Hannibal Hamlin

Hannibal Hamlin (1809-1891) was an American politician and diplomat who was the 15th vice president of the United States, serving from 1861 to 1865 during President Abraham Lincoln's first term. He was the first Republican vice president.

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Biography

Hannibal Hamlin was born in 1809 in Paris, then part of Massachusetts and now in Maine. He attended the district schools and Hebron Academy, ran his father's farm, co-published the Oxford Jeffersonian newspaper and, after studying law, was admitted to the bar in 1833, practising in Hampden.

A Democrat, he entered the Maine House of Representatives in 1835, served two terms in the US House from 1843 to 1847 and was sent to the US Senate in 1848. He opposed the spread of slavery, backing the Wilmot Proviso and fighting the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and in June 1856 he left the Democrats for the new Republican Party. Elected governor of Maine, he held the office only from January to February 1857 before returning to the Senate.

In 1860 he was elected vice president on Abraham Lincoln's ticket, the first Republican in the office. He had little influence in the administration but urged emancipation and the arming of Black soldiers, and in the summer of 1864 served as a militia corporal in the Maine State Guard. That year the party replaced him on the ticket with Andrew Johnson.

He was briefly Collector of the Port of Boston, resigning over Johnson's Reconstruction policy, sat in the Senate again from 1869 to 1881 and was US minister to Spain in 1881-1882. He died in Bangor in 1891.