Millard Fillmore

Fillmore was 15 and barely literate when his father apprenticed him to a cloth dresser in the Finger Lakes, which is to say sold four years of the boy's labor to a man he came to hate. He bought a dictionary with almost nothing and read it in stolen glances when the master's back was turned. He paid 30 dollars to get out of the indenture and walked home. At an academy in Moravia in 1819 he met the teacher Abigail Powers, two years older, who lent him books and told him the ambition was reasonable. A local judge took him on as a clerk. He reached the New York bar in 1823 and married her three years after that.

Politics reached him through the Anti-Masonic Party, a movement built on one man's disappearance, and carried him to the New York Assembly, the Ways and Means Committee, the state comptroller's office, and a vice presidency Zachary Taylor froze him out of. Two months after Taylor died, Fillmore had signed the Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Act along with it. BriefHistory takes up that bargain and what it detonated. This page is about the man who spent the next 24 years insisting he had been right.

Abigail had never wanted Washington and did not survive leaving it. She stood through Franklin Pierce's inauguration in raw March weather in 1853, caught cold, and died of pneumonia 26 days after the Fillmores gave up the White House. Their daughter Mary Abigail died of cholera the following summer, at 22. The contradiction runs older than the grief. Fillmore called slavery an evil in private and then enforced the law he doubted with unusual energy — Marines dispatched to Christiana, Pennsylvania, in September 1851 after a Maryland enslaver was shot trying to seize four men, and a federal push to prosecute the Boston crowd that had walked Shadrach Minkins out of a courthouse. He believed a law he distrusted had to be enforced precisely because he distrusted it.

On December 28, 1917, H.L. Mencken published a fake history of the bathtub in the New York Evening Mail, in which Vice President Fillmore tried one in Cincinnati, liked it, and installed the first tub in the White House. None of it happened. Mencken confessed twice and the hoax kept traveling anyway, into medical journals and reference books, and it is the only thing most Americans know about him. The verifiable Fillmore chartered the University of Buffalo and was its first chancellor, helped found Buffalo General Hospital and the Buffalo Historical Society, and lies in Forest Lawn. Historians park him in the bottom ten, and the case for raising him rests on Japan rather than anything he did at home.

Millard Fillmore's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Compromise of 1850 law
  Five bills he signed in September, one at a time 1850
• Fugitive Slave Act law
  The part of the bargain he never disowned 1850
• Perry expedition to Japan mission
  He ordered it — the treaty was signed under his successor 1852
• University at Buffalo company
  Chartered with his help — he was its first chancellor and held the post for 28 years 1846
• Buffalo Historical Society company
  Founded in his retirement and led by him 1862
• The White House library other
  Assembled with Abigail Fillmore, who found the house had almost no books 1850

• 1815 aged ~15 Apprenticed to a cloth dresser at 15 He later paid 30 dollars to buy out the remainder and walked home.
• 1819 aged ~19 Meets his teacher Abigail Powers at an academy in Moravia
• 1823 aged ~23 Admitted to the New York bar and opens a practice in East Aurora
• February 5, 1826 aged 26 Marries Abigail Powers after a seven-year courtship
• 1829 aged ~29 Takes his seat in the New York Assembly as an Anti-Mason He worked there to end imprisonment for debt.
• September 11, 1851 aged 51 Sends Marines to Christiana, Pennsylvania, after a slave-catching raid is met with gunfire Forty-one people were charged with treason. The first jury acquitted in 15 minutes and the rest of the cases collapsed.
• March 30, 1853 aged 53 Abigail dies of pneumonia 26 days after they leave the White House
• July 26, 1854 aged 54 His daughter Mary Abigail dies of cholera at 22
• March 8, 1874 aged 74 Dies in Buffalo after two strokes

• Henry Clay 1777–1852
  Senator and statesman known as the Great Compromiser for his role in preserving the Union. allied with
• Daniel Webster 1782–1852
  Senator and orator whose speeches on the Union and Constitution are among the greatest in history. appointed
• Harriet Beecher Stowe 1811–1896
  Author of Uncle Tom's Cabin whose novel galvanized the abolitionist movement. opposed by
• Frederick Douglass 1818–1895
  Former slave who became a leading abolitionist, orator, and advocate for equal rights. opposed by