The American Vice Presidency (22 page)

Fillmore embarked on the vice presidency with the hope that his experience in Washington and Taylor’s lack of it would give him a more substantive role in the new administration than most of his predecessors had enjoyed. Thurlow Weed reported that Taylor had said of the vice president he barely knew, “I wish Mr. Fillmore would take all of the business in his own hands.”
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Incorrectly, Taylor came to the presidency believing the vice president would be a member of his cabinet.

Fillmore’s hope that Taylor would be true to his word soon crumbled. When the New Yorkers Weed and Seward made a recommendation on a key federal appointment in the Empire State and Taylor accepted it, an angry vice president asked him to withdraw it. Weed thereupon rushed to Washington, urging Taylor to avoid further patronage disputes by placing recommendations from the state in the hands of Governor Hamilton Fish. Weed represented Fish as impartial, when in fact he was a close ally of Weed and Seward, and Taylor naively agreed. Matters got worse for Fillmore when the job of collector of the port of Buffalo, in the vice president’s backyard, also went to a Weed-Seward man. Further complaints by
Fillmore brought a Taylor promise to treat him better, but it didn’t happen. Fillmore was on notice that despite the president’s earlier observation that he wished his vice president would take all of the business in his own hands, Taylor had no intention of letting that occur.

In Fillmore’s sole active function in the second office, as president of the Senate, he, like all those who had served before him, was charged by the Constitution with overseeing but not entering into the debates on all issues, great and small. They included all aspects of the slavery question, which critically included the issue of whether it would be extended into the western territories, particularly when the admission of new states was contemplated. The 1848 treaty ending the Mexican War expanded those territories to include California and New Mexico, which in 1849 Taylor proposed apply at once for statehood. Under Mexican rule, slavery already had been banned, and in October 1849 Californians held a convention and drafted a constitution barring slavery. In New Mexico, the same process went forward more slowly, but an impatient Taylor didn’t wait with his statehood proposal.

Southern members of Congress, led by Calhoun talking darkly of secession, balked. Assuming all along that Taylor as a slaveholder was an ally, Calhoun felt he had betrayed them by advocating admission of California as a free state and potentially New Mexico as well.

The intense North-South conflict gave rise to the Compromise of 1850, fashioned by Clay with the help of the Democratic senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, who debated ferociously in the Senate with Fillmore in the chair. Under the compromise, California would enter the Union as a free state, and territorial governments would be established in the remaining former Mexican lands with the slavery question left to the settlers there. Texas would abandon a boundary claim against New Mexico in return for the United States’ assumption of Texas’s national debt incurred before joining the Union. Slavery in the District of Columbia would be abolished with compensation to slave owners and with the adoption of a tough fugitive slave law.
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Clay opened the debate in January 1850 with seriously ill Calhoun sitting silently on the Senate floor, listening to the aging Kentuckian’s case for the compromise as the best way to preserve the Union. Shortly afterward, Calhoun offered his rebuttal to Clay, though too weak to present it, so
listening as a colleague read it for him. He pleaded for the North to yield in what he characterized as the restoration of the South’s equal rights in determining the fate of slavery in the territories. If the North could not do so, he said, “say so; and let the States we both represent agree to separate and go in peace.” Then he added, “If you are unwilling we should part in peace, tell us so; and we shall know what to do, when you reduce the question to submission or resistance.”
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Calhoun never got his answer; on March 31 he died, with the fate of the Union still undecided.

Two days later Fillmore presided over the funeral service for Calhoun in the Senate chamber. Aware of the rising furor over the slavery issue and the peril facing the Union, the next day he took the unusual step of addressing the Senate on his role as the keeper of civility in the hallowed chamber and his “powers and duties to preserve order.”
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According to the rules in place during the first days of the Senate, only the presiding officer could call an offending or unruly senator to order, but a revision in 1828 empowered any senator to do so as well. Fillmore observed that senators were not inclined “to appear as volunteers in the discharge of such an invidious duty,” so the obligation fell to him when required. At the risk of being accused of interfering with freedom of speech, he said, he intended to call out any senator whose remarks he felt might imperil proper discourse.

Weeks later, a bitter clash on the Senate floor validated his worry. Henry Foote of Mississippi launched a sharp personal attack on Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, which ended in Benton advancing on Foote and the latter drawing a pistol on the Senate floor. As the two foes exchanged more invectives, Fillmore quickly recognized another senator who called for adjournment, and the presiding officer quickly complied.
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Through all this, Fillmore supported Clay on the basic compromise in spite of Taylor’s opposition to it. He told the president that in the event of a tie vote in the Senate, he would vote for passage. But before the debate reached that stage, fate intervened. At a Fourth of July celebration in the hot sun, Taylor drank a quantity of iced drinks, then suffered cramps and an attack of gastroenteritis that killed him five days later. Fillmore was notified the night of Taylor’s death and took the presidential oath of office in the House of Representatives the next day at noon. No one seemed worried that overnight the country was without a sworn-in president, the line of succession clearly established and recognized by now. With Fillmore already
in support of the Clay compromise, its enactment was assured, making California a free state, making New Mexico and Utah territories with the slavery issue decided by popular sovereignty, and settling the other issues as well.

Fillmore’s abbreviated presidency was rife with political mistakes and miscalculations from the very start. On his first day in office, all members of the Taylor cabinet submitted what they thought were pro forma resignations in keeping with the usual custom in a sudden change in administrations. To their surprise and in some cases anger, Fillmore accepted the lot of them, all loyal Whigs, leaving himself devoid of experience in key departments, even though he himself had little of it. He added insult to injury by asking them to stay on for a while until he could find suitable replacements, and they all declined. So little had Fillmore contemplated the possibility of his ascension that it took him months to assemble his own cabinet, with a number of men invited to service also begging off. Fillmore’s one obvious selection was his mentor, Daniel Webster, to be his secretary of state and closest adviser.

But Fillmore had no grip on the Whig Party, whose leadership he had just inherited, giving the aging and tired Clay another opportunity to assert himself, though apparently without the energy to make an effective attempt. In the worked-over Clay compromise on the extension of slavery into the western territory, the South got the bulk of what it wanted, with Fillmore focusing on enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act, which was part of the extension package. Fillmore defended the seizure of fugitive slaves in the North and payments to captors under the law, which eventually left a stain on the Fillmore legacy.

As early as 1851 the latest “accidental president” declared that he would not seek a presidential term in his own right, though he advocated another try by the increasingly frail Webster. Fillmore finally agreed to oppose the Whig nomination of General Winfield Scott, the preferred candidate of his old New York rival, Seward. Again Fillmore counted heavily on his courtship of the South to sustain him. At the Whig convention in Baltimore in June 1852, the forces of Fillmore and Scott labored on a relatively even scale through more than forty ballots until on the forty-third Scott was nominated.

Out of office at last, Fillmore ran again in 1856 as the nominee of the
American Party, more popularly known as the Know-Nothings, winning 44 percent in the slave states but only eight electoral votes. During the Civil War, he organized a volunteer home guard of elderly men in Buffalo and helped raise money for wounded soldier relief, and not surprisingly he opposed the emancipation of American blacks and their enlistment in the Union army. He died in Buffalo in 1874 at age seventy-four. His presidential tenure was little recommendation for the elevation of the vice president to the highest office.

WILLIAM R. KING

OF ALABAMA

A
man who arguably may have been the most qualified vice president to carry out the office’s sole active constitutional responsibility, as president of the Senate, never had the opportunity to do so. Senator William R. King of Alabama, elected as the running mate of Senator Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire in 1852, had been sworn into the vice presidency for only twenty-five days when a severe case of tuberculosis took his life on April 18, 1853.

For many years in the Senate, King had been regularly chosen by his colleagues as temporary Senate president pro tem, to occupy the chair in the very frequent absences of the vice president of either party. In his nearly twenty-nine years in the Senate, his peers had elected him eleven times to function as the stand-in, presiding over some of the most tumultuous debates in Senate history. His selection was a tribute to his customary calm and even-handed manners. Nevertheless, the few mentions of King in later history books mostly record his challenge to the famous Whig leader Henry Clay to a duel, after a sharp exchange of words on the Senate floor in 1841. The notoriously proud Clay finally backed down and apologized.

Whether King’s tenure would follow the precedent of denying the vice president a voice in the decision making in the administration to which he was elected, let alone other significant functions, never came to be tested. Shortly after his election with Pierce, King’s worsening illness forced him
to resign his Senate seat prematurely and find a warmer climate in hope of a quick recovery.

On January 17, 1853, he sailed to Havana, Cuba, but soon realized he would be physically unable to return to Washington for the prescribed March 4 inauguration. He won approval of Congress to be sworn in as vice president abroad and on March 24 took the oath in the seaport town of Matanzas, sixty miles east of Havana. Gamely trying to return, he sailed to Mobile, Alabama, reached his plantation eleven trying days later, and died the next day at age sixty-seven. Again the vice presidency was left vacant, this time for nearly the next four years.

King’s long-established demeanor of fairness and collegiality in the Senate, rather than his views on the major issues of the day, was what had brought him to the brink of national power. At a time of increasing regional conflict over slavery and other threats to the preservation of the Union, King became a voice of mediation and conciliation, even as a Jacksonian Democrat he clashed with Clay and other advocates of the American System.

Born in North Carolina on April 7, 1786, William Rufus Devane King was the son of a wealthy planter and jurist who had fought in the Revolutionary War. The father, a slave owner, had been a delegate to the North Carolina convention to ratify the Constitution and later served in the state assembly. As a young man, William attended local academies and the University of North Carolina through his junior year. After continuing legal training under a leading lawyer in the state, he was admitted to the bar in 1805. Five years later, a few months short of the required age of twenty-five, King was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Wilmington, where he joined the band of young “war hawks” with Calhoun behind Clay, pushing hard for military confrontation with Great Britain in what became the War of 1812.

In 1816, King resigned from the House to become secretary to William Pinkney, appointed U.S. minister to Russia. He served a year in St. Petersburg before moving to the Alabama Territory, where he later organized a land company. He founded the town of Selma, which nearly two centuries later became a milestone in the fight for the civil rights of black Americans as the site of a major racial clash. In 1819, King was a delegate to the constitutional convention that brought statehood to Alabama and subsequently became one of its first United States senators. In 1825, when the House chose John Quincy Adams over Andrew Jackson in their rancorous contest
for the presidency, King helped deliver the state’s electoral votes for Jackson. Meanwhile, he continued his Senate association with Calhoun, whose clash with Jackson brought the issue of state nullification of federal law to the political forefront of the era.