Abigail Powers Fillmore: A teacher and accidental First Lady

Image from: https://issuu.com/wintersking74/docs/080508715x-millard_fillmore_by_paul

Written by law professor Paul Finkelman, Millard Fillmore, in The American President series, focuses much less on the life of Fillmore himself and more on a political and legal analysis of what got him into the office of Vice President in the first place and his policy decisions once President that the author argues would pave the way for Civil War in the long-term and in the short-term prevent Fillmore’s outright election to a term as President. Finkelman spends a large chunk of the middle section of the book discussing the machinations of the Compromise of 1850 and how it was in no way a real compromise and then repetitiously reminding us of Fillmore’s aggressive implementation of the Fugitive Slave Act that was part of that “Compromise.”  

image from:
 http://www.firstladies.org/biographies/firstladies.aspx?biography=14

We are only offered a few small pieces of information about Fillmore’s wife and family. Fillmore came from a poor family in central New York. He was almost entirely self-taught, but met his future wife while briefly enrolled in a local academy. Abigail Powers was a teacher at the school. “She was two years his senior, the daughter of a deceased Baptist minister and the sister of a local judge. Abigail was well read and as sophisticated as one could become at the time in a tiny town in rural central New York” (4-5). Millard and Abigail married in February 1826. Abigail continued teaching for two years after their marriage, making her “the only first lady before the twentieth century to have worked outside the home after marriage” (10). As Finkelman points out, “Her employment after marriage also suggests that while Fillmore was rising in his profession [law], he was hardly economically secure at this time” (10). Abigail remained in Buffalo for much of her husband’s vice presidency. The book says that after Fillmore moved into the White House as President in July 1850, “in the fall Abigail, who had last visited her husband in March, returned to Washington” (72). We learn nothing else about Abigail during her time as First Lady except that either she or her husband started the White House library, and the Fillmore family was personally involved in ordering books (96). Abigail Fillmore died less than a month after President Fillmore left office and their daughter, Mary Abigail, died in July 1854. Finkelman tells us when mentioning her death that Mary Abigail “often served as the official hostess in the White House” (131-32), but we learn nothing else about life in the White House or any other details of the personal lives of the Millard family.  

While reading this book, I was most struck by how much Millard Fillmore seems to have had in common with our current president. While significant differences are that Fillmore did not come from a wealthy family and was a largely self-educated, voracious reader, both Fillmore and 45 had, respectively, little to no political experience and unexpectedly gained their nominations. Each fumbled his way through most of his time in high office – making costly mistakes and lacking any real backbone and leadership abilities in cases where it might have actually been beneficial to himself or the country. At the same time, each proved stubborn in obsessively enforcing unfair and potentially damaging policy and let his fear of outsiders and disregard for the most vulnerable populations dictate his policy and campaigns. And similar to what seems to be the trajectory of the current administration, Millard Fillmore’s “leadership, or lack thereof, did little to either solve the nation’s problems or reduce its tensions. Indeed, his presidency exacerbated both” (4). I’ll let the reader consult Finkelman's book or other research for details and to make their own determination in this regard, but consider this: When Fillmore ran for president again in 1856, he did so under the nomination of the American Party (also known as the Know-Nothing Party) whose slogan was “Americans Must Rule America.” Sound at all familiar?   

Margaret “Peggy” Mackall Smith Taylor: The First Lady rumored to be a recluse

I knew very little about Zachary Taylor going into this read except that he was known as “Old Rough and Ready” and died early in his term supposedly from eating too many cherries. I knew, from a very brief internet search, that his wife actively did not want him to run for president and that she passed off the entertaining duties of First Lady to her daughter. I learned a little more about each of them by reading the brief biography of Zachary Taylor by John S. D. Eisenhower in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.’s The American Presidents Series.  

More than half the book focuses on Zachary Taylor’s military career, on which he built his very brief political career. Taylor, a gentleman farmer from a prominent family, first joined the army in 1808, served in the War of 1812, and became president based on his leadership in the Mexican-American War (when he was in his sixties!). He was elected president later the same year the war ended. Apparently long furloughs for army officers were common in the years between wars, so he spent his time between his plantations in Kentucky and Louisiana and his service at relatively remote military outposts on the frontier. It was unclear from the biography how much time his wife, Margaret, whom he married in 1810, spent at these military outposts or war camps, though the author describes her as “devoted” and a “conscientious helpmeet” who likely spent at least some of her time travelling to be with him. I wish I could have learned more about their marriage. 

The remainder of the book deals with the politics behind the 1848 election and the issues Taylor dealt with during his 16 months in office. One of the driving presumptions of the book is that Taylor, had he lived to serve a full term or two, might have had the most success in postponing or even preventing the Civil War because he was a southern slaveholder who did not support the unmitigated spread of slavery to new states and territories. As such, there is much discussion of the political debates surrounding statehood for Texas, California, New Mexico, and Utah – how their status as slave or free could upset the voting balance in the Senate, issues that were not resolved until shortly after his death with the Compromise of 1850.  

In brief snippets throughout the book we learn of Taylor’s family life, but it is never really enough to paint a full picture. We know he and Margaret Mackall Smith met and were married in 1810 while Taylor was on extended leave in Louisville. We know they had six children, half of whom died young and tragically, including a daughter who married future Confederate President Jefferson Davis only to die of malaria very shortly after their nuptials. When his wife and four daughters suffered with measles in 1820, two of them died and his wife’s health was left “permanently impaired” (described in the timeline at the back of the book as “semi-invalid”). It was, in part, this impaired health that prevented Mrs. Taylor from taking on her expected duties as First Lady. In fact, she so badly wanted a simple domestic life with her husband after the Mexican War, that she actively prayed that someone else would receive the Whig nomination instead of Taylor. Upon Taylor's election to the Presidency, Mrs. Taylor agreed to live at the White House on the compromise that while her husband ran politics and her daughter, Betty Bliss, entertained on the main floor, she enjoyed her simpler domestic life upstairs. Such living arrangements led people to spread rumors that Mrs. Taylor was a simple-minded recluse, while in reality she was likely an educated woman since she came from a prominent family even before marriage. Mrs. Taylor shunned the typical public life of a president’s wife, but she ruled domestic life at the White House, remaining genial and welcoming to the many relatives and personal guests who passed through. 

A few other interesting things of note that came from this book:  

1) While it is true that President Taylor ate large quantities of apples and cherries several days before his death, it is unlikely they were the cause of his death from an unidentified bodily infection. Apparently, other prominent people, including John Clayton, William Seward, George Crawford, and William Bliss, suffered from similar symptoms without having eaten the massive amounts of fruits. 

2) Mrs. Taylor refused to have her husband buried in Washington, D.C., and instead insisted he be buried on a family plantation in Louisville, KY, finally getting him settled there four months after his death. 

3) Apparently, Zachary Taylor coined the term “First Lady,” but not in reference to his own wife or daughter; rather, he used it to describe Dolley Madison at her funeral in 1849 after which it came to apply to the wives of presidents more generally.  

Sarah Childress Polk: A Most Influential First Lady

I’m thinking about changing how I manage this blog, meaning changing my own personal expectations when it comes to writing about the books I read. I take notes while reading each biography, in the hopes that I will refer back to them and compose organized, well-written and thought-out blog posts in a timely manner after completing the books. If anyone has been following along, those well-thought-out posts are scattered and rare and almost never completed in a timely manner. Here I am again, having completed the book months ago and still not written a blog post. Because I want to it to be “scholarly reflection” quality, like back in my grad-school or museum-interning days, but in my current life situation, that motivation is lacking (not impossible, mind you, for any museum hiring managers who may be reading; I am still a fabulous and accomplished writer when presented with the right motivation and focused time). I’m now starting to think that a sentence or a few sentences to summarize the most compelling thing I learned from a book might have to suffice. Maybe with some rambling thoughts to go along with it. Maybe even that minimalist approach won’t be enough to get this writing-averse blogger online to publish something within a week or so of completing a book. But maybe it’s worth a shot.  

With that caveat, Bumgarner’s biography on Sarah Childress Polk is rather direct about the fact that Mrs. Polk was more actively influential in the policy work of the President than any First Lady before her. Mrs. Polk actually served as President Polk’s personal secretary, so she was privy to pretty much everything that came across his desk. Apparently, President Polk was a workaholic who was actually rather weak health-wise and likely could not have performed the work of president without the assistance of his wife, whose advice he not only respected but solicited. So, when it comes to the Mexican-American war, looks like we have more than just one Polk to blame for our colonizing aggression.  

Yet, Bumgarner’s brief biography of Sarah Childress Polk is not the best biography I have ever read. It struggles with a tendency to want to tell amusing or interesting anecdotes that all seem terribly disconnected from each other, any overarching argument, and the general context of the time. So, while I certainly learned things, I often found myself baffled at why I was learning them, why I was being told this particular nugget of information at any given moment, and what it was supposed to tell me about the Polks as people within American history.  

Sarah Childress Polk: What I Know Going In

Nothing. Except that she was apparently a “remarkable First Lady,” according to the title I have chosen for this portion of the blog – Sarah Childress Polk: A Biography of the Remarkable First Lady by John Reed Bumgarner. I chose the book because it was the only one I could find on Mrs. Polk that wasn’t written for children. It’s relatively short at less than 200 pages, so hopefully it won’t take too long to learn many new things. 

Image from Amazon.com

Julia Gardiner Tyler: Northern Socialite by Birth, Southern Secessionist by Marriage

Julia Gardiner Tyler. Image from Wikimedia Commons

Julia Gardiner Tyler (JGT) was born into a moderately wealthy and generally well-connected New York family in 1820. Her education included boarding school and a European grand tour, through which she underwent serious academic studies, learned proper feminine skills, and experienced the grandeur of European royalty against the visible poverty of many European cities and the famine in Ireland. When she was presented to the Washington, D.C., social scene in her early twenties, she was well-prepared to engage in both the heated political debates of the time and the flurry of social activity that netted her a prominent husband. While at least one critic would accuse JGT of fulfilling selfish and blind ambitions by flirting her way to the top, being seen as desirable while politically savvy and knowledgeable was an ideal expression of womanhood at the time that would have certainly attracted politically powerful and socially prominent men, including the president. John Tyler and JGT were married in 1844.  

While her mother expected JGT to fulfill her domestic duties while in the White House through more menial tasks like cleaning and redecorating, JGT preferred to spent her time serving as her husband’s trusted friend, hostess, and political aide. With Dolley Madison as a mentor, she made White House receptions as elegant as possible, added excitement to Tyler’s final year in office, and did all she could to use the receptions to aid in her husband’s bid for annexation of Texas. When it became obvious that Tyler would not seek reelection, JGT was disappointed that her time of national prominence was cut short but dutifully devoted herself to the life of a Southern wife at the Tyler retirement home in Virginia, Sherwood Forest.  

What I found most striking about JGT was her ability to adapt to the gendered expectations of her time when going from Northern socialite to First Lady to Southern plantation wife. Relatively indifferent to slavery as a Northern woman, JGT “enthusiastically embraced and defended Southern culture and its definition of womanhood” after moving to Sherwood Forest. While not immune from the influence of her upbringing and family in the North, she was intent on being a proper Southern wife and woman. She learned to manage a plantation of slaves but hired white women to help with rearing her children. She maintained an image of traditional wife, a gentle woman making personal sacrifices for the love of her husband, but became increasingly independent and honed her skills in self-sufficiency.  By 1853, she publicly defended the peculiar institution with a published pro-slavery essay in which she appealed to gender roles of proper Southern women who never criticized their homeland. When war finally came, she seceded along with the Tyler family, but took advantage of her Northern connections to find safety for herself and her children in New York after John Tyler’s death in 1862. Indeed, JGT remained in the North after the war, converted to Catholicism in the 1870s, and became somewhat more tolerant of people outside her own race and class.  

In some ways, JGT lived an opposite trajectory from Sarah Grimke, of whose life I recently read a fictionalized version in Sue Monk Kidd’s The Invention of Wings. Sarah Grimke lived with but despised slavery during her upbringing in Charleston, South Carolina. When accompanying her father on a failed attempt to rejuvenate his health in the North, she was introduced to Quaker ideals and dedicated herself to conversion. She eventually moved North permanently and became one of the most famous abolitionists of her time, along with her sister Angelina, by using her personal experience of Southern slavery to speak out against it. I think the lives of JGT and Sarah Grimke show how location and societal expectations can dictate how one lives and the way they choose to define themselves.  

When reading about JGT, I was also struck by how common it is for Presidents and First Ladies to live lives of wealth and comfort but to do so while buried in financial debt. The comparable situation that stands out most in my mind is that of Dolley Madison. JGT’s most significant contribution in this case was her fight for a pension for all surviving First Ladies. In 1881, Congress awarded her $1200 a year, but Julia argued for equality to Mary Todd Lincoln, who was awarded $3,000 annually in 1870.  After the assassination of President Garfield, the measure passed in 1882 at $5,000 annually for all Presidential widows—at that time Garfield, Lincoln, Polk, and Tyler—allowing JGT to live the last several years of her life in Richmond with her sons. 

Julia Gardiner Tyler: What I Know Going In

In finding a text for this entry of the blog, I have learned that John Tyler had four First Ladies (official and acting) during his presidency of just under four years. His first wife, Letitia Christian Tyler, died while her husband was in office, so her tenure as official First Lady was relatively short: 4 April 1841 – 10 September 1842. Even shorter was the tenure of Tyler's second wife, Julia Gardiner Tyler: 26 June 1844 – 4 March 1845. In between marriages, Tyler had his daughter-in-law, Priscilla Cooper Tyler, and, very briefly, his daughter, Letitia "Letty" Tyler, control hostess duties. From what I have gathered through quick scans of information online, Priscilla Cooper Tyler apparently took on White House hostess duties in place of Tyler's first wife, who was physically unable to do so, and continued on after Letitia's death until moving away from Washington in the spring of 1944.  

While this information should probably lead me to be reading two or even three books, I have chosen to read just one. There is no monograph-length piece on Letitia Christian Tyler. And while there is an older biography of Priscilla Cooper Tyler, written by John Tyler's great-granddaughter, I have decided to make things easier on myself and disqualify her as "unofficial" and focus on a biography of Julia Tyler written by an historian perhaps a tiny bit more objective than a family member. I have obtained a digital copy of Theodore C. DeLaney's 1995 Dissertation, Julia Gardiner Tyler: A Nineteenth Century Woman, which will serve as my education on this brief era in Presidential history. Yes, there is a massive biography of John and Julia Tyler by Robert Seager, first published in 1963. But who wants to read 700 pages of outdated pros about both John and Julia, when I can just easily get my hands on 300 pages of updated information on just Julia? Neither was available on the shelves at the public library, so the shorter female-centric study was the way to go.