1856 President Millard Fillmore

Had Fillmore won the election of 1856, let's say Buchanan dies before the election and so his voters vote for Fillmore instead, how would his second presidency have looked like? I read a story once which has this happen with Fillmore enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law and causing riots in New England leading to their secession. How plausible is this? If it isn't realistic, what do you think Fillmore would've done with his presidency? Thanks
 
Had Fillmore won the election of 1856, let's say Buchanan dies before the election and so his voters vote for Fillmore instead, how would his second presidency have looked like? I read a story once which has this happen with Fillmore enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law and causing riots in New England leading to their secession. How plausible is this? If it isn't realistic, what do you think Fillmore would've done with his presidency? Thanks

Huh? How exactly? or why?

Fillmore was a whig? You honestly think he has the chance of getting the Democratic nomination?

I mean, sans Buchanan, you have Breckenridge, Douglas or Franklin Pierce.....
 
Well despite how he wins the election, a Fillmore Presidency would be very interesting. You’d definitely see a banishment or severe limitation of immigration, and anti-Catholic sentiment would be at an all time high. As for the rest of the problems I wouldn’t be sure.
 
Huh? How exactly? or why?

Fillmore was a whig? You honestly think he has the chance of getting the Democratic nomination?

I mean, sans Buchanan, you have Breckenridge, Douglas or Franklin Pierce.....
I didn't say anything about him getting the Democratic nomination so I'm not sure where you got that. I said that Buchanan dies shortly before the election, so the people who would've voted for Buchanan vote for Fillmore instead
 
Well despite how he wins the election, a Fillmore Presidency would be very interesting. You’d definitely see a banishment or severe limitation of immigration, and anti-Catholic sentiment would be at an all time high. As for the rest of the problems I wouldn’t be sure.
Would it though? Fillmore himself wasn't really a Know-Nothing and the Know-Nothings dont control Congress so are they able to even push their agenda?
 
I didn't say anything about him getting the Democratic nomination so I'm not sure where you got that. I said that Buchanan dies shortly before the election, so the people who would've voted for Buchanan vote for Fillmore instead


Why wouldn't they just vote for the new Democratic candidate, whoever that was?
 
Why wouldn't they just vote for the new Democratic candidate, whoever that was?
If Buchanan dies too close to the election, the Democrats will be unable to coalesce around a new candidate. Douglas will likely try to be the new nominee, but the campaigning season will already be pretty much over. With the Democratic Party in shambles, voters would likely turn to Fillmore, who they already know as a previous president.
 
The question is though what would Filmore get done and how would he react to the Dred Scotf decision. At one point he had to pick a side or he’d be a lame duck for four years.
 
If Buchanan dies too close to the election, the Democrats will be unable to coalesce around a new candidate. Douglas will likely try to be the new nominee, but the campaigning season will already be pretty much over. With the Democratic Party in shambles, voters would likely turn to Fillmore, who they already know as a previous president.


Didn't most voters in those days just vote a straight party ticket? If no other candidate was chosen, most Democrats could still vote for Buchanan or, more accurately, for the Democratic slate of Electors. The latter, if no one else has been chosen prior to election day, will presumably vote for Breckenridge as POTUS and someone else as VP. Given the strength of Party loyalty back then, this is more likely than Democrats going over en masse to a Whig.
 
The question is though what would Filmore get done and how would he react to the Dred Scotf decision. At one point he had to pick a side or he’d be a lame duck for four years.
Indeed. I tend to agree with the story I read which posits that Fillmore would attempt to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law (which he also did in his actual presidency, which caused tensions in New England) and cause more tension in New England states. Whether or not they would secede as a result is another question
 
Didn't most voters in those days just vote a straight party ticket? If no other candidate was chosen, most Democrats could still vote for Buchanan or, more accurately, for the Democratic slate of Electors. The latter, if no one else has been chosen prior to election day, will presumably vote for Breckenridge as POTUS and someone else as VP. Given the strength of Party loyalty back then, this is more likely than Democrats going over en masse to a Whig.
You don't seem to understand that I'm having Buchanan die only a few days before the election. How are the Democrats supposed to find and agree on a candidate in such a short amount of time? Besides, this argument is pointless since I'm asking what Fillmore would do in his presidency.
 
A better POD is that Pierce is renominated and that Fillmore runs a more active campaign. An interesting earlier POD is Pierce's son not getting killed, leading to a more active Pierce, but he pardoxically makes himself more unpopular among the general public than OTL but more able to get renominated.

Pierce beat Winfield Scott in 1852 by an electoral vote landslide, and by a wide popular vote margin by the standards of his time, but he still beat Scott by a nationwide popular vote margin of only 7%, getting a bare majority of the vote. In 1852 IOTL, Buchanan got 45% of the nationwide popular vote to 33% for Fremont and 22% for Fillmore. Pierce was not a popular or effective President and less popular than Buchanan.

Can this elect Fillmore? I don't think any Democratic presidential candidate of that era gets below 40% until the party becomes really unpopular in the late 1850s and splits. Lets push the nationwide popular vote to Pierce down to 40%, the bare minimum, and give Fillmore 41%, doubling his IOTL performance, leaving 14% Fremont, still an improvement over the 4% that the Free Soiler Hale got in 1852. We can make the Democrats really unpopular and have the vote coalesce around Fillmore. You can give Pierce a few more percentage points but you have to raise Fillmore's points as well to pull this off.

In the 15 slave states, Fremont was either not on the ballot at all, or (in Maryland and Delaware) was on the ballot but got minimal support. Fremont electors polled 595 votes in these states combined. Fillmore won Maryland IOTL and picks up any of the others only due to Pierce's greater unpopularity, which probably would not be as bad in these states. But IOTL he came within 5$ of Buchanan in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Louisiana, and given that Kentucky and Tennessee voted for Scott, Fillmore can win these ITTL. Along with Maryland, these give him 38 electoral votes. Fillmore needs 149 electoral votes to win an electoral college majority. The only other slave states where he has a chance are Missouri, where he finished 9% behind IOTL and had 9 electoral votes, and Delaware, 11% behind and 3 electoral votes. Lets leave him with the 38 electoral votes and see if Filmore can get the other 111 from the free states.

The only free state where Fremont got less than 20% of the vote was, somewhat paradoxically given his ties to that state, California where he got just above 18%. However, if we adopt the model of a more viable Fillmore campaign and northern and Whig opinion rallying around Fillmore, I think its a better model to just give Fillmore three fifths of the Fremont vote ITTL, leaving Fremont with 14% of the popular vote and carrying no states. Its very possible as a strong third party candidate to have a fairly strong nationwide popular vote percentage and carry no states; this happened with Van Buren in 1848 and Perot in 1992, plus Fillmore in 1856 and LaFollette in 1924 carried only one state each, all these candidates got over 17% of the nationwide popular vote. Major party candidates Taft (1912), Landon (1936), McGovern (1972) and Mondale (1984) also only carried one or two states each with popular vote percentage ranging from 26% to just above 40%, though the latter three were in two candidate contests.

Just transfering 60% of Fremont's support to Fillmore gives Fillmore the Fremont states of New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont for 57 electoral votes. IOTL he got only 1% of the vote in Vermont, but Vermont was a Scott state and I think in this scenario we have the Whigs coalesce around Fillmore and him carrying all the Whig strongholds. That gets Fillmore to 95 electoral votes, with 54 to go.

The 60% model doesn't give Fillmore any northern Buchanan states, but I will give him Pennsylvania, New Jersey,and California. The 60% model gets Fillmore close, he had significant support in those states IOTL, and well Pierce is unpopular. New Jersey is a little bit of a stretch since even Lincoln could never carry New Jersey. These three states provide another 48 electoral votes, for a total of 143.

To get Fillmore over the top, Ill will give him Illinois. It went 44% to Buchanan to 40% to Fremont to 15% to Fillmore IOTL. You can have Pierce fall out with Douglas to the point where the Democratic machine in Illinois sits things out. I thought of having Lincoln and Fillmore's VP, but his VP would be a southerner and IOTL it was a Tennesee pol which he needs to be able to carry Tennessee.

If you want to throw any states to Fremont in this scenario, Maine, Wisconsin, and Michigan are good candidates. They are all traditionally Democratic states in the second party system, where Fremont did really well and where Fillmore had next to no support. These are all good places for a Free Soil/ Liberty type candidate to break through even if the northern Whigs rally around a more traditional Whig candidate.
 
You don't seem to understand that I'm having Buchanan die only a few days before the election. How are the Democrats supposed to find and agree on a candidate in such a short amount of time? Besides, this argument is pointless since I'm asking what Fillmore would do in his presidency.


I understand perfectly. But it's academic since Fillmore was a distant third in most northern states, so if any significant number of northern Democrats switch to him, this will throw their states to Fremont, so that he, not Fillmore, will be the beneficiary. After all, if the Dems don't have time to agree on a candidate of their own, they certainly won't have time to persuade their voters to support Fillmore.

Most likely, the various State Democratic parties just have agents at the polls telling their people to vote for Buchanan anyway, because his Vice-President will take over the same as if he died after the election. If the Democratic ticket wins by about the same margin as OTL, then the fun will start when the democratic Electors have to agree on a candidate. If 149 of hem vote for the same man, then he becomes POTUS. If not, the election goes into the HoR.
 
Theoretically, Fillmore could be elected in the following way: If in addition to Maryland (which he carried in OTL) , he also carried Louisiana, Tennessee, and Kentucky (in all three states he got at least 47.46% of the vote), then the result would be: 144 electoral votes for Buchanan, 114 for Fremont, and 38 for Fillmore. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1856 So Buchanan falls short of a majority in the Electoral College, and the race goes into the House. In theory, Fillmore could win there if in addition to Whigs-Americans, he gets the support of Republicans who consider his election a lesser evil than that of Buchanan or a deadlock that will make the vice-president chosen by the Senate (i.e., Breckinridge) president.

Because the parties were in flux, it is impossible to give an exact breakdown of party strength in the House in 1856. But here is the breakdown given by Congressional Quarterly's Guide to U.S. Elections third edition):

Democrats--10 states (Alabama, Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia)

Republicans--7 states (Illinois, Indiana, Maine, Michigan, Ohio, Vermont, Wisconsin)

Whig--4 states (Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania)

(It may seem bizarre that Missouri, which had always been one of the Whigs' weakest states, elected six Whig congressmen out of seven in 1854. The explanation is the split between pro- and anti-Benton Democrats. Anyway, by 1855 most Missouri Whigs drifted into the American party. As for New York, out of 33 seats, it had 16 Whig congressmen, and 11 nominated by both Whigs and Americans.)

Americans (slave states)--3 states (Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland)

Americans (free states)--4 states (Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island). All antislavery, all pro-Fremont by 1856.

Democratic-American tie--2 states (Tennessee, Texas)

Democratic-Republican tie--1 state (Iowa)

In short, Republicans or North Americans (as the Americans who came out for Fremont in 1856 were called) seem to dominate eleven delegations, Democrats ten, pro-Fillmore Americans, four (Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri) I suspect that by 1856 even the relatively conservative Whigs/Americans of New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania were largely for Fremont. [1] And Tennessee, Texas, and Iowa are all evenly split between Democrats and either Americans or Republicans.

My feeling, though, is that there would be enough Republicans who just could not stomach Fillmore (believing him a "doughface" no better then Buchanan) that there will be a deadlock, and VP-elect Breckinridge will become president.

If Fillmore is elected, though, one thing is certain: he will *not* approve the Lecompton Constitution. In OTL, "Millard Fillmore considered the action of the Lecompton convention "so infamous a fraud" that it would provoke the entire North to rise up against it."
https://books.google.com/books?id=Q5WF8NCK9YYC&pg=PA28

[1] FWIW, the following "Whig" or "Whig-American" congressmen from New York for the 34th Congress are listed by CQ as "Republican" candidates (successful or not) for the 35th: James S. T. Stranahan (2nd District); Guy R. Pelton (3rd); Abram Wakeman (8th); Ambrose S. Murray (10th); Edward Dodd (15th); Orsamus B. Matteson (20th); Henry Bennett (21st); Amos P. Granger (24th); Edwin B. Morgan (25th); John M. Parker (27th); William H. Kelsey (28th). Only two--Solomon Haven of the 32nd and Francis G. Edwards of the 33rd--ran for re-election as Americans (unsuccessfully in both cases). Haven was Fillmore's former law partner, and as late as 1857 he assured Fillmore that the American party had a bright future: "I think the Republican vote was accidental last fall...the causes which produced it are nearly extinct already. If our boys can hold on two years...one side or the other will come to our party." (Quoted in Tyler Anbinder, *Nativism and Slavery*, p. 247.)
 
I didn't say anything about him getting the Democratic nomination so I'm not sure where you got that. I said that Buchanan dies shortly before the election, so the people who would've voted for Buchanan vote for Fillmore instead

If Buchanan dies too close to the election, the Democrats will be unable to coalesce around a new candidate. Douglas will likely try to be the new nominee, but the campaigning season will already be pretty much over. With the Democratic Party in shambles, voters would likely turn to Fillmore, who they already know as a previous president.

You don't seem to understand that I'm having Buchanan die only a few days before the election. How are the Democrats supposed to find and agree on a candidate in such a short amount of time? Besides, this argument is pointless since I'm asking what Fillmore would do in his presidency.

If Buchana dies only a few days before there is a greater chance the southern states would vote for Breckenridge regardless. Given that Fillmore only won Maryland in OTL, he might get an uptick of votes in the North, and maybe some border states, but I would say it may possibly go to the house if Fillmore wins more states.....
 
Also, of course, it is only necessary for the Democratic parties in five Northern States - NJ, PA, IN, IL, CA - to name new candidates. The rest of the North is going to vote for Fremont anyway, so it doesn't really matter what happens there. And so long as the Dems win PA they can be sure of a House election in which at least one Democrat will be eligible.

One other point. How long would it take for the news of Buchanan's death to reach the majority of the nation? I know that telegraph lines existed, but how widespread were they in 1856? Could we get substantial numbers of people voting for Buchanan because the news of his death had not yet reached them?
 
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