Book Review: Millard Fillmore: Biography of a President, by Robert J. Rayback
The last Whig President: A big deal in his time, an obscure joke today.
American Political Biography Press, 1959, 470 pages
For some reason hard to understand, the historically minded public has had to wait 85 years since the death of a president for an adequate biography. This gap has now been filled with Dr. Rayback's authoritative work on Millard Fillmore. It is no eulogy, rather it is honest and unprejudiced, describing and assaying his defects of judgment such as his leadership of two abused parties at the beginning and at the end of his political career, but asserting that all this -- even his approval of the fugitive slave law -- was far outweighed by his moral convictions and concrete actions against the institution of human slavery. To Western New Yorkers this book will of course have special appeal, but it is by no means unduly concerned with local history; it is the story of a life not only of dignity and integrity but of permanent achievement on both the local and national scene. The Buffalo Historical Society takes pride in this presentation of its first president.
I have been progressing through presidential biographies in chronological order, and I've hit one of America's historical doldrums: the period between Andrew Jackson (an asshole, but he at least made history interesting) and Abraham Lincoln.
Millard Fillmore, to the degree that he's remembered at all, is little more than a historical punchline today. His name is satirized in political cartoons. Fictional "Millard Fillmore High Schools" are used in 80s sitcoms and comic books to indicate "This school is a hellhole of mediocrity." As far as I can tell, in reality there are actually no schools in the entire United States named after poor POTUS #13. (The University at Buffalo, which Fillmore was once chancellor of, used to have a building named after him, but it was renamed in 2020 during the wave of cancellations of any historical white dude who ever did a racism.)
Fillmore was our second "accidental president," taking office after the death of Zachary Taylor. He served one term, declined to run for reelection, and ended up presiding over the death of the Whig Party and the rise of the Republican Party, with his attempts at striking a "moderate" position between "slavery good" and "slavery bad" manifestly a failure.
Unsurprisingly, biographies of Millard Fillmore are not exactly abundant. So, in diving into the life and times of MallardMillard Fillmore, I was presented with a choice, basically between two books: Robert Rayback's thorough, dense, and tedious 1959 tome, or the shorter and more digestible work by Paul Finkelman. Looking at reviews, Rayback seemed to be more complimentary of Fillmore, while Finkelman's more recent volume seemed to just summarize the contemporary view that Fillmore was a bad president who compromised too much on slavery and thus helped precipitate the Civil War. Which is a fair perspective, but I was interested to see what a defense of Fillmore would look like.
So, HARD MODE it is.
Robert Rayback's biography is indeed quite positive about Fillmore. Indeed, while not quite a hagiography, Rayback is fulsome in his praise, constantly describing Fillmore as principled, polite, and motivated by the best and most noble of intentions.
Millard Fillmore was a New York machine party politician who rose to the top at the height of the spoils system (you got and kept office by promising to reward political allies, explicitly with jobs and contracts). He presided over a party (the Whigs) that literally had no foundational platform or principles, and he did everything he could to hold the Whigs together to maintain political power. At the beginning of his career, he cynically joined the Anti-Masonic Party despite having no real convictions about Masons. At the end of his career, he cynically joined the nativist, anti-Catholic Know-Nothing Party despite having no real convictions about immigrants or Catholics. During his presidency, he supported the Missouri Compromise of 1850, which included the Fugitive Slave Act (which is why the University of Buffalo cancelled him 180 years later). Arguably, he had utilitarian reasons for all of these political moves, and Rayback makes a valiant effort to present it as pragmatic realpolitick motivated by a desire to hold the Union together. But, let's face it, Fillmore might have been a pleasant, well-mannered fellow, but as a president he was at best unremarkable, living in an unremarkable period, and at worst, a grifter and a useless "moderate" who was never guided by anything other than political advantage.
The Man From Buffalo
Unlike many other presidents, Fillmore grew up poor. His father was an unsuccessful tenant farmer in upstate New York. Young Millard, hoping to make something of his life, decided he liked the law, and got himself apprenticed to a Quaker lawyer named Judge Walter Wood.
This experience was both an opportunity and an experience for Fillmore. Judge Wood was sour, dour, and miserly, yet he advanced Fillmore money he needed for his clerkship. However, Judge Wood was also a landlord, and most of Fillmore's work for him involved evicting poor tenants. The judge also wanted control over him, and reprimanded him when Fillmore had the opportunity to make a little money on the side.
Eventually, Fillmore worked his way free of Judge Wood and became a lawyer in Buffalo. He then moved to Albany, arriving as a well-dressed dandy who looked nothing like his hayseed upbringing. Here, he got his start in politics.
Anti-Masons: the first QAnon
The Anti-Masonic movement of the early 19th century has been described, with some justification, as an early QAnon-type movement. Freemasonry had been around for a long time, and many of the Founding Fathers were Freemasons. They were (and are) an ancient fraternal order with secret signs and handshakes and a mystical bent that frequently aroused the animosity of Catholics and protestants, and spawned many conspiracy theories.
In 1826, a Freemason from upstate New York named William Morgan disappeared, in shady circumstances. Morgan was in debt and reportedly had been writing an "expose" of the Masonic Order to make a quick buck. Local Masonic lodges had him arrested, but were not able to keep him jailed. When he subsequently turned up missing, lurid tales of his abduction, torture, and execution by being thrown over Niagara Falls spread throughout New York, touching off anti-Masonic hysteria which led to the forming of a full-fledged political party devoted to removing all Freemasons from office. Even former president John Quincy Adams was drawn into the Anti-Masonic movement.
At around this time, Millard Fillmore was entering politics, under the wing of political boss Thurlow Weed, who would be his great patron and later his greatest enemy. Weed saw the Anti-Masons as a "Trojan horse" to fight his political rivals in Albany, and Fillmore rode that horse without ever leaving much record of any real anti-Masonic views. It would not be the first time that he'd sign onto a platform for political advantage without really caring what it was endorsing.
Much of the next part of Rayback's biography details the political machinations of New York in the first half of the 19th century. Having already read a biography of Martin Van Buren, whose origins were similar to Fillmore's and who also rose to become a major power in New York state politics, I already understood a little bit how things worked - and also how tedious it could be reading about the ins and out of the various factions operating out of Albany, New York City, and Buffalo.
Political parties were still a relatively new development in America; George Washington never acknowledged an actual party affiliation, and many politicians considered parties unnecessary and dangerous. Martin Van Buren was probably the first president to wholly and completely embrace party politics. By the early 19th century, political parties were definitely a thing, but they still weren't particularly defined by a cohesive set of principles or a "party platform." The early Federalists were basically those who supported a strong government and the Constitution, while the Anti-Federalists were defined by being... well, anti-Federalist. The Democrats started as Thomas Jefferson's party (Jefferson himself was reluctant to claim party affiliation), and evolved to be more or less the party of the South and agrarian interests.
Thurlow Weed, an influential New York newspaper editor, had long been a rival of Van Buren's "Albany Regency" Democrats, who held a lock on New York politics until the Anti-Masonic party disrupted it. Weed and Fillmore jumped on board the Anti-Masonic ticket, but it turned out that the 19th century version of QAnon, made up of people who believed that Freemasons were creating an invisible empire doing nefarious Satanic things in their lodges, did not have much staying power as a national issue. So eventually they created the Whig party.
The Whigs started as the party of everyone who really hated Andrew Jackson. Really, this was their only unifying trait. Besides absorbing most of the former Anti-Masons, the Whigs included everyone from Northern abolitionists (including John Quincy Adams) to Southern slaveholders (including Henry Clay). The first Whig President, William Henry Harrison, was elected on a campaign of... not being Martin Van Buren.
With Jackson and Van Buren out of office, you might wonder what held the Whigs together. The answer is that they were a self-perpetuating party mostly defined by trying to stay in power.
Not only did this present certain problems (like trying to hold Northern abolitionists and Southern slaveholders together in the same party on the principle of "We don't want to let those other guys win, do we?") but even regional Whigs were not unified. New York mercantile Whigs had different interests than upstate agrarian Whigs. Some Whigs were conservative, some were liberal. Their stance on protectionism changed according to whoever held the party reins.
Rayback meticulously details all the political and economic shenanigans that defined New York and its patronage system at the time. It is a gruesome (tedious) account of how the sausage was made, which mostly proved that Rayback actually read every one of those letters he cites in footnotes.
With Friends Like These
Fillmore was elected to Congress in 1832 on the Anti-Masonic ticket, during Andrew Jackson's presidency, and became a powerful national figure. Despite being a historical footnote today, Millard Fillmore was a big deal in his time. He engineered a tariff bill to screw over John Tyler, the Whig VP who upon succeeding William Henry Harrison as the first "accidental president" started openly opposing Whig policies. During this time Fillmore continued to correspond with Thurlow Weed; as Rayback tells it, Fillmore was relentlessly polite, charitable, and willing to give his old patron the benefit of the doubt, even though Weed kept backing Fillmore's rival William H. Seward.
Thurlow Weed became a kingmaker in New York. Fillmore was originally his friend, but they split over slavery, but more importantly, Weed's ego, as Fillmore insisted on actually maintaining autonomy. William H. Seward was openly anti-slavery, unlike Fillmore, who thought slavery was morally wrong but not wrong enough to make Southerners mad. This led to Weed and Seward conspiring against Fillmore, and this conspiring and backstabbing would continue even once Fillmore improbably found his way to the White House.
Eventually, Fillmore left Congress and returned to Buffalo to work in his law practice. However, he was too political to give up politics. Still deeply embedded in the Whig Party, he negotiated with Weed over who would be the Whig VP candidate in the election of 1848. Fillmore wanted the job but was too much a party loyalist to create a schism over it. Weed did not want Fillmore to become VP because that would give him too much power over the Whig Party (especially, the patronage appointments controlled by the White House). So Weed schemed to get the Whig convention to reject Fillmore as a candidate because "We need him as Governor of New York."
Rayback provides another detailed account of the Whig Party convention, the backroom negotiations, and the votes which led to Fillmore unexpectedly becoming Zachary Taylor's running mate.
General Zachary Taylor, a national hero after the Mexican War, was an attempt by the Whigs to repeat their success with William Henry Harrison, running a war hero military commander who had basically zero political experience. It worked. Taylor and Fillmore took the White House, handily defeating Democratic candidate Lewis Cass, in part because former President Martin Van Buren, running with the son of John Quincy Adams, split the vote with his Free Soil Party.
Taylor and Fillmore had barely had a relationship, and Fillmore was sidelined, like many afterthought VPs, while he was alive. Fillmore had been working out the division of spoils in New York with Thurlow Weed, but Weed was all the while planning to stab him in the back with the help of now New York Senator Seward. They seized control of all Whig patronage appointments throughout New York, and made a point of disempowering Fillmore and getting rid of all his appointments in his home territory of Buffalo, openly bragging about the fact that Vice President Fillmore was impotent and had no power to give anyone anything.
When President Taylor repeated history again by unexpectedly dying in office, Fillmore became the second accidental president, and Weed and his cronies were suddenly suffering a serious case of heartburn.
The Great Compromiser
When Zachary Taylor died, the Weed-Seward camp assumed Fillmore would retaliate, so they doubled down and lashed out, trying to undermine President Fillmore right from the beginning.
Fillmore tried to offer compromises, and refrained from taking back all of Weed's patronage appointments, hoping he'd see the olive branch and reciprocate. Instead, Weed and Seward stepped up their attacks and threatened to split the Whig party. At the New York convention, Seward was pressing for stronger anti-slavery planks while Fillmore wanted to stay centrist to hold the North/South Whig party together.
This was another section of the book where it was evident that Rayback was perhaps a little too enamored with his subject. Fillmore did appear to be a reasonable and forgiving man, constantly trying to work things out and show forbearance towards his supposed "allies" in the Whig Party who kept trying to screw him over. Rayback emphasizes Fillmore's very reasonable attempts at compromise, rather than pointing out that (a) he was kind of a chump (at some point it must have been obvious that Weed was the scorpion and Fillmore was the frog) and (b) his "compromises" on the issue of slavery were all about holding the Whig Party together regardless of actual principles. Rayback presents Fillmore's moderate position on slavery ("slavery is bad but let's just wish for it to go away eventually without actually doing anything about it") as reasonable, while taking at face value his position that the abolitionists were a bunch of unreasonable radicals threatening party unity.
Fillmore did face a real problem, with Southern Whigs obviously alarmed by the growing abolitionist sentiment among Northern Whigs. This was a problem he was never going to be able to solve.
He wasn't a complete failure in office, but the fact is he was just one in a string of presidents who kicked the slavery can down the road, and otherwise had a fairly unremarkable presidency.
He presided over the California Gold Rush and filibuster ventures in Cuba. He rejected the Manifest Destiny advocated by his predecessors and opposed American expansionism, while out-negotiating Britain and France, who wanted to sign a treaty with the United States agreeing that none of them would ever colonize Cuba - a proposal which, as Fillmore pointed out, was a significant concession for the U.S. and hardly any concession at all for European powers who'd more or less given up on colonialism in the New World.
One of the issues Fillmore faced during his presidency was the struggle over building a canal through Central America, which is one of the few places where Rayback actually criticizes Fillmore. The British had control over the Pacific trade and didn't want Americans to have easy access to the Pacific. They took control of San Juan, Nicaragua, ostensibly in the name of "His Mosquito Majesty," the chief of the Mosquito Indians who were under British protection. This posed a serious problem to efforts to build a canal. Fillmore negotiated with Britain to maintain peace, despite the fact that the British clearly weren't going to budge on San Juan; Rayback argues that Fillmore could have secured the area by force and built a canal many years earlier if he hadn't been so accommodating.
Whigging Out
Presidents in the 19th century were not like presidents today. They didn't necessarily want to stay in office as long as possible, they couldn't rely on becoming rich and staying in demand after they left office, and Fillmore wasn't the first to decline to run for reelection.
Fillmore wanted out, but in 1852 the Whig Party was in danger of breaking apart, and Fillmore first and foremost wanted to keep the party together. His rival William Seward backed Winfield Scott, another former general the Whigs hoped would win votes on his military record. Scott, being an anti-slavery Northerner, would have caused the Southern Whigs to revolt, so Fillmore stayed on the ballot. His original plan was to have his name withdrawn "at an opportune time" once Scott was defeated, but his friend, the legendary Daniel Webster, who had been absent from his Secretary of State duties for most of Fillmore's presidency, leaving Fillmore to do Webster's job, had wanted to be president forever. Webster, despite having very little chance of winning, stayed on the ballot, divided the Whig vote, and ended up throwing the nomination to Scott. The Southerners, as predicted, revolted, Democrat dark horse candidate Franklin Pierce trounced Scott in the election, and Millard Fillmore graciously forgave Webster as he watched the Whig Party go down in flames.
Fillmore attended Pierce's inauguration on a cold March winter day. His wife caught pneumonia, and died three weeks later. Fillmore suddenly had a lonely retirement to look forward to.
So of course he decided to run for president again.
Know-Nothings
At the beginning of his career, Fillmore opportunistically joined the Anti-Masonic party, a fringe movement driven by hysteria and conspiracy theories.
With the collapse of the Whigs, most of the Southerners went to the Democrats, the new Republican Party was absorbing most of the Northern Whigs, but another fringe movement driven by hysteria and conspiracy theories was turning into a new third party: the "Know-Nothings."
The Know-Nothings (so-called because they met in secret, exchanged secret signs and handshakes, and when asked about the party claimed to "Know nothing about it") were a nativist movement opposed to the new wave of European immigrants, and especially Catholics. Officially they were the "Native American Party" and then just the "American Party."
Fillmore, never particularly religious, never particularly anti-immigrant, and never indicating he had feelings one way or the other about Catholics, mouthed the right words to join the Know-Nothings and became their presidential candidate in 1856. He campaigned on the American Party ticket while barely ever mentioning immigration or Catholics. (His running mate, Andrew Donelson, was the nephew and one-time campaign manager of former President Andrew Jackson, the great arch-nemesis of the Whigs.)
While Fillmore had the respect of many Whigs, most of his former allies regarded the Republican Party as an existential threat (as indeed, it was). Arguing that Fillmore couldn't win and they had to stop the anti-slavery Republican candidate John C. Fremont no matter what, they threw their support behind the Democrats. Fillmore's American Party still won a respectable 21% of the popular vote; not enough to save the country from what would be the disastrous presidency of James Buchanan.
Elder Statesman
Fillmore retired to Buffalo, where his concerns about supporting himself were addressed by marrying a rich widow. The two of them became the center of Buffalo high society, and Fillmore settled into a fairly respectable model of an ex-President, very active in civic activities and supporting libraries, schools, hospitals, even a humane society, in Buffalo.
During the Civil War, he supported the Union, but his old instincts towards "compromise" above all else once more got him into trouble. He did not like or trust the Republican administration, and while the war was going poorly for the Union and Lincoln was insisting on unconditional surrender, Fillmore delivered an ill-timed speech criticizing the progress and expense of the war and urging reconciliation and forgiveness of the secessionists.
This got him labeled (unfairly) as a "Copperhead" and for a while he was the target of nasty editorials all over the North. Fortunately, the country had bigger things to worry about than an elderly ex-President in Buffalo, and his reputation recovered. When Abraham Lincoln took a pass through Buffalo during his reelection campaign, Fillmore received the President at his home. What the two men said to each other is not recorded.
Fillmore was instrumental in establishing the University of Buffalo. Initially it consisted only of a medical school, and while during his lifetime he tried to expand it to add a liberal arts college and law school, this didn't happen until long after his death.
In a final, ironic episode, Fillmore had one last meeting with his old frenemy, Thurlow Weed. Fillmore ran into Weed's daughter by chance, asked her if her father would be amenable to meeting with him, and the two old political rivals, despite not having spoken to one another in over twenty years, had a cordial afternoon reminiscing about old times in Weed's quarters. Fillmore left feeling like bygones were bygones - unaware that Weed would screw him over one more time in his autobiography, in which he very much did not let bygones be bygones in his malicious appraisal of Fillmore and his presidency.
Fillmore was healthy until his death by stroke in 1874, at the age of 74.
Reviewing Fillmore and this biography
Millard Fillmore falls into the category of "Presidents less interesting than their times," and that only barely. He wasn't the worst president, but came nowhere near being one of the better ones. Reading this biography, like many previous ones, did not fill me with a newfound appreciation of Millard Fillmore, but it did fill in a lot of blanks concerning American politics in the 19th century, and in particular, the many complex political factors that were in motion for decades prior to the Civil War.
This book was written in 1959. It's dense and dry and wordy, and Rayback's prose is not exactly smooth. He's wordy and praises almost every decision Fillmore made, even the questionable or bad ones.
I can't say whether a more critical biography would have been a better read. I wouldn't really recommend this book except to a historian researching the time period or someone who is, like me, plodding through presidential biographies and wants to do them on HARD MODE. But having read it, I'll bet I now rank among the top 1% of Americans in knowledge of Millard Fillmore!
In this review, I've bashed my man Millard quite a bit for his, um, flexible principles. Today, of course, any historical figure who wasn't wholeheartedly anti-slavery tends to be viewed in a dim light, but I am generally willing to give a "man of his time" pass. That said, I am less willing to give a pass to someone who repeatedly mouthed words about fairness and generosity but never actually took a principled stand, and was willing to ally himself with literally anyone who'd help him win.
Rayback's biography, being so concerned with presenting Fillmore as a great guy, did succeed in giving a pretty good impression of what he was like as a man: cordial, pleasant, kind in person, probably wonderful dinner company. He was a nice man. But nice isn't always good. Did he ever regret representing the Anti-Masons, the slaveholders, or the Know-Nothings? Rayback does not tell us he did.
So, I don't feel like it's a tragedy that he doesn't even have a high school named after him.
My complete list of book reviews.
American Political Biography Press, 1959, 470 pages
For some reason hard to understand, the historically minded public has had to wait 85 years since the death of a president for an adequate biography. This gap has now been filled with Dr. Rayback's authoritative work on Millard Fillmore. It is no eulogy, rather it is honest and unprejudiced, describing and assaying his defects of judgment such as his leadership of two abused parties at the beginning and at the end of his political career, but asserting that all this -- even his approval of the fugitive slave law -- was far outweighed by his moral convictions and concrete actions against the institution of human slavery. To Western New Yorkers this book will of course have special appeal, but it is by no means unduly concerned with local history; it is the story of a life not only of dignity and integrity but of permanent achievement on both the local and national scene. The Buffalo Historical Society takes pride in this presentation of its first president.
I have been progressing through presidential biographies in chronological order, and I've hit one of America's historical doldrums: the period between Andrew Jackson (an asshole, but he at least made history interesting) and Abraham Lincoln.
Millard Fillmore, to the degree that he's remembered at all, is little more than a historical punchline today. His name is satirized in political cartoons. Fictional "Millard Fillmore High Schools" are used in 80s sitcoms and comic books to indicate "This school is a hellhole of mediocrity." As far as I can tell, in reality there are actually no schools in the entire United States named after poor POTUS #13. (The University at Buffalo, which Fillmore was once chancellor of, used to have a building named after him, but it was renamed in 2020 during the wave of cancellations of any historical white dude who ever did a racism.)
Fillmore was our second "accidental president," taking office after the death of Zachary Taylor. He served one term, declined to run for reelection, and ended up presiding over the death of the Whig Party and the rise of the Republican Party, with his attempts at striking a "moderate" position between "slavery good" and "slavery bad" manifestly a failure.
Unsurprisingly, biographies of Millard Fillmore are not exactly abundant. So, in diving into the life and times of MallardMillard Fillmore, I was presented with a choice, basically between two books: Robert Rayback's thorough, dense, and tedious 1959 tome, or the shorter and more digestible work by Paul Finkelman. Looking at reviews, Rayback seemed to be more complimentary of Fillmore, while Finkelman's more recent volume seemed to just summarize the contemporary view that Fillmore was a bad president who compromised too much on slavery and thus helped precipitate the Civil War. Which is a fair perspective, but I was interested to see what a defense of Fillmore would look like.
So, HARD MODE it is.
Robert Rayback's biography is indeed quite positive about Fillmore. Indeed, while not quite a hagiography, Rayback is fulsome in his praise, constantly describing Fillmore as principled, polite, and motivated by the best and most noble of intentions.
Millard Fillmore was a New York machine party politician who rose to the top at the height of the spoils system (you got and kept office by promising to reward political allies, explicitly with jobs and contracts). He presided over a party (the Whigs) that literally had no foundational platform or principles, and he did everything he could to hold the Whigs together to maintain political power. At the beginning of his career, he cynically joined the Anti-Masonic Party despite having no real convictions about Masons. At the end of his career, he cynically joined the nativist, anti-Catholic Know-Nothing Party despite having no real convictions about immigrants or Catholics. During his presidency, he supported the Missouri Compromise of 1850, which included the Fugitive Slave Act (which is why the University of Buffalo cancelled him 180 years later). Arguably, he had utilitarian reasons for all of these political moves, and Rayback makes a valiant effort to present it as pragmatic realpolitick motivated by a desire to hold the Union together. But, let's face it, Fillmore might have been a pleasant, well-mannered fellow, but as a president he was at best unremarkable, living in an unremarkable period, and at worst, a grifter and a useless "moderate" who was never guided by anything other than political advantage.
The Man From Buffalo
Unlike many other presidents, Fillmore grew up poor. His father was an unsuccessful tenant farmer in upstate New York. Young Millard, hoping to make something of his life, decided he liked the law, and got himself apprenticed to a Quaker lawyer named Judge Walter Wood.
This experience was both an opportunity and an experience for Fillmore. Judge Wood was sour, dour, and miserly, yet he advanced Fillmore money he needed for his clerkship. However, Judge Wood was also a landlord, and most of Fillmore's work for him involved evicting poor tenants. The judge also wanted control over him, and reprimanded him when Fillmore had the opportunity to make a little money on the side.
Eventually, Fillmore worked his way free of Judge Wood and became a lawyer in Buffalo. He then moved to Albany, arriving as a well-dressed dandy who looked nothing like his hayseed upbringing. Here, he got his start in politics.
Anti-Masons: the first QAnon
The Anti-Masonic movement of the early 19th century has been described, with some justification, as an early QAnon-type movement. Freemasonry had been around for a long time, and many of the Founding Fathers were Freemasons. They were (and are) an ancient fraternal order with secret signs and handshakes and a mystical bent that frequently aroused the animosity of Catholics and protestants, and spawned many conspiracy theories.
In 1826, a Freemason from upstate New York named William Morgan disappeared, in shady circumstances. Morgan was in debt and reportedly had been writing an "expose" of the Masonic Order to make a quick buck. Local Masonic lodges had him arrested, but were not able to keep him jailed. When he subsequently turned up missing, lurid tales of his abduction, torture, and execution by being thrown over Niagara Falls spread throughout New York, touching off anti-Masonic hysteria which led to the forming of a full-fledged political party devoted to removing all Freemasons from office. Even former president John Quincy Adams was drawn into the Anti-Masonic movement.
At around this time, Millard Fillmore was entering politics, under the wing of political boss Thurlow Weed, who would be his great patron and later his greatest enemy. Weed saw the Anti-Masons as a "Trojan horse" to fight his political rivals in Albany, and Fillmore rode that horse without ever leaving much record of any real anti-Masonic views. It would not be the first time that he'd sign onto a platform for political advantage without really caring what it was endorsing.
Much of the next part of Rayback's biography details the political machinations of New York in the first half of the 19th century. Having already read a biography of Martin Van Buren, whose origins were similar to Fillmore's and who also rose to become a major power in New York state politics, I already understood a little bit how things worked - and also how tedious it could be reading about the ins and out of the various factions operating out of Albany, New York City, and Buffalo.
Political parties were still a relatively new development in America; George Washington never acknowledged an actual party affiliation, and many politicians considered parties unnecessary and dangerous. Martin Van Buren was probably the first president to wholly and completely embrace party politics. By the early 19th century, political parties were definitely a thing, but they still weren't particularly defined by a cohesive set of principles or a "party platform." The early Federalists were basically those who supported a strong government and the Constitution, while the Anti-Federalists were defined by being... well, anti-Federalist. The Democrats started as Thomas Jefferson's party (Jefferson himself was reluctant to claim party affiliation), and evolved to be more or less the party of the South and agrarian interests.
Thurlow Weed, an influential New York newspaper editor, had long been a rival of Van Buren's "Albany Regency" Democrats, who held a lock on New York politics until the Anti-Masonic party disrupted it. Weed and Fillmore jumped on board the Anti-Masonic ticket, but it turned out that the 19th century version of QAnon, made up of people who believed that Freemasons were creating an invisible empire doing nefarious Satanic things in their lodges, did not have much staying power as a national issue. So eventually they created the Whig party.
The Whigs started as the party of everyone who really hated Andrew Jackson. Really, this was their only unifying trait. Besides absorbing most of the former Anti-Masons, the Whigs included everyone from Northern abolitionists (including John Quincy Adams) to Southern slaveholders (including Henry Clay). The first Whig President, William Henry Harrison, was elected on a campaign of... not being Martin Van Buren.
With Jackson and Van Buren out of office, you might wonder what held the Whigs together. The answer is that they were a self-perpetuating party mostly defined by trying to stay in power.
Not only did this present certain problems (like trying to hold Northern abolitionists and Southern slaveholders together in the same party on the principle of "We don't want to let those other guys win, do we?") but even regional Whigs were not unified. New York mercantile Whigs had different interests than upstate agrarian Whigs. Some Whigs were conservative, some were liberal. Their stance on protectionism changed according to whoever held the party reins.
Rayback meticulously details all the political and economic shenanigans that defined New York and its patronage system at the time. It is a gruesome (tedious) account of how the sausage was made, which mostly proved that Rayback actually read every one of those letters he cites in footnotes.
With Friends Like These
Fillmore was elected to Congress in 1832 on the Anti-Masonic ticket, during Andrew Jackson's presidency, and became a powerful national figure. Despite being a historical footnote today, Millard Fillmore was a big deal in his time. He engineered a tariff bill to screw over John Tyler, the Whig VP who upon succeeding William Henry Harrison as the first "accidental president" started openly opposing Whig policies. During this time Fillmore continued to correspond with Thurlow Weed; as Rayback tells it, Fillmore was relentlessly polite, charitable, and willing to give his old patron the benefit of the doubt, even though Weed kept backing Fillmore's rival William H. Seward.
Thurlow Weed became a kingmaker in New York. Fillmore was originally his friend, but they split over slavery, but more importantly, Weed's ego, as Fillmore insisted on actually maintaining autonomy. William H. Seward was openly anti-slavery, unlike Fillmore, who thought slavery was morally wrong but not wrong enough to make Southerners mad. This led to Weed and Seward conspiring against Fillmore, and this conspiring and backstabbing would continue even once Fillmore improbably found his way to the White House.
Eventually, Fillmore left Congress and returned to Buffalo to work in his law practice. However, he was too political to give up politics. Still deeply embedded in the Whig Party, he negotiated with Weed over who would be the Whig VP candidate in the election of 1848. Fillmore wanted the job but was too much a party loyalist to create a schism over it. Weed did not want Fillmore to become VP because that would give him too much power over the Whig Party (especially, the patronage appointments controlled by the White House). So Weed schemed to get the Whig convention to reject Fillmore as a candidate because "We need him as Governor of New York."
Rayback provides another detailed account of the Whig Party convention, the backroom negotiations, and the votes which led to Fillmore unexpectedly becoming Zachary Taylor's running mate.
General Zachary Taylor, a national hero after the Mexican War, was an attempt by the Whigs to repeat their success with William Henry Harrison, running a war hero military commander who had basically zero political experience. It worked. Taylor and Fillmore took the White House, handily defeating Democratic candidate Lewis Cass, in part because former President Martin Van Buren, running with the son of John Quincy Adams, split the vote with his Free Soil Party.
Taylor and Fillmore had barely had a relationship, and Fillmore was sidelined, like many afterthought VPs, while he was alive. Fillmore had been working out the division of spoils in New York with Thurlow Weed, but Weed was all the while planning to stab him in the back with the help of now New York Senator Seward. They seized control of all Whig patronage appointments throughout New York, and made a point of disempowering Fillmore and getting rid of all his appointments in his home territory of Buffalo, openly bragging about the fact that Vice President Fillmore was impotent and had no power to give anyone anything.
When President Taylor repeated history again by unexpectedly dying in office, Fillmore became the second accidental president, and Weed and his cronies were suddenly suffering a serious case of heartburn.
The Great Compromiser
When Zachary Taylor died, the Weed-Seward camp assumed Fillmore would retaliate, so they doubled down and lashed out, trying to undermine President Fillmore right from the beginning.
Fillmore tried to offer compromises, and refrained from taking back all of Weed's patronage appointments, hoping he'd see the olive branch and reciprocate. Instead, Weed and Seward stepped up their attacks and threatened to split the Whig party. At the New York convention, Seward was pressing for stronger anti-slavery planks while Fillmore wanted to stay centrist to hold the North/South Whig party together.
This was another section of the book where it was evident that Rayback was perhaps a little too enamored with his subject. Fillmore did appear to be a reasonable and forgiving man, constantly trying to work things out and show forbearance towards his supposed "allies" in the Whig Party who kept trying to screw him over. Rayback emphasizes Fillmore's very reasonable attempts at compromise, rather than pointing out that (a) he was kind of a chump (at some point it must have been obvious that Weed was the scorpion and Fillmore was the frog) and (b) his "compromises" on the issue of slavery were all about holding the Whig Party together regardless of actual principles. Rayback presents Fillmore's moderate position on slavery ("slavery is bad but let's just wish for it to go away eventually without actually doing anything about it") as reasonable, while taking at face value his position that the abolitionists were a bunch of unreasonable radicals threatening party unity.
Fillmore did face a real problem, with Southern Whigs obviously alarmed by the growing abolitionist sentiment among Northern Whigs. This was a problem he was never going to be able to solve.
He wasn't a complete failure in office, but the fact is he was just one in a string of presidents who kicked the slavery can down the road, and otherwise had a fairly unremarkable presidency.
He presided over the California Gold Rush and filibuster ventures in Cuba. He rejected the Manifest Destiny advocated by his predecessors and opposed American expansionism, while out-negotiating Britain and France, who wanted to sign a treaty with the United States agreeing that none of them would ever colonize Cuba - a proposal which, as Fillmore pointed out, was a significant concession for the U.S. and hardly any concession at all for European powers who'd more or less given up on colonialism in the New World.
One of the issues Fillmore faced during his presidency was the struggle over building a canal through Central America, which is one of the few places where Rayback actually criticizes Fillmore. The British had control over the Pacific trade and didn't want Americans to have easy access to the Pacific. They took control of San Juan, Nicaragua, ostensibly in the name of "His Mosquito Majesty," the chief of the Mosquito Indians who were under British protection. This posed a serious problem to efforts to build a canal. Fillmore negotiated with Britain to maintain peace, despite the fact that the British clearly weren't going to budge on San Juan; Rayback argues that Fillmore could have secured the area by force and built a canal many years earlier if he hadn't been so accommodating.
Whigging Out
Presidents in the 19th century were not like presidents today. They didn't necessarily want to stay in office as long as possible, they couldn't rely on becoming rich and staying in demand after they left office, and Fillmore wasn't the first to decline to run for reelection.
Fillmore wanted out, but in 1852 the Whig Party was in danger of breaking apart, and Fillmore first and foremost wanted to keep the party together. His rival William Seward backed Winfield Scott, another former general the Whigs hoped would win votes on his military record. Scott, being an anti-slavery Northerner, would have caused the Southern Whigs to revolt, so Fillmore stayed on the ballot. His original plan was to have his name withdrawn "at an opportune time" once Scott was defeated, but his friend, the legendary Daniel Webster, who had been absent from his Secretary of State duties for most of Fillmore's presidency, leaving Fillmore to do Webster's job, had wanted to be president forever. Webster, despite having very little chance of winning, stayed on the ballot, divided the Whig vote, and ended up throwing the nomination to Scott. The Southerners, as predicted, revolted, Democrat dark horse candidate Franklin Pierce trounced Scott in the election, and Millard Fillmore graciously forgave Webster as he watched the Whig Party go down in flames.
Fillmore attended Pierce's inauguration on a cold March winter day. His wife caught pneumonia, and died three weeks later. Fillmore suddenly had a lonely retirement to look forward to.
So of course he decided to run for president again.
Know-Nothings
At the beginning of his career, Fillmore opportunistically joined the Anti-Masonic party, a fringe movement driven by hysteria and conspiracy theories.
With the collapse of the Whigs, most of the Southerners went to the Democrats, the new Republican Party was absorbing most of the Northern Whigs, but another fringe movement driven by hysteria and conspiracy theories was turning into a new third party: the "Know-Nothings."
The Know-Nothings (so-called because they met in secret, exchanged secret signs and handshakes, and when asked about the party claimed to "Know nothing about it") were a nativist movement opposed to the new wave of European immigrants, and especially Catholics. Officially they were the "Native American Party" and then just the "American Party."
Fillmore, never particularly religious, never particularly anti-immigrant, and never indicating he had feelings one way or the other about Catholics, mouthed the right words to join the Know-Nothings and became their presidential candidate in 1856. He campaigned on the American Party ticket while barely ever mentioning immigration or Catholics. (His running mate, Andrew Donelson, was the nephew and one-time campaign manager of former President Andrew Jackson, the great arch-nemesis of the Whigs.)
While Fillmore had the respect of many Whigs, most of his former allies regarded the Republican Party as an existential threat (as indeed, it was). Arguing that Fillmore couldn't win and they had to stop the anti-slavery Republican candidate John C. Fremont no matter what, they threw their support behind the Democrats. Fillmore's American Party still won a respectable 21% of the popular vote; not enough to save the country from what would be the disastrous presidency of James Buchanan.
Elder Statesman
Fillmore retired to Buffalo, where his concerns about supporting himself were addressed by marrying a rich widow. The two of them became the center of Buffalo high society, and Fillmore settled into a fairly respectable model of an ex-President, very active in civic activities and supporting libraries, schools, hospitals, even a humane society, in Buffalo.
During the Civil War, he supported the Union, but his old instincts towards "compromise" above all else once more got him into trouble. He did not like or trust the Republican administration, and while the war was going poorly for the Union and Lincoln was insisting on unconditional surrender, Fillmore delivered an ill-timed speech criticizing the progress and expense of the war and urging reconciliation and forgiveness of the secessionists.
This got him labeled (unfairly) as a "Copperhead" and for a while he was the target of nasty editorials all over the North. Fortunately, the country had bigger things to worry about than an elderly ex-President in Buffalo, and his reputation recovered. When Abraham Lincoln took a pass through Buffalo during his reelection campaign, Fillmore received the President at his home. What the two men said to each other is not recorded.
Fillmore was instrumental in establishing the University of Buffalo. Initially it consisted only of a medical school, and while during his lifetime he tried to expand it to add a liberal arts college and law school, this didn't happen until long after his death.
In a final, ironic episode, Fillmore had one last meeting with his old frenemy, Thurlow Weed. Fillmore ran into Weed's daughter by chance, asked her if her father would be amenable to meeting with him, and the two old political rivals, despite not having spoken to one another in over twenty years, had a cordial afternoon reminiscing about old times in Weed's quarters. Fillmore left feeling like bygones were bygones - unaware that Weed would screw him over one more time in his autobiography, in which he very much did not let bygones be bygones in his malicious appraisal of Fillmore and his presidency.
Fillmore was healthy until his death by stroke in 1874, at the age of 74.
Reviewing Fillmore and this biography
Millard Fillmore falls into the category of "Presidents less interesting than their times," and that only barely. He wasn't the worst president, but came nowhere near being one of the better ones. Reading this biography, like many previous ones, did not fill me with a newfound appreciation of Millard Fillmore, but it did fill in a lot of blanks concerning American politics in the 19th century, and in particular, the many complex political factors that were in motion for decades prior to the Civil War.
This book was written in 1959. It's dense and dry and wordy, and Rayback's prose is not exactly smooth. He's wordy and praises almost every decision Fillmore made, even the questionable or bad ones.
I can't say whether a more critical biography would have been a better read. I wouldn't really recommend this book except to a historian researching the time period or someone who is, like me, plodding through presidential biographies and wants to do them on HARD MODE. But having read it, I'll bet I now rank among the top 1% of Americans in knowledge of Millard Fillmore!
In this review, I've bashed my man Millard quite a bit for his, um, flexible principles. Today, of course, any historical figure who wasn't wholeheartedly anti-slavery tends to be viewed in a dim light, but I am generally willing to give a "man of his time" pass. That said, I am less willing to give a pass to someone who repeatedly mouthed words about fairness and generosity but never actually took a principled stand, and was willing to ally himself with literally anyone who'd help him win.
Rayback's biography, being so concerned with presenting Fillmore as a great guy, did succeed in giving a pretty good impression of what he was like as a man: cordial, pleasant, kind in person, probably wonderful dinner company. He was a nice man. But nice isn't always good. Did he ever regret representing the Anti-Masons, the slaveholders, or the Know-Nothings? Rayback does not tell us he did.
So, I don't feel like it's a tragedy that he doesn't even have a high school named after him.
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