SeleucusNicator
Diadoch
When Americans are asked to give an example of an obscure President, Millard Fillmore is usually the first name off their lips, variously because of his short term in office, his low profile in the vulgar view of history, and his somewhat unusual name. However, this view of the man is wrong. President Fillmore was a pivotal leader for the United States, one of our most underrated executives and, I would argue, one of the foremost tragic figures in American political history.
Millard was born on January 7, 1800, in Cayuga County, New York, in a log cabin near the so-called "finger lakes", the second of six children born to Nathaniel and Phoebe Fillmore, dirt-poor farmers. As the Fillmores could barely afford to stay alive, Millard received no formal education as a child and was almost entirely self-taught, something he would always be cognizant of. In 1815, Millard's father sent him off to learn the arts of cloth dressing and carding as an apprentice. After a few years, young Fillmore was skilled enough to purchase his release and fund his higher education; he enrolled in a one-room school in New Hope, New York, where he met his future wife, Agaile Powers, a minister's daughter and schoolteacher. In 1819, his next big break came when he obtained a clerkship with a judge in Montville, New York. Ever on the lookout for education, Fillmore used his new job as an excuse to study law, and by 1823 he had been admitted to the New York state bar and set up his own private practice. After three years of large difficulties and little pay, he managed to achieve some degree of success, enough to marry Powers (although she had to continue her teaching career to fully support the family) and begin dabbling in local politics.
When Fillmore first began to look towards politics, he affiliated himself with the National Republicans, the faction of the now-split Democratic-Republican Party that had formed around President John Quincy Adams. However, the National Republicans would be short-lived, and Millard's first opportunity came with the newly-formed Anti-Masonic Party. Conspiracy theories (and some actual crimes) involving the Freemasons and other such groups led to a massive movement in the Norteast to rid government of secret societies, which especially appealed to "common men" such as Fillmore. He was elected to the New York State Assembly in 1828 and re-elected twice. His political fortunes only grew when he and his wife moved to Buffalo, the large city of his area, where he was able to charm, impress, and fleece with legal fees the locals, giving him a personal and financial base for higher office. Using his new-found status, he ran for Congress, again as an Anti-Mason, in 1832 and won. Fillmore went to Congress just as a new political movement was afoot. Andrew Jackson, founder of the Democratic Party, was re-elected in a landslide that year, ensuring a continuation of his revolutionary politics, seen as crude, dangerous, or even monarchial by many of his opponents, a diverse group including former National Republicans, New England aristocrats, Southern plantation owners, and Anti-Masons. Normally indifferent or hostile to each other, these groups soon pooled their congressional seats together and, for the first time in American history, a political party formed not out of shared ideals, but out of shared opposition to a single individual. The Whigs had arrived. Fillmore formally joined the Whig Party in 1834, but decided to sit out that year's congressional election, as the Whigs, having several freemasons among their leaders, were at first greatly distrusted in his home district. Fillmore used his two-year vacation to further build his political base, becoming editor of the Buffalo Commercial Advertiser, a rather honestly-named local newspaper, which, of course, allowed him to print and distribute propaganda about himself and his party. This led to an easy re-election for Millard when he ran for Congress in 1836. Now a full-fledged Whig, Fillmore became Chairman of the powerful Ways and Means committee when his party took control of the US House of Representatives. Fillmore used this position to push much of his party's domestic agenda, mostly tariffs and internal improvements, through Congress, but grew tired of the constant struggle between the Whig-controlled Congress and President John Tyler. Tyler, the former governor of Virginia, had "converted" to Whiggism and was rewarded with the Vice-Presidential spot on the 1840 Whig ticket. When President William Henry Harrison died one month after taking office in 1841, Tyler became the first Vice-President to become President, and quickly began acting like a Democrat, vetoing Whig internal improvement bills and pursuing an expansionist foreign policy. Unfooled by Tyler's nominal Whiggery, congressional Whigs, Fillmore among them, expelled Tyler from the party. The resulting political deadlock was largely blamed the Whigs, who were destroyed in the 1842 Congressional elections. Fillmore, foreseeing this, chose not to run that year and decided to instead focus on politics in his native New York.
Beginning in the late 1830's, the Whig Party in New York, enjoying relative hegemony because of a violent split in the Democratic Party, began to divide into two distinct factions. The more liberal faction, led first by Thurlow Weed, a former anti-Mason, and later by William H. Seward, yet another former anti-Mason, who was elected governor in 1838, became known as the Sewardites. Opposing the Sewardites for control of New York Whiggery were conservative and moderate Whigs, called "Silver Grays", whose leadership fell largely to Fillmore. Sewardites and Silver Grays differed in two ways. First, while both factions were anti-slavery, Sewardites were enthusiastic in their opposition, while Silver Grays barely mentioned it, seeing opposition to slavery as a grave handicap to national success. (Even in those days, nobody could become President without winning at least a few Southern states). Second, while Sewardites courted new immigrants as potential Whig voters, Silver Grays distrusted them as drunken, violent, and, worst of all, Catholic.
Fillmore's Silver Grays were in the minority for most of the New York Whig Party's history, and Seward and Associates were not above exploiting them. Fillmore first experienced this in 1844, when Seward offered him the Whig nomination for Governor of New York. While Fillmore wanted the national Vice-Presidential position, he was unable to get it, and agreed to run for governor. Fillmore lost, although he won more votes than the Whig Presidential ticket, showing the potential appeal of moderate Whiggery.
Fillmore now went back to his newspaper and attempted to build up the Silver Gray movement and overthrow Seward. In 1847 he managed to get himself elected State Comptroller of New York, a position ripe with patronage abilities, and his base grew with every high-paying job he was able to give to his cronies. By the 1848 Whig National Convention, he was prominent enough to be selected as a running mate for General Zachary Taylor, a political newcommer with no previous party affiliation (indeed, the Whigs were merely the largest of the dozens of parties that nominated Taylor -- he accepted every nomination and was secretly harboring plans to combine them into a single, unstoppable "Taylor Party" -- but that's a different article). Fillmore fully believed that once he was Vice-President he could convince Taylor, who won in a landslide, to fill the federal bureaucracy with loyal Silver Grays, fatally wounding Seaward and his cronies in the battle for patronage.
Fillmore couldn't have been more incorrect; he discovered the powerlessness of the Vice-President the hard way. Taylor, dreaming of his future übercoalition, decided that, as a southerner, needed to gain the trust of liberal northern Whigs. This meant Sewardites. Lots and lots of Sewardites. Fillmore was reduced to begging, but to no avail. Taylor was more concerned with attracting new supporters than rewarding existing ones, and the Silver Grays were in no danger of being lost to the Democrats or the Abolitionists. Meanwhile, trouble was brewing in Congress. Henry Clay had submitted his 1850 Compromise, which contained the Fugitive Slave Act, a law that forced Northern governments to comply with the South in the tracking and return of escaped slaves. This outraged Seward, now a Senator, who ordered his entire political organization to work against it. President Taylor declared a fanciful counterproposal which called for the immediate statehood of California, Utah (as a huge Mormon state larger than anything in the Union today) and New Mexico. This may have even passed, but its presentation was botched by several errors, and stagnation between pro-Compromise and anti-Compromise forces ensued. Fillmore, who was pro-compromise, could only watch, trapped in his own office: presiding over the Senate but being almost entirely powerless. However, fortune would soon move him into a slightly better position.
On July 9, 1950, after a brief illness contracted during a Fourth of July celebration, Ol' Rough and Ready died, propelling Fillmore to the Presidency. As Taylor's cabinet resigned, Fillmore replaced them with pro-Compromise Whigs, making his preference on the issue clear. The Compromise passed Congress, and an uneasy peace between North and South prevailed for 10 years. Outside of the Whig Party, that is.
Fillmore now was in a position to fulfill his dreams of crushing Seward, who had repeatedly humiliated him for so long. With a single stroke of his pen, President Fillmore could wipe Seward and his followers from the face of the Earth, giving all of their jobs to loyal Silver Grays. Seward braced for the impact, but it never came; Millard made sure to prevent Seward from gaining any further power, but declined to take away much of what his old nemesis already had. Fillmore knew that such a move, while expected, would only increase Whig infighting. Liberal Northern Whigs were already up in arms over the fugitive slave laws and their significant differences with Southern Whigs; Fillmore was bent on forcing these two groups to cooperate and to overcome their differences on the explosive issue of slavery for the good of the Whig Party and the good of the country.
Unfortunately for Fillmore, he was living in the 1850's. Slavery was not an issue that could simply go away. Indeed, not even the awesome power of patronage could keep it under wraps. Northern and Southern Whigs ignored Fillmore's call for unity and grew ever more distant. Despite his benevolence towards them, Fillmore received virtually no support from Northern Whigs because of his support of the Fugitive Slave laws. For their part, Southern Whigs supported him, but it was insufficient to gain him the 1852 Whig nomination. Instead, Northern Whigs picked General Winfield Scott, a hero of the Mexican-American war whom they hoped could attract southerners with his border-state background. Scott was soundly defeated by Franklin Pierce, the Democratic governor of New Hampshire, 254 electoral votes to 42. As modest as Scott's finish was, it would be the last time a Whig received electoral votes. The party fell apart between 1852 and 1856; Southern Whigs and Northern Whigs could no longer tolerate each other over the slavery question and the latter bolted from the party, joining various small parties, such as the Abolitionists, the Prohibitionists, or the Republicans. Sectionalism grew, much to Fillmore's disgust.
After a tour of Europe during the Pierce administration, Fillmore took one last shot at attempting national politics. In 1856, he accepted the nomination of the American Party, also known as the "Know-Nothing" party, due to their practice of denying their own existence. Although the Know-Nothings were primarily an anti-immigration and anti-Catholic party, they did stand for some old Silver-Gray ideals, and Fillmore believed he could turn the movement into a legitimate political force, much as had occurred with the Anti-Masons at the beginning of his career. After some early signs of success, however, the Know-Nothing movement failed to materialize anything other than Maryland's 8 electoral votes; in a mistake that would be repeated countless times thereafter, Fillmore and his supporters had begin campaigning too early (Fillmore himself began political appearances in 1854) and peaked too soon. The moment moved to John C. Fremont, the first Republican Presidential candidate, and a new party system was born, paving the way for Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War.
Fillmore watched all of this with disgust. He was distrustful of the Republicans but abhorred the actions of the South. Characteristically, he supported every possible chance for compromise between the two sides, even backing a Democrat, General George McClellen, for President in 1864 in the hopes of bringing about a negotiated peace. Even after the Civil War had ended, he maintained his old Silver Gray urge to placate the South, condemning Radical Republicanism and Congressional Reconstruction. He died on March 8, 1874, after a series of strokes.
In many ways, however, Millard Fillmore and the world that he loved were dead far before 1874. Fillmore, always seeking to compromise and avoid conflict, was out of place in the sectionalist environment that marked his Presidency. Almost tragically, he sacrificed well-deserved revenge and political plunder for what he likely knew was a lost cause and continued to campaign for national understanding in a time marked by increasing sectional hate, and yet today he is given virtually no credit for this, being listed with the incompetent likes of Buchanan and Harding, denied his rightful place at the side of great and thoughtful compromisers such as Clay, Webster, and Grant, a martyr to moderation and centrism.
Sources:
http://www.presidentelect.org
http://ap.grolier.com/article?assetid=0156400-00&templatename=/article/article.html
http://ap.grolier.com/article?assetid=atb999b405&templatename=/article/article.html
http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/firstladies/af13.html
http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents/mf13.html
The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party by Michael F. Holt (excellent book)
Millard was born on January 7, 1800, in Cayuga County, New York, in a log cabin near the so-called "finger lakes", the second of six children born to Nathaniel and Phoebe Fillmore, dirt-poor farmers. As the Fillmores could barely afford to stay alive, Millard received no formal education as a child and was almost entirely self-taught, something he would always be cognizant of. In 1815, Millard's father sent him off to learn the arts of cloth dressing and carding as an apprentice. After a few years, young Fillmore was skilled enough to purchase his release and fund his higher education; he enrolled in a one-room school in New Hope, New York, where he met his future wife, Agaile Powers, a minister's daughter and schoolteacher. In 1819, his next big break came when he obtained a clerkship with a judge in Montville, New York. Ever on the lookout for education, Fillmore used his new job as an excuse to study law, and by 1823 he had been admitted to the New York state bar and set up his own private practice. After three years of large difficulties and little pay, he managed to achieve some degree of success, enough to marry Powers (although she had to continue her teaching career to fully support the family) and begin dabbling in local politics.
When Fillmore first began to look towards politics, he affiliated himself with the National Republicans, the faction of the now-split Democratic-Republican Party that had formed around President John Quincy Adams. However, the National Republicans would be short-lived, and Millard's first opportunity came with the newly-formed Anti-Masonic Party. Conspiracy theories (and some actual crimes) involving the Freemasons and other such groups led to a massive movement in the Norteast to rid government of secret societies, which especially appealed to "common men" such as Fillmore. He was elected to the New York State Assembly in 1828 and re-elected twice. His political fortunes only grew when he and his wife moved to Buffalo, the large city of his area, where he was able to charm, impress, and fleece with legal fees the locals, giving him a personal and financial base for higher office. Using his new-found status, he ran for Congress, again as an Anti-Mason, in 1832 and won. Fillmore went to Congress just as a new political movement was afoot. Andrew Jackson, founder of the Democratic Party, was re-elected in a landslide that year, ensuring a continuation of his revolutionary politics, seen as crude, dangerous, or even monarchial by many of his opponents, a diverse group including former National Republicans, New England aristocrats, Southern plantation owners, and Anti-Masons. Normally indifferent or hostile to each other, these groups soon pooled their congressional seats together and, for the first time in American history, a political party formed not out of shared ideals, but out of shared opposition to a single individual. The Whigs had arrived. Fillmore formally joined the Whig Party in 1834, but decided to sit out that year's congressional election, as the Whigs, having several freemasons among their leaders, were at first greatly distrusted in his home district. Fillmore used his two-year vacation to further build his political base, becoming editor of the Buffalo Commercial Advertiser, a rather honestly-named local newspaper, which, of course, allowed him to print and distribute propaganda about himself and his party. This led to an easy re-election for Millard when he ran for Congress in 1836. Now a full-fledged Whig, Fillmore became Chairman of the powerful Ways and Means committee when his party took control of the US House of Representatives. Fillmore used this position to push much of his party's domestic agenda, mostly tariffs and internal improvements, through Congress, but grew tired of the constant struggle between the Whig-controlled Congress and President John Tyler. Tyler, the former governor of Virginia, had "converted" to Whiggism and was rewarded with the Vice-Presidential spot on the 1840 Whig ticket. When President William Henry Harrison died one month after taking office in 1841, Tyler became the first Vice-President to become President, and quickly began acting like a Democrat, vetoing Whig internal improvement bills and pursuing an expansionist foreign policy. Unfooled by Tyler's nominal Whiggery, congressional Whigs, Fillmore among them, expelled Tyler from the party. The resulting political deadlock was largely blamed the Whigs, who were destroyed in the 1842 Congressional elections. Fillmore, foreseeing this, chose not to run that year and decided to instead focus on politics in his native New York.
Beginning in the late 1830's, the Whig Party in New York, enjoying relative hegemony because of a violent split in the Democratic Party, began to divide into two distinct factions. The more liberal faction, led first by Thurlow Weed, a former anti-Mason, and later by William H. Seward, yet another former anti-Mason, who was elected governor in 1838, became known as the Sewardites. Opposing the Sewardites for control of New York Whiggery were conservative and moderate Whigs, called "Silver Grays", whose leadership fell largely to Fillmore. Sewardites and Silver Grays differed in two ways. First, while both factions were anti-slavery, Sewardites were enthusiastic in their opposition, while Silver Grays barely mentioned it, seeing opposition to slavery as a grave handicap to national success. (Even in those days, nobody could become President without winning at least a few Southern states). Second, while Sewardites courted new immigrants as potential Whig voters, Silver Grays distrusted them as drunken, violent, and, worst of all, Catholic.
Fillmore's Silver Grays were in the minority for most of the New York Whig Party's history, and Seward and Associates were not above exploiting them. Fillmore first experienced this in 1844, when Seward offered him the Whig nomination for Governor of New York. While Fillmore wanted the national Vice-Presidential position, he was unable to get it, and agreed to run for governor. Fillmore lost, although he won more votes than the Whig Presidential ticket, showing the potential appeal of moderate Whiggery.
Fillmore now went back to his newspaper and attempted to build up the Silver Gray movement and overthrow Seward. In 1847 he managed to get himself elected State Comptroller of New York, a position ripe with patronage abilities, and his base grew with every high-paying job he was able to give to his cronies. By the 1848 Whig National Convention, he was prominent enough to be selected as a running mate for General Zachary Taylor, a political newcommer with no previous party affiliation (indeed, the Whigs were merely the largest of the dozens of parties that nominated Taylor -- he accepted every nomination and was secretly harboring plans to combine them into a single, unstoppable "Taylor Party" -- but that's a different article). Fillmore fully believed that once he was Vice-President he could convince Taylor, who won in a landslide, to fill the federal bureaucracy with loyal Silver Grays, fatally wounding Seaward and his cronies in the battle for patronage.
Fillmore couldn't have been more incorrect; he discovered the powerlessness of the Vice-President the hard way. Taylor, dreaming of his future übercoalition, decided that, as a southerner, needed to gain the trust of liberal northern Whigs. This meant Sewardites. Lots and lots of Sewardites. Fillmore was reduced to begging, but to no avail. Taylor was more concerned with attracting new supporters than rewarding existing ones, and the Silver Grays were in no danger of being lost to the Democrats or the Abolitionists. Meanwhile, trouble was brewing in Congress. Henry Clay had submitted his 1850 Compromise, which contained the Fugitive Slave Act, a law that forced Northern governments to comply with the South in the tracking and return of escaped slaves. This outraged Seward, now a Senator, who ordered his entire political organization to work against it. President Taylor declared a fanciful counterproposal which called for the immediate statehood of California, Utah (as a huge Mormon state larger than anything in the Union today) and New Mexico. This may have even passed, but its presentation was botched by several errors, and stagnation between pro-Compromise and anti-Compromise forces ensued. Fillmore, who was pro-compromise, could only watch, trapped in his own office: presiding over the Senate but being almost entirely powerless. However, fortune would soon move him into a slightly better position.
On July 9, 1950, after a brief illness contracted during a Fourth of July celebration, Ol' Rough and Ready died, propelling Fillmore to the Presidency. As Taylor's cabinet resigned, Fillmore replaced them with pro-Compromise Whigs, making his preference on the issue clear. The Compromise passed Congress, and an uneasy peace between North and South prevailed for 10 years. Outside of the Whig Party, that is.
Fillmore now was in a position to fulfill his dreams of crushing Seward, who had repeatedly humiliated him for so long. With a single stroke of his pen, President Fillmore could wipe Seward and his followers from the face of the Earth, giving all of their jobs to loyal Silver Grays. Seward braced for the impact, but it never came; Millard made sure to prevent Seward from gaining any further power, but declined to take away much of what his old nemesis already had. Fillmore knew that such a move, while expected, would only increase Whig infighting. Liberal Northern Whigs were already up in arms over the fugitive slave laws and their significant differences with Southern Whigs; Fillmore was bent on forcing these two groups to cooperate and to overcome their differences on the explosive issue of slavery for the good of the Whig Party and the good of the country.
Unfortunately for Fillmore, he was living in the 1850's. Slavery was not an issue that could simply go away. Indeed, not even the awesome power of patronage could keep it under wraps. Northern and Southern Whigs ignored Fillmore's call for unity and grew ever more distant. Despite his benevolence towards them, Fillmore received virtually no support from Northern Whigs because of his support of the Fugitive Slave laws. For their part, Southern Whigs supported him, but it was insufficient to gain him the 1852 Whig nomination. Instead, Northern Whigs picked General Winfield Scott, a hero of the Mexican-American war whom they hoped could attract southerners with his border-state background. Scott was soundly defeated by Franklin Pierce, the Democratic governor of New Hampshire, 254 electoral votes to 42. As modest as Scott's finish was, it would be the last time a Whig received electoral votes. The party fell apart between 1852 and 1856; Southern Whigs and Northern Whigs could no longer tolerate each other over the slavery question and the latter bolted from the party, joining various small parties, such as the Abolitionists, the Prohibitionists, or the Republicans. Sectionalism grew, much to Fillmore's disgust.
After a tour of Europe during the Pierce administration, Fillmore took one last shot at attempting national politics. In 1856, he accepted the nomination of the American Party, also known as the "Know-Nothing" party, due to their practice of denying their own existence. Although the Know-Nothings were primarily an anti-immigration and anti-Catholic party, they did stand for some old Silver-Gray ideals, and Fillmore believed he could turn the movement into a legitimate political force, much as had occurred with the Anti-Masons at the beginning of his career. After some early signs of success, however, the Know-Nothing movement failed to materialize anything other than Maryland's 8 electoral votes; in a mistake that would be repeated countless times thereafter, Fillmore and his supporters had begin campaigning too early (Fillmore himself began political appearances in 1854) and peaked too soon. The moment moved to John C. Fremont, the first Republican Presidential candidate, and a new party system was born, paving the way for Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War.
Fillmore watched all of this with disgust. He was distrustful of the Republicans but abhorred the actions of the South. Characteristically, he supported every possible chance for compromise between the two sides, even backing a Democrat, General George McClellen, for President in 1864 in the hopes of bringing about a negotiated peace. Even after the Civil War had ended, he maintained his old Silver Gray urge to placate the South, condemning Radical Republicanism and Congressional Reconstruction. He died on March 8, 1874, after a series of strokes.
In many ways, however, Millard Fillmore and the world that he loved were dead far before 1874. Fillmore, always seeking to compromise and avoid conflict, was out of place in the sectionalist environment that marked his Presidency. Almost tragically, he sacrificed well-deserved revenge and political plunder for what he likely knew was a lost cause and continued to campaign for national understanding in a time marked by increasing sectional hate, and yet today he is given virtually no credit for this, being listed with the incompetent likes of Buchanan and Harding, denied his rightful place at the side of great and thoughtful compromisers such as Clay, Webster, and Grant, a martyr to moderation and centrism.
Sources:
http://www.presidentelect.org
http://ap.grolier.com/article?assetid=0156400-00&templatename=/article/article.html
http://ap.grolier.com/article?assetid=atb999b405&templatename=/article/article.html
http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/firstladies/af13.html
http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents/mf13.html
The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party by Michael F. Holt (excellent book)
