylor became even more hostile to the South when he threatened to lead the U.S. Army against the Texas militia, which was trying to spread slavery westward by threatening Texas's boundary with the territory of New Mexico. This never transpired because on July 9, 1850, Taylor died suddenly and Fillmore was sworn in as president.

Fillmore supported the compromise, but he too wanted the legislation divided into separate bills. With the departure from the Senate of the compromise's strongest supporters—Clay, Daniel Webster, and John C. Calhoun—and the maneuvering of new leaders such as Stephen A. Douglas, Jefferson Davis, and William H. Seward, the bill was split up. Only three months after Taylor's death, all the separate bills were passed by Congress and signed into law by Fillmore.

Fillmore was opposed to slavery and had difficulty signing one of those bills, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The act forbade both government and individuals to help slaves escape from their master. It also made the federal government responsible for recovering and returning runaway slaves. Fillmore believed it was his constitutional responsibility to enforce the law even though he disagreed with it. In a letter to Webster, he wrote,

God knows I detest slavery, but it is an existing evil, for which we are not responsible, and we must endure it and give it such protection as is guaranteed by the constitution, till we get rid of it without destroying the last hope of free government in the world.

In the area of foreign policy, the Fillmore administration achieved one of the first trade agreements ever reached between the empire of Japan and a foreign country. This agreement opened up new sources of coal to power the United States' seagoing steamers, and it helped establish a Pacific trade route between the United States and Asia. Fillmore opposed the popular nineteenth-century philosophy of Manifest Destiny, which regarded U.S. expansion into the Pacific as inevitable. He thought seizing another nation's land was dishonorable. In August 1851, he refused to give military support to an attempted annexation of Cuba by four hundred U.S. citizens, mostly veterans of the Mexican War. The invasion of the Spanish colony failed, and most of the invaders, including their leader, Narciso Lopez, were captured and executed.

Early in his presidency, Fillmore had determined that he would not seek reelection, but in the months leading up to the 1852 election, it became clear that the southern Whigs would support only Fillmore. Even though he did not desire his party's nomination, Fillmore left his name on the convention ballot to prevent the nomination of General Winfield Scott. Fillmore knew the general would be a hopeless candidate in the South because of his connections with abolitionists like Seward. But on the fifty-third ballot, Scott was nominated. As Fillmore predicted, Scott lost the general election to Democrat Franklin Pierce.

Fillmore's last venture into politics came in 1856 when he accepted the presidential nomination of the Know-Nothing party. This political party was formed as a result of a division in the Whig party between those who favored national expansion and those who were against slavery. The Know-Nothings, created by the national Whigs, used their opposition to mass immigration from Europe to unite northern and southern voters. U.S. citizens never took the party seriously, and Fillmore lost the election to southern Democrat James Buchanan.

After the election, Fillmore settled down in Buffalo, New York, and became the city's leading citizen. He participated in many committees and supported institutions such as the University of Buffalo and the Orphan Asylum. When the nation fell into civil war in 1861, he pledged his support to the Union cause and worked to enlist Buffalo men in the war effort. His support dwindled as the war raged on, and in 1863, he publicly denounced Abraham Lincoln's administration's handling of the conflict and supported George B. McClellan in the 1864 presidential election.

Fillmore died March 8, 1874.

IN BRIEF: n. - Elected vice president and became the 13th President of the United States when Zachary Taylor died in office (1800-1874).