The Lady and the President

The Letters of Dorothea Dix and Millard Fillmore

Charles M. Snyder

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813186597
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Letteratura epistolare

When the private papers of Millard Fillmore, thought to have been destroyed in 1889, were discovered they proved to include a large number of letters to Fillmore from Dorothea Dix, the renowned crusader for the humane treatment of the insane. Almost simultaneously, the letters of Fillmore to Dix, which had lain forgotten in a private collection since 1887, became available.

Thus overnight a correspondence of more than a hundred and fifty letters, spanning nearly twenty years, opened new perspectives upon two prominent Americans whose friendship was known to few during their lifetimes and had long been forgotten by historians.

All the extant correspondence between the thirteenth President of the United States and the humanitarian reformer is published here for the first time. Charles M. Snyder provides an illuminating background on the principles and a running commentary on the events that shaped their lives and their relationship.

The Lady & the President provides a wealth of raw material for a reinterpretation of these two neglected figures, offering new insights into their warm personal relations, their roles as national leaders, and the perilous times in which they lived.

1

Beginnings

American women cast off from traditional moorings in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. With deliberation the ladies began to steer toward an uncertain future.

Propelling them was a tide of American achievement won by the labor and ingenuity of earlier generations on a virgin continent fabulously rich in natural resources. Material prosperity was liberating women from the heavier burdens of their mothers and grandmothers—but at the price of restricting their activities to the home. Here they were to practice the rites of fragile femininity and live in sublime accordance with the Victorian mystique.

American women, it came to be assumed, were created with mental powers peculiar to their sex. They were intuitive, not logical. They were unable to grasp higher mathematics, political theory, and philosophy. They were therefore unsuited for many positions. They were more spiritual and moral than men, and more delicate and modest. Women were ordained to be helpers, teachers, and preservers, not competitors. Before these notions came into effect, Ruth Holmes Marshall, a young woman from Buffalo, New York, had emigrated as a bride to the frontier on horseback. She rode alone to the Illinois prairie and the upcountry of South Carolina. But in the age of Victoria her unmarried granddaughter, in her late twenties and the product of contemporary mores, had to be accompanied by relatives or friends whenever she traveled—and delivered carefully to the home of her host.

In this milieu few readers of the popular Godey’s Lady’s Book and Magazine found fault with its admonitions to avoid feminist groups and shun political issues. These only made sex conspicuous. Woman’s sphere was not a public one, and there was nothing more unlovely than a female politician. Defects in the laws should be left to “our rulers and statesmen.”¹

The same publication advised women to join exclusively female social gatherings at which music, conversation, and kindred intellectual engagements were pursued. It told women to assist in the education of poor but talented youths. It told them, as mothers, to work in their homes for the cause of peace.

But there were misfits—young women, frequently daughters of professional families, who received at home liberal educations that went beyond the restrictive curricula of female schools. And there were unmarried women who rebelled against society’s preconceived role for spinsters—a life of self-abnegation and sacrifice spent in ministering to others in the home and local community. Married and unmarried women chafed against the limited opportunities available to the professional woman. She might teach children, write for magazines that catered to conventional types, and occasionally find success as an “authoress” of novels. But prevailing assumptions of what was proper virtually eliminated all women from the business and civic worlds.

Dissidents drove an opening wedge into the system with the antislavery movement. Women’s antislavery societies were not inconsistent with existing organizations for domestic and foreign missions. But when the South Carolina-born Grimke sisters obtained the platform of the predominantly male American Antislavery Society (the invitation had received the blessing of William Lloyd Garrison despite protests by some associates), a milestone was passed and a precedent broken. Women had addressed a mixed audience! When Angelina Grimke strayed from her text to advocate woman’s rights, she was warned by the poet Whittier that her action was destructive to antislavery. Angelina retorted that women could do little against slavery while they were under the feet of men!

The temperance crusade was also a godsend to malcontents looking for a cause. They entered into it enthusiastically, and Susan Anthony and Frances Willard made their first platform appearances in its behalf.

Ultimately, in 1848, a handful of the female leaders of antislavery and temperance, headed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, assembled at Seneca Falls in western New York. There the ladies drafted a declaration of rights, paraphrasing the Declaration of Independence but amending it to read “that all Men and Women are created equal.” Their declaration and resolutions were a call for a second American Revolution.

At mid-century the women’s rights movement remained without an effectual national organization, and many of its goals would have to await the twentieth century. But it did not lack again for individual spokesmen and inspiration. Emma Willard in education, Elizabeth Blackwell in medicine, Clara Barton in nursing, Harriet Beecher Stowe in literature, Margaret Fuller in philosophy, Amelia Bloomer in dress reform, and a tight phalanx of fellow workers were challenging Victorian concepts and providing guidelines for a new American woman.

One who challenged the concepts head-on was Dorothea Dix. As the advocate for improved care of the mentally deranged, Dorothea became a polished political strategist and an indefatigable tactician. She met on equal terms with top statesmen of her time, and she captured their support for her cause. To this slender woman from New England most of them also gave their respect. One of them, a President of the United States, gave special affection.

There is no record of the first meeting between Dorothea Dix and Millard Fillmore, but evidence of an early appointment and its approximate date is supplied by a letter written by a mutual friend and dated April 12, 1850. It introduces Miss Dix to Vice President Fillmore.²

Considering Dorothea’s dislike for formal hearings and her preference for person-to-person relationships, they probably met in the Vice President’s office, a high vaulted room a few yards from the entrance to the Senate chamber. The office, warmed and brightened by a classical marble fireplace, would soon become a robing room for the Supreme Court when the Senate moved into a new north wing. It was just a short walk down the poorly lighted corridors of the old Capitol from the Congressional Library, where Dorothea had improvised a headquarters to press for legislative action on a Federal land grant to provide hospitals for the indigent insane.

The fifty-year-old Vice President would have been hospitable and his manner impeccable. He was not unaware that women found him handsome. The heavy blond hair of his youth had whitened prematurely, but his muscular frame remained athletic and his pinkish complexion radiated vitality. At forty-eight Dorothea provided a physical contrast to the increasingly rotund Vice President. Tall and spare, she had dark luxuriant hair that parted to frame an oval face and accentuate large and beautiful blue eyes. Her plain dress, unadorned by jewelry, suggested a natural dignity. Having demonstrated her capability to direct statewide campaigns for the humane treatment of the insane, Dorothea would have shown the Vice President a quiet confidence and dignity she had lacked as a younger woman. Her innate shyness then would have precluded such an interview. Three months later, on July 9, 1850, Fillmore’s importance in Dorothea’s scheme of things was enhanced unexpectedly when Zachary Taylor’s death elevated him to the Presidency.

Between the two there appears to have been a special meeting of minds and an immediate understanding of each other’s needs and aspirations. In this slender, almost frail, soft-spoken woman Fillmore saw the personification of hope for the most miserable of humankind. In the untried Chief Executive, facing a political crisis unprecedented in the nation’s history, Dorothea discerned a leader at once sensitive to sectional cleavages and committed to compromise and reconciliation. Their early meetings laid foundations for a personal friendship, a mutual trust, and, in time, a deep emotional involvement.

A relationship initiated in behalf of Dorothea’s land grant bill broadened to encompass the Washington scene, patronage, social reform, politics, and the sectional crisis. Both Fillmore and Dorothea seem to have assumed at the outset that they spoke to each other in confidence, with only a few persons admitted on occasion to their privacy. The interview, begun in the Vice Presidential office and later resumed in the family quarters of the White House, soon incorporated the entire family. At times the relationship included Fillmore’s wife, Abigail, his son, Powers, twenty-two, and his daughter, Abby (Mary Abigail), eighteen. Dorothea enjoyed the informality of their home life and was a frequent caller. She preferred to come and go as one of the family, and to avoid formal dinners and receptions. She advised Abby on her reading and Abigail on her health. She became a foil for Fillmore’s humor and exchanged keepsakes with him.

When she left Washington to attend to the building of asylums in the South, Dorothea sent to Fillmore detailed reports on political attitudes there. On one occasion, after she forwarded laudatory newspaper editorials about his administration with additional praise of her own, Fillmore’s next letter joked about her flattery. But Dorothea did not see the humor. She insisted that “high esteem” of his character and her “friendly regard and esteem” were based solely on the President’s “moral worth and strong mindedness.” She spoke and wrote, she said, only the “language of truth and soberness.” And while she did not consider a frequent exchange of letters during her absence from Washington to be feasible, considering the claims on the time of both and the possibility that other persons “in the strange world wherein we are dwellers” might place a false interpretation on their friendship, Dorothea suggested that if Fillmore esteemed her, their correspondence might continue indefinitely, “perhaps always.”³

Abigail’s death just after the termination of Fillmore’s term of office brought Dorothea closer to the stricken family, and when Abby died unexpectedly a year later, she was momentarily distraught. She wrote to Fillmore: “I cannot be silent. . . . I must mourn with you.”⁴ “My heart is aching for you . . . [and] you have not at any time this week past [been] out of my thoughts. . . . I sit here alone in my room and think of you. . . . I am powerless to cheer your broken heart.”⁵

If Fillmore’s personal tragedies deepened their attachment, they also complicated their relationship. Dorothea, committed at least to one Victorian concept of what was proper, could not simply drop in to see a widower in Buffalo as she had visited a President in the White House. Whenever she made calls, she was attentive to conventions, and when their paths crossed in Europe in 1855 and 1856, she firmly reminded Fillmore that since he was no longer President he would be expected to call on her, not vice versa!⁶

Although the involvement between Fillmore and Dorothea was probably known to their closest associates, it has been long forgotten. Dorothea is not mentioned in the biographies of Fillmore. He is given few lines in hers.⁷ The reason is apparent. The personal papers of Fillmore had been burned—or so it seemed—by a decision of his son, Powers, who provided for their destruction in his will. Historians had lamented this shortsightedness ever since Powers’ death in 1889. But unobtrusively Charles D. Marshall, a Buffalo lawyer and one of the executors of Powers’ will, moved the papers to his home a few blocks from the Fillmore mansion and stored them in his attic. There they remained until Marshall’s death twenty years later.

C. Sidney Shepard, a cousin of Marshall who attended his funeral, purchased the papers in the attic, apparently without realizing that they contained Presidential manuscripts. Shepard had them boxed securely and expressed to his home in the quiet village of New Haven, New York. There under a stairway in the cool cellar of his sprawling house they lay for another sixty years, until their recent discovery. An examination in 1969 revealed that they exceeded ten thousand items and extended from Fillmore’s youth to old age.

Equally surprising, Fillmore’s letters to Dorothea became available simultaneously at Harvard University after they had lain in a private collection since Dorothea’s death in 1887.

Thus overnight a correspondence of more than a hundred and fifty letters opens new perspectives upon two prominent, long-neglected Americans, with insights into their warm personal relations, their roles as national leaders, and the perilous times in which they lived.

2

Millard Fillmore

EARLY YEARS

On July 9, 1850, President Zachary Taylor, the rugged hero of Buena Vista, died after an illness of five days. Physicians attributed his death to “cholera morbus” resulting from an overexposure to sunshine and an overindulgence in cold fruits and drinks. Unwisely, the President had participated too vigorously in prolonged ceremonies commemorating the nation’s seventy-third anniversary. The festivities had taken place at the Washington Monument, then a stubby shaft just a few feet high. In accordance with the American system Taylor was replaced at once by Vice President Millard Fillmore.

In the early years of the republic the Vice Presidency had been filled by towering figures like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. But the Twelfth Amendment, which separated the balloting for President and Vice President after the abortive coup of Aaron Burr and the Federalists to snatch the Presidency from Jefferson in 1800, had downgraded the Vice Presidency. In the ensuing half-century the office grew increasingly political in character.

Like most Vice Presidents after 1800 Fillmore would not have been considered for the top spot. He was hardly the equal of Webster as an orator, or of Clay or Calhoun as a congressional leader, or of Thurlow Weed or Van Buren as a machine politician. Yet his elevation to high station was not altogether accidental.

Unlike the apologetic Webster he was born in a primitive log cabin on January 7, 1800, on the frontier of central New York in the town of Summerville. His father, Nathaniel, and his mother, Phoebe Millerd Fillmore, natives of Vermont and Massachusetts respectively, had purchased a bounty lot there, sight unseen.

They soon lost the land due to a “bad title,” a misfortune which Fillmore later termed a blessing. The lot was unproductive and isolated. They then leased a farm in Niles, a few miles away, on the west side of Skaneateles Lake, but this site also was sparsely settled, and opportunities for schooling were infrequent and of short duration.

From the age of ten young Millard could be spared only for brief periods from work on the farm. At fifteen he was apprenticed to a wool-carder and cloth-dresser at New Hope, a growing hamlet about a mile from his home. Here he worked from June to December, leaving the remaining months of the year for farm labor and schooling. He later recalled that while he attended the carding machines he placed a dictionary on a desk which he passed while feeding the machine and removing the rolls. “. . . In this way I could have a moment in which to look at a word and read its definition, and could then fix it in my memory.”¹

At eighteen during the off-season at the mill Fillmore taught a short winter term in a district school, an employment that probably tested his ability to handle the rod more than the alphabet. But it also taught him his academic inadequacies. He joined a tiny circulating library and the following winter earned the costs of a term in a short-lived academy by chopping wood for two days for each week spent in the classroom.

At the academy he met Abigail Powers, who like himself was a product of the New York frontier. Unlike him, however, she was spared the struggle against poverty and isolation. Though her father, a Baptist preacher, had died during her infancy, her mother, brothers, and sisters were able to provide her with a liberal education in their home in Kelloggsville, a short walk from New Hope. Abigail had opportunities to cultivate aesthetic tastes denied to most of her neighbors including a love of literature, music, and flowers. And if her personal charm and graceful movements drew Fillm...