CHAPTER 2
I never knew what it was to be so constantly pressed with engagements.
—FRANKLIN PIERCE
Pierce ~ Fillmore ~ Tyler ~ Van Buren
In the autumn of 1833, two future presidents arrived in the city of Washington. Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire and Fillmore of New York were newly elected members of the 23rd Congress, the first to meet in Jackson’s second term. Fillmore was thirty-three years old and Pierce had just turned twenty-nine, but aside from youth the two had little in common.
The polished appearance and impeccable manners of Millard Fillmore masked an upbringing of extreme poverty. The son of an itinerant farmer, Fillmore was raised to backbreaking labor in western New York. He watched his father struggle to scrape out a living, only to be thrown off his land following a title dispute. The desperate feelings of poverty and helplessness before the law would serve as powerful motivators.
At fourteen Fillmore took an apprenticeship in a textile mill, but aspired to something better. “While attending the carding machines,” he would later recall, “I used to place the dictionary on the desk—by which I passed every two minutes in feeding the machine and removing the rolls—and in this way I would have a moment in which to look at a word and read its definition and could then fix it in my memory.” As an adult, the boy who practiced with his dictionary would own a personal library of more than four thousand volumes. Fillmore left his apprenticeship early, remembering his journey home “on foot and alone with a knapsack on my back.” From there he attended school in the winter and worked on a farm in the spring. By 1818, he taught school for three months in Cortland County, a testament to his rapid development as well as the desperate need for teachers on the frontier. When the academic year was over, he supported himself by working in a sawmill in New Hope. He remembered that the establishment of a small library at Kelloggsville, perhaps a mile from where he worked, “gave me my first knowledge of books, and though I had little leisure, I enjoyed the reading very much.”
A greater opportunity appeared when his father became a tenant farmer of Cayuga County’s Judge Walter Wood, whom he persuaded to take on Fillmore as a law clerk. The young man who had read the dictionary for elucidation was now reading Blackstone’s Commentaries. When it was time to return to the mill, the judge offered him a seven-year clerkship. Fillmore used his teacher’s salary to pay his way out of his previous apprenticeship, and in 1820 was finally able to accept Judge Wood’s offer. While studying in his office, he worked as a land surveyor to cover his expenses. In the wintertime, he resumed teaching at a school eight miles distant. At a local Fourth of July gathering Fillmore was asked to give a speech, greatly impressing the audience. It led to his being hired to handle a suit before the Justice of the Peace, a lower court where advocates did not need to be lawyers. Judge Wood disapproved and ordered him not to repeat his offense. It then dawned on Fillmore with horror. “He did not intend that I should be a lawyer; but a dependent on him and a drudge in his business. But what could I do? I was friendless and penniless but my pride was instantly aroused, and I told him I would leave and at once settled up and I gave him my note for the balance I owed him.” Once again, he found himself with a broken apprenticeship, trudging on foot back to his father’s home. Fillmore resumed teaching in Aurora, handling the occasional dispute before Justices of the Peace. In 1823, he taught in Cold Springs, and “assisted some in the Post Office” at Buffalo. In the Law Offices of Rice and Clary, he finally completed the training to become a lawyer. In 1826, he married Abigail Powers, a minister’s daughter. He bought a lot for them near East Aurora and built a sturdy home, one that stands to this day.
In 1828, Fillmore was elected to the state legislature as an Anti-Mason, a populist party focused on eliminating the secret societies that had begun in his home region of western New York. There, while tending closely to the issues affecting his district, he helped create a bankruptcy law that abolished imprisonment for debt.
Many presidents of the United States are intimately associated with places. None more so than Fillmore with Buffalo, where he finally moved in 1830, after opening a new law practice and renting a wooden tenement on Main Street above Mohawk. The first directory of the city misspelled both his first and last name, but in time he would become the best known of its citizens. He had first seen the city in 1818, five years after the British torch had been laid to it. One writer noted, “It was just rising from the ashes and there were many cellars and chimneys without houses, showing that its destruction by the British had been complete.” Now it was a thriving, prosperous city on the western terminus of the Erie Canal. The former farm and factory worker embraced the active civic and social community he found there. For four months a year, when ice prevented shipping on the canal, the people of Buffalo opened their homes to one another. Millard and Abigail were frequent guests and hosts. Rapid growth meant great opportunity, and in 1832 Fillmore withstood the Jackson and Van Buren landslide in the state to win a seat in Congress.
Franklin Pierce’s path to prominence was short and straight, especially by contrast with Fillmore. As a twelve-year-old attending New Hampshire’s prestigious Hancock Academy, a homesick Pierce decided to return to his parents. He was shocked to find that his father, a stern veteran of the Revolution, did not rebuke him for desertion. The two had dinner, where the subject went unmentioned, and afterward Benjamin Pierce silently drove his carriage back toward Hancock. At a juncture in the woods, Franklin was ordered to walk the rest of the way, a significant part of the journey in the rain. And so he began the day where he had started, only wetter, colder, and more fatigued.
Pierce entered college at Bowdoin, in Maine, in 1820. Returning for his sophomore year by stagecoach, he met an incoming freshman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, beginning what would become the most important friendship of his life.
Pierce returned to his hometown of Hillsborough after graduation, an appointment arranged by his father to provide him a salary while studying law. In 1827, Benjamin Pierce was elected New Hampshire’s governor after two previous defeats. The following year Franklin followed his father into politics, and was convincingly elected presiding officer of the Hillsborough Town Meeting. Pierce and his allies—ardent Jacksonians—defeated the old guard loyal to John Quincy Adams. Pierce campaigned hard for Jackson, and in the process helped create the New Hampshire Democratic Party.
Pierce was elected at twenty-five to the Great and General Court of New Hampshire, the state’s legislature, where he chaired a committee to overhaul control of the local schools. In his second term, the affable, popular Pierce was chosen from New Hampshire’s legislative body of 230 to serve as speaker. With seemingly little effort, Pierce leapt from one honor to the next, all the while struggling within himself to be content, writing, “Is it not the present that we cling to but something that sparkles in the distance and beckons us on—to find what? Disappointment.”
The following year the Democratic state convention nominated him for the Congress. New Hampshire elected its five members at-large, giving an advantage to Pierce’s party. Pierce was “gratified,” but not “elated,” when he won, and wondered whether he should not have shifted focus to the law. While at Bowdoin he and a friend had pledged not to marry young, worried “that our union with a lovely woman would interfere with and check the course of our ambition.” His youth waning, at least for matrimonial purposes, Congressman-elect Pierce proposed marriage to Jane Appleton, the sister-in-law of one of his Bowdoin instructors. “Shy, retiring, frail and tubercular,” in the words of one historian, Jane seemed less than an ideal fit for the hard-drinking, gregarious politician. They would be married in a quiet affair at the home of her family in Amherst, New Hampshire, during a congressional recess. A half hour after the nuptials, the newlyweds were on the road for Washington and the next session of Congress.
Partisan rancor would typify their later careers, but Fillmore and Pierce arrived in Congress in an era without crisp partisan divisions, when members were largely classified by their support or opposition to Jackson. In the House there were 143 “Jacksons,” 63 “Anti-Jacksons,” with 25 Anti-Masons and 9 Nullifiers. Fillmore and Pierce joined two other presidents in the House, one future, James K. Polk of Tennessee, and one past, John Quincy Adams. Fillmore and Pierce had incredible demands on their time, socially and professionally. Pierce wrote, “I never knew before what it was to be so constantly pressed with engagements.” Their first days of federal service would later be known as “The Panic Session” of Congress. President Jackson was opposed to the Bank of the United States—a federally chartered institution that received government deposits and set monetary policy—believing it an anti-democratic concentration of power and a corrupting influence on politicians. First Jackson had vetoed the reauthorization of the bank, which gave it an expiration date but one that was too distant for his liking. He then turned to depleting its funds; federal expenditures were made with the bank’s deposits, while new revenues were placed in various state banks.
Fillmore remembered, “the chief topic was the removal of deposits from the Bank.” Pierce wrote, “the debate upon the deposit question seems to be interminable.”
The future presidents found themselves on opposite sides of numerous votes on the bank. Fillmore in the House and Tyler in the Senate presented petitions from their constituents protesting the president’s actions. Tyler, who personally opposed the bank, objected to the withdrawals, reasoning that Jackson could legally put the money in his own pocket as easily as in the state banks. For him, the question was not whether to have a national bank; it was whether the separation of powers would be preserved.
Vice President Van Buren, presiding over the Senate, feigned disinterest in the bromides against Jackson. Hoping to get a rise out of him, Clay, in one of his many speeches on the removals, asked Van Buren to go to the White House to “extend his well known influence” over the president. Van Buren, who had been reading a book, set it aside and walked down onto the Senate floor. Anxious senators and spectators alike watched as the vice president headed for Clay. Arriving at his desk, Van Buren said, “Mr. Senator, allow me to be indebted to you for another pinch of your aromatic Maccoboy [tobacco].”
The fight culminated in March, when Tyler joined a 26–20 Senate majority in favor of censuring Jackson. By that summer the fragmented opposition groups became known as the Whigs, after the English political faction that opposed monarchial rule, and a new era of political parties was born.
On January 30, 1835, the luminaries of Washington were at the Capitol for the funeral of a congressman. As the mourners walked down the Capitol steps headed to the burial site, Tyler felt unwell and stood off to the side. Then, an explosion. Startled, he turned to see a man, “about four steps off, with a pocket pistol pointed at the President.” The man produced a second gun and again pulled the trigger at point-blank range. Both misfired. Jackson raised his cane to strike him as he was tackled to the ground.* “The old General sprung at him like a tiger,” Tyler recalled, “and manifested as much fearlessness as one could possibly have done.” Tyler visited the White House the following day. “Why, Mr. President,” Tyler said, “when I looked at you yesterday while springing on that man with your cane, I could have taken you for a young man of twenty-five.” So heated were the politics of the hour that Jackson blamed his Whig opponents for complicity in the crime. Fillmore wrote to his law partner, “The city is all in commotion at the outrageous attempt to assassinate the president.” It was on account of that same partner that Fillmore would retire from Congress after only one term. In his absence, their firm had been engaged in a number of lawsuits, representing the Holland Land Company against ordinary settlers. While remunerative, the backlash among the voters was such that Fillmore chose not to run again.
** This was the first presidential assassination attempt. Jackson would also receive what was probably the first presidential death threat the following year, over his refusal to pardon two men: “You damned old scoundrel . . . I will cut your throat while you are sleeping,” and a later sentence that ended with the phrase “burnt at the stake in Washington.” Its author was an actor, destined for less notoriety than his son, Junius Brutus Booth.
During the next congressional session slavery would come to the fore. Congress set aside one or two days a week for the reading of petitions from constituents, and many of these entreaties related to abolition or the limitation of slavery. Unhappy southern members and their allies in Congress proposed a “gag rule,” which would prevent these petitions from being printed, read, or referred to a committee. Pierce was on the committee that drafted this proposal and denounced abolitionists on the House floor. He wrote to Polk, now Speaker of the House, “I do not believe there is one person out of a hundred who does not wholly reprobate the course of the few reckless fanatics who are only able to disturb occasionally the quiet of a village.” Rather than quiet the village, authors of the gag rule had guaranteed their opponents a rallying cry, with nine years of spirited debate to follow.
Meanwhile, a possible fight with France and the liberal use of patronage had realigned Jackson with his base of support in Virginia. Tyler’s opposition to the president went from being an asset to a liability, coinciding with a movement in the Senate to lift the censure against Jackson. The Virginia legislature was preparing instructions to Tyler to support the measure. Tyler, who believed that senators were ambassadors of their states, would not defy his instructions. Nor would he vote against his conscience. If directed to lift the censure, he would resign. “I look daily for my walking papers from the legislature,” Tyler wrote. His friends argued that the censure was of no moment, that he should vote to remove it or simply vote against it, but encouraged him in any event not to let the legislature drive him from the Senate. But Tyler was sanguine. As he once told his son, who was struggling with school, “adopt my motto, Perserverando, and all difficulties will vanish.”
Tyler believed that public opinion, with its fluctuations, was not a useful compass. “The Duke of Marlborough, after being idolized by England, was turned adrift, hated and despised,” he wrote. “This teaches us not to place our hopes of happiness on others, and least of all, to rest it upon popular favor. The purest and the best of men have been neglected and abused. Aristides was banished, and Socrates was poisoned.” The Virginia legislature was not looking to make Tyler a martyr; offered a judgeship to go away quietly, he declined. Finally receiving his instructions to repeal the censure, Tyler resigned from the Senate in February 1836. “I shall set an example to my children which shall teach them to regard as nothing place and office, when either is to be attained or held at the sacrifice of honor.”