Hannibal Hamlin was a vice-president of the United States and United States senator. He settled at Hampden in Penobscot County, Me., and was politically a Jacksonian Democrat, representing Hampden in the state legislature from 1837 to 1841.
Background
Hamlin was born on August 27, 1809 to Cyrus Hamlin and his wife Anna, née Livermore, in Paris (in modern-day Maine, then a part of Massachusetts). He was a descendant in the sixth generation of English colonist James Hamlin, who had settled in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1639. He was a grandnephew of United States Senator Samuel Livermore II of New Hampshire.
Education
Hamlin attended town school and Hebron Academy, studied law in Portland, Me., and was admitted to the bar in 1833.
Career
In 1842 Hannibal Hamlin was elected to the United States House of Representatives, where he served from 1843 to 1847. In 1848 he was elected to the United States Senate by anti-slavery Maine Democrats. He supported Franklin Pierce in 1852, but in 1856 he became a Republican because of the Democrats' tolerance of slavery. In the same year, he was elected governor of Maine, serving one month in 1857 and resigning to return to the Senate. Nominated for the vice-presidency on the Lincoln ticket of 1860, he favored emancipation of the slaves and cooperated with the "Radicals" in Congress. Because Lincoln wished to conciliate moderate Southerners, Hamlin was not renominated in 1864.
Politics
Entering politics as an anti-slavery Democrat, he was a member of the state House of Representatives in 1836-1840, serving as its presiding officer during the last four years.
From the very beginning of his service in Congress he was prominent as an opponent of the extension of slavery; he was a conspicuous supporter of the Wilmot Proviso, spoke against the Compromise Measures of-1850, and in 1856, chiefly because of the passage in 1854 of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, which repealed the Missouri Compromise, and his party's endorsement of that repeal at the Cincinnati Convention two years later, he withdrew from the Democrats and joined the newly organized Republican party.
The Republicans of Maine nominated him for governor in the same year, and having carried the election by a large majority he was inaugurated in this office on the 8th of January 1857.
Connections
Hamlin was married to Sarah Jane Emery of Paris Hill in 1833. Her father was Stephen Emery, who was appointed as Maine's Attorney General in 1839–1840. Hamlin and Sarah had four children together: George, Charles, Cyrus and Sarah. Sarah died in 1855. The next year, Hamlin married to her half-sister, Ellen Vesta Emery in 1856. They had two children together: Hannibal E. and Frank. Ellen Hamlin died in 1925