President millard fillmore
President millard fillmoreMillard Fillmore was born in a frontier cabin in Cayuga county, New York, on Jan. 7, 1800. He was the second child and the first of five sons of Nathaniel and Phoebe Millard Fillmore. The family was miserably poor, and Fillmore was almost entirely self-educated. Deeply wanting an education, Millard Fillmore, enrolled in an academy at New Hope, New York, where he met his future wife, Abigail Powers. In that same year Fillmore�s father obtained a clerkship for him in the office of Judge Walter Wood in Montville, NY, where he began the study of law.
During the next few years Fillmore taught school from time to time and also clerked in a Buffalo law firm. He was admitted to the bar in 1823. After setting up a law office in East Aurora near Buffalo, he married Miss Powers in1826. As his legal business expanded he took on a student clerk in his office, his future law partner and political associate, Nathan Kelsey Hall.
In 1830 the Fillmors moved to Buffalo, where a year or two later they joined the Unitarian Church. Fillmore formed a law partnership with Hall and developed a thriving practice. His massive frame, benign air, dignified mien, and conciliatory temper commanded respect and admiration. His popularity in Erie County marked him as one of the outstanding political leaders in western New York, and in 1832 he won election to Congress on the Anti-Masonic ticket.
During the 1840's Weed led the New York Whig party's liberal wing, which was hostile to slavery. Fillmore disliked slavery but disapprove of attacks on it. For he regarded the South's peculiar institution as untouchable in the states where it existed. The influx of foreigners into New York State posed another political issue, and Fillmore sympathized with those who were hostile to the recently naturalized citizens. Here, too, he differed from Weed and Seward, who hoped to attract the newcomers into the Whig party.
Fillmore wished to be Henry Clay's running mate in the presidential election of 1844, but reluctantly yielded to Weed's desire that he accept the Whig nomination for governor instead. In the election he ran ahead of Clay by some 3,000 votes in the state, but lost the governorship to Democrat Silas Wright. He attributed his defeat to the Abolitionists and foreign Catholics, but he also felt that Weed and Seward had maneuvered him into a hopeless race. In the ensuing national election the Whigs won a narrow victory. Throughout the country controversy was rising over slavery in the new territories and in the District of Columbia.
As vice president, Fillmore presided over the SENATE in capable fashion. The senators generally bowed to his admonitions, but Seward, who had been elected to the Senate in January 1849, regarded him with unrelenting hostility. A bitter struggle over patronage in New York State developed between the two men. Seward won President Taylor's confidence, and his control over the New York State appointments became virtually complete. Seward and...
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