The American Vice Presidency (26 page)

Hamlin was shocked at the news. The next day he wrote to his wife, Ellen: “I neither expected or desired it. But it has been made and as a faithful man to the cause, it leaves me no alternative but to accept it.” He said he took consolation that if the Lincoln-Hamlin ticket won, his duties would “not be hard or unpleasant.”
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In June, as already noted, the Democrats split badly, with Douglas, John C. Breckinridge, and John Bell chosen on separate tickets, to the obvious benefit of the Republican ticket.

In this national campaign in which race had become a central issue over the expansion of slavery into the West, the notably swarthy Hamlin again had to endure vicious rumors, especially in the South, that he was a black man. Robert Barnwell Rhett, the editor of the
Charleston Mercury
in South Carolina, charged at a Breckinridge rally in Charleston, “Hamlin is what we call a mulatto.… He has black blood in him.” He said the “Black Republicans” had put “a renegade Sothernor
[sic]
on one side for President, for Lincoln is a native Kentuckian, and they put a man of colored blood on the other side of the ticket for Vice President of the United States.”
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A campaigner for the Constitutional Union ticket in Tennessee, William G. Brownlow, observed 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.
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Other similar allegations and slurs were heard across the Deep South. In November, the Lincoln-Hamlin ticket swept eighteen northern states and won the election with 180 electoral votes, compared with 72 for Breckinridge, 39 for Bell, and only 12 for Douglas, who was shut out in the South.

Soon after, Lincoln wrote Hamlin, “I am anxious for a personal interview with you as early a date as possible. Can you, without much inconvenience, meet me in Chicago?”
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They met there and had a warm and convivial conversation that encouraged Hamlin to think he would be more than the traditional vice presidential standby.

At the end of several meetings, according to Hamlin, Lincoln told him, “I shall accept and shall always be willing to accept, in the very best spirit, any advice that you, the Vice-President, may give me.”
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Hamlin must have thought: so far so good. In fact, one of his cabinet recommendations,
Gideon Welles of Connecticut, ultimately was nominated as secretary of the navy.

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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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(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.”
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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.)
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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