August 27, 1809 – Birth of Hannibal Hamlin, Lincoln’s First Vice President

Hannibal Hamlin, born on this date in Maine, studied law, was admitted to the bar in Portland, and won his first case against a prominent local judge. Subsequently he married the judge’s daughter. In 1835, he was elected to the Maine House of Representatives where he argued for an end to the death penalty in the state and for the eventual emancipation of Black slaves.

In 1843, Hamlin was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. There he was instrumental in helping to shape the Wilmot Proviso, which would bar slavery in any territory gained from Mexico at the conclusion of the Mexican American War in 1848. In 1848 he won a seat in the Senate.

Because of his abolitionist views, he left the Democratic Party for the newly formed Republican Party in 1856. Maine Republicans convinced him to run for governor, and he won a resounding victory. But he resigned shortly after his inauguration to return to the Senate for a third term.

For the 1860 presidential election, Hamlin supported Lincoln, who was nominated on the third ballot over William Seward. The Sewardites favored Hamlin for the vice president, and he was selected to be partnered with Lincoln. Hamlin was reportedly shocked at the news.

Hamlin, by the way, had a dark complexion, and was the recipient of any number of slurs, especially from Southerners, about it. Harry Draper Hunt, author of a biography about Hamlin, records that it was said that “Hamlin looked, acted, and thought so much like a black man that if he dressed as a field hand he could be sold in the South.” (Hannibal Hamlin of Maine, Lincoln’s First Vice-President by Harry Draper Hunt, 1969, p. 122). Hamlin ignored the slurs, but they persisted both before and after the presidential campaign.

After the election, Hamlin first went back to Maine and then to New York to help mobilize volunteers for the Civil War. Upon his return, to his chagrin and disappointment he was not brought into the administration’s deliberations and actions, as Jules Witcover has written in The American Vice Presidency. He began to wish he had stayed in the Senate.

Hamlin did have to preside over the Senate, however, but could neither speak nor vote on the issues debated. Witcover recounts a rather amusing episode that occurred when Hamlin, not paying attention (since he could have no input anyway), was asked whether an insult made to Lincoln by a drunk senator was against Senate rules. Hamlin replied, “The Chair was not listening to what the Senator from Delaware was saying and did not hear the words.” After repeated harassment, however, Hamlin did call upon the Senate sergeant-at-arms to remove the Senator from the chamber.

Hamlin believed that slaves should be armed to fight on the Union side, but Lincoln “was slow to move, much slower than it seemed to us he should have been….” (Hunt, p. 159-60.)

As 1864 approached, Lincoln professed his neutrality about the choice of vice president, but actually was not neutral at all. He concluded, Whitcover writes, that he needed a War Democrat to help him get reelected. Hamlin was from a safe Republican state and thus did not bring much to the ticket. After his rejection however, Hamlin generously helped campaign for the Lincoln-Johnson ticket.

Hamlin then returned to Maine. On the night of April 14, his daughter Sarah, her brother Charles, and their spouses were attending the performance of “Our American Cousin” at Ford’s Theater when Lincoln was assassinated. Hamlin returned for the funeral, where he stood next to Andrew Johnson.

Back in Maine, Hamlin was first appointed Collector of the Port of Boston, and then was elected to two more terms in the Senate. President James Garfield nominated Hamlin to be the American minister to Spain, where Hamlin served two years before retiring to Maine. He died at age eight-one.

As Witcover concludes:

Lincoln’s decision to drop Hamlin as his vice president after a single term deprived the country of a champion of slave emancipation who, had he been elevated to the presidency upon Lincoln’s assassination, might have changed the nature and outcome of the Reconstruction era after the Civil War. The circumstance remains one of them ore intriguing speculations of that most critical postwar period.”