Millard Fillmore

Millard Fillmore: The Founder His Own University Disowned

On 3 August 2020 the University at Buffalo removed the name of its founder and first chancellor from an academic building. The man in question had run the institution from 1846 until his death in 1874 and had helped establish half the civic furniture of the city. He had also, as President of the United States, signed and enforced the Fugitive Slave Act. UB's statement conceded the obvious: the decision "remains a deeply hurtful decision, especially for African Americans."

Thirty Dollars and a Walk Home

Fillmore came into the world on 7 January 1800 in upstate New York, in the country between Syracuse and Ithaca, the second of eight children and the eldest son. The family worked the "lean, rocky soil of Cayuga County" and, in the Miller Center's flat phrase, "often went hungry."

His father apprenticed him as a teenager to a cloth-maker in another town. Fillmore "detested the drudgery" and judged the terms exploitative; he borrowed thirty dollars, bought his indenture out, and walked home. Back in Cayuga County he "pored over any book he could get his hands on" and enrolled at a school in a nearby town — the beginning of an education acquired almost entirely by his own decision.

The Teacher He Married

At that school he met Abigail Powers, a "highly intelligent, well-read young woman" who taught him, lent him books, and pushed his ambitions upward. She became the decisive influence of his life. They were engaged in 1819 and married in early 1826, and had two children, Millard Jr. in 1828 and Mary in 1832. Meanwhile his father secured him a clerkship with a local judge; he was admitted to the New York bar in 1823 and opened a practice at East Aurora, near Buffalo.

Anti-Masons and Ways and Means

His politics began in a scandal. The kidnapping of a Mason named William Morgan sparked the formation of the Anti-Masonic Party; Fillmore joined it and was recruited to stand for the New York legislature. Elected in 1829, he served three terms in the assembly and worked chiefly on ending imprisonment for debt.

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Elected to the United States House in 1832 and re-elected three times through 1843, he chaired the Ways and Means Committee from 1841 to 1843 and pressed the case for protective tariffs — the fiscal heart of Whig doctrine, since the Anti-Masons had folded into the Whig Party by 1834. Fillmore aligned himself with Henry Clay and Clay's instinct for compromise on slavery. In 1847 he was elected comptroller of New York by a large margin, which made him the natural Whig choice for vice president in 1848 alongside the war hero Zachary Taylor.

A Death on the Ninth of July

On 4 July 1850 President Taylor sat through Independence Day orations, walked along the Potomac, came back hot and tired, and "drank iced water and consumed large quantities of cherries and other fruits." Five days of violent stomach pain followed. His doctors called it cholera morbus. At about ten in the morning on 9 July he told his wife, "I have always done my duty, I am ready to die," and died. Millard Fillmore, a man nobody had elected to the office, was President of the United States.

He inherited the crisis over the territories won from Mexico and threw his weight behind the package of measures known as the Compromise of 1850. Michael Holt, emeritus professor of history at the University of Virginia, credits the result generously: the Compromise kept "America from civil war for more than a decade."

The Fugitive Slave Law

The price was the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, bundled into the same settlement. Fillmore did not merely sign it; he enforced it. Holt's verdict on that choice is unsparing — in doing so "he all but guaranteed that he would be the last Whig President." The party could not hold. "The Whigs were not cohesive enough to survive the slavery imbroglio," Holt writes, and Fillmore's proslavery course hurried the collapse. The University at Buffalo, in explaining its 2020 renaming, put the modern verdict simply: his presidency "has been widely criticized for his support of The Compromise of 1850, which included the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850."

Know-Nothings and a Long Afterlife

The losses came quickly after office. Abigail died of pneumonia contracted at Franklin Pierce's inauguration in 1853; their daughter Mary died of cholera at twenty-two. In 1856 Fillmore ran for president again as the candidate of the Know-Nothings, the anti-immigrant American Party, taking "only 21 percent of the vote" — enough to split the opposition and help deny the Republican John C. Frémont the White House. In early 1858 he married Caroline McIntosh, a wealthy Albany widow. When the war he had spent his career postponing finally came, he was "a staunch Unionist, helping to organize enlistment and war-financing drives." He died of a stroke in March 1874.

Why Millard Is Called a Genius

No serious historian calls Fillmore a genius, and it would be dishonest to construct the claim. Holt's summary is that he is "almost an invisible man among Presidents," a figure "utterly forgotten by the American people," whose "accomplishments, while not great, were nonetheless substantial." That last clause is where the honest case sits.

What Fillmore had was not intellect of the first order but an unusually pure form of self-manufacture combined with real legislative competence. A boy from a hungry farm bought his own freedom from an apprenticeship for thirty borrowed dollars, taught himself out of whatever books he could find, read law with a country judge, and rose to chair the Ways and Means Committee — the House's central financial post — and then to the presidency. The skill on display in 1850 was procedural and coalitional: the ability to assemble votes for an unpopular package of measures that, on Holt's reckoning, bought the Union ten years it desperately needed.

The counter-case is severe and is now institutional. The measure he is credited with came bundled with the Fugitive Slave Act, and Fillmore chose to enforce it — a moral decision, not a technicality, and one his own university now describes as deeply hurtful, especially to African Americans. It destroyed his party, and he closed his career at the head of a movement organised against immigrants. In 2020 the university he founded stripped his name from its buildings while carefully noting that its earlier honours "were based on his role at the university, not an endorsement of his policies or legacy as president." That is roughly the shape of the whole man: genuinely constructive in Buffalo, genuinely destructive in Washington. The word for him is capable, not brilliant.

Legacy

Fillmore's real monuments are civic rather than presidential. He founded the University at Buffalo and served as its chancellor for twenty-eight years, and he helped bring into being several other institutions of his adopted city. In national memory he survives as the man who bought the republic a decade and charged it the Fugitive Slave Act, and as the last president the Whig Party ever produced.