The American Vice Presidency (25 page)

Commissioned a brigadier general and later a major general, Breckinridge fought in the major western battles of Shiloh, Stone’s River, Chickamauga, and Chattanooga and then in the southeastern slaughter at Cold Harbor, before leading a raid on Washington in July 1864. His troops got as close as Silver Spring, Maryland, on the northeast outskirts, and they sacked the home of Francis Blair, where Breckinridge had often dined as a friend. Before they could enter the capital city, however, Union troops forced them to retreat west to Winchester, Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley, where they were defeated by General Philip H. Sheridan.

Near the end of the war, Confederate president Davis appointed Breckinridge his secretary of war. When General Robert E. Lee finally surrendered at Appomattox and Davis wanted to keep fighting, Breckinridge told him, “This has been a magnificent epic; in God’s name let it not terminate in farce.”
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Davis, fleeing Richmond with his cabinet, was captured, but Breckinridge got away to Florida, then Cuba and England, and eventually settled with his family in Toronto.
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On Christmas Day 1868, President Andrew Johnson issued a blanket pardon to all Confederate soldiers, and Breckinridge soon after returned to Kentucky, where he resumed the practice of law and began building railroads. At only age fifty-four, his health rapidly declined, and he died on May 17, 1875. Having gone to the brink of the American presidency, both as vice president and as a presidential candidate, he left the American scene with a checkered record: beloved in the South, castigated in the North, but still wed to the idea of national union.

HANNIBAL HAMLIN

OF MAINE

A
s the United States struggled through the last painful throes of the Civil War, Vice President Hannibal Hamlin, a strong advocate for an end to slavery, was frustrated by his limited role in trying to achieve that goal and, indeed, in any aspect of Abraham Lincoln’s efforts to save the American Union. Despite early promises from Lincoln to involve him, the president essentially followed the traditional course of shunting his standby aside.

As Lincoln’s reelection campaign of 1864 approached, Hamlin hoped his engagement would broaden, anticipating a second vice presidential term. But Lincoln’s political calculations determined otherwise, and it was Hamlin’s fate to be dropped from the Republican ticket as the war neared a conclusion. Less than six weeks after leaving the vice presidency, upon the assassination of Lincoln, Hamlin saw his replacement become president and commander in chief of the Union armies. One can only surmise, had the man from Maine still been in the second office on that fateful night, how postwar America would have emerged and what Hamlin’s place in history would have been.

Hamlin, the grandson of an officer in General George Washington’s army in 1775 and the son of the practicing physician Cyrus Hamlin, sheriff of Oxford County, Maine, was exposed at an early age to books of biography, history, and politics that helped prepared him for public responsibility.
Although his forebears in New England were Federalists and later Whigs, young Hannibal, named after an uncle as well as for the great Carthaginian general, soon became a Jacksonian Democrat.
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After early public schooling, the boy was enrolled at Hebron Academy, in Maine. His father’s sudden death of pneumonia ended Hannibal’s hopes of college. In 1830, he and a friend bought the local weekly newspaper, the
Oxford Jeffersonian
, where he picked up printing skills while giving the paper a faithful Jeffersonian editorial line. Eventually he moved to Portland to read law at a prestigious firm and, after admission to the bar, won his first case against a prominent local judge, subsequently marrying the judge’s daughter. In 1835, he was elected to the Maine House of Representatives and became an advocate for ending the death penalty in the state and for the eventual emancipation of black slaves, while not embracing the militancy of the abolitionist movement.

Young Hamlin was a tall and strapping fellow after years of farmwork and had a notably swarthy complexion, which later fanned reports that he was a mulatto. In one debate, an older, red-faced legislator made an insensitive remark about his complexion, to which Hamlin replied, “If the gentleman chooses to find fault with me on account of my complexion, what has he to say about himself? I take my complexion from nature; he gets his from the brandy bottle. Which is more honorable?” The older man apologized, and Hamlin thereafter was nicknamed the “Carthaginian of Maine.”
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In 1837, he was elected Speaker of the House in the Maine legislature, lost the position after the panic of that year, but regained it the next year. In 1843 he was elected to the U.S. Congress, where he encountered another racial jibe when referred to as “that black Penobscot Indian.”
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When a gag rule barring anti-slavery petitions was debated in the House, Hamlin argued forcefully for accepting them all and letting the House decide to adopt them or not: “Let this committee report to us what are the duties we owe—not to the South, but to the Union, the whole Union, and nothing but the Union.”
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On the annexation of Texas, he said he favored it as an expansion of the Union, not for the purpose of extending slavery, and he argued for notifying the British that the United States intended to terminate the joint occupation of the Oregon Territory. North and South should join, he urged, “to plant
our stars and stripes, and they should float over Texas forever, and march on until they should wave on the shores of the Pacific in the distant Oregon.”
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In the House, Hamlin was instrumental in shaping the Wilmot Proviso, which would bar slavery in any territory taken from Mexico in the recent war, to the ire of President Polk. The proviso was twice rejected in the Senate, but Hamlin’s hand in it underscored his anti-slavery view. The slavery fight went on, with Polk advocating extension ever westward of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, whose line separated free and slave territory obtained in the Louisiana Purchase, casting it as protection of free white labor. But anti-slavery forces saw it a vehicle for keeping black slaves out.

During his second term in the House, Hamlin decided to run for the Senate. After a narrow defeat by a legislative vote on his first try, the death of an incumbent opened a seat, and he won it in 1848 with the support of Free Soil members in a clear anti-slavery test. Hamlin agreed with their anti-slavery position but remained a loyal Democrat.

In the Senate, Hamlin became disturbed by the unruliness and intemperance he often encountered there. He argued often with Senator Jefferson Davis over slavery issues, to the point that Hamlin for a time carried a handgun. He was present in 1848 when Senator Henry Foote of Mississippi drew a pistol on Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri in their row over slavery. Himself not much of a drinker, Hamlin talked of the heavy tippling in the Senate cloakroom and even on the floor.
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He wrote to one friend, “Brawling billingsgate seems to assume the place of wisdom in an American statesman, backed up by the weapons of the highwayman and the assassain
[sic]
.” He lamented that the Senate had “turned into an arena for political blackguards.”
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For all that, Hamlin flourished in the Senate, and from the outset he left no doubt of his strong view that, both morally and constitutionally, slavery was wrong. In his maiden speech, he said he was amazed that “in this model Republic—with the sun of liberty shining upon us—we have been gravely discussing the proposition whether we will not create by law the institution of human slavery in territories now free.”
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With Polk’s departure from the White House and the inauguration of the Whig Zachary Taylor, Hamlin found himself with an anti-slavery ally in the Oval Office. For openers, the new president was strong for the swift
admission of California as a free state. Californians had already drafted a constitution and applied for entry into the Union, and Taylor urged the territories of New Mexico and Utah to do the same. Also, at the end of January 1850, the old Whig conciliator Henry Clay offered a series of resolutions that included California statehood and constituted the Compromise of 1850. Hamlin readily agreed that the state should be admitted but had reservations about some of the other Clay resolutions. After months of debate and negotiation, California was admitted as a free state, the territories of New Mexico and Utah were left without restriction on slavery, and the Oregon Territory, where slavery was not an issue, was left free.

But the slavery issue continued to confound Hamlin. In January 1854, when Stephen Douglas proposed that popular sovereignty be applied to the so-called Indian Territory west of Missouri, splitting it into the two states of Kansas and Nebraska, an irate Hamlin asked: Should the 1820 Missouri Compromise be repealed “and let Kansas be made a slave country? Where will this spirit end? Shall we repeal freedom and make slavery? It comes to that.”
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He voted against the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, one of four Democrats to stand up to their party, but it passed easily. A result was agitation for a new anti-slavery party that could drive the last stake into the heart of the Whigs, a lure for many defecting Democrats.

In June 1854, a group calling itself the Independent Democrats of Maine nominated and elected Anson P. Morrill for governor, after which they began to call themselves Republicans. The next spring, Morrill wrote Hamlin and urged him to join, reporting, “They are looking to you for direction and advice more than to any one man at this time. You have a host of good friends in our Republican party, & so far as I know, no enemies.… Has the time not come when you can act openly with us?”
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But Hamlin was not one to make such a decision precipitously. He continued to support the Democratic Party on most issues unrelated to slavery, in order to hold on to his influential Senate committee chairmanships. In 1855 when his wife, Sarah, became ill, he considered resigning from the Senate but was dissuaded by political friends. After she passed away the next year, he married Sarah’s younger half-sister, with whom he would have three more children.

Politically as well as personally, 1856 was a pivotal year in Hamlin’s life. On June 12, he rose in the Senate and resigned as the chairman of a key
committee, explaining, “I love my country more than I love my party,” and he could not accept the calamity of “Bleeding Kansas” upon the introduction of slavery there.
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But principle might not have been the whole story. His prospects for renomination were far from certain.

Maine Republicans moved swiftly to bring Hamlin into their fold. They proposed that he run for the governorship as a Republican, assuring him he would win. But Hamlin had no interest in leaving the U.S. Senate to be governor. A scheme was hatched in which the Republican legislature, by prearrangement, would vote him back into the Senate after his election as governor. An old friend told him, “This is the only way in which we can keep you there, for if you refuse what is so universally desired, it will be said you are not with us, and thus you will be defeated.”
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In the end, Hamlin agreed to run for the governorship as a Republican.

Hamlin won a sweeping victory and became somewhat of a national celebrity. In keeping with the strange agreement, Hamlin was inaugurated as governor in Augusta, and five days later, the Republican state legislators, holding the majority, caucused and nominated him to be the next U.S. senator from Maine. He then resigned the governorship and returned to Washington to begin his third term in the Senate.

There, the slavery question continued to dominate. In 1858, as the Senate debated the admission of Kansas under a state constitution permitting slavery, the Democratic Party split wide open on sectional lines. Hamlin accurately wrote about his former party: “Most of the northern Dems affirm that they will not force upon the people of Kansas a Const. which establishes slavery. If they succeed in remanding the Const. for a vote on it, the South will bolt. If they succeed in forcing the Constitution on the people of Kansas, then the Dems feel that it will utterly destroy them in all the North.”
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In cold political terms, he concluded, it all boded well for his new Republican Party.

As the 1860 election approached, some Maine Republicans urged Hamlin to seek the Republican presidential nomination. But Hamlin favored Abraham Lincoln of Illinois. In mid-May, the convention met at the new Wigwam, in Chicago, and on the third ballot chose Lincoln over William Seward. In a gesture to the losing camp, the party agreed that Lincoln’s running mate should come from the East. The Sewardites readily agreed, one of them noting that Hamlin was “a good friend of Mr. Seward,” was
“geographically distant from Lincoln and was once a Democrat. It was deemed judicious to pretend to patronize the Democratic element.”
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