The American Vice Presidency

by Jules Witcover

  For one thing, his political fight with James Buchanan, which occupied much of Dallas’s time and energies in Pennsylvania, followed them to Washington. Polk, over the strenuous objections of his vice president, appointed Buchanan as his secretary of state and as such the first among equals in the Polk cabinet. Dallas himself was not a member, but from the outset Polk listened to him in dealing with heavy patronage demands from the politically important Keystone State.

  Both Dallas and Buchanan, as the leaders of the major factions in the Pennsylvania Democracy, vied for Polk’s ear and largesse in distributing lucrative and influential federal offices in the state and desirable diplomatic posts abroad. Shortly after the election, Dallas himself unwittingly paved the way for Buchanan’s appointment to the State Department, proposing that Polk dismiss all Tyler men, particularly John C. Calhoun as his secretary of state, blaming him for the Senate’s defeat of the Texas annexation treaty Tyler had sought.

  Buchanan’s friends in Pennsylvania, meanwhile, sought the State Department for him. They got the state’s presidential electors to urge the appointment in casting their electoral votes for Polk, a move that outraged Dallas. He wrote, “A more grotesque and humiliating movement could not well be made,” and he denounced them “for their precipitous meddling.” Dallas said he did not intend to stand idly by in his new eminence. “I have become vice president willy-nilly,” he said, “and anticipate the necessity of enduring heavy and painful and protracted sacrifices, as the consequence. Well! I am not, in the bargain, disposed to be considered a cypher! On the contrary, I am resolved that no one shall be taken from Pennsylvania in a cabinet office who is notoriously hostile to the vice president. If such a choice be made, my relations with the administration are at once at an end.”11

  In light of Polk’s pledged retirement after a single term, Dallas already seemed to be anticipating a drag-out fight with Buchanan for the 1848 Democratic presidential nomination. He insisted that Pennsylvania’s Democrats would never accept as their voice in the Polk administration “the distinguished gentleman so prematurely and arrantly foisted upon Mr. Polk.”12 He fervently hoped that Senator Robert J. Walker of Mississippi, married to his niece, would become secretary of state instead of Buchanan. But Polk had no intention of letting his vice president, essentially a stranger to him, pick his cabinet for him.

  Walker meanwhile told Dallas in January that he expected Polk to keep Calhoun at State for at least a time, and therefore he was pursuing the top job at the Treasury, but Dallas continued to pitch Walker for secretary of state. In late February, when Polk’s selection of Buchanan became known, Dallas called it “a most dangerous choice” and groused about trouble ahead that could have been avoided had Walker gotten the State appointment.

  Dallas, nonetheless, continued to press for an influential position for Walker. Polk finally gave him the Treasury Department to make peace with his vice president and with the South. But Jackson, for one, warned Polk that the Dallas-Walker alliance could cause trouble, as the struggle for Pennsylvania dominance between Dallas and Buchanan was certain to go on.

  Polk for his part made clear to his cabinet appointees that he intended to be in charge and expected loyalty. “I desire to select men who agree with me,” he pointedly told Buchanan on his appointment, “and who will cordially cooperate with me in carrying out my principles and policy.” He warned at the same time that any cabinet member who pursued the next presidential nomination while serving would be told to resign.13 Nevertheless, Polk found himself repeatedly enmeshed in refereeing the patronage wars between Dallas and Buchanan, finally promising to pay more attention to his vice president.

  One vote Dallas cast to break a Senate tie proved to be his own biggest challenge. In 1846, after Polk’s decision to seek tariff reductions, the balloting on doing so ended in a tie. After much soul-searching Dallas supported it, against the interests of his state’s iron and steel industry.14 To make the choice more palatable to Dallas, Richard Rush, a Pennsylvania ally of his, wrote to him: “Pennsylvanians are small men.… You are not of their race and they left you. The union put you where you are, and can keep you there and do more.… Pennsylvania cannot lead, she can only follow and bellow. You cannot repudiate the state, you must love her openly, and your notion of elevating her in the scale of the union is noble, and may begin to come about, but at present the union is your element and platform.”15

  To his Pennsylvania constituents, Dallas rationalized, “An officer, elected by the suffrage of all twenty-eight states, and bound by his oath and every constitutional obligation, faithfully and fairly to represent, in the execution of his high trust, all the citizens of the Union [could not] narrow his great sphere and act with reference only to [his own state’s] interest.”16

  Dallas was so concerned about the negative reaction back home that he had the Senate sergeant-at-arms deliver a handwritten message to his wife, Sophy, that at the slightest indication of riot in the city of Philadelphia because of passage of the tariff bills, she should “pack up and bring the whole brood to Washington.”17 His fears were well-founded. When news of the tariff’s passage and Dallas’s tie-breaking role in it reached the City of Brotherly Love, he was hanged in effigy from telegraph wires on a main street. Diarist Philip Hone castigated a “faithless, corrupt administration” that had destroyed Pennsylvania’s domestic industry, declaring that the names of Polk and Dallas “be recorded on the same page with those scourges of mankind, war … small pox, cholera and yellow fever.”18

  While voting for the tariff gave Dallas hope for southern support if he were to seek the presidency in 1848, his strong assertions of Manifest Destiny—the expansion into Oregon, the annexation of Texas, and support of the coming war against Mexico—ran counter to that objective. An argument with Great Britain over the dividing line between Canada and the United States in the Northwest, along with reports of British mischief making in Mexico, fed Dallas’s concern of English interference with Polk’s hopes of complete American dominance on the continent. What Dallas most feared was fighting two wars at one time if the row with the British was not peacefully resolved. In the end, however, the British accepted the 49th parallel as the northern border with Canada.

  By now war had begun with Mexico, and Dallas embraced it completely, even advocating the annexation of the northern Mexican states, when the endgame of the war became the subject of competition among the prospective 1848 presidential candidates. Buchanan said that if an honorable peace could not be reached with Mexico, the United States should “fulfill that destiny which Providence may have in store for both countries.” Dallas also weighed in, saying that nothing in the Constitution inhibited America from accepting “the vast task which may be assigned to it by the resistless force of events—guardianship of a crowded and confederated continent.”19

  Polk, however, was tired of war after nearly two years of it. When an American negotiator brought a peace offer from the Mexicans that included their surrender of any claims to California and New Mexico, the American purchase of them for fifteen million dollars, and the resolution of three million dollars in American claims on Mexico, Polk agreed. The Senate ratified the peace treaty in March 1848, and with it went Dallas’s rationale for a presidential candidacy based on further continental expansion.20

  Undaunted, in an effort to strike a middle ground on the slavery issue at home, Dallas adopted the concept of popular sovereignty in determining whether slavery would be permitted or prohibited in the western territories. But this position only drew animosity from both sides on the slavery issue and further buried his sinking presidential aspirations. Nevertheless, he challenged Buchanan for Pennsylvania’s designation as its favorite son. Dallas’s only hope was running overwhelmingly in Philadelphia, where supporters held a large rally for him in advance of the state party convention. In the fight for Philadelphia’s eighty-five delegates, Dallas won forty-seven to Buchanan’s thirty-eight, but the margin was insufficient to overcome Buchanan’s strength els
ewhere in the state.

  Soon after, a caucus of the Democrats in the state legislature endorsed Buchanan, and the state party convention followed suit. But the convention rejected Buchanan’s support of extending the Missouri Compromise to other states, pairing free and slave states in admission to the Union, damaging his chances at the national convention in Baltimore in May. In the end, the demoralized Democrats rejected both Buchanan and Dallas, and after a flirtation with General Zachary Taylor, hero of the Mexican War who eventually threw in with the Whig Party, they nominated Senator Lewis Cass of Michigan on the fourth ballot.

  Dallas’s relations with Polk had disintegrated to such a degree by now that the two barely spoke. After the election, in which Taylor and his running mate, Millard Fillmore of New York, were easily elected, Dallas returned to the Senate. But by this time he had grown weary of the routine and looked forward to his retirement. There was some talk of a second presidential bid in 1852, but he observed in his diary: “The Presidency is fast getting out of my head, and I don’t want my mind diverted from a steady and exclusive pursuit of professional practice,” meaning making money.21

  Seven years later, Dallas was called back into public service by President Franklin Pierce as his minister to Great Britain. He replaced, of all people, his old and bitter Pennsylvania rival, James Buchanan, who had resigned to challenge Pierce for the presidency. Also surprisingly, after Buchanan was elected, he kept Dallas in the London post until he resigned in May 1861 and returned home, where three and a half years later Dallas died at the age of seventy-two.

  George Mifflin Dallas left behind perhaps the bitterest assessment of the vice presidency of any occupant up to that time. He wrote that with the exception of the obligation to serve as president of the Senate, the vice president “forms no part of the government—he enters into no administrative sphere—he has practically no legislative, executive or judicial functions:—while the Senate sits, he presides, that’s all—he doesn’t debate or vote (except to end a tie); he merely preserves the order and courtesy of business.” Referring to when Congress was in recess, he asked, “Where is he to go? What has he to do?—nowhere, nothing! He might, to be sure, meddle with affairs of state, rummage through the departments, devote his leisure to the study of public questions and interests, holding himself in readiness to counsel to help at every emergency in the great onward movement of the vast machine:—But, then, recollect, that this course would sometimes be esteemed intrusive, sometimes factious, sometimes vain and arrogant, and, as it is prescribed by no law, it could not fail to be treated lightly because guaranteed by no responsibility.”22

  The harshness of this little-regarded vice president’s appraisal aside, his description of the job summed up its significance and utilization about as well as it then warranted and deserved. Dallas’s words were an indictment of the office, of the haphazard process that had placed him in it, and of the president under whom he served, for failure to make more of its potential for constructive public service. It was an indictment that would remain valid for most vice presidencies well into the next century.

  MILLARD FILLMORE

  OF NEW YORK

  After more than half a century of American presidencies serving their full four-year terms, for the second time in eight years a vice president was elevated to the first office in 1850. President Zachary Taylor, in the White House only sixteen months, contracted acute gastroenteritis and died, making Millard Fillmore of Buffalo the chief executive.

  Fillmore’s highest public offices prior to obtaining the vice presidency had been as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives and as the state comptroller of New York. Born in the upstate farm town of Locke in 1800, the second of nine children of Nathaniel and Phoebe Fillmore was given his mother’s maiden name for his odd first name.1

  Growing up, young Millard worked his father’s land with little formal schooling. Up to the age of seventeen he could barely read, although he carried a dictionary with him. At nineteen he attended a small academy in New Hope and, with the aid of his future father-in-law, undertook some legal training while becoming a local teacher and subsequently a law clerk in Aurora, eighteen miles from Buffalo. He was admitted to the New York bar in 1824, two years later he married the judge’s daughter Abigail, and in 1830 they settled in Buffalo, where his law practice flourished and they became socially prominent.2

  The city was at the western end of the Erie Canal, and not surprisingly Fillmore became a supporter of Henry Clay’s American System and its emphasis on internal transportation improvements. He caught the eye of the Whig leader Thurlow Weed, who helped him win a seat in the state assembly in 1828, after which Fillmore himself soon became a party leader in the western end of the state. Four years later, when National Republicans and Anti-Masons linked, he was elected to Congress from the Buffalo district, where after a one-term break, taken to deal with the merging of these two factions into the Whig Party, Fillmore served for six more years in the House.

  When the Whigs won the White House and took control of both houses of Congress in 1841, Fillmore became chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, in which he helped engineer passage of the protective Tariff of 1842 over the stiff opposition of President John Tyler. At the end of his latest term, tired of Washington life, he returned to Buffalo again, indicating little ambition for a greater political role. Nevertheless, in the summer of 1843 former president John Quincy Adams visited him and urged him to return to public service. He was thus spurred to pursue the Whig nomination for vice president, but boss Weed favored his close friend and former New York governor William Seward, a bitter Fillmore rival. When Seward expressed no interest in the second national office, Weed urged Fillmore to seek the governorship, opening the way for a draft of Seward for the vice presidential nomination. Fillmore balked, writing a friend, “I need not tell you that I have no desire to run for governor.… I am not willing to be treacherously killed by this pretended kindness.”3

  In 1844, when Henry Clay captured the Whig nomination for president and the vice presidential nomination went to Theodore Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, Fillmore yielded to Weed’s pressure and agreed to stand for governor. But he lost to Democrat Silas Wright, a defeat that also cost Clay the state and, his allies claimed, the presidency. In the process, however, Fillmore emerged as a rival to the Weed-Seward partnership for Whig leadership in New York, and the vice presidency remained in his mind.

  Prior to the 1848 election, General Taylor, a lifelong soldier, insisted he had never entertained the idea of a political career until his Mexican War exploits made him the target of both major parties. “Such an idea never entered my head,” he said, “nor is it likely to enter the head of any sane person.” He declined to take any overt steps to high political office, observing, “If I ever occupy the White House it must be by the spontaneous move of the people.”4

  For some time while he was being courted, Taylor declined even to declare a party preference, finally owning up only that had he voted in the last presidential election (he never had cast a vote in such an election), “it would have been for Mr. Clay.” The man from Kentucky, oft frustrated in his presidential ambitions, wryly commented of Taylor’s seeming qualification for the office, “I wish I could slay a Mexican.”5

  After some regular Whigs champed at his distance from party celebrations and commitments, Taylor finally relented to the point of writing a letter to his son-in-law, Captain John Allison, in April 1848, in which he declared that he would have none of the campaign shenanigans, though admitted, “I AM A WHIG, but not an ultra Whig.” Then he added, “I trust I will not be again called on to make further explanations.”6

  At the Whig convention in May, Clay’s hopes of finally achieving the presidency were dashed by the reluctant political warrior Taylor, who led Clay on the first ballot and widened the lead until he won the nomination over Clay and Winfield Scott on the fourth roll call. Clay, disappointed again, petulantly washed his hands of the whole matter. “Se
lf-respect, the consistency of my character, and my true fame,” he loftily said, “require that I should take no active or partisan agency in the ensuing contest.” With a jibe at the political novice and hero of the Mexican War, he added, “The Whig party has been overthrown by a mere personal party.”7

  With Taylor’s positions on critical Whig issues unspoken, the party leaders wanted his running mate to be a dependable Whig. Fillmore, having run once for the vice presidential nomination in 1844, was a good fit for the profile the party leaders believed was needed to complement Taylor, a warrior much favored in the South and also a longtime Louisiana slave owner. The New Yorker Fillmore deftly walked the line on slavery, declaring it an evil but saying it wasn’t the business of the federal government to say where it could or could not exist in the nation. His embrace of popular sovereignty—leaving slavery’s existence to the choice of each state—was designed to assuage hostile feelings on both sides of the argument, in North and South. Accordingly, Fillmore soon emerged as a northern counterbalance to Taylor the Louisiana slaveholder.

  Taylor’s history on slavery gave the ticket sufficient evidence of where he stood; Fillmore, in his artful dodging on the issue, hoped to mollify the North. Taylor’s complete lack of experience in domestic national issues seemed not to matter at all. If Taylor was to be elected, others of experience would be at his side. The first step was to win the White House, and Fillmore, a demonstrated statewide vote-getter in becoming the comptroller of New York, seemed the right man to help Taylor get there. Furthermore, Fillmore could be offered to the convention as a consolation prize to the disappointed supporters of Clay, as a devotee of the Kentuckian’s American System.