Millard Fillmore
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- Vice President to:
General Zachary Taylor - Whig, from Louisiana.
- Zachary Taylor served 1849 - 1850. He died in 1850, after only 1 year in office,
at the age of 66.
- Dates Served: Fillmore served as Vice President from 1849 - 1850, then as President till 1853.
- Political Party: Fillmore was a Whig, from New York.
- Born: 1800.
- Died: 1874, at the age of 74.
- The presidential opponent during the 1848 campaign was:
- Campaign issues in 1848:
- The primary issue in all politics was now Slavery and its extensions into the
Territories. The election pitted one war hero against another, and each candidate
treated the issue gingerly. Taylor, who was running as a hero from the Mexican
American War which had just ended, was decidedly mute on the Slavery issue
but he personally owned over 100 slaves, and this was reason enough for the South to
support him. Cass, who had served in the War of 1812 as General and had also served
as Secretary of War in Andrew Jackson's administration, addressed the issue by
arguing that residents in the Territories should be allowed to decide the issue for
themselves. Showing a firm grasp of paranoia he once said, "If the relation of master
and servant may be regulated or annihilated, so may the relation of husband and wife,
or parent and child". Despite Taylor's lack of any government experience, not
having ever even voted, he won the election, helped to a large extent by the fact that
Martin Van Buren was trying to get re-elected, running a small campaign on a clear anti-Slavery campaign and siphoned off enough
Abolitionist votes in New York to put Taylor in the White House.
- Notable Facts about Millard Fillmore:
- Millard married his High School teacher, but she died during Millard's term as
President. He later married a rich widow.
- Religious affiliation: Fillmore was a Unitarian, though his wife was a Baptist. He
hardly ever quoted the Bible in his speeches, and in 1830 he tried to remove a
New York law that required witnesses testifying in court to profess belief in God,
but failed. He revealed very little of his religious beliefs, if any.
- He was a lawyer, and began his political career as a New York State Assemblyman,
from 1829 - 1831. He ran on the Anti-Mason ticket, a party which made a platform
of denouncing the Masonic Order. Millard was a Unitarian, and during this time
he fought unsuccessfully to abolish a law requiring witnesses in court to swear
a belief in God.
- He represented New York in the US House of Representatives from 1833 - 1835, then
again from 1837 - 1843.
- He served as New York State Comptroller from 1848 - 1849, at which point he
was nominated Vice President to Zachary Taylor.
- Millard and Zachary Taylor never met each other until after the
election in 1848. Taylor then ignored him for the rest
of his short term, never even asking Millard for advice, despite his experience
on Capitol Hill.
- When Millard became President, he became the last member of the Whig party to serve.
- Millard's father lived to be 92, and after Millard became president his father
was the first father of a president to visit his son in the White House.
- Millard later ran unsuccessfully against James Buchanan in 1856 on the
Know-Nothing Party
ticket (the Sgt. Schultz of political parties).
- Unlike Millard, Zachary Taylor had never voted prior to his own
election, and it's not certain whether he voted even then.
- During his retirement, Millard visited Paris where he bailed out of jail the
notorious American newspaperman Horace Greeley, who had skipped out on paying
back a debt. Millard later posted bail for another friend, Jefferson Davis who
was in jail for treason after the Civil War.
- After Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, a mob vandalized Millard's house,
angered over his pre-war policies of appeasing the South.
- Millard was once offered an honorary degree from Oxford but he
turned it down, arguing that since he couldn't read Latin and had
"neither literary nor scientific attainment" he therefore didn't
deserve it.
- Millard died of a stroke while shaving.
Notable events during his Vice Presidency:
- When Zachary Taylor was first considering running for President,
the Whig Party offered the post of Vice President to Senator
Daniel Webster. But Webster turned them down saying, "I do not
intend to be buried until I am dead". So they decided instead to
bury Millard Fillmore, or so they thought.
- The Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, in 1850. This defined the laws regarding the future
construction of the Panama Canal, which was then being proposed. This treaty
with Britain stated that any such canal built by either country across Central
America would be politically neutral, with neither the US or Britain placing
any restrictions on which country could use it. No military fortifications were
to be built along it and neither country would annex or colonize any part of any
country surrounding it. Britain, however, already claimed neighboring Honduras as
it's colony, a point which caused some consternation in Congress, but the Treaty
was ratified.
- Zachary Taylor died on July 9, 1850, after only one year in office. He had spent
the 4th of July sitting out in the hot sun listening to patriotic speeches, then
later went inside and, sweating from the heat, ate a large bowl of cherries and
drank a jug of milk. (Sanitation in those days was poor and the heat could
easily cause raw fruit and dairy to be infected with bacteria, which nobody knew
existed back then in the days before germs were discovered.) He quickly developed
cramps and was diagnosed with cholera. Doctors prescribed opium as treatment
but he soon fell to fits of vomiting. Within 2 days he was coughing up all sorts
of unpleasant past meals and had blood drawn by his doctors to try and "drain the
disease", which was a common medical treatment back then. It didn't work and
Taylor soon died.
Notable events during his completion of Taylor's Presidential term:
- The Compromise of 1850 was ratified, which addressed
the Slavery issue and tried to forestall Civil War. It only made
things worse. It admitted California into the Union as a "free state"
but at the same time established the Fugitive Slave Act, which required
the federal government to return runaway slaves from anywhere in the
Union to their master in the South. It caused a fatal split in the
Whig party and cost Fillmore his chances of re-nomination for a second
term.
- Perry Mission to Japan, 1852 - 1854, which established formal trade
relations with Japan for the first time.
- California admitted into the Union, in 1850.