150th anniversary of the ‘almost president’ from Maine

By Paul H. Mills

It’s the President’s Day weekend. We are now in a holiday to celebrate our chief executives. Most notable among them are the two most revered, Washington and Lincoln, whose birthdays occur this month.

It is thus a bragging rights time for the states that claim such presidents for their homeland: In Lincoln’s case: Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois. In Washington’s: Virginia, “The Mother of Presidents” being the birthplace of eight of them.

Maine is not only upstaged by these but also by our smaller sister northern New England states: New Hampshire, the birthplace of Franklin Pierce, Vermont the native land for presidents Chester Arthur and Calvin Coolidge.

Maine, however, is a “near miss” state. GOP presidential nominee James G. Blaine’s narrow loss to Grover Cleveland was one of our closest ever White House contests.

Though we have been edged out of the presidential action, the Pine Tree state does lay claim to two of our more intriguing vice presidents. Seal Harbor native Nelson Rockefeller was the most recent heartbeat away. Even though Maine was not the terrain that furnished the bedrock of his New York based political career, the Mt. Desert Island area was a frequent vacation refuge for the 41st vice president.

Becoming vice president to succeed Gerald Ford who ascended to the presidency upon the forced resignation of Nixon in 1974, Rockefeller’s tenure occurred in the immediate aftermath of one of the more traumatic periods of American presidential and VP history. He was the third person to occupy the vice presidential office in just 14 months, his nomination by Ford occurring in the wake of both the Agnew as well as Nixon episodes of the scandal plagued Watergate era.

Though by the time Rockefeller took office we had been in a period of unprecedented turnover in the nation’s two leading positions a second Maine native to have held the “Veep” office brought Maine closer to the brink of putting us on the presidential map.

Meet Hannibal Hamlin. Just 150 years ago at this time he was completing the final few days of his tenure in the nation’s second highest position, leaving office a mere six weeks before his successor would assume the presidency from the most martyred and admired president of them all, Abraham Lincoln. In this sense, Hamlin has come as close to the doorsteps of the presidency as any person from Maine.

Putting Hamlin and Lincoln together

With the 1860 elections on the horizon, Hamlin emerged as a possible favorite son candidate. Republicans in Maine felt that if the frontrunner, New York’s William Seward, should falter, Hamlin might emerge as a dark horse choice. James G. Blaine, a major potentate among Maine Republicans, however, lobbied the delegation to the National Convention to support Lincoln’s nomination instead. When at the Chicago Convention Lincoln pulled off an upset that resulted in his nomination, the VP slot was then offered to the Seward camp. When the Seward forces failed to put forward anyone, major support emerged for Cassius Clay, a Kentucky abolitionist. The GOP leaders in Chicago felt Clay was too radical. Maine’s Hamlin then seemed like a “more national” pick but still with a solid anti-slavery record and an ally of Seward’s in the U.S. Senate where Hamlin had served a dozen years already.

Hamlin winning the nomination came as a complete shock to the Maine U.S. senator. At first, Hamlin turned down the offer but was prevailed upon by some of his Senate colleagues to accept the position.

After Republicans won the September state elections – then held two months ahead of the national presidential contest – Hamlin went to Boston to march in a torchlight parade. There, he was accompanied by Penobscot native Americans, Maine lumberjacks and party regulars. One of the favorite signs combined the ticket into the name: “ABRA/HAMLIN/COLN.”

When the Lincoln-Hamlin ticket emerged victorious, Lincoln hosted Hamlin for various meetings both in Chicago as well as in D.C. During the long four-month interregnum that then existed between the November election and the March inauguration, Hamlin and Lincoln collaborated and worked closely together. After all, Lincoln had not set foot in the nation’s capitol as an elected official since his obscure two-year House term back in the mid-1840s. He needed someone of Hamlin’s popularity among fellow U.S. senators to help recruit and win support for proposed cabinet appointments. In this, the relationship between the president and vice president was similar to that which has existed in recent years between President Obama and his own vice president, long-time former U.S. Sen. Joseph Biden.

Once taking office, Hamlin was relegated to political purgatory, however, and he was both bored and disenchanted with being what Nelson Rockefeller himself would a century later deride as being mere “standby equipment.”

Only when Lincoln was about to issue his Emancipation Proclamation was Hamlin invited inside the drawing room. Because Hamlin had been one of the more ardent advocates of such a proclamation, Lincoln gave Hamlin the privilege of being the first to see the document before it was issued.

By the 1864 re-election campaign, Hamlin was dumped by Lincoln because Lincoln foresaw that he badly needed support among so-called “War Democrats” in order to pull out a win. Second place in the ticket thus went to Tennessee’s Gov. Andrew Johnson.

A few weeks after leaving Washington at the end of his term in 1865 and returning to his home in Bangor, Hamlin was called back to the Capital by the shocking news of Lincoln’s assassination. Moreover, Hamlin’s own son Charles, a brigadier general, had in fact witnessed the assassination at Ford’s Theater. The younger Hamlin was immediately put in charge of securing the streets of Washington, this in anticipation of a threatened general uprising rumored to be in the works.

At the White House, the elder Hamlin stood shoulder to shoulder with the new President Andrew Johnson at Lincoln’s casket. This gave rise to considerable comment about the paradox by which Hamlin had within a matter of weeks missed the presidency.

The nation’s post-Civil War history would have been considerably different had Hamlin instead of Johnson succeeded to the office.

A Hamlin administration would have allied itself with the Congressional Republicans who favored an ardent reconstruction policy in the South by which the right to vote and other civil rights of Afro-Americans would have been aggressively defended by military force. Johnson, who had been a border state governor with greater sympathies for the former Confederates, had opposed such measures, an opposition that led to his 1868 impeachment trial.

By 1869, Hamlin was returned to the U.S. Senate for two additional terms and by 1881 became Ambassador to Spain.

After returning from a year in Europe where he had been treated like an American deity for his perceived close association with Lincoln and former holder of the nation’s second highest office, Hamlin spent the remaining decades of his life in Bangor.

On July 4, 1891, exactly 30 years after he had convened the U.S. Senate at the outset of the Civil War, Hamlin died of a heart attack while playing cards at the Tarratine Club in Bangor. He was 81.

Though the base of Hamlin’s adult life in Maine was in the Bangor area, his birthplace and boyhood home at Paris Hill has in recent years also been the subject of great interest. Its entire neighborhood has been restored and enshrined by businessman Robert Bahre.

Thus, as we celebrate this year’s Presidents’ Day weekend and as we enter the sesquicentennial of Maine’s “near miss” president, it is a compelling time to remember the various ways in which Maine has come close to being at the spotlight on the stage of national events. Foremost among them is the career of Hannibal Hamlin.

Paul H. Mills is a Farmington attorney well known for his analyses and historical understanding of public affairs in Maine. He can be reached by e-mail at: pmills@myfairpoint.net.