Presidency of Millard Fillmore
's tenure as the 13th president of the United States began on July 9, 1850, upon the death of President Zachary Taylor, and ended on March 4, 1853. Fillmore, the last Whig president, had been vice president under Taylor prior to succeeding the presidency. He was the second president to succeed to the office without being elected to it, after John Tyler. His presidency ended after losing the Whig nomination at the 1852 Whig National Convention. Fillmore was succeeded by Democrat Franklin Pierce.
Upon taking office, Fillmore dismissed Taylor's cabinet and pursued a new policy with regard to the territory acquired in the Mexican–American War. He supported the efforts of Senators Henry Clay and Stephen A. Douglas, who crafted and passed the Compromise of 1850. The Compromise of 1850 temporarily settled the status of slavery in the lands acquired as result of the Mexican–American War, and led to a brief truce in the escalating political battle between slave and free states. A controversial part of the Compromise was the Fugitive Slave Act, which expedited the return of escaped slaves to those who claimed ownership. Fillmore felt himself duty-bound to enforce it, but his support of the policy damaged his popularity and split both the Whig Party and the nation. In foreign policy, Fillmore launched the Perry Expedition to open trade in Japan, moved to block the French annexation of Hawaii, and reduced tensions with Spain in the aftermath of Narciso López's filibuster expeditions to Cuba.
Fillmore somewhat reluctantly sought his party's nomination for a full term, but the split between supporters of Fillmore and Secretary of State Daniel Webster led to the nomination of General Winfield Scott at the 1852 Whig National Convention. Pierce defeated Scott by a wide margin in the general election. Though some analysts praise various aspects of his presidency, Fillmore is generally ranked as below-average in polls of historians and political scientists.
Accession
The 1848 Whig National Convention selected Zachary Taylor, a top American general during the Mexican–American War, as the Whig presidential nominee. For Taylor's running mate, John A. Collier convinced his fellow Whigs to nominate Fillmore, a loyal supporter of defeated presidential candidate Henry Clay. During the 1848 presidential election, Fillmore campaigned for the Whig ticket, and he helped put an end to a brief anti-Taylor movement among Northern Whigs that had emerged after Taylor accepted the nomination of a small, breakaway group of pro-slavery Democrats. With the Democrats divided by the Free Soil candidacy of former President Martin Van Buren, the Whigs won the 1848 presidential election.Despite the Whig presidential victory, Democrats maintained control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate, preventing the reversal of outgoing President James K. Polk's policies on the tariff and other issues. Taylor's presidency instead centered the status of slavery in the region ceded by Mexico following the Mexican–American War. After taking office, Vice President Fillmore was quickly sidelined by the efforts of editor Thurlow Weed, who viewed Fillmore as a rival to Weed's close political ally, William H. Seward. Fillmore was unhappy during his vice presidency, partly because his wife, Abigail Fillmore, spent much of her time at their home in New York.
Fillmore received the formal notification of Zachary Taylor's death, signed by the cabinet, on the evening of July 9, 1850 in his residence at the Willard Hotel. Fillmore had spent the previous night in a vigil with the cabinet outside of Taylor's White House bedroom. After acknowledging the letter, Fillmore went to the House of Representatives Chamber in the U.S. Capitol the following day, where he took the presidential oath of office. William Cranch, chief judge of the U.S. Circuit Court, administered the oath to Fillmore. In contrast to John Tyler, whose legitimacy as president had been questioned by many after his accession to the presidency in 1841, Fillmore was widely accepted as the president by members of Congress and the public.
Taylor's widow, Margaret Taylor, left Washington soon after her husband's death, and Fillmore's family took up residence in the White House shortly thereafter. Because Fillmore's wife, Abigail, was often in poor health, his daughter, Mary Abigail Fillmore, frequently served as the White House hostess.
Administration
Taylor's cabinet appointees submitted their resignation on July 10, and Fillmore accepted the resignations the following day. Fillmore is the only president who succeeded by death or resignation not to retain, at least initially, his predecessor's cabinet. The biggest challenge facing Taylor had been the issue of slavery in the territories, and this issue immediately confronted the Fillmore administration as well. Taylor had opposed a plan, formulated by Henry Clay, which was designed to appeal to both anti-slavery northerners and pro-slavery southerners, but which received the most support from Southerners. During his vice presidency, Fillmore had indicated that he might vote to support the compromise, but he had not publicly committed himself on the issue when he assumed the presidency.Fillmore hoped to use the process of selecting the cabinet to re-unify the Whig Party, and he sought to balance the cabinet among North and South, pro-compromise and anti-compromise, and pro-Taylor and anti-Taylor. Fillmore offered the position of Secretary of State to Robert Charles Winthrop, an anti-compromise Massachusetts Whig who was widely popular among Whigs in the House of Representatives, but Winthrop declined the post. Fillmore instead chose Daniel Webster, who had previously served as Secretary of State under William Henry Harrison and John Tyler. Webster had outraged his Massachusetts constituents by supporting the compromise, and he was unlikely to win election another term in the Senate in 1851. Webster became Fillmore's most important adviser. Two other prominent Whig Senators, Thomas Corwin of Ohio and John J. Crittenden of Kentucky, also joined Fillmore's cabinet. Fillmore appointed his old law partner, Nathan Hall, as Postmaster General, a cabinet position that controlled many patronage appointments. Charles Magill Conrad of Louisiana became the Secretary of War, William Alexander Graham of North Carolina became Secretary of the Navy, and Alexander Hugh Holmes Stuart of Virginia became Secretary of the Interior. Though Fillmore's cabinet appointments were warmly received by both Northern and Southern Whigs, party unity was shattered soon after Fillmore's accession due to the fight over Clay's compromise.
Judicial appointments
Fillmore appointed one Supreme Court justice, though two Supreme Court vacancies arose during his presidency. The first vacancy arose due to the death of Associate Justice Levi Woodbury in 1851. Determined to nominate a Whig from New England, Fillmore settled on Benjamin Robbins Curtis. The 41-year-old Curtis had earned notoriety as a leading practitioner of commercial law, and he won the full backing of Secretary of State Webster. Despite some opposition from anti-slavery senators, Curtis ultimately won Senate approval. After the death of Associate Justice John McKinley in mid-1852, Fillmore successively nominated Edward A. Bradford, George Edmund Badger, and William C. Micou. By refusing to act on any of the nominations, Senate Democrats ensured that the vacancy would be filled by Franklin Pierce after Fillmore left office. Curtis would serve on the Supreme Court until 1857, when he resigned in protest of the holding in Dred Scott v. Sandford. Fillmore also made four appointments to United States district courts, including that of his Postmaster General, Nathan Hall, to the federal district court in Buffalo.Domestic affairs
Compromise of 1850
Background
Before and during Taylor's presidency, a crisis had developed over the land acquired after the Mexican–American War in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The key issue was the status of slavery in the territories, which, for many leaders, represented a debate over not just slavery but also morality, property rights, and personal honor. Southern extremists like John C. Calhoun viewed any limit on slavery as an attack on the Southern way of life, while many Northerners opposed any further expansion of slavery. Further complicating the issue was that much of the newly acquired Western lands seemed unsuitable to slavery due to climate and geography. In 1820, Congress had agreed to the Missouri Compromise, which had banned slavery in all lands of the Louisiana Purchase north of the 36° 30' parallel, and many Southerners sought to extend this line to the Pacific Ocean. During the Mexican–American War, a Northern member of Congress had put forth the Wilmot Proviso, a legislative proposal that would have banned slavery in all territories acquired in the Mexican–American War. Though not adopted by Congress, the debate over the Wilmot Proviso had contributed to an increasingly tense national debate regarding slavery.The territorial issues centered on the territories of California and New Mexico, as well the state of Texas, which had been annexed in 1845. Because California lacked an organized territorial government, the federal government faced difficulties in providing adequate governance in the midst of the California Gold Rush, and many sought immediate statehood for California. After the start of the gold rush, hundreds of slaves were imported into California to work the gold mines, provoking a harsh reaction from competing miners. With the approval of military governor Bennet C. Riley, in 1849 Californians held a constitutional convention. In anticipation of imminent statehood, the convention wrote a new constitution that would ban slavery in California. Meanwhile, Texas claimed all of the Mexican Cession east of the Rio Grande, including parts of the former Mexican state of New Mexico that it had never exercised de facto control over. Texan leaders had expected to be granted control of all territory east of the Rio Grande after the Mexican-American War, but the inhabitants of New Mexico had resisted Texan control. New Mexico had long prohibited slavery, a fact that affected the debate over its territorial status, but many New Mexican leaders opposed joining Texas primarily because Texas's capital lay hundreds of miles away and because Texas and New Mexico had a history of conflict dating back to the 1841 Santa Fe Expedition. Outside of Texas, many Southern leaders supported Texas's claims to New Mexico in order to secure as much territory as possible for the expansion of slavery. President Taylor had opposed Texas's ambitions in New Mexico, and he favored quickly granting statehood to both California and New Mexico in order to avoid reigniting the debate over the Wilmot Proviso.
Congress also faced the issue of Utah, which like California and New Mexico, had been ceded by Mexico. Utah was inhabited largely by Mormons, whose practice of polygamy was unpopular in the United States. Aside from the disposition of the territories, other issues had risen to prominence during the Taylor years. The Washington, D.C. slave trade angered many in the North, who viewed the presence of slavery in the capital as a blemish on the nation. Disputes around fugitive slaves had grown since 1830 in part due to improving means of transportation, as escaped slaves used roads, railroads, and ships to escape. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 had granted jurisdiction to all state and federal judges over cases regarding fugitive slaves, but several Northern states, dissatisfied by the lack of due process in these cases, had passed personal liberty laws that made it more difficult to return alleged fugitive slaves to the South. Another issue that would affect the compromise was Texas's debt; it had approximately $10 million in debt left over from its time as an independent nation, and that debt would become a factor in the debates over the territories.