Meanwhile, the election of Lincoln, seen in much of the South as an anti-slavery rebuke of the region, triggered the flight to secession. On December 20 the South Carolina legislature voted to leave the Union, followed in the next six weeks by Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. Delegates from each of these states met in Montgomery and on February 7 adopted a constitution for the new Confederate States of America, with Jefferson Davis as its president.
In Lincoln’s inaugural address on March 4, he concluded by striking a sober but hopeful tone. “I am loath to close,” he said. “We are not enemies but friends. We must not be enemies. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”20 But Vice President Hamlin began the chore of presiding over a special session of the Senate with a heavy heart. He told a Bangor friend, Colonel James Dunning, “There’s going to be a war, and a terrible one, just as sure as the sun will shine tomorrow. Those Southerners mean [to] fight, and I know they do. We ought to lose no time in getting ready.”21
Some thirty Deep South congressmen had already informed their constituents, “The argument is exhausted,” and most of the bloc left Washington. Buchanan, after denying the right of South Carolina to secede but saying he didn’t have the power to stop it, finally told Congress the Union was “a sacred trust,” and he would continue to collect federal taxes in all the states and to protect federal property in them, which included Fort Sumter, in the Charleston Harbor.22
With the special congressional session over, Hamlin headed home and arrived in Bangor on April 4. Eight days later, after Lincoln had ordered more provisions to Fort Sumter, Confederate forces in South Carolina fired on Sumter under orders from President Davis, and the Civil War was on. Hamlin set out at once to do what he could to mobilize Maine volunteers for the war, then went to New York to continue the effort nationally. Hamlin, after his early involvements with Lincoln, could not have been faulted for assuming these would continue and even intensify with the advent of the terrible war that had now descended on the administration and the Union. But as time went on and he was not brought more significantly into the administration’s deliberations and actions, his frustration grew. In 1862, he confided to a correspondent that had he known in Chicago how being vice president would be, he would rather have stayed in the Senate, adding, “But as it was there was no choice left me.”23
The same summer, when the wife of General John Fremont asked for his help in getting her husband a new command, Hamlin forlornly replied, “What can I do? The slow and unsatisfactory movements of the Government do not meet with my approbation, and that is known, and of course I am not consulted at all, nor do I think there is much disposition in any quarter to regard my counsel I may give much if at all.”24
Also, one day when a New York congressman, William A. Wheeler, dropped by Hamlin’s office on the Senate side of the Capitol to invite him to lunch, he found the vice president snoozing behind his desk after a long and windy debate on the floor. Aroused by Wheeler, Hamlin told him, “I will take lunch with you on condition that you promise me you will never be vice president. I am only a fifth wheel of a coach and can do little for my friends.”25 (If Wheeler made such a promise, he broke it seventeen years later by occupying the second office in the Rutherford B. Hayes administration.)
Presiding over the Senate during the war had to be particularly frustrating for Hamlin, inasmuch as he could neither speak nor vote on the many critical issues brought before the Senate, including raising money for the maintenance of the Union troops and other wartime matters. His torpor was disturbed on January 27, 1863, however, during a debate on a bill to exempt Lincoln from damages involved in his suspension of habeas corpus, one of his most controversial actions of the war. A bitter administration critic, Senator Willard Saulsbury of Delaware, obviously drunk, struggled to his feet to declare sarcastically that the president should not be so fined. He said, after having seen and conversed with Lincoln, “I say here, in my place in the Senate of the United States, that I never did see or converse with so weak and so imbecile a man as Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States.”26
Senator James Grimes of Iowa jumped to his feet, asking Hamlin whether such arch remarks were in order under Senate rules. Hamlin aroused himself and blithely replied, “The Chair was not listening to what the Senator from Delaware was saying and did not hear the words.” Saulsbury shot back, “That is the fault of the Chair.” When Senator James Bayard of Delaware rose to complain that the president should be referred to only by title, not name, on the Senate floor, Saulsbury declared, “I do not intend to be deterred from the expression of my opinion by any blackguardism” from the floor. Hamlin declared Saulsbury out of order and told him to sit down, but the man continued his tirade against Lincoln, saying, “The voice of freedom is out of order in the councils of the nation!” Whereupon Hamlin ordered the Senate sergeant-at-arms to remove Saulsbury from the chamber. (Related to this episode or not, one of Hamlin’s only initiatives as president of the Senate was to bar the sale of liquor in the Senate restaurant.)27
Through all this, a much more notable lament of Hamlin’s was Lincoln’s reluctance to use his war powers to arm the slaves to fight on the Union’s side and free them thereafter. Hamlin reminisced much later about Lincoln: “He was slow to move, much slower than it seemed to us he should have been; much slower than I wanted him to be.… I urged him over and over again to act; but the time had not come, in his judgment.”28 Hamlin must have been surprised then when, according to one account, he called on Lincoln at the White House on June 18, 1862, at which time the president asked Hamlin to accompany him to Lincoln’s residence at the Soldier’s Home in Washington, where the president showed Hamlin his draft of the Emancipation Proclamation and asked him for suggestions. For all Hamlin’s frustrations about not being in the loop on key wartime decisions, he had to have been warmed by this gesture.
Hamlin now urged Lincoln to take the next step and permit enlistment of black volunteers into the military. He told a Bangor rally, “We want to save, as much as possible, our men, [even] if it is done by men a little blacker than myself.”29 When his son Cyrus delivered ten white officers willing to lead black troops, Hamlin brought them to the White House, where Lincoln interviewed them and agreed. In October, Hamlin had an opportunity to discuss military matters with the president and took the occasion to press for more aggression on the part of General George McClellan, prior to Lincoln’s decision to relieve McClellan as commander of the Army of the Potomac. But Hamlin remained unhappy with the progress of the war and in time learned to hold his tongue. He wrote to wife, Ellen, “I suppose military men know best, and as my opinions are not asked at all, I keep my silence, as I have nothing to say. I have learned to give my opinion when asked for.”30
In the meantime, he visited soldiers from Maine, including the wounded at military hospitals, and kept close track of his two sons in uniform. The vice president himself had enlisted as a private in the Maine Coast Guard, and when his unit was called to active duty in the summer of 1864 he turned down the exemption to which he was entitled and went along. But when he tried to gain a promotion for a Maine general, nothing came of it, in what was a diminution of his role in patronage for the state. As for Lincoln, he was growing weary of Hamlin’s patronage pleadings. On one letter from his vice president, Lincoln scribbled, “The Vice-President says I promised to make this appointment, & I suppose I must make it.”31
Lincoln’s regard for Hamlin, considered more radical than the president, may have been reflected in a derogatory remark attributed to him. He was said to have asked whether “the Richmond people [at the Confederate capital] would like to have Hannibal Hamlin here any better than myself? In that one alternative I have an insurance on my life worth half the prairie land in Illinois.”32
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For all of Hamlin’s professed yearnings to return to the Senate, as the 1864 national election approached he was willing to stand for reelection as vice president. There was no clear path for regaining entry to his old stamping ground, with Senator William Pitt Fessenden entrenched there and as leader of the Maine Republican Party as well. In January, the Bangor Jeffersonian called for Hamlin’s renomination, and in March the Maine State Legislature passed a resolution backing another term for the Lincoln-Hamlin ticket. In June, when the Republicans, now calling themselves the Union Party for reasons of patriotic fervor, held their convention in Baltimore, the general surmise was that the man from Maine would again be Lincoln’s running mate. There was no question that the war president would be renominated, and he was, unanimously, on the first ballot.
But when the roll call of the states began for the vice presidential nomination, names other than Hamlin’s were entered. New York proposed its own senator Daniel D. Dickinson, and Indiana nominated the Tennessee military governor Andrew Johnson, a “War Democrat” who was a firm champion of the preservation of the Union. President Lincoln professed his neutrality, and the Maine delegation was expected to be solid for Hamlin in leading the New England states for his renomination. Instead, Connecticut gave all of its twelve votes to Johnson, Massachusetts gave only three to Hamlin, and the rest of the Yankee states scattered. The count after the first ballot was 200 for Johnson, 150 for Hamlin, and 108 for Dickinson. What was going on?
Before the second roll call began, Kentucky switched its twenty-one votes to Johnson, Oregon and Kansas joined in, then Pennsylvania, with its fifty-two shifting from Hamlin to the Tennessean. Secretary of State William Seward and the New York Republican boss Thurlow Weed, concerned about Dickinson’s strength and fearing a challenge from him for party dominance in New York, also switched the votes under their control to Johnson.33 Seeing that occur, even Maine switched to Johnson, and he was nominated with 494 votes to 27 for Dickinson and only 9 for Hamlin. What had happened?
Lincoln had not been neutral at all. Convinced that his reelection was imperative for the Union to complete its military mission and for its preservation, he concluded that he needed a War Democrat as his second-term running mate. He much preferred Johnson over the other War Democrat under consideration, General Benjamin F. Butler, who was personally obnoxious to Lincoln and when sounded out declined, disparaging the vice presidency in the process.34 Lincoln apparently had nothing against Hamlin, but Hamlin came from what was now considered a safe Republican state and was judged to bring little politically to the ticket. The president had decided to remain silent about dumping Hamlin to avoid causing resentment and possible loss of support in New England. So Lincoln, without endorsing Johnson, quietly had the word passed to key Republican operatives in the states.
One old Lincoln friend, Judge S. Newton Pettis, a Pennsylvania delegate to the Republican National Convention, said later he had called on the president at the White House on the morning of the convention and asked him whom he wanted as his running mate. Pettis reported that Lincoln replied softly, “Governor Johnson of Tennessee.”35 This version of what had happened was later disputed by Hamlin’s grandson Charles. He cited Lincoln’s secretary, John J. Nicolay, as asserting that Lincoln had deliberately adopted a hands-off position on his running mate for 1864.36
Apparently at the time, Hamlin was unaware of any Lincoln role in the decision to drop him from the ticket. A quarter of a century later, he ran into Judge Pettis at the inauguration of President Benjamin Harrison, and Pettis told him of Lincoln’s statement in the White House that he wanted Johnson as his second-term running mate. “Judge Pettis,” Hamlin replied, “I am sorry you told me that.” Later, Hamlin wrote to Pettis, “Mr. L evidently became alarmed about his re-election and changed his position. That is all I care to say. If we shall meet again I may say something more to you. I will write no more.”37
When Maine Republican committees called on Hamlin in the fall to campaign for the Lincoln-Johnson ticket, he complied while telling Ellen, “I had hoped sincerely that they would let me off, but as they do not I am unwilling to refuse, as they would attribute it to my disappointment, which is not the fact.… Hence I shall once more make some stump speeches.” At a victory rally in Bangor on Election Night, he even called for three cheers for Johnson, an indication that he might not yet be ready to retire from elective politics.38
Lincoln himself observed, “Hamlin has the Senate on his brain and nothing more or less will cure him,”39 and in part to facilitate Hamlin’s return to Congress the president persuaded Maine’s senator Fessenden to become his treasury secretary. Meanwhile, Hamlin urged Lincoln to appoint Fessenden to the Supreme Court, but Fessenden preferred to go back to the Senate, and the state legislature in the end voted to keep him there, in another rebuke of Hamlin. The former vice president again said he had “really no particular desire to go back to the Senate,” except for the opportunity he would have had to dispense patronage to his friends in Maine.40
When Fessenden left the treasury to seek his old Senate seat, Lincoln considered offering the post to Hamlin, but Fessenden strongly objected. In the end, Lincoln told Hamlin rather disingenuously, “You have not been treated right. It is too bad, too bad. But what can I do? I am tied hand and foot.”41 As for Hamlin, he told his wife he would not “ask favor of the Administration to prevent me from going to the poor house. So you see I have some pride.”42 In his final duties as president of the Senate, Hamlin tallied the election results and announced the Lincoln-Johnson ticket the winner, and on Inauguration Day he accompanied his successor to the ceremony, with ramifications to be related in the next chapter.
Two days after paying a farewell call on Lincoln, Hamlin headed home to Maine. The New York Herald reported that he did so “thoroughly disgusted with every thing and almost everybody in public life, excepting the President. He complains that almost every one with whom he has had anything to do has played him false.”43
On the night of April 14, Hamlin’s daughter Sarah, her husband, George, her brother Charles and his wife, Sallie, were attending the comedy Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theater when she heard “the crack of a pistol” and saw a man fleeing across the stage as Lincoln lay wounded in the presidential box. Early the next morning in Bangor, her father learned of the president’s assassination. He boarded a steamer for Washington and arrived for the funeral moments before it began, standing near the casket in the East Room of the White House at the side of Andrew Johnson, his successor and now president of the United States in an ironic coda to Hamlin’s long national service in Washington.44
After returning to Maine and relaxing and farming for a few months, in August 1865 Hamlin was appointed collector of the Port of Boston for a year, until resigning in disagreement with the reconstruction agenda of the man who had succeeded him as the Republican vice presidential nominee. But the next year the Maine State Legislature sent Hamlin back to the United States Senate, where he served two more full terms.
By this time Hamlin was the grand old man of the Senate and ready for retirement. President James Garfield, in one of his last official acts before an assassin’s bullet ended his presidency, nominated Hamlin to be the American minister to Spain, which was swiftly confirmed by the Senate. He served for two years before retiring to Maine to farm, fish, and reflect on his long political career, until his death at age eighty-one.
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 the more intriguing speculations of that most critical postwar period.
ANDREW JOHNSON
OF TENNESSEE
In 1865, for the third time in twenty-four years, a vice president succeeded a deceased president in the Oval Office, this time only forty-one days aft
er taking the second office and as the nation just emerged from a calamitous civil war. Only five days before, the Confederate commander General Robert E. Lee had surrendered to the Union commander General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse, delivering to President Abraham Lincoln the Union-preserving victory he had so long sought. With huge ramifications for that preservation, his assassination on the night of April 14, at the hands of the Confederate zealot John Wilkes Booth as Lincoln was attending a play at Ford’s Theater, in Washington, elevated Andrew Johnson of Tennessee to the presidency.
Johnson’s arrival at that august position was a product of Lincoln’s determination to achieve a second term and an end to the Civil War. To assure that outcome, Lincoln, when nearing completion of his first presidential term, had concluded that he needed to choose a new running mate. This decision related less to dissatisfaction with Hamlin than to the desire to fortify the ticket with a prominent member of the War Democrats, who supported the Union. Johnson filled the bill, as a former governor and U.S. senator from Tennessee, Lincoln’s military governor of the state at the time, and a loyalist to the Union even after his state had seceded from it.
Johnson, however, was not the only man considered. Another War Democrat, the Union major general Benjamin F. Butler, commander at Fort Monroe, in Hampton, Virginia, not only turned down an overture from Lincoln but did it with uncommon disdain and arrogance. When Lincoln sent a secret emissary, Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania, to Butler to sound him out on his availability, Butler, who held a high opinion of himself unshared by many others, asserted he’d rather continue his military career in wartime. He gave Cameron this caustic and irreverent reply to his commander-in-chief, providing his assessment of the proposal:
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