This Day in American History

Jan. 7, 1800 -- Millard Fillmore, the 13th President of the United States, was born in Locke, N.Y.

Fillmore is proof positive that even people who come out of virtually nowhere to occupy the Oval Office – and enjoy almost zero name recognition in the general public – can have a major impact on the course of American and world events.

Under the patronage of New York State power broker Thurlow Weed, Fillmore first gained election to the House of Representatives as a Whig. He was Comptroller of New York at the time of his selection as Vice-President by his party in 1848.

Ironically, President Zachary Taylor, a slaveowner, wanted no part of any measures that might open Southwest territory seized during the Mexican War to be open to slavery, while Fillmore, a Northern, was more amenable to slavery expansion into the West. Fillmore’s accession to the Presidency following Taylor’s unexpected death in 1850, then, opened the way to the Compromise of 1850, an omnibus bill that only temporarily staved off the coming conflict over slavery.

Northern Whigs, angered by Fillmore’s pro-slavery stance and his wholesale removal of the Compromise of 1850 from his administration, helped deprive him of the Presidential nomination in 1852. Fillmore couldn’t stop while he was ahead. Four years later, he accepted the nomination of the American (better known as the “Know-Nothing”) Party, one of the most virulently anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic movements in American history. Throughout the Civil War, he opposed the policies of Abraham Lincoln, and after his assassination favored the Reconstruction policies of Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson.

On the international front, Fillmore left a far more lasting legacy. In March 1852, he ordered Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry to sail to Japan, a nation long closed to foreigners. It took two voyages and two years, by which time Fillmore had left the White House, for Perry to secure Fillmore’s desired treaty.

It took the columnist H.L. Mencken to bestow a form of immorality, albeit a bogus one, on the pompous Fillmore. In 1917, more than six decades after his death, when the President had already begun to fall into obscurity, Mencken published an article called “A Neglected Anniversary,” in which he claimed that Fillmore faced down substantial opposition in installing a bathtub in the White House. The claim, which Mencken later blithely admitted was a hoax, soon began to be perpetuated by reporters and even encyclopedias.