Our 13th president may not be worthy of great honor, but his choice of statesmanship over principle does deserve to be taken seriously.
Our 13th president may not be worthy of great honor, but his choice of statesmanship over principle does deserve to be taken seriously.
M illard Fillmore is often treated as an obscurity or a curiosity. His choices deserve a more serious assessment.
Our 13th president had a funny name — he was given his mother’s maiden name — which has been lampooned in our time by the comic strip Mallard Fillmore. He was never elected to the job, wasn’t even renominated by his party, and served less than two and a half years. When he was nominated for the vice presidency in 1848, he was serving as New York state comptroller.
Fillmore’s political party, the Whigs, died two years after he left office. Before becoming a Whig, he began his career with the eccentric Anti-Masonic Party; after leaving office, he attempted a political comeback as the candidate of the nativist American Party, remembered as the Know-Nothings. Both parties ran largely on conspiratorial populism. While Fillmore shared much of their outlook, he was the opposite of a rabble-rousing bomb-thrower in his public deportment and positions.
Whatever else can be said of Fillmore, it is wrong to consider him inconsequential. He played an important and pivotal role at a key moment in the national agony over slavery that ended with the Civil War. A profoundly conservative man by temperament more than ideology, his virtues and vices as a public servant present a Rorschach test for how we view politics.
***
The first president born in the 1800s — barely, he was born January 7, 1800 — Fillmore came a long way to the Executive Mansion. In stark contrast to the British ruling class of the day with its earls and dukes and viscounts, the leading American politicians of the 1850s included many men who came up from hardscrabble beginnings and/or struck out on their own at an early age with barely a penny to their names. Fillmore was one of those, as were Abraham Lincoln, Stephen Douglas, Andrew Johnson, and Salmon P. Chase. Raised on dirt-poor farms in upstate New York and largely self-educated (Fillmore was uncultured but a voracious reader), Fillmore made his way by talent and fortunate mentors into legal practice near Buffalo. Confident of his abilities, he was nonetheless sensitive about his humble origins. When Oxford once offered him an honorary doctorate, Fillmore begged off: “I had not the advantage of a classical education, and no man should, in my judgment, accept a degree he cannot read.”
Fillmore by nature was cautious, prudent, and diligent, a workhorse rather than a theorist or an inspirational leader. He prized order and stability. He had the soul of a banker, and would have made an outstanding treasury secretary. That picture, fortified by his famously stolid appearance, starchy dress, baritone voice, and ponderous speaking style — in mid-life, he looked remarkably like Alec Baldwin at the same age — sits uneasily with the populist enthusiasms of the meteoric parties in which he began and ended his career.
The Anti-Masonic Party, which drew Fillmore into politics in the late 1820s, mixed evangelical Christian zeal and populist conspiracy theories. Formed in reaction to an 1826 murder in Batavia, New York that was believed to be targeted at preventing whistleblowing about secret Masonic rituals, it captured control of Vermont and for a time dominated Western New York and parts of Massachusetts. But the Anti-Masons were also in some sense dupes: wire-pullers such as New York newspaperman Thurlow Weed aimed to use them as a stalking horse for John Quincy Adams in the 1828 presidential campaign. Fillmore was one of the dupes. William Seward and Edward Everett also started as anti-Masons; Quincy Adams later made his post-presidential return to Congress on the party’s ticket. The movement failed: The establishment loved Henry Clay and the people loved Andrew Jackson, and both were proud Masons. Most of its members wound up in the Whig Party.
Fillmore was on his surest footing dealing with economics and finance. As a New York state legislator, he carried the laboring oar on a reformist bill to abolish debtors’ prisons, then deftly let the Democrats claim it as their own work in order to get it passed. In the House, as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, he handled the nitty-gritty of passing a protective tariff. He opposed the Mexican War, which he saw as motivated to expand slavery. This was the only time he really publicly denounced the Slave Power, and it was for disturbing the status quo. Failing at a bid for governor, he held the powerful but unglamorous role of state comptroller when he was chosen as Zachary Taylor’s running mate largely by process of elimination. The 1848 Whig convention sought a northerner who was vaguely anti-slavery — but not so serious about it that he’d make trouble for Taylor — and an orthodox Whig on everything else, to avoid a repeat of John Tyler (the previous accidental president who ended up getting formally expelled by the Whigs for his apostasies).
A devoted party man, Fillmore lacked an instinct for strategy or subterfuge or a taste for hardball, and always preferred conciliation. His defenders said he thought deeply; he did not think quickly. He had sought the vice presidency, but got it more by default than by plan. New York politics in both parties in this period was dominated to an unhealthy degree by patronage, and Fillmore was constantly outmaneuvered by his cunning intra-party rivals, Seward and Weed, in controlling those levers. He disdained what he called the “two cent system of politics which builds up individual and personal interests upon abstract and non-essential points, affecting prejudices and not actualities.” In the vice presidency, he found himself shut entirely out of influence as Seward and Weed gained the confidence of Taylor.
But he was also ideologically at odds with Taylor and Seward, as Taylor proved unexpectedly opposed to the expansion of slavery for a Louisiana planter. The bitterness between Fillmore and Taylor’s cabinet over patronage explains why he became the only vice president to fire his departed predecessor’s entire cabinet immediately upon taking office. In picking as his secretary of state Daniel Webster, a mentor since Fillmore’s early days in Washington, Fillmore chose the chief of his cabinet and a man equally devoted to placing national unity — and, they vainly hoped, sectional unity within the Whig Party — above all else, including due process and human liberty.
***
The decision to throw his full support behind passing the Compromise of 1850, and then to enforce it, was the central decision of Fillmore’s presidency. It has colored every assessment of it since then.
The controversy grew out of the Mexican War. For 30 years, the 1820 Missouri Compromise governed the admission of free and slave states. States above its geographic line (36°30′) — exempting only Missouri — would be admitted without slavery; states below would be admitted as slave states. The implicit principle of the bargain was that Congress would admit one free state for one slave state, keeping a balance of the two in the Senate. In 1848, there were 15 free states and 15 slave states, but the newly acquired territory of Oregon (eventually Oregon and Washington) had just been organized as free territory.
Now, California wanted immediate admission as a single free state, and the 1848–49 Gold Rush gave it the population and economic importance to justify this. But California would tip the balance and extend free territory all the way below 36°30′ to the Mexican border. There was also vast new territory in the west to organize, eventually divided into the Utah and New Mexico territories and later subdivided into six states.
Henry Clay, the aging Whig eminence and author of the Missouri Compromise, proposed a new deal with five parts. California would enter as a free state; the Utah and New Mexico territories would choose for themselves whether to have slavery; Congress would settle a border dispute between Texas and the New Mexico territory in ways mostly unfavorable to Texas; the slave trade would be banned in the District of Columbia; and Congress would greatly strengthen the Fugitive Slave Act. The first four elements of the deal ranged from neutral to strongly favorable to the free-state position, so the essence of the bargain for the South was the Fugitive Slave Act.
Despite the backing of Clay and Webster, the deal couldn’t pass Congress. Taylor disliked the deal. Southerners threatened secession. There were threats of war over the Texas-New Mexico border. Shortly before Taylor’s death on July 9, 1850, Fillmore told him that he intended to cast the tiebreaking vote for Clay’s package in the Senate if it came to that. Then, suddenly, Taylor fell ill and died. Fillmore backed a strategy, largely devised by Stephen Douglas, to break the five-part omnibus bill into components so that different sections could vote for the parts they could stomach. Fillmore convinced enough anti-slavery northern Whigs to abstain from the vote on the Fugitive Slave Act to ensure that all five parts of the deal would pass.
***
What followed over the next two years was one of the most explosive controversies in American history. Unlike slavery itself, fugitive slaves often crossed state lines, requiring a choice between letting Northern states nullify the South’s laws on this species of “property” or letting Southern states invade the North and override Northern laws on human liberty. The transportation revolution after 1830 exacerbated these tensions, as railroads and steamboats made it easier for runaway slaves to get far away in a hurry. Frederick Douglass, for example, made most of his escape in 1838 by train and ferry from Maryland to Manhattan, and was soon in New Bedford, Mass.
The new Fugitive Slave Act only heightened these tensions. The law put the burden on the alleged escaped slave to prove that he or she was a free person (or, at least, not the property of the claiming owner), yet denied the captive the right to testify or other tools to gather evidence, and even paid the hearing officers more if the captive was found to be a fugitive slave. Over the decade of the 1850s, 97 percent of tribunals found for the slaveholder. That exacerbated Northern concerns that slave-catchers were using the law as cover to kidnap free black citizens of the North and deny them the constitutional due process rights of citizens. The extremity of the law’s design was an overreach by its Southern backers; even Fillmore had qualms. Stephen Douglas, by contrast, scoffed that “the whole catalogue of objections would be all moonshine, if the negro was not required to go back to his master.”
Federal enforcement seemed calculated to inflame the situation. There were early, high-profile arrests of black men who had lived in the North for years, prompting an exodus to Canada. Fillmore, seeking to prove to the South that he would keep his end of the bargain, cracked down. He and Webster issued a joint proclamation in February 1851 “calling on all well-disposed citizens to rally to the support of the laws of their country.” In one celebrated case in April 1851, it took 300 armed men to get one fugitive, Thomas Sims, out of Boston after a nine-day standoff with vigilance committee lawyers while the courthouse was chained shut. In a May 1851 speech, Webster called resistance to the law “treason, treason, Treason, and nothing else.” In September 1851, resistance came to bloodshed, as a pursuing slaveholder was gunned down in Christiana, Pa.
To Southerners, especially those who had objected to the Compromise of 1850 or gone along with it reluctantly, Northern resistance looked very much like welching on a deal. It was the first of several times in the 1850s that each of the two sides would conclude that the other could not be trusted to keep a bargain or abide by the law — essential prerequisites for a constitutional republic. While abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass were debating the merits of violent resistance to law and Henry David Thoreau was penning essays on civil disobedience, the savvier Southern fire-eaters, while finding only a modest audience for secession, began building an ideological case for the principle of the right of secession. The Northern reaction gave birth to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and launched the careers of Harriet Tubman and John Brown. Battle lines were being drawn.
***
To his admirers, Fillmore was the last great compromiser, the man who staved off the breaking of the Union where Taylor would have failed. In this view, Fillmore first swallowed his Northern anti-slavery sentiments for the good of the nation, then ultimately sacrificed both his presidency and his party by his principled devotion to enforcing federal law without fear or favor. Some defend the Compromise of 1850 as a better sort of politics than the bloody-minded, zero-sum sectional combat of the rest of the 1850s. Others argue that, in retrospect, Fillmore won the Civil War for the North by delaying it a decade, giving the North more time to industrialize and outrun the South in wealth and population. That’s the case for Fillmore as a statesman.
The contrary view comes to us from Fillmore’s anti-slavery critics: that the Fugitive Slave Act was morally monstrous, that Fillmore’s distaste for slavery was superficial and masked his callous unconcern for the fate of slaves, and that he betrayed whatever anti-slavery views he had in becoming (along with Webster) the chief enforcer of a profoundly unjust law. Fillmore underestimated the growing anti-slavery reaction in the North. He failed to foresee how his effort at conciliation would drive the Northern and Southern wings of the Whig Party further apart, leaving the Democrats as the only remaining national party.
Because Fillmore thought pragmatically rather than ideologically, he missed the pragmatic consequences of ideas. By breaking the Missouri Compromise’s geographic line and implicit balance in the Senate, and by allowing the Utah and New Mexico territories to decide the fate of slavery themselves by local popular sovereignty, the Compromise laid the groundwork for its own undoing in 1854, when Douglas defended the Kansas-Nebraska Act’s open repeal of the Missouri Compromise in the original lands of the Louisiana Purchase on the grounds that popular sovereignty for Utah and New Mexico had “superseded” the bases of the Missouri Compromise.
There is much to commend both views of Fillmore. As Lincoln would later observe, it was impossible for a house divided against itself on slavery to stand indefinitely without one side prevailing. Fillmore was the last American leader to try sincerely to mediate between two positions that were morally and politically unreconcilable.
***
Outside of the Compromise of 1850, Fillmore’s presidency was largely concerned with foreign policy. The Whigs believed in opening foreign markets for Americans, by force if necessary, but broadly preferred a more humble, less confrontational, and less expansionist approach than the “Young America” Democrats with their Manifest Destiny slogans and their hunger for more territory south of the border.
Fillmore’s signature accomplishment, only taking place after he left office, was Commodore Matthew Perry’s expedition to force Japan to open to the outside world. Fillmore’s administration arranged the expedition, and Fillmore himself saw Perry off in mid-November 1852, carrying a letter from Fillmore to the Japanese regime. Perry’s mission would have vast consequences, setting in motion the collapse of the shogunate by 1869.
Fillmore faced down the British over efforts to extort money from Cornelius Vanderbilt’s steamships in Nicaragua. He helped undercut a failed filibuster in Cuba, averting a collision with Spain, even at the cost of letting the Spanish execute the nephew of Fillmore’s attorney general. He backed out of an Anglo-French effort to force Haiti to abandon its invasions of the Dominican Republic. He rescued Hungarian rebel Lajos Kossuth from Turkish exile and deftly managed to ensure a warm national welcome for Kossuth without committing America to any policy steps, although Webster still ended up on non-speaking terms with the Austrian ambassador as a result. Fillmore and Webster almost blundered into war with Peru over islands containing guano, a fertilizer in such demand that Fillmore pledged in his first State of the Union message that “nothing will be omitted on my part” to get more Peruvian guano into the country.
Fillmore’s appointments were likewise a mixed bag. He chose Benjamin Curtis, the only Whig appointee to the Supreme Court; Curtis distinguished himself with a great dissent in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857). He bowed to facts on the ground by appointing Brigham Young as both governor and commissioner of Indian affairs in Utah, giving the Mormon leader near-total power over the territory — storing up trouble later in the 1850s. Fillmore’s choice for territorial governor of New Mexico almost started a war, which was resolved with the 1853 Gadsden Purchase by Fillmore’s successor. His blustering appointee as ambassador to China, Humphrey Marshall, feuded bitterly with Commodore Perry and made a mess of U.S. policy in Shanghai.
***
In June 1852, Fillmore sought renomination at the Whig convention, but was notably diffident about wanting it and refused to use the tools of patronage to control the party. Webster challenged his boss for the job, but finished a distant third, deciding too late to withdraw and move his support to Fillmore while it could have made a difference. (Webster, his liver failing from years of heavy drinking, died in October; the Whigs dodged a bullet in not selecting him.) Fillmore, characteristically, did not hold the challenge against Webster. The nomination went to war hero Winfield Scott, one of America’s greatest generals but an inept politician who was largely a stalking horse for Seward.
Fillmore faded into private life for a while after his wife Abigail died of pneumonia caught attending the inauguration of Fillmore’s successor, Franklin Pierce, in bitter weather. After a trip across Europe, he returned to claim the Know-Nothing nomination in 1856. While he can fairly be said to have shared the Know-Nothings’ ideas (especially their prejudices against Catholics), Fillmore did little to advance those ideas, and basically used the ticket as a vehicle for one last effort to unify the country across sectional lines and avert the disaster he anticipated if Republicans won the presidency. He declared: “If there be those either North or South who desire an administration for the North as against the South, or for the South as against the North, they are not the men who should give their suffrages to me. For my own part, I know only my country, my whole country, and nothing but my country.”
Despite getting 21 percent of the popular vote — second only to Teddy Roosevelt in 1912 as the best third-party showing ever — Fillmore didn’t really affect the outcome, as James Buchanan got enough electoral votes just from states where he won a majority of the popular vote. Most of Fillmore’s support came in the South, where Republican John C. Frémont wasn’t on the ballot as an alternative to Buchanan.
In the final chapter of his public life, Fillmore threw himself during the Civil War into the Union cause, organizing local defenses for his home city of Buffalo and inspiring the city’s young men to enlist. He did this even though he largely blamed Republicans for the war, an opinion he finally aired in 1864.
The crises of slavery, Civil War, and Reconstruction consumed American politics for 30 years from 1846 to 1876. Debates about how the leaders of that era navigated the often-competing values of preserving the Union and battling the scourge of slavery are still with us. Fillmore represents one side of that debate, and how we remember him today still says a lot about how we think about its dilemmas.
The date of Zachary Taylor’s death has been corrected.