The American Vice Presidency (27 page)

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.”
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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.
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Lincoln himself observed, “Hamlin has the Senate on his brain and nothing more or less will cure him,”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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

I
n 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 after 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:

“Please say to Mr. Lincoln, that while I appreciate with the fullest sensibility this act of friendship and the compliment he pays me, yet I must decline. Tell him with the prospects of the campaign, I would not quit the field to be Vice-President, even with himself as President, unless he will give me bond with sureties, that he will die or resign within three months after his inauguration. Ask him what he thinks I have done to deserve the punishment, at forty-six years of age, of being made to sit as presiding office over the Senate, to listen to debates, more or less stupid, in which I can take no part nor say a word, nor even be allowed a vote upon any subject which concerns the welfare of my country, except when my enemies might think my vote would injure me in the estimate of the people, and therefore, by some parliamentary trick, make a tie on such question, so I should be compelled to vote; and then at the end of four years (as nowadays no Vice-President is ever elected President), and because of the dignity of the position I had held, not to be permitted to go on with my profession, and therefore with nothing left for me to do save to ornament my lot in the cemetery tastefully and get into it gracefully and respectably, as a Vice-President should do.”
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Johnson had no such contemptuous attitude toward the office or toward the new president’s call to service, and the vice presidency was another step in a long-held ambition for high public office from his humblest beginnings. An unschooled country boy, he literally was born in a log cabin in Raleigh, North Carolina, on December 29, 1808. When he was only three years old, his father, Jacob Johnson, a bank porter and local constable who could not read, died, leaving his mother, Mary, called Polly, a seamstress and laundress, to raise him and a brother. When she remarried, she managed to get the two boys placed as apprentices in a Raleigh tailor shop, from which they fled after an altercation with a neighbor. Next Andrew went
to Lauren, South Carolina, to another tailor shop, where his proposal of marriage to a local girl was rejected by her mother. Dejected, he returned to Tennessee, found yet another tailor shop and another girl, and in 1827 married Eliza McCardle, the daughter of a shoemaker in Greenville. Self-educated with help from her, he built a thriving tailor shop of his own, invested in real estate, and started a family. Interested in politics and an enthusiast for Andrew Jackson, he joined a local debating society and was elected an alderman in Greenville in 1829 and mayor in 1834.
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Young Johnson was a rising star, elected as a Whig to the state legislature the next year, where he introduced homesteading legislation designed to give poor men land to work if they lived on it. In 1837, however, he voted against bringing railroad service to eastern Tennessee and lost his seat. Switching to the Democratic Party, he won the seat back, and in 1840, the party’s state convention appointed him as one of the two Tennessee presidential electors and sent him around the state speaking for President Van Buren and local Democratic candidates.

Johnson prospered as a tailor in Greenville and bought a large house opposite his shop and a farm on which he settled his mother and stepfather. For service in the militia he came to be called Colonel Johnson and for the first time became the owner of a few slaves.
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In 1843 he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he was now a strong proponent of Jacksonian policies and an opponent of Whig protectionism, federal expenditures for internal improvements, and all manner of other projects. In the House, Johnson also spoke against anti-slavery petitions and denied the authority of either the federal government or an individual right to abolish slavery.
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In 1844, he was reelected to the House, where he supported the annexation and statehood of Texas and the Mexican War. In 1846, he introduced his homestead bill giving “every poor man in the United States who is the head of a family” 160 acres of public land to farm “without money and without price.” It got nowhere, but Johnson persevered to its enactment years later.
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In 1852, faced with his House seat being gerrymandered against him, he ran for and won the governorship of Tennessee, with emphasis on his populist roots, and was reelected in 1854. In 1857, the state legislature elected him to the United States Senate, where he again pushed his homesteading bill, finally passing it in 1860, only to have it vetoed by President James Buchanan. His efforts to override fell three votes short.
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Meanwhile, committed as ever to the preservation of the Union, Johnson was determined to discourage Tennessee’s secession. At a Democratic convention in Charleston in April 1860, the Tennessee delegation was instructed to vote for Johnson as the state’s favorite son for president, and its newspapers joined the call. The
Nashville Union and American
praised him unabashedly as “a people’s man … unafflicted with crude learning of schools … real homemade man, standing head and shoulders taller than those who have rubbed their backs against a college wall.”
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But Carl Schurz, a German writer and later a U.S. senator, subsequently described Johnson as “sullen … betokening a strong will inspired by bitter feelings” and with a face having “no genial sunlight in it.”
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At the convention, the Tennessee delegation cast all its votes for Johnson through twenty-six rounds before he dropped out, and Douglas was nominated as the choice of the northern Democrats. In a separate convention, the southern Democrats picked Vice President John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, and on Election Day, Johnson voted for him as the best alternative for preserving the Union while opposing him on secession. “The blood of secession at the Charleston convention,” he told friends, “is not on my head.”
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The day before the election, predicting a Lincoln victory, he told friends, “When the crisis comes, I will be found standing by the Union.”
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Back in the Senate, Johnson took on the basic concept of secession. “I am unwilling, of my own volition, to walk outside of the Union which has been the result of a Constitution made by the patriots of the Revolution,” he said. “I believe I may speak with some degree of confidence for the people of my State; we intend to fight that battle inside and not outside of the Union, and if anybody must go out of the Union, it must be those who violate it.”
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He declared that Tennessee did not intend to go out. “It is our Constitution; it is our Union, … and we do not intend to be driven from it.” He got down to cases: “The Constitution declares and defines what is treason. Let us talk about things by their right name!… If anything be treason … is not levying war upon the United States treason? Is not attempt to take its property treason?… It is treason and nothing but treason.… Then let us stand by the Constitution; and in saving the Union, save this, the greatest government on earth.”
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