… Patience? President Lincoln had little of it left in him when in June 1864 time came to get nominated for re-election. Gains on the battlefield in the fight to restore and preserve the Union had been evident but slow, and voters were beginning to show Civil War fatigue. Lincoln figured that he would need every vote he could get in order to finish the job of re-uniting the United States. In 1860, the Republican Convention had picked an able running mate from Hampden, Maine, senator Hannibal Hamlin. Though the two of them hadn’t met until the day both were inaugurated, and vice-presidents were given little to say and do, nobody in the nation’s capital doubted that Hamlin was the kind of guy you’d want to be a heartbeat away from the presidency, if the president were to become incapacitated. Death had visited the White House twice before, recently, in 1841 when president Harrison had suddenly died from pneumonia, and in 1850 again when president Taylor had been killed by food poisoning.
Yet Lincoln dumped Hamlin for a second term. He was concerned that his ticket wouldn’t be strong enough with a New Englander as a running mate. New England could be relied upon to vote for Lincoln anyway, so instead he let the party convention know that he’d prefer a southerner for vice-president. He picked Tennessee governor Andrew Johnson who was then duly nominated and chosen on June 8, 1864.
Six weeks after the convention, July 22, Lincoln’s general William Tecumseh Sherman won the Battle of Atlanta. It suddenly made a Union end victory all but inevitable, and boosted Lincoln’s popularity. The president won his re-election overwhelmingly without ever having needed the balance that his Tennessee running mate brought to the ticket. The rest is history. Lincoln was assassinated six weeks into his second term, Andrew Johnson became president, and he completely screwed up Lincoln’s carefully planned reconstruction of the South.
So, what if Hannibal Hamlin had not been dumped and become president instead? Johnson pardoned Confederate military men and politicians by the thousands. He returned their possessions to them, and allowed them to restore the South’s way of life in many ways to what it was before they seceded. Black people, though no longer enslaved, remained second-rate citizens. It would take another century, until the late 1950s and ’60s, for the civil rights movement to successfully change the law. Most historians agree it’s unlikely that Maine’s Hamlin would had let it come to that. He was a hardcore civil rights advocate who loudly challenged Johnson’s policies. President Hamlin could have spared generations of people with a colored skin the pain they continued to endure in southern states that had lost their slavery case fair and square. If only Honest Abe had been a tad more patient and not listened to his fear of suffering a loss that, in the end, was not forthcoming.
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