📃Millard Fillmore

13th President · 1850–1853 · Whig

Millard Fillmore rose from genuine frontier poverty to the presidency — his log-cabin upbringing was real, unlike some opponents' rhetoric. He assumed office on Taylor's death and immediately signed the Compromise of 1850, a sweeping attempt to settle the slavery question that included the Fugitive Slave Act. The Compromise delayed civil war by a decade but cost Fillmore his party and much of his reputation.

Self-Made Man

Fillmore was born in a log cabin in central New York and worked as an indentured servant to a cloth maker. He taught himself law, built a practice in Buffalo, and served in the New York legislature and U.S. House before being elected Vice President in 1848. He was added to the ticket as a Northern balance for the slaveholding Taylor.

Compromise of 1850

Taylor had opposed the complex Compromise of 1850 brokered by Henry Clay and Stephen Douglas. Fillmore supported it and signed its five component bills after Taylor's death. The Compromise admitted California as a free state, organized New Mexico and Utah territories without slavery restrictions, settled the Texas-New Mexico border, abolished the slave trade (but not slavery) in Washington D.C., and passed a harsh new Fugitive Slave Act. The Fugitive Slave Act outraged Northern abolitionists and eroded Fillmore's support.

Opening Japan

In 1852, Fillmore dispatched Commodore Matthew Perry with a squadron of warships to force Japan to open to American trade. Perry arrived in Edo Bay in July 1853 (after Fillmore had left office) and presented demands that ended more than two centuries of Japanese isolation. The opening of Japan had far-reaching consequences for 19th-century international trade and geopolitics.

End of the Whigs

Fillmore lost the 1852 Whig nomination to General Winfield Scott. The Whig Party itself collapsed shortly after, split between Northern and Southern factions. Fillmore ran again in 1856 as the nominee of the nativist American (Know-Nothing) Party, finishing third with eight electoral votes from Maryland.

Fillmore Trivia

• Fillmore installed the first permanent library, bathtub with running water, and cooking stove in the White House.
• He was the last Whig president.
• Queen Victoria once called him "the handsomest man I have ever seen," though historians doubt the story.
• He refused an honorary degree from Oxford on the grounds that he had not earned it, writing that he had "neither literary nor scientific attainment to justify it."

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