Today’s #stampoftheday tells the story of an ambitious, xenophobic New Yorker connected with popular conspiracy theories who unexpectedly became president and then turns out to be one of the worst presidents in US history.
The president in question is Millard Fillmore, who was born on January 7, 1800 and is pictured on a 13-cent stamp issued in 1938 as part of a series that pictured every US President from George Washington to Calvin Coolidge. Fillmore, who was elected vice-president in 1848, became president when Zachary Taylor died in 1850. He couldn’t get his party’s nomination in 1852 and then ran unsuccessfully for president in 1856 as the candidate of a party best known for supporting anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic policies.
To say Fillmore’s reputation is bad, would be an understatement. President Harry S. Truman, never one to mince words, for example, supposedly said that Fillmore was “a weak, trivial thumb-twaddler who would do nothing to offend anyone” and was responsible in part for the Civil War. And Filmore biographer Paul Finkelman contended that “on the central issues of the age his vision was myopic and his legacy is worse…in the end, Fillmore was always on the wrong side of the great moral and political issues.”
Who was the distinguished predecessor of Donald Trump? The first president to be born after the Revolutionary War, Fillmore’s parents were poor tenant farmers in New York State’s Finger Lakes region. A diligent student, he became a successful attorney in the Buffalo area and then became active in politics as a supporter of the Anti-Masonic Party, a third party whose members contended that Freemasons–many of them prominent businessmen and politicians-were secretly trying to take control of the government. In 1828 Fillmore was elected to the New York State Assembly as a member of the Anti-Masonic Party and in 1832 he was elected to Congress.
In the 1830s the Anti-Masons expanded their scope and became aligned with the Whig Party, which emerged as one of two key parties in the late 1830s. Fillmore became a Whig and was soon a rival for the state party leadership with the editor Thurlow Weed and Weed’s protŽgŽ, William H. Seward (who went on to be Lincoln’s Secretary of State). Fillmore believed while slavery was evil, the federal government didn’t have the power to regulate it. Seward, who opposed slavery, argued the federal government should actively try to end it.
In 1841, Fillmore became chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee., In 1844 he unsuccessfully sought to be the Whig nominee for vice-president, and when that failed, to be their nominee for governor of New York. But in 1847, he was overwhelmingly elected Comptroller of New York (a position that had previously been filled by appointment).
In 1848, after Taylor, a war hero and slave owner, emerged as a compromise Whig candidate for president, delegates selected Fillmore to the vice-presidential candidate as a way to balance the ticket. The two, however, barely knew each other and Taylor largely ignored Fillmore.
Although he was a slave owner, Taylor did not believe slavery would thrive in the arid land the US had gained through the Mexican-American War. So much to the consternation of Southern Senators, he proposed immediately admitting California as a free state and doing the same for the New Mexico Territory once a border dispute with Texas was settled.
But Taylor died in July 1850. And unlike Taylor Fillmore supported and actively (and successfully) worked to secure passage of a compromise package put forward earlier that year by Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky, one of the era’s leading figures. For northern, anti-slavery forces, the compromise admitted California as a free state and banned the importation of slaves into the District of Columbia. For Southerners, it toughened the Fugitive Slave Act by imposing severe punishments on those who aided escaped slaves, denying due process to escapees, who could not even testify before magistrates who enforced the law; and even given those magistrates higher payments if they decided the escapee was a slave, rather than a free man or woman.
Not surprisingly, the compromise was bitterly opposed by many Northerners. Opponents of slavery also had little patience for Fillmore’s contention that he was bound by his oath as president as well as commitments he made during the legislative process to enforce the law. Meanwhile, many Southerners complained that it was not being aggressively enforced. The controversies overshadowed some accomplishments of Fillmore’s presidency, such as opening up trade with Japan, halting French efforts to gain control of Hawaii, and keeping Southerners from annexing Cuba. And, in what became one of his most famous accomplishments, Fillmore had the first bathtub installed in the White House!
Although Fillmore sought the Whig nomination to a full term in 1852, the controversies over the Fugitive Slave Act made him unacceptable to many Northern Whigs. As a result, the party nominated General Winfield Scott (who lost to Democrat Franklin Pierce). In the wake of that defeat, the Whig Party splintered into a wing that became the anti-slavery Republican Party and a more conservative wing that joined forces with others to form the Know-Nothing Party. The group, which had begun as a secret society, was anti-Catholic, anti-immigration, populist and xenophobic.
The new party nominated Fillmore for president in 1856. In the campaign, Fillmore said little about immigration in the campaign and instead presented himself as a moderate alternative to pro-slavery Democrat James Buchanan (who won), and anti-slavery John Fremont, the candidate of the then-new Republican Party (who finished second).
After the election Fillmore moved back to Buffalo. When the Civil War started, he opposed secession, and then supported proposals to allow Southern states to return to the Union as slave states. He also backed President Andrew Johnson’s efforts to allow Southern states to quickly return to the Union without offering significant rights and protections to the Blacks who had been slaves. Fillmore died after a stroke in 1874.
Fillmore’s few defenders claim that his actions helped forestall the Civil War at least for a decade. But in 20 separate surveys of scholars taken since 1948, he has always ranked in the bottom quartile of former presidents, usually a just few places ahead of dead last. (Warren Harding usually is last; Pierce and Buchanan are usually ranked lower than Fillmore.)
I have a hunch, however, the Fillmore and his fellow bottom-dwellers will soon have serious competition at the bottom of the list.
Be well, stay safe, don’t be a “a weak, trivial thumb-twaddler,” fight for justice, and work for peace.