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On most challenges confronting Millard Fillmore's administration, Daniel Webster and Fillmore saw eye to eye. They cooperated brilliantly to extinguish the fire over the Texas-New Mexico boundary and to secure passage of the Compromise. They shared a commitment to its finality. On two matters of critical political importance, however, Webster and Fillmore parted company, so much so that Webster's portrait of unanimity was disingenuous, if not wantonly hypocritical. This patient, tolerant stance sorely exasperated Webster. Rather than conciliating anti-Compromise Whigs, he advocated total war against them. Webster lusted for the presidency. Webster, with his single-minded pursuit of the presidency during 1851, inflicted as much damage on the northern Whig party, especially in New England, as any one individual possibly could.

Southern Whigs' “only chance” was now “a diversion—a change of names”, South Carolina's George S. Bryan concluded two months before the North's crucial October and November elections. John P. Kennedy agreed. Kennedy's dream appalled most northern Whigs. These dramatically divergent reactions to Know Nothings' success in 1854 outline the millstones between which the Whig party was ground to powder. Most southern and conservative northern Whigs abandoned the Whig organization and flocked to the Know Nothing order to convert it into a new bisectional Union party that could make Millard Fillmore president. In response, northern Whigs of the Sewardite ilk, who continued to fear that Slave Power aggressions might succeed unless the North was rallied against them, declared “war” against Know Nothingism. Almost inevitably, they gravitated toward the emerging Republican party in order to smash the nativists and to prevent Free Soil extremists from dominating it.

The diarrhea and painful indigestion that afflicted Zachary Taylor had been diagnosed by his doctors as “cholera morbus”. Taylor probably suffered instead from acute gastroenteritis, an infection of the stomach wall and intestines, and the primitive treatment he received did him more harm than good. The sixty-five-year-old president managed to conduct business for two days and then began to decline rapidly. By the afternoon of July 9, 1850, word spread around Washington that his end was near. That night the “Hero of Buena Vista” died. As soon as the doleful news spread, stunned Whigs began to speculate about “the effect of General Taylor's death upon the Country” and upon their party. Millard Fillmore's unanticipated ascension to power suddenly created the possibility of a change in men and measures. As a Northerner and an orthodox Whig party regular, Fillmore was no John Tyler, but ultimately his presidency had almost as deleterious consequences for the Whig party as did the proslavery Virginian's.

When Millard Fillmore signed the Compromise measures in September 1850 and the New York Democratic state platform endorsed them, William Henry Seward's New York allies instructed Thurlow Weed that the Whig party's state platform must demand revision or repeal of every prosouthern concession Congress had made. Fillmore's pro-Compromise stance must be publicly repudiated. Five days after New York's Whigs met, Daniel Webster penned the administration's response to this declaration of war. He understood why many northern Whigs opposed the compromise measures in Congress. These salvos opened a battle between Fillmore's administration and its northern Whig critics that lasted from the fall of 1850 to the Whigs' national convention in June 1852. Fundamentally, however, it revolved around a dispute over how to carry elections, about whether the campaign needs of local Whigs should be placed ahead of intersectional comity within the nation and the national party and of support for the national administration.

This chapter assesses the strengths and weaknesses of Millard Fillmore, focusing on six realms: public communication, organizational capacity, political skill, policy vision, cognitive style, and emotional intelligence. Vice President Fillmore unexpectedly became the thirteenth president of the United States following the death of Zachary Taylor on July 9, 1850. Fillmore had been sidelined in his predecessor's administration, but in his capacity as presiding officer of the Senate, he had carefully followed the heated congressional debate over the status of slavery in the Mexican Cession. Plunged immediately into a crisis when he assumed the presidency, Fillmore played a critical part in the enactment of compromise legislation that appeared at the time to have averted the threat of a war between the slave and free states.

Developing tremendous momentum during the winter of 1850–1, the Union party movement challenged Millard Fillmore's hope of saving the Whig party as much as did the defiance he encountered from northern anti-Compromise Whigs. Their defection would abdicate control of northern Whig organizations to anti-Compromise men and possibly drive them into an explicitly anti-southern alliance with Free Soilers that could provoke the disunion he sought to avert. To Fillmore, therefore, the dangers from the South included both the secession movement and the Union party movement formed to prevent it. To demonstrate that neither secession nor a new party was necessary, he set out to prove that the Whig party was reliably pro-Union and could win elections on those grounds. This course enormously enhanced Fillmore's popularity among southern Whigs, who by 1852 clearly wanted him as the party's presidential nominee.

This chapter focuses on the similarities between Millard Fillmore and the president he succeeded, Zachary Taylor. Fillmore, who immediately assumed the title of president and proceeded to exercise the full powers of the presidential office, is remembered today as one of America's most forgettable presidents, but he was by no means a nonentity while in office. His first act in office was to fire and replace all of Taylor's cabinet, which had been tarred by a minor scandal, even though both he and Taylor were loyal members of the Whig Party. This marks the only time a succeeding vice president has ever fired his predecessor's entire cabinet. The firing and replacing of Taylor's whole cabinet indicates Fillmore's desire to control his own administration, and his belief in the removal power.

The Civil War era posed profound challenges to the six presidents. There is widespread agreement that Abraham Lincoln met that test in a superlative manner while Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan responded to it abysmally. It is also widely held that Millard Fillmore's performance was pedestrian and James K. Polk's was unusually effective. This chapter reviews the way each of these protagonists rose, or failed to rise, to the challenges of his times. It then explores the ways in which the leadership criteria employed in this book figured in the period under consideration. It concludes by discussing a pair of theoretical issues implicit in Allan Nevins' assertion in the epigraph to this chapter that if the nation had “possessed three farseeing, imaginative, and resolute” chief executives “instead of Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan, the [Civil] War might have been postponed.”

The bill signed by President Millard Fillmore in 1850 was designated an amendment supplementary to the act of 1793. Essentially, it expanded federal power over the interstate rendition of fugitive slaves at the expense of state power to intervene in the process. Thus, anyone taken into custody as a fugitive slave was cut off from the traditional legal resorts of an accused person. As for extralegal action, the new law made it more hazardous by increasing financial penalties and adding the threat of imprisonment. The law of 1850 never could have been passed except as part of a grand design of compromise at a time of national crisis. It was utterly one-sided, lending categorical federal protection to slavery while making no concession to the humanity of African Americans or to the humanitarian sensibilities of many white Americans.

This chapter first sets out the book's purpose, which is to use the period from the Mexican–American War to the Civil War (1846–1865) as a stage to assess the strengths and weaknesses of six American presidents: James K. Polk, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, and Abraham Lincoln. These men merit attention because of the demands placed on the chief executive in this momentous era and because they varied so greatly in the caliber of that leadership. The chapter then provides context by discussing the background against which these six presidents performed their duties, followed by a discussion of the causes of the Civil War.

This chapter discusses the continued Know Nothing election setbacks in the mid to late 1850s. However, the chapter emphasizes the belief that only the Know Nothings, according to many members, could avoid the sectional tension of the 1850s. While the state elections proved futile for the Know Nothings, the party continued to do well in Greater New Orleans. The chapter also continues to describe how Louisiana Democrats branded the Know Nothings as proscriptionists and abolitionists. The presidential election of 1860 is highlighted in this chapter with sectional stress assuming more importance than native Americanism. The ultimate failure of the Know Nothings in the state follows the party’s 1860 presidential election defeat and its gubernatorial defeat in 1857. Finally, the chapter summarizes how inexperience and lack of Know Nothing unity adversely affected the Know Nothings in these elections, as well as in the state legislature.