Millard Fillmore was the 13th President of the United States when Cape Island was officially incorporated as a borough on Feb. 28, 1851

Like presidents before and after him, Fillmore was challenged by what to do about the slavery issue. At about the same time, the people of the cape, isolated somewhat from the rest of the nation by their geography, were challenged by what to do with all those tourists who discovered the seashore venue as an ideal place to vacation and recuperate from whatever ailed them.

Fillmore assumed the presidency in July of 1850 after Zachary Taylor died five days after he took ill on the Fourth of July. Inevitably the slavery issue came up. Would the new western states, California included, become free states or slave states? The South, of course, wanted a continuation of slavery there. The North did not. It became a hot issue and there was ominous talk, years later to come to fruition, that the South would secede.

Enter United States Senator Henry Clay, who had caused considerable excitement on Cape Island when he visited the resort in August of 1847 while grieving about the death of his son in the Mexican-American War. But it was now 1850 and the senator from Kentucky came up with a compromise that earned Clay the title of “The Great Compromiser.”

Under the Compromise of 1850, California would enter the nation a free state, but to assuage the South a new Fugitive Slave Act would permit an owner to invade a free state and to pursue and capture his runaway. What’s more it would be against the law for anyone to help a slave run away.

Fillmore, a native of upstate New York, was against slavery but thought Clay’s idea was a good compromise. He supported it, hoping that once and for all this would settle the slavery issue. With his support, Congress passed the legislation in 1850.

But instead of settling the issue, the new law enraged abolitionists. They were so angry with Fillmore that they refused to nominate him at the Whig convention in 1852. Instead, they nominated General Winfield Scott, a hero of the Mexican-American War.

Scott was beaten by Democrat Franklin Pierce, who was nominated by his party on the 49th ballot and served only one term from 1853 to 1857. His party refused to nominate him again, turning to James Buchanan as Pierce’s successor from 1857 to 1861. But the slavery issue destroyed Buchanan’s political ambitions too and he was not nominated again, replaced on a split Democratic ticket by Stephen Douglas, a Northern Democrat, and John C. Breckenridge, who labeled himself as a Southern Democrat. The relatively new Republican party boasted as its candidate in the 1860 election a 51-year-old lawyer named Abraham Lincoln.

It is an interesting part of Cape May/s history that the three consecutive presidents, Pierce, Buchanan and Lincoln, all of whom, served consecutively, are said to have vacationed at the resort during that critical period before the Civil War, although there is disagreement from national historians about Lincoln’s appearance, claiming that he was attending legal matters in Springfield, Ill. when he allegedly was in Cape May on July 31, 1849.

As the presidents were painfully struggling about the slavery issue in the nation’s capital during the 1850s, Cape Island was trying to walk a narrow path to keep everybody happy, particularly its tourists from the South. At first the attitude seemed to be “That’s their problem. Let’s not get involved.”

Henry Swain, a local activist, summed up his views which may have been the thoughts of many others at that time.

“I am confident that slavery is a curse and its effects are like the blight of the mildew,” he said, “but I believe that turning loose of four millions of Negroes upon the country would be a much greater evil than this.”

Some in the upper region of the county publicly deplored antislavery “agitation” as “deadly poison” and would not tolerate abolitionist sentiments in their schools, housing or meeting halls. And they opposed what they called “meddling” in the affairs of the South.

Joseph Smallridge Leach, who claimed Mayflower and Revolutionary War ancestries, was the editor of the Ocean Wave, the county’s first newspaper, which he started in the middle of the 1850s when Cape Island was perking along nicely. He came to the cape in 1840 from Massachusetts and was soon to see its potential as a viable resort, even playing a major role in trying to establish a railroad connection to the island.

But as the issue of slavery heated up, Leach saw the dilemma that was building in the town he adopted.

Many of the visitors came from Virginia, the nation’s capital as well as other points of the South, and when he viewed a state secessionist flag from South Carolina flying in front of a Cape Island hotel he knew a careful road had to be traveled to avoid the dangers that might erupt in this peaceful and successful resort. Still, he was optimistic that peace would ultimately prevail, characterizing the “secessionist rumbling” as “more smoke than fire.”

He was wrong, of course, and when war broke out in 1861 and the southerners had gone home, Leach was a local leader in supporting the Union cause after he had boosted the successful election bid of Abraham Lincoln.

As it was to be a little less than a century later during the biggest war in the history of mankind, there were some concerns, especially from Leach, that Cape Island’s shores would be attacked, perhaps invaded, by the enemy.

So he approached the Board of Freeholders in early 1861 and asked for money to train local volunteers. After all, he pointed out, the rebels were approaching Washington, only some 100 miles away, and who knows whether their ships and troops might soon target

Cape May?

“Why should Cape May have stood in the rear when it is known that her homes are more exposed and are more liable to receive invasion than any others on the seaboard from Maine to New Jersey?” he asked the freeholders who were not all that enthusiastic about his request.

Soon, though, after the war began the local ambivalence about the slave issue that prevailed during the 1850s turned to activism. Some of it was triggered by the story of local Civil War hero Henry Sawyer, who was captured by the South and was almost executed until his wife intervened and pleaded successfully with President Lincoln to try to save her husband’s life.

It is a matter of conjecture whether the local turnabout in its attitude toward the war was because of the slavery issue or because of resentment about the secession uprising. Some reports have been written that Sawyer volunteered because of the south’s secession, more than the subject of slavery.

Whatever the reason, local support for the war emerged as vigilance committees were formed and the Cape Island Home Guard enlisted 70 volunteers. What had been a place for bathing, sunning and fishing in the daytime and feasting, dancing and promenading in the evening during the 1850s was now a site for military training, some of it on the lawns of the hotels that the now-enemy from the South had frequented in an earlier time of ambiance.

But, grimmer news was to come to the island of the cape.

(Coming next: More on the war and what to do with the freed slaves.)

(Some of the information in this article was researched in the book, “Cape May County, New Jersey, The Making of an American  Resort Community,” by Jeffery M. Dorwart.)