ExclusiveMillard Fillmore: Last of the Whigs

Each culture has its legends, and that could be myths or different stories, but here in America, our greatest legends are the wonderful heroes who are right from our history pages. Now, some of these heroes are very famous, and some are obscure. But each person deserves to be discovered, because each man or woman stands as a great example of how we can be better Americans in our daily lives. The legacy of each U.S. president is different. No two men had the same path to the White House, and no two presidents had the same time during their term in office. Each individual had to face different challenges, and thus, different successes or failures. Thus, it always seems to me a bit unfair when ranking them, to put some as the superior and some as in the bottom quarter, when each one, whether he was one of the greatest or one of the lesser, played an important role in the continuation of the American dream. My name is Tiffany Brannon, and join me today as we talk about the 13th President of the United States, Millard Fillmore, in this episode of American Legends. Millard Fillmore had the unlucky distinction of being the 13th President of the United States, but the way he got into office was rather lucky. In 1848, Zachary Taylor, a former war hero, was elected as the 12th President of the United States. Riding on his victory in many wars, although he'd never served in an elected official political office, Taylor became the Whig candidate and then won. His running mate as Vice President was Millard Fillmore. Unlike Taylor, who had no political background, Millard Fillmore had a very rich political background, although he was relatively young for someone in that political position, being only 49 when he became the Vice President. He had served as a lawyer, as a member of Congress, and had shown his prominence in the Whig Party, having helped other candidates campaign for important offices as well. He was chosen to be the Vice Presidential candidate to balance the ticket with Zachary Taylor. You see, Taylor was a slave owner from Louisiana, very much a Southerner, and the Whig Party at that time was eager to keep a balance between the North and the South. They were afraid if they put a Vice President on that ticket who was another Southerner, or someone else who was very much openly in favor of slavery, they would lose all their support of Northerners who were anti-slavery, so they decided that they needed to balance the ticket with someone from a free state. Enter Millard Fillmore. Now, Millard Fillmore can't be mentioned without discussing his connection to the state of New York. He was very closely aligned with politics in New York for his whole life. He was born in New York as one of eight children, and he came from a poor family. He was the second child and the oldest son. He didn't get to have much of an education because of the poor state of his family. His father, Nathaniel, came from a colonial background, which had deep ties in the state, having been influential in the New England area for generations. At the age of 14, young Millard wanted to join the War of 1812, but his father discouraged him from starting this early military career because he wanted him to be apprenticed to a trade so that he could elevate his position in life. Unfortunately for Millard, though, the two places to which he was apprenticed just wanted to have him doing menial labor. They didn't teach him the real trade, so he ended up leaving one after the other before eventually becoming apprenticed to a lawyer. Now, he was eager to learn all he could, even though he didn't have the benefit of a formal education. He didn't go to college, which seems very unusual and impossible compared to the process for becoming a lawyer now, but back then you didn't have to go to college or to a university before studying law. As with other trades, you could simply study the books. He eagerly taught himself everything he could by reading all the books he could find, and eventually studying under others. He started going to different academies in different schools. Not colleges, but interesting schools in this area where he could learn and become more knowledgeable. At the age of 19, he started going to the New Hope Academy, and it was there that he met Abigail Powers. She was a young woman two years older than he, who was alternating between teaching at the school and studying herself. She too came from a poor family, but she had learned a great deal from reading her father's extensive library, and she was educating herself further by expanding her knowledge in different subjects. They quickly began a courtship, which would last many years for this time period, since they wouldn't be able to marry until he was 26 years old due to his impoverished state. Fillmore, as a young man, apprenticed himself to a judge, where he learned a good deal about the law profession. He ended up breaking from this man, however, when he ended up giving advice to a farmer on a legal matter. This did not please the judge, because he was the only one who was supposed to be giving advice in that area. When Millard refused to promise that he would never accept a fee for doing some law work again while still his apprentice, he had to leave his apprenticeship. But that did not stop him from continuing his education. He continued studying, and when he was only 23, he passed the bar exam, and he became a lawyer, and pretty soon he was a justice of the peace in this area. While he was continuing his education, Millard also earned extra money by being a teacher. He eventually worked his way into politics. Now, his first political party was not the Whig Party. As he was joining the political scene in the 1820s, that hadn't been formed yet. The main political power at that time was the Democratic Party, which had recently broken off from the Democratic-Republican Party, forming these two separate groups. The Democrats, led by Andrew Jackson, and the National Republicans, who were less organized. So, a third party formed around this time called the Anti-Masonic Party, and its basic platform was being against Freemasonry, which many believed was trying to take over the government at this point. You could say that Millard Fillmore's whole political career was really based on being against things. First, he was part of the Anti-Masonic Party, and he was actually a very prominent member of it, and then he and some of his other colleagues helped form its successor, the Whig Party, which took most of the powers of the Anti-Masonic Party, and organized the anti-Jackson politicians. So, at that point, basically, you were pro-Jackson democracy or against it, and if you were against it, eventually you were a Whig. Now, the Whig Party was the most controlled, or influenced, you could say, by a man named Thurlow Weed. He was an editor, and people who were close to him would become very important in this party. As a young man, Fillmore became good friends with him, and they became important collaborators for the rest of Fillmore's career until Weed's death. Another man who was in this tight-knit circle was a man named Seward, and he would become an opponent of Fillmore. They had to pretend to be friends on the surface, but they began to have some opposing views regarding the issue of slavery. One could look at politics of this era and simply say that everyone before Abraham Lincoln was a slave owner and thought that slavery was just fine. That is not the case at all. From the earliest days of the Union, right from the start, with George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Americans knew that slavery was wrong, particularly those from the North, but even slave owners themselves, like Jefferson and Washington, admitted that slavery was morally wrong, but they weren't sure how to make it politically wrong, how to actually remove it from the government. And that was the position that Millard Fillmore had. However, that was a much more popular position in the 1780s than by the 1820s, 30s, and 40s. By that point, many people from especially the North, but even the South, were willing to say that slavery needed to be abolished on a federal level, if not a state level at least, but it needed to be a government issue. That wasn't Fillmore's position. He stated that slavery was evil and he hated it, yet it was allowed in the Constitution and the government should have nothing to do with it. His exact statement on the issue comes from a letter he wrote to someone from Alabama expressing his position when it was declared that he was an abolitionist, which was also not a very popular position to have at the time. He wrote, God knows that I detest slavery, but it is an existing evil, for which we are not responsible and we must endure it till we can get rid of it without destroying the last hope of free government in the world. The last part of this statement highlights an ever-growing issue, which became more and more controversial with each candidate who took office. The fact that the South and the North were being pulled farther and farther apart by this issue of slavery and with each new state that entered the Union, it became more contentious because should new states be slave states or free states? And Millard Fillmore was not willing to risk open warfare. Now, Zachary Taylor wasn't a very strong politician. He was an extremely strong man and someone with very strong opinions about right versus wrong, but he never had even voted in a presidential election because he felt that it was the job of someone in the military to support the whole country, not just one party. In complete opposition to this was Millard Fillmore, who was a very dedicated Whig politician. He had served four terms in Congress at that point, representing his home state of New York, and he was closely aligned with the Whig party. On and off friendliness with Henry Clay, who was a very important member of Congress, who never made it to the White House. He tried over and over to get that nomination, but he always fell short. Although he was very powerful, he just never quite made it. But meanwhile, between times serving in Congress, Millard Fillmore helped establish important cities in New York. He founded the city of Buffalo. He helped develop it. It was merely a village when he first moved there. He helped draft the documentation to make it officially a city. One point in the 1840s where Millard Fillmore started to disagree with Thurlow Weed was about being governor versus becoming a vice president or president. He had his eye on the vice presidency, but Weed really wanted him to be the governor. Although this was done out of friendliness, Fillmore declared that he refused to be killed by this act of kindness. He didn't want to be stuck in New York as the governor. He was intent that he wanted to stay more involved in the politics in Washington. So he tried to run for Speaker of the House. When he failed at that, he ended up running for the new role of Comptroller of New York, which is basically a financial position on the statewide level. It's almost like being the treasurer of the state. This wasn't a brand new position, but he was the first person to be publicly elected for the role. And he won by a margin of 36,000, which is the largest margin winning for a third-party ticket, something other than Democrat or Republican in that state. He did an excellent job on this position, having shown how good he would be at it when he'd served on the Ways and Means Committee in Congress, which was also financial. It was partly the good job he did in this role which made him a good candidate for vice president. Now, he took that position in the year 1848, and that was also the year of the presidential election. At that time, it was considered bad form for politicians to appear to be actively campaigning for important roles. They had to seem surprised to be properly modest. He wasn't very close to Zachary Taylor. In fact, they scarcely ever met. And at this point, the president didn't have to personally choose his running mate. It was the party who chose the running mate. And the Whig Party, although it was short-lived, held the distinction of being the first party to have a convention in which it chose its nominee. And this proved to be so successful that all the other parties started doing the same thing. He ended up winning the vice presidency, of course, as Zachary Taylor won the presidency. But he quickly realized that this wasn't a very good position. Because although he was from New York, he found that Zachary Taylor didn't give him much respect. And when he was looking for advice on matters of New York, he was going to weed and even seward his enemy. So he was very displeased about this, having, by this point, resigned from the comptroller to serve as the vice president. He did, however, have more power as he was in charge of the Senate. And he was doing quite a good job managing these affairs. Everything changed in 1850 when Zachary Taylor suddenly died. Fillmore wasn't in Washington at that point, but he quickly went there and became the president. And it was thus up to him to deal with this bill that had come before Congress. In fact, it was a group of several bills, which was called the Compromise of 1850. Henry Clay was mainly behind it. And although the Whigs were really supporting it, Zachary Taylor didn't want to fall in line with party politics the way that someone who was more of a politician would. However, Congress, particularly the Whig Party, was glad when Fillmore began to seriously look at the Compromise of 1850. It included five major issues. The first was statehood for California. The second was incorporating the land that had been formerly claimed by Texas into the territory of New Mexico. The third was giving the new territories of New Mexico and Utah the right to decide on whether or not they would be slave states. The fourth was banning the slave trade in the District of Columbia. And the fifth, the most controversial, was the Fugitive Slave Act. Which allowed slaves to be returned to their owners if they were found in a spree area. This was something that Zachary Taylor had not supported, and many others didn't support it at the time either. But by signing these bills and agreeing to this compromise, he was able to delay the Civil War for another ten years. Despite this, he did not prove a very popular president. And he is now rated in the lowest quarter of presidents. Because of his lack of popularity, he couldn't even gain nomination when he tried to run again for the 1852 election. Because of this, he was the last Whig to hold office. That basically was the end of the Whig Party, since he wasn't a very popular president, so they lost strength after that. In fact, Millard Fillmore was the last president who was neither a Democrat nor a Republican. Because before that there had also been the Federalists and the Democratic Republicans. But after that, from then until the present day, it has just been Democrats and Republicans. Although countless other third parties have sprung up. Now that was not the end of Millard Fillmore's political career. He tried to run again in the next election, 1856, under a different political party. The Anti-Catholic Party, which had many other names. Sometimes it was called the National American Party or the Native American Party, which did not mean anything like American Indians at that point. It was a nationalist group which was basically anti-immigrant and which held that Catholics were trying to take over the government. Now it's interesting to see that those two political parties with which he was affiliated, besides the Whig, were anti-something, anti-Mason, anti-Catholic. It's believed that he lost some of the political roles he tried to hold before his vice-presidency because of his rather prejudiced anti-immigrant position. Which, there were a lot of German immigrants in New York and they didn't appreciate that view that he held. But that goes along with another strongly held belief he had. And it wasn't just that he thought people born in America were superior or that he hated people who had other beliefs. Those beliefs came from a sense of suspicion and fear he had that some of these groups would try to, maybe not overthrow the government, but would try to infiltrate the government and thus compromise and ultimately destroy the idea of this free nation. Because he believed that some of these groups didn't fully believe in the separation of church and state. He thought that Freemasons wanted to control the government. He thought that, with their connection to Rome and the Pope, Catholics didn't completely agree in the idea of a complete separation of church and state. He himself was a Christian and he was a strong Unitarian for most of his life. But he believed very strongly that church and state should be completely separate. He's quoted as saying on the matter, I am tolerant of all creeds, yet if any sect suffered itself to be used for political objects, I would meet it by political opposition. In my view, church and state should be separate, not only in form, but in fact. Religion and politics should not be mingled. Sometimes the anti-Catholic party is most commonly known as the Know-Nothing Party, which was a somewhat insulting name given to it by its opponents, but it really comes from the fact that it was a rather secretive group. If a member was asked exactly what they believed, he would reply, I know nothing. After leaving the White House in the year 1854, he helped found the University of Buffalo and became its Chancellor. He also traveled to Europe, where he mingled with the European courts, before, of course, coming back to America and trying to run for president again unsuccessfully in 1856. Since his wife died shortly after he left the White House, he would, a few years later, marry another woman named Caroline, who was a wealthy widow. While she enjoyed the prestige of being married to a former president, he appreciated the wealth which she brought to the Union, since he never did have much money from his law practice, which was often suffering from the fact that he spent most of his time in government positions, which didn't pay very well. Interestingly, when they were married, her lawyers made him sign one of the first prenuptial agreements known to be used in America. He ended up dying in the 1870s, having lived a long life, and had an interesting and important legacy in the history of this country. Although he was one of those accidental presidents, who took office merely filling in for the vice president, it was generally agreed that he did better than John Tyler, the other president at that point, who had taken office when the president died, because he remained loyal to the beliefs of his party. He was a well-versed, very experienced politician, although a younger man for serving as president. Although he may not have been that popular at that time, and isn't very well regarded now, he truly tried to do what was right for his country at that time. The boldness with which he accepted the role of president, unafraid, not asking questions, can be reflected in this final quote from him. The man who can look upon a crisis without being willing to offer himself upon the altar of his country is not for public trust. His country was truly in need of him in that position when Zachary Taylor abruptly died, with the South rumoring that they wanted to break away because of some of these positions on slavery, and he did what he felt needed to be do to keep the country at that time. The Compromise of 1850 was what was generally regarded as the right thing to do in 1850 to maintain peace and preserve the Union, at least for a little while longer. Millard Fillmore, 13th president of the United States, may not be the most well-remembered name, and he is not very popular now because of his views on slavery, but when we look at him honestly, not through the lens of 2025 or 1965, but through the lens of 1849, 1850, the years that he was actually there, it was a very different world, and we must judge him fairly, as we judge all others, looking at the climate of that day and how we often have to deal with things which we know to be wrong, and as we look at these and see that perhaps Millard Fillmore was morally ambiguous in not being stronger against an evil like slavery, let us use that same discerning magnifying glass and turn it like a mirror toward ourselves and see are there evils or wrongs around us today, either in the political sector or the social view, or maybe even our own personal lives. Are there things which wouldn't look good if written in a history book a hundred years from now, but which we allow in our own lives? Let us use Millard Fillmore and other American legends as a good example of how we should live today as citizens and as human beings. Thank you for spending this time with me. Goodbye.