Millard Fillmore

Millard Fillmore became president when Zachary Taylor died, signed the Compromise of 1850 including the Fugitive Slave Act, and sent the fleet that opened Japan. He was born in a log cabin in New York, apprenticed to a clothmaker, and taught himself law; he is one of the few presidents to have risen from genuine poverty. As vice-president he presided over a Senate arguing about whether the territory taken from Mexico would be slave or free, and when Taylor died in July 1850 he reversed the administration's position overnight and backed Henry Clay's compromise. It admitted California free, organised the other territories without restriction, and strengthened the Fugitive Slave Act to require northern citizens and officials to assist in returning escaped people, with penalties for refusal. That provision did more than anything else to make abolitionists of ordinary northerners and to destroy his own Whig party, which refused to renominate him. He authorised Commodore Perry's expedition to Japan, which arrived after he left office and ended two centuries of seclusion. He ran again in 1856 for the Know Nothings, an anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic party, and carried one state. He is consistently ranked near the bottom by historians, and the Compromise arguably bought the Union a decade. He refused an honorary degree from Oxford on the grounds that he had no literary attainment and could not read the Latin it would be written in, which is the most sympathetic thing recorded about him. His wife Abigail caught pneumonia at his successor's inauguration and died weeks later. He spent his last decades in Buffalo, founding the university and the historical society there.

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