Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.
The sphinx kept his silence as long as he could, even after his election to the presidency was established beyond all doubt. But though he tried to maintain the semblance of a normal life — he was observed buying hair tonic at the drug store on Nov. 10 — he was in the maw of history now. Every act, every word commanded attention as the storm clouds gathered.
The silence broke on Nov. 20, in one way he anticipated, and another he did not. After refusing requests to outline his position on slavery, he inserted a firm statement into the speech of his friend, Senator Lyman Trumbull, promising that all states would have “complete control of their own affairs.” Measured, controlled, it stated its position with perfect clarity, every comma in place. But the crowds trolling for excitement wanted more than precise punctuation. One of their own, “the Tall Sucker,” had been elected president! (“Sucker” = Illinoisan.) So they followed the scent (of hair tonic?) to his house and demanded an appearance.
If the features of the man who emerged seemed fuzzy to them, it may have been because, upon close inspection, they were — Lincoln had just started to grow a beard, and it was not yet fully in place. But he quickly gave them what they wanted: a short speech that expressed happiness over the election and also reminded them that “all American citizens are brothers of a common country, and should dwell together in the bonds of fraternal feeling.”
With that, the dam was breached, and the next day, he gave three more.
On a railroad journey, his train stopped in three small towns, like so many whistle-stop campaigns to come, and he delivered brief remarks in each. They were unremarkable, except
for a folksy joke about the interchangeability of wives that would probably have derailed his presidency in the hypersensitive modern era. In the third of the three towns, Lexington, Ill., a newspaper commented,
“Old Abe looks as though the campaign had worn lightly upon him. He is commencing to raise a beautiful pair of whiskers, and looks younger than usual. Still there is no disguising the fact that he is homely.”
Library of CongressA Republican Party campaign banner, showing a beardless Abraham Lincoln on the left and Hannibal Hamlin on the right.The ultimate destination of Lincoln’s train was the city in which he had been nominated six months earlier, Chicago. There he would meet his running mate, Hannibal Hamlin of Maine, for the first time, or so they thought — neither could quite remember if they had met when both served in Congress in the 1840s. On Nov. 8, two days after the election, Lincoln had written an urgent letter to Hamlin, stating that “I am anxious for a personal interview with you at as early a day as possible.” Though it meant missing his son’s wedding, Hamlin dutifully journeyed west for the first meeting of the administration-to-be.
Their positions might easily have been reversed. For many years, Hamlin was the more successful politician. They were born the same year, 1809, when Hamlin’s Maine was nearly as primitive a frontier as Lincoln’s Kentucky-Indiana-Illinois. He had been elected earlier, and more often, to the House, and then, unlike Lincoln, he made it to the Senate, where he led a vigorous opposition to the Slave Power, all the more impressive for the fact that he was a Democrat. But in 1856, he joined the new Republican Party, and four years later found himself on the ticket.
As a former Jacksonian, a Northerner and an insider, he balanced Lincoln’s qualities (ex-Whig, westerner, outsider) perfectly. The machinery of campaigning embraced the pair; clubs were formed, buttons minted and tunes penned, most of them instantly forgettable. Three separate songs that summer were entitled “Lincoln and Hamlin,” “Lincoln and Hamlin” and, just to drive the point home, “Lincoln and Hamlin!” Some wags noticed that Hamlin was the middle of Abraham Lincoln’s name, and banners were devised urging people to vote for ABRA – HAMLIN – COLN.
But their enemies were also gifted at propaganda, and one of the uglier rumors of the 1860 campaign was that Hamlin was secretly a mulatto. His complexion was darker than average, and his political enemies had taken advantage of the fact even in Maine, where he was once lampooned as “that black Penobscot Indian.” In 1860, with tensions high, the accusations were even more targeted. A South Carolina editor, Robert Barnwell Rhett, gave a speech accusing Hamlin of having “black blood in him,” and the charge spread like wildfire. Medals with Hamlin and Lincoln were darkened to give their features an African cast. In Tennessee, a politician named William Brownlow said that Hamlin “looked, acted and thought so much like a Negro” that he could be sold as a field hand. In fact, Hamlin had no African blood that has ever been determined.
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The Chicago meeting was a success. They exchanged pleasantries — Lincoln praised Hamlin for once giving a speech that was filled “chock up” with “the very best kind of anti-slavery doctrine,” and Hamlin remembered hearing Lincoln give a sharp, comical address years earlier. The next day, Nov. 23, they toured the post office, the custom house and the federal court building — all symbolic of the American government at a moment when no one quite knew what that meant.
Over the next few days, the pair was forced to endure a whirlwind of public receptions that Lincoln, especially, found grueling — a sign that he was still growing into his new role. But throughout their private consultation, Lincoln and Hamlin began to hammer out Lincoln’s cabinet. Hamlin was particularly involved in the outreach to William Seward, the rival Lincoln had defeated for the nomination, an operation of such subtlety and secrecy that Lincoln asked Hamlin to burn his letters (regrettably, he did).
By the time Hamlin left for the East Coast, the new administration was beginning to take shape. But just because a government was forming did not mean the country was governable. Southerners were deliberating with equal seriousness about whether to recognize Lincoln’s presidency at all. On Nov. 27, the day Lincoln returned home from Chicago, he received a letter from three self-proclaimed specialists in “negro trading” in Spartanburg, S.C., who offered to buy the “intelligent mulatto boy” known as Hannibal Hamlin. An enormous pile of mail, doubling in size every day that he was away, contained bushels of news from around the country. Very little of it was good.
Sources: Earl Schenk Miers, ed.,”Lincoln Day by Day: A Chronology, 1809-1865″; Roy P. Basler, ed., “The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln”; H. Draper Hunt, “Hannibal Hamlin of Maine: Lincoln’s First Vice-President”; Charles Eugene Hamlin, “The Life and Times of Hannibal Hamlin”; 1860 campaign songs from the John Hay Library, Brown University; Michael Burlingame, “Abraham Lincoln: A Life”.
Ted Widmer is director and librarian of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. He was a speechwriter for President Bill Clinton and the editor of the Library of America’s two-volume “American Speeches.”