Millard Fillmore (1800 - 1874) was an American politician and lawyer who served as the 13th president of the United States from 1850 to 1853. [1] Elected vice president in 1848, he took office on the death of Zachary Taylor and gave his support to the Compromise of 1850, a package of measures that included a stringent Fugitive Slave Act. [2] He was the last member of the Whig Party to occupy the presidency.
Early life and education
Millard Fillmore was born on 7 January 1800 in Summerhill, a frontier settlement in the Finger Lakes region of New York, into a family of poor tenant farmers. [1] His formal schooling was brief and irregular; as a youth he was apprenticed to a cloth dresser and educated himself largely by reading. He later read law in the office of a county judge, was admitted to the New York bar in 1823, and built a practice first in East Aurora and then in Buffalo.
Rise in politics
Fillmore entered public life in the New York State Assembly, where he was associated with the Anti-Masonic movement before joining the emerging Whig Party. He served several terms in the United States House of Representatives and became chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, a position from which he helped shape the protective tariff of 1842. [2] In 1847 he was elected comptroller of New York State, and the following year the Whigs nominated him for vice president on a ticket headed by the Mexican-American War general Zachary Taylor. The ticket won, and Fillmore took office in March 1849.
Presidency
Taylor died suddenly in July 1850 and Fillmore succeeded him, immediately reversing the administration's course on the territorial crisis produced by the Mexican-American War. He backed the series of bills known collectively as the Compromise of 1850, which admitted California as a free state, organized the Utah and New Mexico territories without restrictions on slavery, ended the slave trade in the District of Columbia, and imposed a far-reaching Fugitive Slave Act. [3]
Fillmore's insistence on enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act, which obliged citizens and officials in free states to assist in the capture of people who had escaped slavery, provoked intense opposition across the North and deepened the divisions that would destroy the Whig Party. In foreign affairs his administration dispatched Commodore Matthew C. Perry on the naval expedition that led to the opening of Japan to American trade. [2]
Later life
Denied his party's nomination in 1852, Fillmore left office the following March. In 1856 he ran for president again as the candidate of the nativist American Party, widely known as the Know Nothings, and finished third, carrying only Maryland. He returned to Buffalo, where he was a leading civic figure: he helped establish the University of Buffalo and served as its first chancellor, and he was active in the Buffalo Historical Society and other local institutions. He died in Buffalo on 8 March 1874. [1]
Legacy
Fillmore remains the last president elected on a Whig ticket, and his term marked the final stage of that party's collapse. Historians generally place him among the least successful American presidents, chiefly because of his defence of the Fugitive Slave Act and his later association with nativist politics. [3] Assessments more favourable to him note that the Compromise of 1850 postponed open conflict between North and South for a decade, and that his administration expanded American commercial engagement in the Pacific.
