“The law is the only sure protection of the weak, and the only efficient restraint upon the strong.”
Millard Fillmore, right? I mean, President Fillmore is one the guys who is really unknown, un-remembered. Most people can name at least 10 Presidents. The “educated” can probably get close to 20. Yet, even for the historian, there are about 5-10 presidents that are always lost to us….Millard is one of those guys. He served from 1850-1853, as the second Vice-President to take over the office when the President had died unexpectedly, as his President, Zachary Taylor did after only one year in office. Fillmore served in the tumultuous decade of the 1850s when the country was headed to its next great crisis. I have been writing for years that our 2010-2020 decade could be exactly like the 1850s…the run-up to the country’s next great crisis.
Maybe, maybe not…we’ll see as these last five years play out….in any case, I think this quote speaks of how Fillmore looked at the country as the first notes of national crisis sounded. The abolition movement was determined to not be silenced and when Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in 1852, that struggle took on an even greater tension. From both sides was a decision to no longer be bound by the law, and both abolitionists and slaveholders turned to violence to make their point. That struggle would explode in warfare in the 1854-1855 period known as “Bleeding Kansas.”
Our country was founded on a core concept known as the social contract, first mentioned by Thomas Hobbes and then enshrined by John Locke. The basic premise is that each citizen will obey the law in deference to one another, and as I expect you to obey, you will expect me to obey, and in that, we won’t need a central government to watch us all the time or rule over us as in a police state. Fillmore watched with some concern when citizens decided that they would move beyond the law. It wasn’t a good step then and it isn’t a good one now.