Hamlin, Hannibal

Born: 1809-08-27 Oxford County, Maine

Died: 1891-07-04 Bangor, Maine

Born in Paris Hill, Maine, Hannibal Hamlin attended district schools and then Hebron Academy. He managed the family farm and worked as a clerk, surveyor, compositor in a printing office, and schoolteacher before taking up the study of law. In 1833, he earned admittance to the bar. He married Sarah Jane Emery the same year, and they eventually had four children together. He commenced a law practice in Hampden, Maine, which he maintained until 1848. He served as a member of the Maine House of Representatives from 1836 to 1841, again in 1847, and served as its speaker in 1837, 1839, and 1840. A Democrat, he ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 1840. He won election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1842, and served from 1843 to 1847. Hamlin ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in 1846, but won election to it as an anti-slavery Democrat in 1848 after Senator John Fairfield died, leaving a vacancy. Hamlin won reelection by a slim margin in 1850 due to his anti-slavery views, and he remained in the U.S. Senate until his resignation in 1857. In 1855, his wife died. In 1856, he married her half-sister, Ellen Vesta Emery, with whom he had two children. Five days before the 1856 Republican National Convention, he left the Democratic Party and became a Republican. Although he opposed slavery on moral grounds and fought against its expansion while in office, helping draft the Wilmot Proviso, for instance, and speaking out against the Kansas-Nebraska Act, he viewed abolitionism as too radical to be constitutionally feasible. He won election as governor of Maine in 1856, serving from January 8 to February 25, 1857, when he resigned. He won election to the U.S. Senate as a Republican, and served from March 1857 until he resigned in January 1861 after winning election as vice president of the United States on the Republican Party ticket alongside Abraham Lincoln. Hamlin served as vice president until March 4, 1865, but was rarely consulted by Lincoln while in office. He took a stronger anti-slavery position than Lincoln during the Civil War, arguing in favor of emancipation and the employment of African American troops long before Lincoln believed such steps were necessary or warranted. He nevertheless supported Lincoln, even after the Republican Party selected Andrew Johnson as Lincoln’s running mate in the 1864 federal election. Hamlin served as collector of the Port of Boston after the war.

Biographical Directory of the American Congress 1774-1996 (Alexandria, VA: CQ Staff Directories, 1997), 1150-51; H. Draper Hunt, “Hamlin, Hannibal,” American National Biography, ed. by John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 9:936-38; Register of Officers and Agents, Civil, Military, and Naval, in the Service of the United States, on the Thirtieth September, 1865 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1866), 86; Charles Eugene Hamlin, The Life and Times of Hannibal Hamlin (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1899), 297; Gravestone, Mount Hope Cemetery, Bangor, ME.