|| Chapter 5 ||
No president pleased Henry Clay more than Millard Fillmore. The two men had been friends for many years, and Clay knew from firsthand experience that Fillmore was a loyal Whig. They had worked closely together when Fillmore was the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee and Clay was the Whig leader in the Senate. Fillmore had supported Clay’s unsuccessful presidential campaigns, and Fillmore had been chosen as Taylor’s running mate to appease southern Whigs, including Clay. Clay got the respect and deference from Fillmore that he believed that Harrison, Tyler, and Taylor had wrongfully denied him.1
In the four months between Fillmore’s inauguration and Clay’s reluctant departure from the Senate because of failing health, Clay served as Fillmore’s spokesman in Congress, and the two frequently met privately to consult on major appointments and policy matters.2 Before he died, Clay endorsed Fillmore as the Whig presidential nominee, the only time he endorsed anyone before the party’s convention.
Yet, as president, Fillmore’s constitutional stands destroyed the Whigs. While the constitutional act for which Fillmore is best known—signing the Compromise of 1850 including the controversial Fugitive Slave Act—was consistent with Whig expectations, many of his other actions were not, including his lobbying members of Congress to support the Compromise, his threats to use federal force to stop Texas from invading New Mexico, and his actions to stifle northern states’ resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act. Later, Lincoln relied on Fillmore’s actions to oppose secession and coordinate federal force to preserve the Union.
I .
The conventional account of Fillmore’s fifteen months as vice president emphasizes his alienation from Taylor. It suggests that he had no influence over Taylor, even on appointments in his home state of New York, and criticizes Taylor’s failure not to use Fillmore—once a well-respected Whig leader in the House—to break the impasse in the Senate over Taylor’s plan for admitting California and New Mexico as new states.3 It attributes Fillmore’s marginalization to Taylor’s conviction that he owed his election and reelection to Fillmore’s rival faction in the New York Whig Party led by Seward and Thurlow Weed. Fillmore’s unhappiness over Seward’s influence is often thought to explain why Fillmore told Taylor, shortly before Taylor died, that he publicly supported Taylor’s plan but, if there were a tie vote on the Compromise, he intended to vote for it.4
Though historically accurate, this account overlooks the most obvious explanation for Fillmore’s apparent disloyalty to Taylor: As vice president, Fillmore was following basic Whig principles. In his capacity as presiding officer of the Senate, Fillmore was acting upon his belief that the Constitution required him to defer to legislative supremacy, and he thus refrained from any active involvement in the debates over Taylor’s plan and pledged to accept the evolving Compromise. Taylor was disappointed, but probably not surprised, that Fillmore was more loyal to Whig principles than to him. The fact that Fillmore’s stated preference to follow his own construction of his constitutional duty as vice president severed his fragile relationship with Taylor underscores the extent to which Taylor had been following a different conception of presidential power.
II .
The Compromise of 1850 was not a single law but five bills that were separately debated, raised different constitutional issues, and were signed into law in the span of eleven days. The common purpose uniting the disparate bills—admitting California as a new state, abolishing the slave trade in the District of Columbia, organizing New Mexico and Utah as new territories, resolving the border dispute between Texas and New Mexico, and enacting a new fugitive slave law— was to be, as Fillmore said, “a final settlement of the dangerous and exciting subjects which they embraced.”5The bills signified shifts in the government’s approach to the constitutional divisions within Congress and the country over slavery.
First, the Compromise rejected the Wilmot Proviso’s prohibition of slavery in the territories in favor of allowing the people of each territory and state the discretion over how to handle slavery.6 The Compromise reflected Congress’s endorsement of the principle of popular sovereignty that was becoming the central tenet of the Democratic Party. In the same vein, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 did not commandeer state officials to assist the enforcement of the law. It left the law’s enforcement to federal officials and private citizens. States had some discretion to outlaw slavery if they wanted to do so, though federal law obliged them to refrain from assisting escaping slaves or interfering with the enforcement of the fugitive slave law. (More than a century later, the Supreme Court would uphold a state’s constitutional immunity to be free of federal coercion.)7Moreover, California’s admission as a state did not tip the balance of power in favor of antislavery forces in the Senate, as Southerners like Jefferson Davis had feared.8 In fact, California did not bar the presence of slaves that had been in the state prior to its admission into the Union; and California’s representatives and two senators were Democrats who usually supported slavery in the years in between California’s admission and the Civil War’s onset.9 Similarly, by organizing New Mexico and Utah as new territories without any restrictions on slavery, the Compromise allowed the people of each of these territories to deal with slavery as they saw fit.10 The Compromise thus became a model for later federal laws affirming popular sovereignty.
The second shift in the federal government’s approach to the constitutional issues associated with slavery was evident in the portion of the Compromise granting Texas some of its claims to New Mexican territory and $10 million in exchange for relinquishing others. This bill reinforced Congress’s authority as the principal arbiter of border disputes among the states and the territories. In exercising this authority, Congress was rejecting Taylor’s proposal of leaving the dispute for the Supreme Court to resolve. (In fact, shortly before Congress approved this component of the Compromise, the Senate rejected, 42–1, Taylor’s proposals to admit New Mexico as a new state and to refer its boundary dispute with Texas to the Supreme Court. William Seward cast the only favorable vote.)
The law signified a novel use of Congress’s spending power. It did not follow the conventional path of using federal money to bribe states to forgo doing things they had the constitutional authority to do.11 Instead, Congress validated the popular government in Texas and rewarded it for not doing something it lacked the authority to do. The law, in other words, vested the state with power it did not previously have. In doing so, it illustrated how the spending power could be used to expand states’ rights.
The third shift in the constitutional approach adopted in the Compromise was embodied in its most controversial component, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Its passage within the House was universally perceived as flatly rejecting the Wilmot Proviso. (Indeed, neither the House nor the Senate would ever come close again to approving anything like the Proviso until after the Civil War.) The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act was modeled on the antithesis of the Wilmot Proviso, the original Fugitive Slave Act that the First Congress had enacted in 1793 and that the Supreme Court had upheld.12 Proponents of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 thus defended its constitutionality on the bases of long-standing historical practices and judicial precedent. Southern Democrats further claimed that the Constitution required Congress to enact this statute as a means of protecting the ownership of slaves as private property guaranteed to be free from federal interference by the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause.13
By signing all five measures of the Compromise, Fillmore signed onto their constitutional significance. On the day he became president, Fillmore told Webster, then a key Whig proponent of the Compromise in the Senate, that he was withdrawing Taylor’s plan and was willing to accept any reasonable compromise approved by Congress on the subject. Fillmore further signaled his intention publicly by making his first cabinet appointment the selection of Webster as secretary of state. (Webster correctly construed Fillmore’s offer to join his cabinet as solid evidence of Fillmore’s intention to approve a legislative compromise.)14 In his first special message to Congress, Fillmore promised his unconditional support for the Compromise.15
By accepting and vigorously enforcing the Compromise, President Fillmore was following the basic Whig belief that the president should defer to congressional leadership on the slavery question and enforce Congress’s preferred policy unless it plainly violated the Constitution. Since Fillmore did not believe the Compromise violated the Constitution, he signed it. Shortly thereafter, he told Hamilton Fish, the Whig governor of New York and an opponent of the Fugitive Slave Act, that, in spite of his personal opposition to slavery and the Fugitive Slave Act, he felt compelled by Whig principles to sign the law.16 He similarly wrote to Webster, “God knows that I detest slavery, but it is an existing evil [that] we must endure, give it such protection as is guaranteed by the Constitution, till we can get rid of it without destroying the last hope of free government in the world.”
Yet Fillmore had not just been a faithful Whig in signing the Compromise. He had not waited passively for the Compromise to come to his desk for his signature. In sharp contrast to his refusal to become involved in Senate debate on Taylor’s plan, Fillmore was personally involved in persuading northern Whigs to support the Compromise and shaping Senate negotiations over the Compromise.17
As part of his duty to enforce the new law, Fillmore was forced to respond to the constitutional arguments made against its enforcement in several states. In fact, nine northern states18 enacted “personal liberty laws,” which forbade state officials (including judges) to participate in the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act or prohibited the use of their jails in fugitive slave cases. The laws tried to remedy the defects cited by opponents of the federal law as the reasons for its unconstitutionality. Accordingly, the laws expressly guaranteed to AfricanAmericans, captured pursuant to the Fugitive Slave Act, the two rights that federal law denied them—the right of habeas corpus and the right to jury trials. Resisting states asserted the right to nullify, or not to comply with, federal laws that they deemed unconstitutional. (Interestingly, the same arguments have been used by states to refuse compliance with federal laws with which they disagreed, including not only prior to the Civil War but also more recently with respect to the Affordable Care Act.)
For the rest of his presidency, Fillmore used every power that he had as president to rebuff the constitutional attacks made against the law’s enforcement. Less than a month after he had signed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 into law, a group of local citizens in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, refused to comply with a federal marshal’s request for assistance in capturing a fugitive slave. The refusal prompted the marshal to turn to two Pennsylvania judges, who asked Fillmore to order federal troops to assist the marshal in enforcing the law. Fillmore understood that the Constitution’s supremacy clause made federal law supreme over any state law (or resistance) to the contrary19 and that he was responsible for ensuring states did not interfere with the enforcement of federal law. Fillmore reassured his cabinet and members of Congress that he had sworn an oath to support the Constitution and that he had the duty to ensure the enforcement of all federal laws that were plainly not inconsistent with it. He told Webster that he would “admit no right of nullification North or South,” and acknowledged that while slavery “is an existing evil, for which we are not responsible, . . . we must endure it, and give it such protection as is guaranteed by the constitution, till we can get rid of it without destroying the last hope of free government in the world.” He further confided that he would avoid using military force if necessary, “not doubting that there is yet patriotism enough left in every state north of Mason’s and Dixon’s line to maintain the supremacy of the laws; and being particularly anxious that no state should be disgraced, by being compelled to resort to the army to support the laws of the Union.”20 In the absence of Webster and Attorney General Crittenden, Fillmore’s cabinet unanimously advised Fillmore that he had the power and the duty to use military force to support civilian authorities trying to enforce the law. Fillmore instructed the marine commander in nearby Philadelphia to assist local authorities if a federal judge deemed such assistance necessary and informed the federal marshals and commissioners in the area that they would have the same support when needed.21
Fillmore delivered the same message to everyone. In November, he reiterated to Fish that his principal duty was to preserve the Union. Interestingly, as resistance to the federal law became more heated, Fillmore modified the basis of his actions to include the oath he had sworn to protect the Constitution and the need to protect the integrity of the Union. He explained to Fish that northern Whigs “did not appreciate the dangers to which we are exposed from the South, and the infinite importance of setting an example of maintaining the Constitution in all its parts.” Toward this end, he felt the fugitive slave “must be executed” and “sustained against attempts at repeal.”22 Fillmore was aware of the risk that several southern states might try to secede once Congress admitted California. To stop them, Fillmore said that he was prepared “to bring the full force of the government” to sustain the law in the North. He believed its enforcement would show Southerners his intention to use force if necessary to stop secession and nullification to preserve the Union and the Constitution.
In early December, Fillmore used his First Annual Message to bolster political and constitutional support for the Compromise. He promised that “to the utmost of my ability and to the extent of the power vested in me I shall at all times and in all places take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” He further declared, “I deem it my first duty not to question [the Constitution’s] wisdom, add to its provisions, evade its requirements, or nullify its commands.” He believed resistance to congressional will was unnecessary and destroyed the rule of the law in “a government like ours, in which all laws are passed by a majority of the representatives of the people, and those representatives are chosen for such short periods that any injurious or obnoxious law can very soon be repealed.” He defended the Compromise as necessary “to allay asperities and animosities that were rapidly alienating one section of the country from another and destroying those fundamental sentiments which are the strongest supports of the Constitution.”23
Less than two months later, a group of free African-Americans stormed a Boston courtroom and released a man who had been on trial as a fugitive slave. In response, President Fillmore issued a proclamation urging Boston citizens to obey the laws and commanding “all officers, civil and military, and all other persons, civil or military” in the area to aid by all means in their power “in quelling this and other such combinations.”24Fillmore directed the federal attorney in Boston to prosecute anyone who assisted the rescue. In a special message sent to the Senate on February 19, Fillmore requested that Congress facilitate enforcement of the act by amending it to empower him to call state militia into national service without first issuing a proclamation calling on lawbreakers to desist and disperse.25 Though Congress never acted on the request, it demonstrated Fillmore’s willingness to take the initiative in formulating responses to the resistance to federal law.
In May 1851, Fillmore extended his public defense of the Fugitive Slave Act on a 500-mile road trip, along with his cabinet, to celebrate the completion of the Erie Railroad from New York to Dunkirk. Since the people and state legislature of New York had announced their opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act, Fillmore and Webster were pressed along the way to defend the law. Consequently, they became the most conspicuous defenders of the constitutionality of the law. Their public defense of the law is an early instance of a president’s using his bully pulpit and cabinet to mobilize pubic support for a controversial initiative.
Besides defending enforcement of federal law in New York, Webster repeatedly urged enforcing the law in Massachusetts. In October 1850, the masters of two married slaves had hunted them down in Boston, where local abolitionists prevented the marshal from recapturing them. Webster traveled to Boston to support the marshal and persuaded Fillmore to announce that he would use federal troops, if necessary, to enforce the law. The couple was rescued and taken to England before a local court could act upon Webster’s request to have them placed in federal custody. In February, Webster traveled back to Boston to intercede on behalf of the law when another crowd stormed a courtroom and freed a man who was on trial as a fugitive slave. Incensed over the lawlessness, Webster published a letter declaring, “No man is at liberty to set up, or affect to set up, his own conscience as above the law, in a matter which respects the rights of others, and the obligations, civil, social, and political due to others from him. Such a pretense saps the foundation of all government.”26 Webster arranged for the indictment of eight men for helping the slave to escape, but a hung jury resulted in their release. After Webster helped to foil a plot to free a fugitive slave from being forced to return to captivity, Fillmore “congratulate[d Webster] and the country upon the triumph of the law in Boston.” As in Pennsylvania, judges asked Fillmore to send troops, and Fillmore again directed that federal judges give that authority to marshals and deputies if they deemed it necessary.27 Webster predicted that Fillmore’s steady backing of the fugitive slave law, along with the decisions of state and federal judges to uphold its constitutionality, “will settle the question” of the legality of noncompliance with the law.28
In May, Webster left the president’s entourage to deliver speeches defending the Fugitive Slave Act in Syracuse, Buffalo, and Albany. In Syracuse, “that laboratory of abolitionism, libel, and treason,” Webster denounced people who had “set up themselves over the Constitution, over the laws, and above the decisions of the highest tribunals, and who say [the fugitive slave law] shall not be carried into effect.” They have “pledged their lives, their fortunes, and sacred honor!—for what? For the violation, of the law, for the committal of treason to their country; for it is treason, and nothing else.”29In Buffalo, Webster used the metaphor of a “house divided” (which Lincoln later embellished) to stress the need to “preserve the Union of the States, not by coercion, not by military power, not by angry controversies . . . but by the silken chords of mutual, fraternal, patriotic affection.” He conceded the problem was slavery but told the crowd that he had never consented to adding “one foot of slave territory beyond what the old thirteen States had at the time of formation of the Union.” He explained “that it was not within the scope or design of the Constitution to admit new States out of foreign territory.” He reminded his audience that he had voted against the treaty with Mexico and had wanted “none of her territory, neither California, New Mexico, nor Utah.” He declared that if the Compromise had not passed, “civil war would have ensued; blood, American blood, would have been shed; and who can tell what would have been consequences?” Acknowledging the fact that slavery existed in the South, he said, “It must be obvious to every intelligent person that, if Congress possessed power over slavery as it exists in the southern states, any attempt to exercise such power would break up the Union just as surely as would an attempt to introduce slavery in Massachusetts.” He explained that the Constitution made federal law supreme over state resistance and promised “to exert any power I had to keep that country together.”30In Albany, Webster urged the “young men of the United States [to] uphold the institutions under which you were born . . . [I] believe firmly that this Union, once broken, is utterly incapable [of] being reconstructed in its original character, of being recemented by any chemistry, or art, or effort, or skill of man.”31
In June, Webster went too far. In Virginia, he stressed that, in order to preserve the Constitution, all of its parts had to be honored. He argued that, when different parties enter into a compact, none may disregard one provision and expect others to obey the rest. Webster maintained that the same principle applied to the fugitive slave law. “A bargain cannot be broken on one side, and still bind the other side.” He added, “I am as ready to fight and fall for the constitutional rights of Virginia as I am for those of Massachusetts. [I] would no more see a feather plucked unjustly from the honor of Virginia than I would see one so plucked from the honor of Massachusetts.”32 It did not take long for Webster to realize his argument supported secession. He subsequently tried to clarify that the Constitution could only be dissolved by revolution. The effort failed, and southern secessionists delighted in citing Webster’s speech in defense of a state’s constitutional right to secede from the Union.
In the fall of 1851, Clay used his final days in the Senate to rally the nation behind the Compromise and against secession. In response to the Boston riots, Clay asked Mississippi senator Henry Foote, a Unionist Democrat, to meet with Fillmore. Fillmore assured Foote that he would “enforce the laws of the land at all hazards, and put down, with the whole power of the government, if need be, any illicit or violent attempt to counteract or overturn them.” At Fillmore’s suggestion, Foote met with Webster, who stressed the administration’s resolve to use force if necessary to preserve the Union.33 In his final speech before the Senate, Clay emphasized that the Constitution recognized no right within the states to nullify federal laws or to secede. “You find that whenever you press [secessionists] on these points, they fly from the Constitution and talk about the mode of its formation, its compact character, its being formed by the States.” Referring to the obstruction of the fugitive slave law in Boston, Clay said that not since the Whiskey Rebellion had there been “an instance in which there was so violent and forcible obstruction of the United States since the commencement of the Government.”34
III .
The initiative Fillmore took in pushing the Compromise of 1850 through Congress and in its enforcement were hardly his only deviations from Whig governance principles. He deviated in several other areas, including appointments, removals, pardons, and his uses of his cabinet and military force.
First, Fillmore defended the principle of rotation in office. On his second day in office, Fillmore became the first president to accept the resignation of his entire cabinet. None agreed with his support for the Compromise. He then worked systematically with Webster and Clay to “remodel” his administration by removing anyone who had not supported the Compromise.35 Consequently, he removed the largest number of political appointees of any president up until that time, including over half of the political appointees in the State Department.36 Fillmore’s actions helped to entrench the principle of rotation in office as a fact of constitutional life.
Second, Fillmore used his appointment power to reward people who supported the Compromise and opposed the Wilmot Proviso. An additional criterion for his cabinet selections was a sworn commitment not to become a candidate in the next presidential election. Although Fillmore’s appointment preferences were designed to heal the party and unify support for his policies within his administration, his purpose was undercut by his purposeful exclusion of Whigs, particularly from the North, who had supported Taylor and the Wilmot Proviso. Perhaps most importantly, he followed his own counsel in appointing his new cabinet and subcabinet officers. The new cabinet was loyal to Fillmore but not to the party’s leaders.
Fillmore followed a similar tact in his one successful Supreme Court appointment. When Associate Justice Levi Woodbury died, Fillmore turned to Webster, but notably not other congressional leaders, for advice. Webster recommended Benjamin Curtis, a prominent lawyer, scholar, and faithful Whig who had opposed the Fugitive Slave Act. Although Democrats held a majority of 35–24 in the Senate, Curtis was easily confirmed by voice vote. Less than six years later, Curtis dissented in Dred Scott v. Sanford37 and resigned in disgust from the Court.38 His dissent is notable as the most comprehensive and carefully reasoned defenses of the federal government’s power to restrict slavery in the territories and of the entitlement of African-Americans to the privileges and immunities of national citizenship.
Fillmore used a different tactic in trying to fill the other vacancy that arose during his presidency. It arose in the summer of 1852 when Associate Justice John McKinley died. In trying to fill the vacancy, Fillmore accepted, as he had with his nomination of Curtis, the need to fill it with someone from the same circuit as the justice being replaced. This time, Fillmore made four different nominations to fill the position, but none succeeded. First, he nominated Whig lawyer Edward Bradford. The Senate was, however, led by Democrats who, eager to keep the vacancy open for the next president to fill, quickly tabled Bradford’s nomination. Fillmore next tried to take advantage of the principle of senatorial courtesy—the Senate’s historic deference to nominations of one of its own to confirmable offices. He nominated Senator George Badger of North Carolina, a Whig whom Fillmore believed fellow senators would agree to confirm. Instead, the desire to keep the vacancy open for Democrats to fill prevailed, and the Senate postponed further action by a single vote. Fillmore then pushed the Senate harder to adhere to senatorial courtesy by taking the unusual step of nominating a Democrat in a Whig-like attempt to defer to the will of a majority of the Senate. Though the Senate confirmed his nomination of newly elected Democratic senator Judah Benjamin of Louisiana, Benjamin declined the appointment. Days before Franklin Pierce’s inauguration, Fillmore nominated Benjamin’s law partner, William Micou, a Whig whom he hoped Democrats would find agreeable because of his close association with Benjamin. Again, the Senate tabled the nomination. Fillmore ran out of time, and Pierce got the vacancy to fill.
In using his cabinet, Fillmore further deviated from Whig principles. Whereas Whig orthodoxy called for a president to defer to his cabinet’s votes on major policy initiatives, he made clear from the outset that his cabinet served him and not the other way around. Indeed, Fillmore only consulted with Webster and Attorney General Crittenden on constitutional objections that had been made to the Fugitive Slave Act,39and he signed the law without consulting other members of his cabinet. For the remainder of his presidency, Fillmore did not ask his cabinet for advice unless he knew it agreed with him.
Fillmore’s deference to his attorney general, John Crittenden, coincided with another deviation from the Whig orthodoxy on presidential power. Two men convicted of violating the Fugitive Slave Act were in prison in the nation’s capital and had been required to pay fines to the federal government and two slaveholders. Their prosecution and imprisonment had received widespread attention since their attempts to assist fugitive slaves had been a part of the largest recorded escape attempt by slaves in American history. Represented by Horace Mann (who had also been one of the lawyers for the slaves who had mutinied on the Amistad), the men requested a pardon from Fillmore, who asked Crittenden for his opinion. Crittenden opined that Fillmore had the power to release the two men from jail and to absolve them from having to pay fines owed to the federal government but that his pardon power did not extend to money owed— even under a federal statute—to private citizens.40 President Fillmore took the advice and freed them from prison and paying federal fines; however, he did not release them from having to pay the fines they had been ordered to pay to the two slaveholders. The fact that Fillmore pardoned the men was no small thing. The pardon literally had undone the various acts he had authorized in signing the Fugitive Slave Act into law and in overseeing the prosecution of the men who sought his pardon. The pardon thus stands in marked contrast to the deference he had shown in signing the Fugitive Slave Act into law and the intense efforts he had waged to secure compliance with it. The pardon was thus an act of independence in direct contrast to the subservience that faithful Whigs expected from their president.
Fillmore’s fifth rejection of the Whig conception of the presidency was one of his first. In his first message to Congress, he declared, contrary to Whig expectations that he would follow Congress’s lead, that he had decided on his own initiative to send an additional 750 troops to Santa Fe to stop Texas from invading New Mexico. Echoing Taylor (and foreshadowing Lincoln), Fillmore vowed,
If the laws of the United States are opposed or obstructed in any State or Territory by combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the judicial or civil authorities, . . . it is the duty of the President either to call out the militia or to employ the military and naval force of the United States or to do both if in his judgment the exigency of the occasion shall so require . . . If Texas militia, therefore, march into any of the other States or into any territory of the United States [to] execute or enforce any law of Texas, they become at that moment trespassers; they are no longer under the protection of any lawful authority, and are to be regarded merely as intruders; and if within such State or Territory they obstruct any law of the United States, whether by power of arms or mere power of numbers . . . the President . . . is bound to obey the solemn instruction of the Constitution and exercise the high powers vested in him by that instrument and by the acts of Congress.41
Fillmore’s decision was significant. He had not consulted with congressional leaders before making or announcing his decision, and there was no law authorizing him to send troops to New Mexico, even to protect against a threatened invasion of federal land. New Mexico was not yet a territory, so the only laws that Fillmore could have been enforcing were a combination of the Constitution, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and the federal law against treason. In not waiting for specific congressional authorization, Fillmore was making the larger point that the authority at stake was that of the federal government. Through his actions and statements, he was emphasizing that a state lacked the authority to assert, by force or otherwise, the authority vested in Congress by the Constitution to resolve boundary disputes within the United States. This decision, along with Fillmore’s arguments against the constitutionality of secession and subsequent decisions to deploy troops to ensure enforcement of federal law, established significant precedents that Lincoln followed in rejecting the legality of secession and ordering federal troops to put down the treason and rebellion threatening the Union and the Constitution.
The tensions between the demands of Whig orthodoxy and the presidency were evident throughout Fillmore’s time in office. While Fillmore assumed that the president had unilateral power to order troops to thwart a threat to federal territory, to remove at will federal officials whom the Senate had confirmed, and to follow his own counsel in making important nominations, he agreed to sign the Compromise of 1850 out of deference to Congress. Such deference did not win back for Fillmore the support he had lost within the Whig Party because of the independence he had shown as president.
Fillmore’s ambivalence to Whig principles is also apparent in his indecision about running for reelection. Early in his presidency, he had said he would follow the Whig principle of a president’s serving only for a single term,42 and he maintained this commitment as late as the winter of 1851. When Fillmore made the pledge, it pleased traditional Whigs who construed it as fealty to the party. Northern Whigs were pleased, because they opposed making him their party’s nominee for president in 1852. Traditionalists within the party were not happy less than a year later when Fillmore broke his pledge. The turnaround came too late, as he realized he had no hope to secure the party’s nomination. No president after Fillmore pledged to serve a single term. It was one of many Whig principles Fillmore helped to bury for good.