July 9, 1850 – Millard Fillmore Becomes 13th President of the United States

Zachary Taylor died after only sixteen months in office. It is believed he died of cholera. His vice president, Millard Fillmore, was elevated to the presidency on July 9, 1850. He was the last president to be a member of the Whig Party while in the White House.

Fillmore was born on January 7, 1800 and was one of the few presidents who could authentically lay claim to birth in a log cabin, as historian Jean Harvey Baker writes in To The Best of My Ability, a book on American presidents edited by James M. McPherson.

Fillmore, born into poverty in the Finger Lakes area of New York state, became a self-taught, successful lawyer in Buffalo. He was attracted to politics and was elected to the New York Assembly in 1828, and to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1832. He 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 protégé, William H. Seward. Throughout his career, Fillmore declared slavery an evil, but one beyond the powers of the federal government.

In 1848 the Whig national convention chose him as running mate for Zachary Taylor. Taylor generally ignored Fillmore, even when it came to dispensing patronage in New York. As Vice President, however, Fillmore presided over the Senate during the months of debates over the Compromise of 1850. A few days before President Taylor’s death, he intimated that if there should be a tie vote on Henry Clay’s bill, he would vote in favor of it. As the White House history site observes:

Thus the sudden accession of Fillmore to the Presidency in July 1850 brought an abrupt political shift in the administration. Taylor’s Cabinet resigned and President Fillmore at once appointed Daniel Webster to be Secretary of State, thus proclaiming his alliance with the moderate Whigs who favored the Compromise.”

Professor Baker contends that the Compromise defined Fillmore’s presidency.

Millard Fillmore – Photo by Mathew Brady

This cluster of five bills supposedly balanced northern and southern interests. It provided for a new, even more draconian Fugitive Slave Law, the entry of California into the Union as a free state, an end to the slave trade in the District of Columbia, the ability of the territories of Utah and New Mexico to decide for themselves the issue of slavery, and the abandonment by Texas of claims to a great deal of territory in New Mexico in exchange for ten million dollars.

Each measure obtained a majority, and by September 20, President Fillmore had signed them into law. But the Compromise fractured the Whigs along pro- and anti-slavery lines. Some of the northern Whigs refused to forgive Fillmore for having signed the Fugitive Slave Act, which helped to deprive him of the Presidential nomination in 1852.

In foreign policy, Fillmore supported U.S. Navy expeditions to open trade in Japan. Fillmore and his Secretary of State, Daniel Webster, dispatched Commodore Matthew C. Perry on an expedition to open Japan to relations with the outside world. Perry and his ships reached Japan in July 1853, four months after the end of Fillmore’s term. Democrat Franklin Pierce succeeded Fillmore as President.

To make matters worse, Fillmore’s wife Abigail caught a cold at President Pierce’s inauguration, developed pneumonia, and died on March 30, 1853. He was bereaved again on July 26, 1854 when his only daughter Mary died of cholera.

In 1855, Fillmore traveled to Europe, not returning for over a year, until the end of June, 1856. During that time he had a private audience with Queen Victoria, who reportedly said he was the handsomest man she had ever seen.

Back in the U.S., the Whig Party had disintegrated. Whigs from the North largely gravitated to the new Republican Party, while Southern Whigs favored the nativist, anti-immigration Know Nothing Party. Although a Northerner, Fillmore became affiliated with the Know Nothing Party. He even ran for president again in 1856 on the Know Nothing ticket, finishing third behind Buchanan and Fremont.

Fillmore had been the first president to return to private life without independent wealth or possession of a landed estate. But his financial troubles were alleviated in 1858 when he married a well-to-do widow. They retired together in Buffalo, New York.

Fillmore suffered a stroke in February 1874, and died after a second one on March 8.