Abraham Lincoln made the second biggest mistake of his presidency when he dumped Hannibal Hamlin of Maine as his vice president and replaced him with a hard-drinking sympathizer of slavery.

It might not have mattered much but for Lincoln’s biggest mistake: attending “Our American Cousin” at Ford’s Theater one evening in April 1865.

An assassin’s bullet that night put Democrat Andrew Johnson of Tennessee in the White House as his successor, thwarting Lincoln’s plans for reconstruction of the rebel states after the Civil War and leading to another century of legal discrimination against newly freed Black Americans.

Historians have generally treated Lincoln gently for his June 1864 decision to drop Hamlin, accepting the electoral argument for tapping the most prominent Southern politician to form a national unity ticket to finish the bloody business of slaying the Confederacy.

But Hamlin, a lawyer who grew up in Oxford County’s Paris, shouldn’t have been put out to pasture.

Lincoln tapped Hamlin, a senator from Maine, for the vice presidency in 1860 because of his extensive ties to the anti-slavery faction of the Republican Party.

If you think vice presidents today don’t have much of a job, you should read up on how little they had to do for most of our history. Hamlin nonetheless managed to develop a relationship with Lincoln that helped influence the first Republican president to sign the Emancipation Proclamation and arm Black soldiers during the Civil War.

In short, Hamlin was about as good a vice president as the times allowed.

Politics, though, doesn’t always reward those who do the best job, as Hamlin learned in 1864 when Lincoln’s allies opted to nominate instead Tennessee’s military governor, the most prominent pro-war Democrat.

At the time, Lincoln fretted, unnecessarily as it turned out, that he might lose his reelection bid unless he could extend his reach to include more pro-Union Democrats. Even so, Lincoln admitted to Hamlin, “You have not been treated right. It is too bad, too bad. But what can I do? I am tied hand and foot.”

That was untrue. Though it’s never been clear just how central a role Lincoln played in dropping Hamlin from the ticket, Lincoln brushed aside a warning from U.S. Rep. Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, who told the president that Johnson “is a rank demagogue and I suspect at heart a damned scoundrel.”

In any case, Hamlin took it all in stride. He supported Lincoln’s National Union ticket and sought to help Johnson.

Right from the start, though, Johnson proved an inept leader.

On the day he was sworn into office in 1865, Hamlin arrived at the U.S. Capitol to find his successor already drunk and eager to continue drinking.

“Mr. Hamlin, I am not well, and need a stimulant. Have you any whiskey?”’ Johnson asked Hamlin, according to a biography written by Hamlin’s son, who was there. Hamlin sent a messenger off to find a bottle for him. Johnson quickly downed two tumblers filled to the brim.

As the men began to leave for the ceremony, Johnson turned back and grabbed another glassful.
“I need all the strength I can get,” Johnson told Hamlin.

Not surprisingly, Johnson’s subsequent speech proved “a rambling and strange harangue, which was listened to with pain and mortification by all his friends,” according to an entry in Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles’ journal. Hamlin’s son said his father pulled at Johnson’s coat during the address and urged him to stop talking. Johnson ignored him.

The Lewiston Evening Daily Journal noted that Johnson’s behavior “should bring the blush to every manly cheek.”

Johnson wasn’t any better as president, undermining congressional efforts to help former slaves after the war, pardoning Confederate traitors and clashing with Capitol Hill’s leaders so often that he escaped conviction by a single vote in the Senate after the House impeached him.

Hamlin resigned from his new job as the federal port collector in Boston to protest Johnson’s misguided Reconstruction policies — and then reclaimed his old Senate seat representing Maine to join the fight against the president’s pro-Dixie policies.

He died on Independence Day in 1891, a public servant to the end but one denied the opportunity to lead his country.

There is no way to know how history may have unfolded had Hamlin taken the place of Lincoln in 1865. Had the Mainer remained as vice president, I’m sure America would today be a more just, fair nation for all of its citizens.