Hannibal Hamlin: Lincoln's Vice President Who Served as a Company Cook

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Hannibal Hamlin was born in 1809 in Paris, Maine, then part of Massachusetts, and as a gravely ill infant was saved by Molly Ockett, a Native American medicine woman who prescribed warm cow's milk. He ran his father's farm, edited the Oxford Jeffersonian, passed the bar in 1833, married Sarah Jane Emery, and entered the Maine House as a Democrat in 1835. During the 1839 Aroostook War, a timber border dispute with New Brunswick, he helped ease tensions on the path to the Webster-Ashburton Treaty. In Congress he backed the Wilmot Proviso and opposed the Compromise of 1850, and in 1856, after Democrats endorsed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, he left the party for the new Republicans.

He won the Maine governorship in a landslide, served only weeks, and returned to the U.S. Senate before joining Abraham Lincoln's 1860 ticket. As vice president he was shut out of cabinet meetings, compared himself to a fifth wheel, pressed for emancipation and the arming of Black Americans, and urged the appointment of General Joseph Hooker. In 1864 the National Union ticket replaced him with Andrew Johnson, whom Hamlin swore in amid Johnson's intoxicated address weeks before Lincoln's assassination. He later resigned as collector of the Port of Boston in protest, served two more Senate terms and as minister to Spain, and died on July 4, 1891.

• In summer 1864 he refused an exemption and reported with Company A of the Maine State Guard to Fort McClary.
• At the fort he stood guard, was promoted to corporal, and took on the duties of company cook.
• Mary Todd Lincoln reportedly disliked him, and he and Lincoln were not personally close.
• His son Cyrus argued early for enlisting Black troops and commanded a brigade of freedmen.
• His son Charles and daughter Sarah were at Ford's Theatre the night Lincoln was shot.