Existing comment:
Millard Fillmore, 1800-1874:
At the beginning of his administration, Millard Fillmore bestowed his presidential blessing on the Compromise of 1850 -- Senator Henry Clay's proposal to unite the North and the slaveholding South. The ensuing harmony, however, was short-lived. Among the compromise's concessions to the South was the new Fugitive Slave Law, which facilitated the capture of runaway slaves, and Fillmore was determined to enforce it. As northern abolitionists sought to undermine the enforcement, tempers on both sides of the issue flared again. The sectional bitterness made a future rupture over slavery all but certain.
Fillmore's portrait by an unidentified artist dates to about the time he retired from the House of Representatives in the early 1840s. In the years following, he devoted to reconciling the growing differences among fellow Whigs in his native New York State.
Unidentified artist, c 1843 |