Millard Fillmore was the last president who was neither Democrat nor Republican
Born in a log cabin in 1800 and apprenticed to a clothmaker at 14, Millard Fillmore became president in July 1850 when Zachary Taylor died. He pushed through the Compromise of 1850, including a controversial Fugitive Slave Act, and remains the last White House occupant from outside the two big parties.
Fillmore arrived on January 7, 1800, on a farm in what is now Moravia, in New York's Finger Lakes, the second of eight children. His family rented land after the title to their first farm proved faulty, and the historian Tyler Anbinder describes a boyhood of hard labour and almost no schooling. At 14 his father talked him out of joining the War of 1812 and bound him to a clothmaker, work he quit in frustration. He bought a share in a lending library to educate himself, and at a new academy in 1819 he met his future wife, Abigail Powers. After clerking for a local judge he was admitted to the bar in 1823 and became East Aurora's only resident lawyer.
The Anti-Masonic movement gave him a start in politics. He served three one-year terms in the New York Assembly from 1829, won a seat in Congress in 1832, and helped build the new Whig Party with Thurlow Weed, who with his protégé William H. Seward later became a rival. Daniel Webster took the young congressman under his wing. Fillmore chaired the Ways and Means Committee, lost bids for vice president and governor in 1844, and in 1847 became New York's first elected comptroller. He called slavery evil but argued Washington had no power to abolish it.
Elected vice president in 1848, he was largely sidelined by Taylor while presiding over furious Senate debates on slavery in land taken from Mexico. Unlike Taylor, he backed Henry Clay's omnibus bill. Taking office in July 1850, he dismissed the cabinet and drove the compromise through; enforcing its Fugitive Slave Act, which sped the return of people who had escaped bondage, cost him and his divided party dearly. Abroad he supported naval missions to open Japan to trade and resisted French designs on Hawaii. The Whigs denied him their 1852 nomination.
In 1856 he ran for the anti-immigrant American Party, stressing national unity, and lost to James Buchanan. During the Civil War he condemned secession while criticising Abraham Lincoln's war policies. He later served as chancellor of the University of Buffalo, which he helped found in 1846, and died on March 8, 1874. Historians generally place him among the weakest and least remembered presidents, chiefly over slavery.
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