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Presidents Patriotism Daddy's
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United States Presidents
Early Years: Fillmore spent his early youth working with his father, a poor tenant farmer. He educated himself and attended New Hope Academy for six months. He studied law and opened a law office in East Aurora, New York. His Presidency: Fillmore took office when President Zachary Taylor died suddenly. The chief achievement of his administration was the Compromise of 1850. Under it, California joined the Union as a free state while the other territories won from Mexico had no slavery restrictions. There was to be no more slave trade in the District of Columbia, and the return of fugitive slaves was to be enforced. His Life: In his rise from a log cabin to wealth and the White House, Millard Fillmore demonstrated that through methodical industry and some competence an uninspiring man could make the American dream come true. Born in the Finger Lakes country of New York in 1800, Fillmore as a youth endured the privations of frontier life. He worked on his father's farm, and at 15 was apprenticed to a cloth dresser. He attended one-room schools, and fell in love with the redheaded teacher, Abigail Powers, who later became his wife. In 1823 he was admitted to the bar; seven years later he moved his law practice to Buffalo. As an associate of the Whig politician Thurlow Weed, Fillmore held state office and for eight years was a member of the House of Representatives. In 1848, while Comptroller of New York, he was elected Vice President. Fillmore presided over the Senate during the months of nerve-wracking debates over the Compromise of 1850. He made no public comment on the merits of the compromise proposals, but a few days before President Taylor's death, he intimated to him that if there should be a tie vote on Henry Clay's bill, he would vote in favor of it. Thus the sudden accession of Fillmore to the Presidency in July 1850 brought an abrupt political shift in the administration. Taylor's Cabinet resigned and President Fillmore at once appointed Daniel Webster to be Secretary of State, thus proclaiming his alliance with the moderate Whigs who favored the Compromise. A bill to admit California still aroused all the violent arguments for and against the extension of slavery, without any progress toward settling the major issues. Clay, exhausted, left Washington to recuperate, throwing leadership upon Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois. At this critical juncture, President Fillmore announced in favor of the Compromise. On August 6, 1850, he sent a message to Congress recommending that Texas be paid to abandon her claims to part of New Mexico. This helped influence a critical number of northern Whigs in Congress away from their insistence upon the Wilmot Proviso--the stipulation that all land gained by the Mexican War must be closed to slavery. Douglas's effective strategy in Congress combined with Fillmore's pressure from the White House to give impetus to the Compromise movement. Breaking up Clay's single legislative package, Douglas presented five separate bills to the Senate:
Some of the more militant northern Whigs remained irreconcilable, refusing to forgive Fillmore for having signed the Fugitive Slave Act. They helped deprive him of the Presidential nomination in 1852. Within a few years it was apparent that although the Compromise had been intended to settle the slavery controversy, it served rather as an uneasy sectional truce. As the Whig Party disintegrated in the 1850's, Fillmore refused to join the Republican Party; but, instead, in 1856 accepted the nomination for President of the Know Nothing, or American, Party. Throughout the Civil War he opposed President Lincoln and during Reconstruction supported President Johnson. He died in 1874. Quotations "The man who can look upon a crisis without being willing to offer himself upon the altar of his country is not fit for public trust." - Millard Fillmore "I have no hostility to foreigners . . . Having witnessed their deplorable condition in the old country, God forbid I should add to their sufferings by refusing them an asylum in this." - Millard Fillmore "The government of the United States is a limited government. It is confined to the exercise of powers expressly granted, and such others as may be necessary for carrying those powers into effect; and it is at all times an especial duty to guard against any infringement on the just rights of the states." - Millard Fillmore (1850) "An honorable defeat is better than a dishonorable victory." - Millard Fillmore "I believe that no one appointment has been made in this country that I had the honor to recommend . . . I regret it not. It has no power to grant what I have any desire to receive." - Millard Fillmore "It is a national disgrace that our presidents . . . should be cast adrift, and perhaps be compelled to keep a corner grocery for subsistence . . . We elect a man to the presidency, expect him to be honest, to give up a lucrative profession, perhaps, and after we have done with him we let him go into seclusion and perhaps poverty." - Millard Fillmore "I had not the advantage of a classical education, and no man should, in my judgment, accept a degree he cannot read." -
Millard Fillmore "Let us remember that revolutions do not always establish freedom. Our own free institutions were not the offspring of our Revolution. They existed before." - Millard Fillmore "Three years of civil war have desolated the fairest portion of our land; loaded the country with an enormous debt that the sweat of millions yet unborn must be taxed to pay; arrayed brother against brother, father against son in mortal combat; deluged our country with fraternal blood; whitened our battlefields with the bones of the slain; and darkened the sky with the pall of mourning." - Millard Fillmore
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