President Millard Fillmore
Compiled by D. A.
Sharpe
President Millard Fillmore (January 7, 1800 Š March 8, 1874) is my fourth cousin, four times
removed. The ancestors in common
between President Fillmore and myself are Dorcas Bronson and her husband,
Stephen Hopkins. They are the third great grandparents of President Fillmore,
and they are my seventh great grandparents. President Fillmore also is the
sixth cousin, three times removed to my wife, Suzanne Margaret Boggess. Their
ancestors in common are George Hills and Mary Symonds, the fifth great
grandparents of President Fillmore. They also are the eighth great grandparents
to Suzanne
Millard Fillmore
was the 13th President of the United States (1850Š53), the last to
be a member of the Whig
Party while in the White House.
A former U.S. Representative from New York, Fillmore was elected the nation's 12th Vice President in 1848, and was elevated to the
presidency by the death of Zachary
Taylor. He was instrumental in getting the Compromise
of 1850 passed, a bargain that led to a brief truce in the battle
over slavery. He failed to win the Whig nomination for president
in 1852; he gained the endorsement of the nativist
Know
Nothing Party four years later, and finished third in that election.
President Millard Fillmore is
usually remembered, if at all, for being the butt of innumerable jokes about
everything from his supposed lack of accomplishments to his unusual name. In
fact, even Fillmore himself appeared aware of his tumble into obscurity. Just a
few years removed from the White House, by which time his Whig political party
had disintegrated and his strategy for staving off civil war had collapsed, he
wrote that the world had forgotten him. Check out 10 illuminating facts about
Fillmore's life and legacy.
His Christian faith was as a member of the Unitarian
Church. His college education was
at the New Hope Academy in a nearby town in 1819. The woman instructing him later became
his wife, Abigail Powers (1798-1853) on February 5, 1826. The children they bore were Millard
Powers (1828-1889) and Mary Abigail (1832-1854).
He worked on his familyÕs farm under
his fatherÕs direction, who at age 14 arranged for Millard to apprentice with a
cloth-maker in a nearby county. It
was said that the work was so grueling that he borrowed $30 to buy his Ņfreedom,Ó
and walked the 100 miles back home.
He taught himself to read and write, acquiring reading material however
creatively he could.
Fillmore was born
into poverty in the Finger Lakes area of New York
state, neat a village named Locke; his parents were tenant farmers
during his formative years. He rose from poverty through study, and became a
lawyer though he had little formal schooling.
Following his 1819 completion of
schooling, he worked as a clerk for a judge in Montville, New York, with whom
he studied law. Millard moved his
family to Buffalo, New York where he practice law in East Aurora, New York
after being admitted to the bar in 1823.
He became prominent
in the Buffalo area as an attorney and politician, was elected to
the New
York Assembly in 1828, and to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1832. Initially, he
belonged to the Anti-Masonic Party, but became a Whig as the party formed
in the mid-1830s; he was a rival for state party leadership with editor Thurlow Weed and Weed's
protˇgˇ, William H. Seward. Through his career, Fillmore declared
slavery as an evil, but one beyond the powers of the federal government,
whereas Seward was not only openly hostile to slavery, he argued that the
federal government had a role to play in ending it. Fillmore was an
unsuccessful candidate for Speaker of the House when the Whigs took control of the
chamber in 1841, but was made Ways and Means Committee chairman. Defeated in bids for the
Whig nomination for vice president in 1844, and for New York governor the same
year, Fillmore was elected Comptroller
of New York in 1847, the first to hold that post by direct election.
Fillmore received the
Whig vice presidential nomination in 1848 as Taylor's running mate, and the two
were elected. He was largely ignored by Taylor, including in the dispensing of
patronage in New York, on which Taylor consulted Weed and Seward.
As vice president,
Fillmore presided over angry debates in the Senate as Congress decided whether
to allow slavery in the Mexican Cession. Fillmore supported Henry Clay's
Omnibus Bill (the basis of the 1850 Compromise) though Taylor did not.
After President
Taylor died in July 1850, Fillmore ascended to the office of President. Almost immediately, he dismissed the
cabinet and changed the administration's policy. The new president exerted
pressure to gain the passage of the Compromise, which gave legislative
victories to both North and South, and which was enacted by September.
The Fugitive
Slave Act, expediting the return of escaped slaves to those who
claimed ownership, was a controversial part of the Compromise, and Fillmore
felt himself duty-bound to enforce it, though it damaged his popularity and
also the Whig Party, which was torn North from South. In foreign policy,
Fillmore supported U.S. Navy expeditions to open trade in Japan, opposed French
designs on Hawaii, and was embarrassed by Narciso L—pez's
filibuster expeditions to Cuba. He sought election to a full term in 1852, but
was passed over by the Whigs in favor of Winfield
Scott.
As the Whig Party
broke up after Fillmore's presidency, many in Fillmore's conservative wing
joined the Know Nothings, forming the American Party. In his 1856 candidacy as
that party's nominee, Fillmore had little to say about immigration, instead
focusing on the preservation of the Union, and won only Maryland. In his
retirement, Fillmore was active in many civic endeavors. He helped to found the
University
of Buffalo, serving as its first chancellor. During the American
Civil War, Fillmore denounced secession and agreed that the Union
must be maintained by force if necessary, but was critical of the war policies
of Abraham
Lincoln. After peace was restored, he supported the Reconstruction policies of President Andrew
Johnson. Obscure today, Fillmore has been praised by some for his
foreign policy, but he is criticized by others for his enforcement of the
Fugitive Slave Act and for his association with the Know Nothings.
With his defeat in
1856, Fillmore deemed his political career at an end. He again felt inhibited
from returning to the practice of law. But his financial worries were removed
when on February 10, 1858, Fillmore married Caroline
McIntosh, a wealthy widow. Their combined wealth allowed them to
purchase a large house on Niagara Square in Buffalo, where they lived for the
remainder of Millard Fillmore's life. There, the Fillmores
devoted themselves to entertaining and philanthropy, according to Smith,
"they generously supported almost every conceivable cause". Among
these was the Buffalo Historical Society and the Buffalo
General Hospital, which he helped found.
In the election of 1860, Fillmore voted for Senator Douglas, the
nominee of the northern Democrats. After the vote, in which the Republican
candidate, former Illinois representative Abraham
Lincoln was elected, many sought out Fillmore's views but he refused
to take any part in the secession crisis that followed, feeling that he lacked
influence. He decried Buchanan's inaction as states left the Union, writing
that while the federal government could not coerce a state, those advocating
secession should simply be regarded as traitors.
When Lincoln came to
Buffalo en route to his inauguration, Fillmore led
the committee selected to receive the president-elect, hosted him at his
mansion, and took him to church. Once war came, Fillmore supported Lincoln in
his efforts to preserve the Union. He commanded the Union Continentals, a corps
of home guards
of males over the age of 45 from the upstate New York area. The Continentals
trained to defend the Buffalo area in the event of a Confederate attack. They
performed military drill and ceremonial functions at parades, funerals, and
other events. The Union Continentals guarded Lincoln's funeral train in
Buffalo. They continued operations after the war, and Fillmore remained active
with them almost until his death.
Despite Fillmore's
zeal in the war effort, he was attacked in many newspapers when he gave a
speech in early 1864 calling for magnanimity towards the South at war's end,
and counting the heavy cost, financial and in blood, of the war.
The Lincoln
administration saw this as an attack on it, that could not be tolerated in an
election year, and Fillmore was called a Copperhead
and even a traitor. This led to lasting ill-feeling against Fillmore in many
circles. In the 1864 presidential election Fillmore supported Democratic
candidate George B. McClellan for the presidency, believing that the
Democratic Party's plan for immediate cessation of fighting and allowing the
seceded states to return with slavery intact was the best possibility for
restoring the Union.
As a former President, he returned to Buffalo, New
York and served as Chancellor of the University of Buffalo. His wife, Abigail died in 1853 of
pneumonia, and his daughter died of cholera in 1854. Five years later, he remarried in
1858. Their Buffalo mansion was
torn down during World War I.
Fillmore, Utah was named by Utah Governor Brigham Young in appreciation
for FillmoreÕs making Young the first governor of the new state of Utah. A sculpted statue of Fillmore was
erected next to the Buffalo City Hall.
Though he opposed President LincolnÕs
policies during the War Between the States, he was a Unionist who helped in the
war effort.
A pink obelisk marks Fillmore's grave at Buffalo's
Forest Lawn Cemetery.
After Lincoln's
assassination in April 1865, black ink was thrown on Fillmore's
house, as it was not draped in mourning like others, though he was apparently
out of town at the time. He put
black drapes in the windows once he returned. Although he retained his position
as Buffalo's leading citizen and was among those selected to escort the body
when Lincoln's funeral train passed through Buffalo, there was still anger
against him for his wartime positions. Fillmore supported President Andrew
Johnson's Reconstruction policies, feeling that the nation needed to
be reconciled as quickly as possible. Most of his time was devoted to his civic
activities. He aided Buffalo in becoming the third American city, after Boston
and Philadelphia, to have a permanent art gallery with the Buffalo
Fine Arts Academy.
Fillmore stayed in
good health almost to the end, but suffered a stroke in February 1874, and died
after a second one on March 8. Two days later, he was buried at Forest Lawn
Cemetery in Buffalo after a funeral procession of hundreds of notables; the U.S.
Senate sent three of its members to honor its former president, including
Lincoln's first vice president, Maine's Hannibal
Hamlin.
Compiled by
Dwight Albert (D. A.) Sharpe
805 Derting Road East
Aurora, TX 76078-3712
817-504-6508