Millard Fillmore

Born in a log cabin in rural New York in 1800, Fillmore rose through self-education, a successful law practice in Buffalo, and steady service in the New York legislature and U.S. Congress. Elected vice president in 1848 on the ticket with Zachary Taylor, he assumed the presidency in July 1850 after Taylor’s sudden death amid the deepening national crisis over slavery.

The heart of the book is Fillmore’s decisive support for the Compromise of 1850. He endorsed the package that admitted California as a free state, organized the Utah and New Mexico territories under popular sovereignty, settled the Texas boundary, ended the slave trade in Washington, D.C., and strengthened the Fugitive Slave Act. Robertson examines how Fillmore’s firm enforcement of that act—rooted in his conviction that constitutional duty and Union preservation required it—alienated Northern Whigs, split his party, and helped destroy the Whigs as a national organization. The narrative also covers his foreign-policy initiatives, notably the dispatch of Commodore Matthew Perry to open Japan, as well as more modest domestic measures and the quiet domestic life of the White House under Abigail Fillmore.

After leaving office in 1853, Fillmore endured personal tragedy (the deaths of his wife and daughter), remarried, ran unsuccessfully for president in 1856 on the Know-Nothing ticket, and lived out his later years in Buffalo while watching the nation move toward civil war. The biography closes with an assessment of his mixed historical reputation: a moderate, conscientious man who sought to hold the Union together through compromise at a moment when compromise was becoming impossible.

Suitable for general readers interested in the antebellum period and the series of presidential biographies of which it forms a part.