Millard Fillmore
... run for Presidency. He was a member of the Whigs party. He became a member of the Whigs in the 1830’s. In congress, Fillmore was a strong supporter of Henry Clay of Kentucky. Clay was also a member of the Whig party. Fillmore didn’t run for the reelection to congress in the year of 1842, although he had hoped for the Vice Presidential nomination on Clay’s Whig Presidential ticket. Fillmore didn’t win. The convention of 1844 gave second place to Theodore Frelinghuysen from New Jersey. Fillmore settled for the Whig nomination for governor of New York. Democratic opponent, Jilas Wright, beat Fillmore, and Clay lost the decisive New York vote. Fillmore tried to blame the defeat on upstate abolitionists and some of the Irish, Roman-Catholic immigrants in New York. The second in power to governing among New York offices was the state comptrollership, this was an office that supervised public finances and superintended the banks. The Whigs elected Fillmore for comptroller in 1847. While doing this, he beat his opponent by a plurality of thirty thousand. This was the largest margin ever gained by any Whig elected to that office. In 1848, Fillmore’s friend, Henry Clay, lost the presidential nomination to General Zachary Taylor. Fillmore became Vice President in 1850. When Taylor’s cabinet resigned, President Fillmore’s choice of a cabinet showed unmistakably that, as a moderate Whig and a believer in sectionalism, he favored compromise to avoid a national crisis. Fillmore’s signing and enforcement of the fugitive slave law was very important. Seward, of the anti-slavery Whigs, opposed Fillmore, and he countered this by removing pro-seward men from federal office. The most important thing of Fillmore’s foreign policy was his sanction of a plan to open Japan to world commerce. This had been prohibited there for more than two hundred years. In January of 1852, the command of Naval expedition was entrusted to Commodore Matthew C. Perry. Later, in July of 1853, after Fillmore had left the Presidency, Perry arrived in Japan with four men-of-war. During the Election of 1852, Fillmore hoped for the Whig Presidential nomination. All of the Southern Whigs that knew he was their supporter backed him up at...