Millard Fillmore's Buffalo
Near Buffalo, New York
Millard Fillmore was born in a log cabin in upstate New York in eighteen hundred, the son of a tenant farmer who could not afford books and whose family had to borrow a copy of the Bible to read from. He learned to read imperfectly until a chance encounter, as a teenager, with a traveling teacher gave him access to a small library. He taught himself law by reading borrowed volumes, was admitted to the bar in eighteen twenty-three, and settled in Buffalo.
Buffalo gave Fillmore his career. He built a law practice, won election to the New York State Assembly, then to the United States House of Representatives, where he served intermittently through the eighteen thirties and forties. He was a Whig, a party of economic modernists who believed in tariffs, public works, and internal improvements. The Whigs nominated him for vice president in eighteen forty-eight, on a ticket with Zachary Taylor, and they won.
Taylor died of illness in July of eighteen fifty, sixteen months into his term. Fillmore was sworn in as the thirteenth President and faced immediately the defining crisis of the pre-Civil War era: the question of whether slavery would expand into territories acquired from Mexico.
Fillmore's answer was the Compromise of eighteen fifty, a package of legislation meant to hold the Union together by appeasing both sides. The compromise admitted California as a free state but also passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which required northern citizens to assist in the capture of escaped enslaved people and return them to their owners. The law made the Underground Railroad's work more dangerous, including in Buffalo, which was twelve miles from Canada and one of the most active passage points on the northern network.
Fillmore retired to Buffalo, where he spent the rest of his life in civic leadership, including helping found what became the University at Buffalo. Historians have consistently ranked him among the least successful American presidents, largely for the Fugitive Slave Act. Buffalo is more generous to him than history is.
