American History Hit - President Millard Fillmore: The Most Handsome President?

Episode Date: January 18, 2024

How did a president lose his entire cabinet so soon after taking office? What was his role in the Westward expansion of the United States? And where did the name Millard come from?From teaching himself to read to becoming President of the United States, today we are being introduced to the 13th President of the United States, Millard Fillmore.Don is joined by Michael David Cohen, Research Professor of Government and Editor of the Correspondence of Zachary Taylor & Millard Fillmore at the American University.Produced by Freddy Chick and Sophie Gee. Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Dan Snow, James Holland, Mary Beard and more.Don’t miss out on the best offer in history! Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 for 3 months with code AMERICANHISTORYHIT1 sign up now for your 14-day free trial https://historyhit/subscription/You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. In the fall of 1826, in Canandaigua, Ontario County, New York, a man named William Morgan is released from jail. It has been his second arrest in a month.

The first time on August 19th, he was booked for petty theft, a stolen shirt and a tie. This time, it's for an outstanding debt of $2. After this one night of incarceration, Morgan is glad to be free, if a bit confused by the strangeness of his bail being paid by a... person he's never before set eyes upon. Morgan is led away from jail, exhausted and in need of a wash and a meal. But as he and his new acquaintance turn the corner, Morgan panics. Murder, murder! He cries out as he is bundled into a waiting carriage. This will be the last time, William Morgan, a former Freemason, will ever be seen alive. His disappearance will stir

up anti-Masonic sentiments across the nation. So much so, a new political party, the first third party in American history, will attract widespread support. One person drawn to this anti-Masonic fervor will go on to become the 13th president of the United States. His name, Millard Fillmore. God knows, I detest slavery, but it is an existing evil for which we are not responsible. We must endure it and give it such protection as is guaranteed. by the Constitution till we get rid of it without destroying the last hope of free government in the world. Hello all. Welcome back to American History Hit for this, our 13th installment of our bi-monthly series on the American presidencies.

Today is our man, Millard Fillmore, 1850 to 1853, 13th president of the United States. You'd be hard pressed to find any number of Americans who could tell you the first thing about the presidency of Millard Fillmore, a commander-in-chief who finds himself consistently near bottom of the rankings of U.S. heads of state. But honestly, personally, I find this fascinating. There is so much happening around Fillmore in the three years he served, much of which comes back around a decade later as the Civil War. So if you're looking to understand what was happening in the antebellum period, Millard Fillmore is where you go.

His achievement as president was mainly to accomplish an illusion, a self-deception, that he could somehow pacify the fiery and divisive conflict roiling up in our nation, which today we look back on and see as inevitable, inexorable. Millard Fillmore would not have seen it that way, and it became his highest calling to preserve the unity of the United States, even at the expense of his own moral standing, and that, to his detriment, has become his legacy. Millard Fillmore, a presidential enigma, and we're about to learn a lot more about him with Michael Cohen, Research professor in the Department of Government at American University in Washington, D.C. Greetings, Michael. Welcome to American History Hit.

Hello, Don. Thank you for having me. It's great to be here. Millard Fillmore. Here we go. The second VP to assume the office of president when the president he has served has died. John Tyler being the first in 1841 after William Henry Harrison, just less than a decade before, takes the oath after Zachary Taylor supposedly eats a bowl of bad cherries in 1850. Suddenly it's President Fillmore. Was he a man who was ready to lead the nation, Michael? There had been some discussion of Fillmore's actually becoming president, either in 1849 when Taylor did or more likely a little later.

But it really was a surprise when it actually happened in 1850. Taylor had been in generally good health, even though he was older by the standards of the time. So neither Fillmore nor anyone else had seriously considered the possibility that he would enter the office right then. He was old rough and ready. Last thing people thought he was going to die in office. Yes. A few years earlier, when he was leading troops in the Mexican-American War, he'd encountered many other officers and soldiers who succumbed to the various diseases that they weren't used to encountering in these more southern climes. But he had actually done pretty well. He had a robust constitution. And by the time he became president, he was, in pretty solid health, though he did have occasional gastrointestinal issues, as most people

drinking the unhealthy water of the Washington Swamp did. Exactly. I mean, one visit to Washington in the middle of the 1800s would have turned your stomach. The place was just not made for human habitation at that point. Yes, there was very little distinction between the sewage and water systems. Exactly. Open, open sewers. They supposedly called creeks.

Yes. Michael, what has drawn you to the works of Miller Fillmore? You have an interesting angle on all of this, don't you? Yes, it's really the time that draws me more than just the individuals. Currently, I'm editing the letters of both Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore, and before that, I did the letters of James K. Polk, the predecessor to Taylor. So I've been looking at several presidents and even more importantly at the many Americans who corresponded with them in the 1840s and early 1850s.

So I've gotten very involved in this period that's established. the debate over slavery and the expansion of slavery, that will ultimately lead to the Civil War. Interesting times, yes. Any one of these guys is their own lens through which to see this antebellum period, which is so rich with controversy, with all of these strains, these themes of American life that are really building towards this explosion, you know, sometime later. Today he is, Millard Fulmore is known as a son of Buffalo, you know, statue stands in front of the Buffalo City Hall downtown, shares his building with Grover. Cleveland, but he was really more broadly from Western New York, wasn't he? A child of real poverty. Tell me about his early years out there. His early years were spent in various towns in the area of Buffalo. He was born in a place called Sampronius, later lived in Aurora, and as an adult move to Buffalo. But he, unlike many presidents of the 19th and 20th centuries, was fairly obscure. He was the

child of some poor farmers in the area and managed to rise himself first through an apprenticeship at a textile shop, but later he became a rather prominent Buffalo lawyer. That led him into politics. Law was a common way through which people would enter political office. He served in the state legislature and then for a while in Congress in 1830s and the 1840s, then from there he went into the office of the comptrollership of New York, which was the lead state financial officer and in many ways more powerful than the governorship. He actually didn't want the job, but he was really pushed by his party to take it. He was a member of the Whig Party. And finally, having achieved this level of prominence, he was put on the ticket for the vice presidency in 1848 with Zachary Taylor.

It's interesting to look at the different backdrops of his life. On one hand, you have this impoverished background. Things get better for his family later on, but he really is born in a virtual log cabin, I guess, which speaks to his view of the every man, I suppose. I mean, that's going to be his outlook from those early formative years. But then he's part of the political community of Buffalo, New York, Western New York, which is booming in these days. I mean, beginning to boom with the Erie Canal and new industries. I mean, it eventually becomes electricity and Tesla and all of that stuff around Niagara Falls. This is a big part of the country. very powerful place, no pun intended, that he sort of stakes his ground in eventually, versus a lawyer, but then, as you say, as a politician. I had to look up comptroller. I did not know what that word even meant. But, you know, after you understand that he's basically the chief financial officer of the government of New York, you understand how in the weeds this guy is, no pun intended

to Thurlow. He is really deeply involved in New York politics. He's a pro, right? Yes, he was. And in 1848, when he was nominated for vice president, that was one of the things he had going for him. The Wake Party, they'd chosen Zachary Taylor, who was the first president who had never served in civil office before he was president. They nominated him as the main candidate, so they wanted someone who was both a committed member of the week party and an experienced politician to be on the ticket with him. Also, and we'll probably get into the issues of sectionalism and slavery later, but one reason that a lot of women,

week supporters liked Philmore was because they were very hesitant about Taylor. They really want a Southern president. But they figured, okay, if we have Fillmore on the ticket, then we'll at least be able to support the ticket as a whole because we like the various presidential candidate. In terms of his kind of obscure, relatively poor upbringing, he not only was born in a log cabin, but really was committed throughout his life to providing education and opportunities for the poor, or at least for poor white Protestant. men. He taught himself to read largely. He did attend several schools, including one where his teacher

was the woman who later became his wife, Abigail. But when he had an apprenticeship at a textile shop, he would set a dictionary on the textile equipment, and then as he'd go back and forth across it in his work, he would read one word each time and memorize it. Then later, when he was a well-known politician, he wrote to Merriam, the company publishing Webster's dictionary, unsolicited, giving them advice and what he thought a dictionary should have in it. He said, be sure to include the swear words because they may be bad words, but people will encounter them. They need to know what they mean. A self-made man, if ever there is one, in the presidential histories, I think. He really had to pull up his own bootstraps to make this thing happen for himself. This is, I found very interesting

about his early career. He was really one of the elemental forces behind the founding of the Whig Party, wasn't he? He was. The Whig Party was this short-lived party that emerged in the 1830s, opposition to Andrew Jackson, who was a Democrat, the first Democratic president, and seen as much too powerful by some people. So Henry Clay was the single leading figure behind it. Philmore was a friend and ally of Clay's and eventually of another wig leader's Daniel Webster, and he, yes, was one of the lead formers of that party in New York. He had entered politics with a different party, a third party, the anti-Masonic party, opposed to the Masonic party, opposed to the masons and other secret organizations, but quickly moved into the wigs.

What was that about the anti-Masonic's? What did they have against the Masons? That was George Washington. Yes, yes. George Washington and many other presidents, including Polk, were members of the Masons. But a lot of Americans saw them as elitist, as anti-democratic, as something from the old world that excluded people, rather than included the common man, as they would call him. So people such as Fillmore set up this third party, the first third party in American history in 1832, specifically to oppose them.

Ironically, Philmore later after his presidency, four years after he'd been out of office, he ran again as a member of the American Party or No Nothing Party, which was affiliated with a secret organization itself, the Order of the Star-Spangled Bander. and he had to take an oath to join that organization, completely reversing his views on secret societies. So he chose to take the oath in private at home rather than in front of the public. This has always interested me, Michael. The Whig Party comes out, not directly out of the Democratic-Republican thing. There is a little few steps along the way, and one of them is the National Republicans. And I didn't even know this until I was reading about this. When the Democratic Republicans break away, the Republicans call themselves the National Republican.

And that begins the trip towards the Whigs, right? Yes. In the 1820s and 1830s, the partisan divisions in the United States are very fluid and uncertain. Before that, the two major parties had been the Democratic Republicans who were sometimes called the Democrats, sometimes called the Republicans, and today sometimes are called the Jeffersonians, and the Federalists. But the Federalists had been tarred with the idea of disunion from some suggestions of New England's deceding made decades earlier.

So in the 1820s, they really faded away. The new Democratic Party was established under Andrew Jackson's and Martin Van Buren's leadership. The Democratic Republican Party kind of disappeared, the Democrats considered it to be their predecessor. And those who opposed the new Democratic Party and Andrew Jackson in particular went through several stages of how they define themselves, as simply this vague collection of opponents, who may believe very different political ideas but didn't like Andrew Jackson, to the slightly more formal idea of national Republicans, again tracing themselves back to the Democratic Republicans, but still opposing Andrew Jackson, to finally in 1832, under the leadership of Henry Clay, the presidential candidate that year, the Whig Party,

which took its name from the British traditionally anti-monarchial Whig Party, saw Andrew Jackson as a sort of king or would be king. So from the 1830s until the 1850s, the Democrats and the Whigs are the major parties. Like Tyler before him, he comes into office. This is obviously an uncomfortable moment for everyone. The poor man's died. But are you going to take over what this guy was coming to do as the president? Are you going to become your own president? That began as an issue with Tyler. Is the same thing, a problem for Fillmore? It was in some way. It's sort of in an opposite direction. William Henry Harrison, who died after one month in 1841, he had been a fairly committed Whig, a reliable member of the party, whereas Tyler, he had considered himself a wig, but had very different political views for most of the party. So he kind of turned the presidency away from the center of the party. With Taylor and Fillmore, it was just the opposite. Taylor, though he had during the campaign described himself as a wig because the party forced him to, he really was committed to being an independent.

of not being beholden to any party and making his own decisions, whereas Fillmore, who took over, was a committed way. So we did, again, have this change in policy. Philmore worked much better with Congress, was much more aligned with where Congress wanted to go on questions of slavery and expansion than Taylor had been, and sort of demonstrating symbolically what a change this was. On the day that Fillmore became president, he accepted the resignations of every member of Taylor's cabinet. Dishingenuously, after he did that, he asked them if they would please stay on for about a month because he hadn't found replacements for them. And oddly enough, they declined. Wow. Why? Did they just not like the guy? Well, they had tendered the resignations as a sort of formality, that you're the president now, you should make your decisions, but they really expected that he would decline them. Philmore instead accepted their resignations, probably to all of their surprise, because he did want to be his own man, his own president. And he'd really been excluded. from the Taylor presidency. The vice president historically before the late 20th century didn't have much of a role in government. He would preside over the Senate during its meetings. But besides that, he wasn't considered an advisor to the president or really invited to cabinet meetings. So he didn't have a close relationship with them. And at least one member of the cabinet had been a major political enemy of his. So he wanted to set them aside and get people whom he could trust. All this happens in 1849, 850. He takes the oath of office in 1850. Now, what has happened in the previous years?

Oh, my goodness. America has exploded territorially. Under Polk, of course, the Mexican-American War, we now have an enormous amount of the American West to figure out what to do with. This is going to be the defining issue during Fillmore's time in office. It's already a big problem. He walks into this, having come out of retirement, I suppose, but even prior to this, he was dealing with it in Congress, right?

I mean, this is a whole issue of whether or not these Western states would become slave states or free states and how that was all going to be managed. Where does Millard Fillmore enter into this and what's his outlook on it? Philmore had what we might consider a surprising stance on slavery and the expansion of slavery and what many people at the time considered surprising as well. As you said, during the Polk administration, when Taylor was leading troops. Mexico, the United States had conquered, that was the word they used, all the land from Texas to California. So half of Mexico became part of the United States. And Mexico, except in Texas, had outlawed slavery in the area. But now the question was whether the United States, which did generally allow slavery, would expand the institution into those areas, would allow white people who

were moving there to bring the black people whom they enslaved with them and continue them enforced labor. Well, Polk, who was president when this land first came into the U.S., he tried to ignore the question. He wrote in his diary that he had no idea what the question of slavery could possibly have to making peace with Mexico. And he was smarter than that. He just wanted to avoid the question. Taylor, he was a major slaveholder. He owned more than 130 people by the end of his life on plantations in Louisiana and Mississippi. So it was expected he would be sympathetic to the to the other enslavers that he would want to allow slavery in this area. But he actually took kind of the opposite view.

When he was present, he allied with some northerners who wanted to exclude slavery from the area, and particularly the people who were in California at the time, they didn't want to allow slavery there largely because they didn't want, the white people there didn't want to compete with a black labor that didn't have to be paid once people were purchased as property. So Taylor took this position that will lead in California, New Mexico, and all this area without slavery. Phil Moore, he's a northerner, and he had written in many of his private letters that he hated slavery, and he hoped it would end someday. He thought it was a great evil.

When he was president, actually, someone sent him a copy of Harriet Beecher Stowe's great anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin. And he wrote back to the person had sent it to him, said that he only had a chance to glance at it, but he was interested and his wife had started reading it, and she really liked it. it. But he was what was called at the time a dooface by those who wanted to deride him. A northerner was Southern sympathies. Even though he thought slavery was an evil, he thought that the Constitution protected it, that the U.S. government did not have the option to end it, except in very limited situations. So he, unlike Taylor, supported allowing slavery to continue in these areas in the West, And ultimately, he supported a what was called a compromise of 1850 between generally anti-slavery northerners and pro-slavery southerners in Congress that they would bring in California as a free state, but the rest of the area would, at least for now, allow slavery. I'll be back with more American history after this short break.

Let's take a pause here and talk about the word compromise in the early half of the 19th century. Listeners will, of course, be aware that there are a number of these things. a whole list of compromises having to do both with congressional actions but also constitutional ones dating all the way back to the beginnings of it all. But the famous ones to do with this issue, slavery, the three-fifths compromise, the compromise of 1820, which is also known as the Missouri Compromise, and then the Compromises of 1850. So when we say compromise having to do with this, it's about trying to keep the country together over the issue of slavery, trying to find some kind of balance, specifically, strategically within the halls of Congress.

because you, you know, if you bring in one state, you're going to make one side more powerful than the other. So there better be a quid pro quo. You need to have one equal the other one. So when Missouri is brought in in 1820, they create the free state of Maine. Hence we've balanced, we've neutralized the issue right there. Later on, we're compromising something even bigger, which is we now have the state of Texas, the territory of New Mexico, Utah, California, this enormous place, some 500. thousand square miles have been added to the United States in one fell swoop, one treaty, basically, at which point Congress has to figure out who's going to be a slave state and who's not, again, trying to find a compromise. Millard Fillmore is appropriately cast in this role because he is that kind of person. He wants to find compromise in life. He's from this very progressive area of the country, as I mentioned, a real booming part of the culture. Western New York has all kinds of stuff going on, Chautauqua and all that.

that stuff. People are thinking in new ways out there. The Mormons come from Western New York. But he himself is this sort of pacifier, which is going to be his legacy. How does he proceed as president through this congressional action, this debate of how to work these states into something that's going to stick together? You're right that he very much did want to preserve the union. And he, like his couple predecessors, realize that slavery was increasingly this question that was going to divide the country. Like Polk, like Taylor, he wrote in some of his letters that he feared that this question of whether to expand slavery into the new Western territories, he feared that it would break up the union, a lead to a war between the states. In one letter, he also wrote that he feared it would ultimately lead to a war

between the races between white and black Americans. He, like many Americans who were paying attention, had a lot of this concern about where the country was headed, and his primary concern, as you said, was to keep the union together. It was not clear that the American experiment was going to last forever. At the same time, he was a member of the Whig Party, which, because it had formed in opposition to a very strong president, Andrew Jackson, was committed to a relatively weak president. When Taylor was running for president and Fillmore for vice president, they, in a number of public and private letters, refused to give their opinions on issues, saying that it's really up to Congress. It doesn't matter so much what the president thinks. Congress will set policy.

And it's just up to the president to, say, if Congress passes something unconstitutional, then he'll veto it. But generally be hands off. Now, when he was in office, Phil Moore did take a role in this debate, but he did so kind of in the background. He didn't make a lot of public statements, as Congress in 1850 was working on this compromise of how we're going to appease both northern and southern politicians, both anti-slavery and pro-slavery politicians. But he would invite members of Congress to the White House to discuss this. He would communicate through his allies in Congress what it was that he wanted, and he was largely in agreement with the major figures in Congress, Henry Clay, Stephen Douglas, who were pushing this compromise.

And ultimately, he did support it. He had strong enough opinions, actually, that when he was vice president, he told President Taylor, according to Phil Moore's later account, that if it were to come up for a vote in the Senate, and he as the vice president were to have to break a tie, then he would actually vote against Taylor's position. He, the vice president, would break with his president because he did want to push this compromise in a certain way. It sounds like we're talking about one act, but in fact, the way they got this made was they broke it down into five different bills, right? And they all sort of move these one, each bill along and finally got the package passed. And now it's called the

compromise of 1850, but it's actually a whole bunch of bills together. That's right. Originally, they tried passing this big compromise, some things the North like, some things the South liked, as what they called an omnibus bill, like all of these different passengers on an omnibus. But the problem with that was every little piece of it had opponents. So if all those opponents of any one piece of it voted against it, which they did, then it couldn't pass. So instead, they broke it up. They gradually took pieces out. until there was only, as some wits put one passenger on the omnibus, so then they broke it all up and passed them separately. So each different element of the compromise was able to get enough support

to pass Congress. And the major pieces were they brought in California as a free state, so no slavery allowed there. They made Utah, or what the Mormons called Deseret, a territory, but for now it would allow slavery. The people there would later decide. when it became a state, whether it would allow its slavery or not. New Mexico, the same thing, came in as a territory with slavery allowed, and statehood would be decided on later. They ended most slave trading in Washington, D.C., and they passed a stronger fugitive slave act, which ultimately became the most controversial issue then and today of the 1850 compromise. This is the stain, the major stain on Millard Fillmore is the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. It has existed for

decades at this point, but they suddenly strengthen this law. The idea is to appease, certainly those border states, those Southerners who are living on the border, who obviously had to worry a lot more about their enslaved people running for the North. And suddenly this law is passed in order to basically involve Northerners in the capture of the United States. these supposed fugitives. Needless to say, hugely controversial. We're just a few years from the Civil War here. That's right. In the original institution, there was a fugitive slave provision that if people escaped from enslavement in a state that allowed it to an area that didn't, then they had to be returned to the people who claimed to be their owners. And Congress had passed legislation

reinforcing that a few years later. But as you said, in 1850, this fugitive slave act really strengthens that, that not only can our federal officers use to bring these people back into enslavement, but those officers assigned to do it, the marshals, they can call state officers or any just innocent bystanders to come and help them capture these people. Then when the case was brought before a magistrate to decide whether this person was in fact enslaved and should be sent back, the magistrate was paid more if he decided that they were enslaved than if he decided that they were not. So there were all of these elements both to infuriate people who opposed slavery and didn't want to support it, and to encourage people who may have been enslaved in the

past and may not have to be sent south into a life of servitude. Phil Moore, he didn't express any opposition to this provision in the compromise. One thing he used, did do is that he waited a couple days before he signed it. When all the other elements of the compromise came to his desk, he almost immediately signed the bills. But in the cases of the Fugitive Slave Act, he waited two days. And some historians have interpreted that as hesitation on his side, but there's no documentary evidence that we found to suggest that he had any reservations about it. And after it was signed, he went on some tours throughout the north, encouraging his fellow Americans to support and enforce this act to send people back into slavery.

One can't forget the fact that New York had a huge vested interest in the institution of slavery, especially New York City. I mean, there was a lot of financial people who were making their hay based on the agriculture in the South. And so you can imagine a Millard Fillmore, who's such a New York politician trying to settle his mind as to who he's serving here. Is it to the nation or is it to those people in New York who support him? same old problem of American politics, special interests involved. Yes, you'd make a very good point that the whole country, not just the states in the south that

still permitted slavery, was committed to financially and culturally this institution of enslavement of African Americans. And at the same time, he's got this, it's the hotbed of the abolitionist movement is in New York. I mean, in a way, you can kind of understand Miller-Hilmore's problem, is that, you know, at a time when he's trying to keep this country together, there are such amazing forces opposing one another. And they're kind of within him. And so you end up with this guy whose take is let's just keep things as calm as possible so the whole thing doesn't fall apart. It's an unfortunate position to be in, right? It is. And you also see within him and across the nation more broadly the fact that although there was increasing anti-slavery sentiment,

anti-slavery did not necessarily mean anti-racist, as term we would use today. In Fillmore's case, and that of many others, they, well, many people oppose the expansion of slavery into New Western areas, but did not oppose its existence in the southeastern states that already had it. Also, many who did hope that slavery would end did not think that after that happened, white and black people would live together in harmony and be equal American citizens. Philmore himself wrote that he hoped someday slavery would be gradually ended, that white people will make it more and more pleasant, reduce the restrictions they placed on black people and have a less harsh form of slavery, then eventually end it and send all the

black people to Africa on the premise that black and white people could not possibly live together in peace, let alone govern a country together. So he was very much a racist, but he disliked the institution of slavery for what it looked like in the United States. In the final analysis, the compromise of 1850 is almost adds up to a stall technique, doesn't it? It just ends up putting off the civil war for another decade or so. Depending how many, you look at it, it either stalled a civil war for another decade or it helped bring about the civil war by just escalating these issues. The decisions that Congress and the president made in 1850, especially the Fugitive Slave Act, really just inflamed tensions between anti-slavery northerners and pro-slavery southerners. and certainly broke up, ruined many African-American families when people living in the North were sent into enslavement of the South. So it made the situation worse in some ways, but the country also did not go to war as some people thought it was about to.

I ran across an interesting note pertaining to this, which I think was really fascinating. As a result of the delay, the unintended consequence was that the North had that much longer to begin. to industrialize or to further its industrialization process that it was already underway, thus creating more of a powerhouse that would come to play in a big way later on in the war. That compromise gave the North that decade to build up. Certainly that was not an intention of the compromise, as you said, an accident. But it does fit with the general view of the Whig Party, Philmore's Party, that one of the major ways in which the U.S. should continue to expand is an industry. The Democrats were largely

the party of expansion in what we call manifest destiny. That's the destiny of the U.S. given by God to expand geographically to the Pacific Ocean. The Whigs were less concerned with geographic expansion and more with expansion in other ways, trade with Europe and Asia and expanding industry within, yes, New York and other states of the Northeast. So in that respect, it was part of what they hoped for in terms of whether the North could win a war against the South, that's not something that they were explicitly discussing at quite that time. In your reading of his letters, I'm curious. You know, what do you think of him on a personal basis?

Can you tell from how he writes? I don't like to say whether I like or dislike him because it's such a complex question. Every person is complex and may have some things he said that appeal to us and others that don't. Certainly, he was someone who cared about his family very much. We have a lot of letters between him and his wife and him and his son and daughter. He believed in a high level of education for both boys and girls and would correspond with them about the books they should read and what languages they should learn. He also was someone who thought in depth about this issue of slavery and these issues of how to preserve the union,

of the dangers facing it. At the same time, from today's perspective, we were, would not be fans of what he chose to do, of what his solutions to these were. They were largely to preserve slavery, to expand slavery, and at best to expel African Americans from the country, at worst, to keep them in lifelong servitude, and send more people from free states in the north into servitude in the south. He was, like everyone, a complex individual. He was an intellectual one, and one who was committed to his principles.

we may no longer as a country agree with a lot of the principles he had. Where did his name, Millard Fillmore? It's very unusual name. It is. Millard was not some common first name in the 19th century that's fallen out of favor. Rather, it was his mother's maiden name. His parents decided to give him a last name as its first name. Both his mother and her family and Millard himself, when it became his first name,

they spelled it a couple different ways, sometimes ended in A-R-D, sometimes in E-R-D. though by the time he became president, he was consistently using an A. He was a very handsome man. That also comes down the ages. Queen Victoria thought he was a poster boy. He did have that reputation in some areas. Queen Victoria is famous for saying that. After he was president, both his wife and his daughter died very soon.

And he did a lot of traveling on his own and with his son. And yes, he went to England and a number of people there, including the queen, were impressed with his visage, which would help him. in politics, but less so than it might today, because there was no television, there was very limited photography. A lot of people voting for president or vice president wouldn't even know what the candidates looked like or would have seen only very inaccurate drawings of them. Tell me about the first lady Abigail. What was their relationship like and what was her impact on the administration? Abigail Fillmore, who was born Abigail Powers, she was a very intelligent person and a very important figure, both in Miller's life and in the White House.

She actually was a little more than a year older than Millard was, and he first met her when he was her student. She was a teacher at a school he attended when he was 14. They became quickly, very close, developed their common passion for books, and when he was 26 years old, they married. They continued to be a partnership in the household in multiple ways. As he was working as a lawyer, she continued working as a teacher. She was actually the first First Lady who continued to work for pay after she married. Then she became an advisor to his, and when he became president, she moved down to Washington to join him. She hadn't been there when he was vice president.

Moved into the White House, and although she delegated some of her White House hosting duties, those traditionally associated with the First Lady to their daughter, Mary Abigail, she was also an important hostess there, especially in the library. Until the Fillmore administration, there had been no official White House library. Eventually, Congress had given the president the ability to use the library of Congress. At first, that wasn't allowed because it's the library of Congress, not the executive branch. But each president had brought his own books into the White House, then taken them back home and he left. The Film Wars together built this first White House library for an official library still exists there,

which only includes one of the books that the Film Wars brought in. But they established this, and they would have little part. parties in the library room. Both Abigail and the daughter Mary Abigail would play the piano or the harp for guests up there. They were very talented musicians as well. So she was an important part of this administration as well as Fillmore's life personally. Yeah. In this age of presidents, the social circuit would have been very important in those days and the first lady would have been, you know, at the core of all of that. Yes. It's also interesting reading some of the letters that Fillmore's the parents exchanged with their children, especially Mary Abigail,

they would make them sort of conversations. Like Millard and Abigail would pass the letter back and forth between each other. And as you read the letter, you're reading their conversation between each other and the different advice the father and mother are giving to the daughter. I want to ask you, in the final analysis of the compromise of 1850, you mentioned that it left a lot on the table and the tensions were going to build only from there. exactly how? What are you talking about when you mentioned that? After the compromise of 1850, although California had come into the union as a free state,

we still had the questions of what's ultimately going to become of Utah or Desiret and New Mexico, New Mexico referring to everything between Texas and California, not just today's state of New Mexico. So there are still all these questions of how are we going to admit these new states? Is slavery going to be allowed there? And this question generally of, do we, expand slavery into new areas had simply become more prominent because it got all this attention through the presidential debate. But even more than that, the Fugitive Slave Act had really brought the question of slavery to the fore in a way that it hadn't even in the past couple years with all that new land in the West. Then as Fillmore took a strong stance in using the power of the federal

government to enforce it, to get federal agents in northern bystanders to entrap African-Americans, and send them into slavery, this led to a lot of standoffs, often physical conflicts in northern states, sometimes judicial conflicts over whether these people were in fact enslaved and should be sent back. So it really heightened tensions. And in a country with a rising media, hotbed stuff to talk about in the newspapers and the magazines. It was, yes. And because the telegraph had been invented and established just a few years earlier in 1844, now news traveled a lot faster than it had before. You know, he doesn't stand for re-election in 1850. Does he want to run? He just politics in the way? What happens?

In 1852, as his presidency is nearing an end, he doesn't really know whether he wants to run for president. He keeps the idea open right up until the Whig Convention is meeting that would decide the nominee of the party. And finally, at the last minute, he sends a note to the convention that, no, I'm not going to run. So then they choose another candidate, Winfield, Scott, who lose. the election and Democrat, Franklin Pierce, becomes president. Four years later, though, he does decide to reenter the fray and runs as a, what you might call a third party candidate with the American party or the no-nothing party, the anti-immigration anti-Catholic party, but he loses that time. You can't talk about Miller Fillmore without seeing words like mediocre and milk toast

and all these kinds of negative pejoratives about the guy. It seems incredible for anybody to become the president of this land at any time, you know, in our history. So I hardly think that's really deserved. But do you take away something uniquely less than about Miller-fil-more than other presidents, or was he just a victim of his times? At this time, the presidency was not as powerful in office as it had been maybe early on in the days of Washington and Adams or as it would become at certain points later when Lincoln was president during the time of a major war. And in the 20th century, as the presidency really became the center of the federal government. So it wasn't that unusual that Fillmore, especially as someone belonging to a party that believed in a weak presidency, that he wouldn't be

as active or as prominent a figure at that time as we associate with the presidency today. Polk, a couple presidencies before him had been more prominent, but again, that was during wartime. And Polk got made it his mission to expand the nation to the Pacific Coast. So it really wasn't that unusual, and Phil Moore was still a prominent citizen in the country after he left office. As I said, he did try to run for president again and was a major candidate in 1856. He became a prominent citizen in Buffalo during the Civil War. He got together a group of elderly gentlemen to become a home guard that would defend the city if it were ever invaded by Confederates, which it wasn't, and to encourage younger men to enlist in the actual armies.

But it really was later and in light of the ultimate failure of these attempts to stave off a civil war and to preserve slavery, that Fillmore became, like some other presidents of the time, Pierce, Buchanan, and to a lesser extent Taylor, became these really forgotten, disrespected figures in American history. Philmore's reputation has also suffered because we focus very rightly on the issue of slavery and the lead up to the Civil War. At the time, though, the president's main job, or the job in which the president had the most active role, was in foreign policy. And in there, he was much more active, much more successfully from at least the perspective of what he wanted to accomplish.

He was the president who sent a U.S. naval force to Japan. At the time, the U.S. very much wanted to open trade with China for this huge market for U.S. manufactured goods, but the steamboats of the time required fueling stations, coaling stations along the way between the California coast and China. So he tried to build up our relationship with Hawaii, the kingdom of Hawaii, and during his administration, a treaty that they'd been working on for years was finally signed with Hawaii. and he sent this naval force to Japan, which ultimately arrived during the presidency of his successor, Franklin Pierce, and that largely at the point of a gun opened up trade with Japan so that the U.S. could trade goods with the Japanese government and with Japanese merchants, but even more importantly, from the U.S. perspective, could use that as another coaling station on the way to China. It's interesting that you bring, and we've spent this entire conversation talking about these hotbed issues of a domestic nature here for good reason. Huge things are happening. The focus of the nation really is internal. We're only thinking about growing this continental country.

But there's a world out there. And Millard Fillmore is one of those presidents who's beginning to think, oh, my goodness, we have to think internationally as well here. Yes. As I think I mentioned earlier, the Democratic Party at the time was very interested in expanding the U.S. geographically across North America, and into the Caribbean, they wanted to acquire Cuba. But the weak party was more interested in expanding in other ways, improving U.S. industry and expanding trade with Europe, with Asia, and also was generally just more attentive to foreign alliances.

So Fillmore ended up being tested on this particular question of European alliances. During 1848 and 1849, there had been a series of revolutions across Europe, in which new Republican governments replaced monarchical ones or monarchies had new restrictions placed on them to establish a more Republican element to monarchies. And the one that got a lot of attention in the U.S. was in Hungary. It had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire ruled from Vienna. But in 1849, Hungarians declared their independence. Under the leadership of Louis Koshuth, they threw off the Austrians and established their own government.

During Taylor's administration, they asked the United States to recognize this new independent government. Taylor was only willing to do so if it was clear that Hungary would be able to win the war for its independence. And Austria then brought in Russia to help them put down Hungary. And once they did that, it was clear Hungary couldn't win. So Taylor didn't recognize them. But then, after Hungary lost the war, Khashut came to the United States and asked President Fillmore if the U.S. could provide some aid so that he could reestablish Hungary, reestablish this independent nation in the face of Russian and Austrian opposition. Khash has got a lot of U.S. support, including

from the Secretary of State, Daniel Webster, and members of Congress, parades were held for him around the country. But when he came to the White House, Phil Moore made it very clear that following the guidance of George Washington, who had advocated avoiding entangling alliances, avoiding too many foreign alliances, the U.S. would follow its normal policy and stay neutral. The U.S. would provide no aid for Hungary in its fight against Russia and Austria. It seems so many themes in the 19th century that just continue on in their own form through the 20th and 21st century. I mean, some of these things are really present in our own lives in just another form. They are. The context are so different, but a lot of the questions do have parallels. Right. It's a whole bunch of chess playing,

and all these pieces are moving into position for the big standoff, which is going to result in the Civil War. Fascinating times. Michael Cohen is a researcher professor at the American University in Washington, D.C. Thank you so much, doing a lot of work on the letters between Taylor and Fillmore. Will this be published in some book form at some point, Michael? It will. At American University, we have a center called a Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies. And one of the projects there is to edit and ultimately publish letters by and to president.

and Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore from before and during their presidencies. There will be three volumes covering the 10 years leading up to and including their administrations. Around 2026, we expect to publish the first volume, which will be during the Mexican-American War and the early stages of the presidential and vice-presidential campaign of 1848. Then the second and third volumes, to be published a few years after that, will cover their presidencies. Invaliable stuff. Thank you so much for your expertise.

Really appreciate you being on the show. Oh, thank you so much, Don, for having me. It's been great. I hope you enjoyed this episode of American History Hit. Please remember to like, review, and subscribe. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts. And I'll see you next time.