| Lincoln chose Hamlin as a running mate, but they had never met, until two days after the election, in 1860. Lincoln’s story has been told often enough. Most of what’s commonly remembered is likely from his campaign biography, which, like Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage, was circulated widely. Both were likely ghostwritten. Readers became familiar with Mr. Lincoln’s small log cabin, (which most pioneers lived in on what was then the frontier), his learning to read largely on his own, and having no direction until he became interested in reading the law, in his twenties, etc. There were no laws schools at the time. Like many others, he studied on his own, and, after passing the bar, started out traveling the court circuit, getting whatever cases he could, for whatever small fees were paid. By the time he entered the national political scene decades later, he was a very successful lawyer for the railroads. The railroads were just getting started at the time, they had a lot of financial backing and they needed a lot from the government — land grants, right of ways, etc. At the time, the railroads were being boosted like the telecommunications industry is today.
Hamlin was born on a farm in Paris, Maine, where his circumstances were somewhat better, financially, than Lincoln’s. Hamlin was schooled locally, went to Hebron Academy for a year, learned surveying, and taught school briefly. At twenty, his father died and Hamlin returned home to run the family farm. He got involved in politics, and a newspaper, before deciding to become a lawyer. Like Lincoln, he studied law on his own, worked in a Portland law office and passed the bar exam, in 1833. Hanging out his shingle in Hampden, he married there, and was elected to the House, in 1835, and Congress, in 1843. He went directly into politics and, again like Lincoln, brought with him a position on slavery. Lincoln was surrounded by slavery in Kentucky, but there were few slaves or negroes in Maine. Abolition had been discussed in Maine at least as early as 1820, when the state was established. Along with the moral issue was the economics of slavery. Abolition of slavery was less popular along the Maine coast than inland, a reflection of the maritime economic connection to the economy of the south, which had deep roots in shipbuilding and shipping. Maine ships and sailors had long been shipping lumber and salt cod to the south and the Caribbean Islands and bringing cotton from the south to mills in England, and later, New England. Some of this trade had been carried on since before the revolution, nearly 100 years earlier. Slavery was the hot-button/front-burner issue in the years before the U.S. Civil War. Behind the moral issue in the public debate were finance and politics. The fight over which states would be free or slave was heated for years and it boiled over when Lincoln took the election, in 1860, with 40 percent of the popular vote. After the opening Confederate salvos, at Fort Sumter, in April of 1861, Lincoln called for 75,000 troops, ordered a blockade of southern ports, asked congress for $300,000, and said the war would be over in three months. Hamlin’s joining the Coast Guard may not have been a bid to see military action, and he didn’t, but action there was, at sea. The south’s agrarian base made it seem an unlikely contender in a brawl with the industrial north. It’s greater congressional strength was gone when the war started. What the south did have was cotton, which generated a lot of wealth. Cotton bales in storage were considered as cash reserves. Cotton was king, and the cash from it provided the means to outsource military provisioning. The south responded to blockades with attacks on Union shipping. Ironclads, blockade runners and crude submarines battled the blockades. Less publicized than battlefield victories were southern successes at sea. But, at the heart of the confederate war on shipping were deep-water cruisers, in particular, the Alabama. The number of ships it took, its prominence in the news and the ever-present threat it created all over the Atlantic, made it the ship to sink for the Union navy. At the helm of the Alabama was former U.S. Navy commander, 35-year naval veteran and lawyer, Raphael Semmes. The south had a dozen cruisers raiding merchant shipping, but the number of ships sunk and captured by Semmes made him a John Paul Jones to the Confederacy. Among Maine’s coasters, clippers and fishermen, the threat from confederate cruisers was constant. They brought the war literally close to home. Early Confederate cruisers were converted merchantmen, sail and steam combinations, armed with six to eight cannon. The first of these was the Sumter, under the command of Semmes. Its first kill and the first for the Confederacy, was the Bangor- built Golden Rocket, taken on July 3, 1861, off Cuba. It was plundered and burned that night. Years later, Semmes would write of his fond memory of the glow from the burning pine decks and tarred rigging of the Golden Rocket, that illuminated the underside of gulls swirling around overhead and the reflected light on the mesmerized faces of his crew. There was no naval academy at the time, sailing was learned as a naval midshipman or in the merchant marine. Thirty-five years earlier, Semmes had gone to sea at 17, as a midshipman. After an unremarkable working life as a naval officer, commander in the Lighthouse Corps, and an attorney, he took this new command and ran with it. Semmes had exceptional skill as the captain of a raider. After the Golden Rocket, he sank, captured or ransomed several ships, many from Maine, with the Sumter. The last was the Investigator, of Searsport, Maine, taken at Gibraltar and ransomed for $12,500.
In April,1861, the Sumter was blockaded at Gibraltar, where Semmes left the ship and went to England. New cruisers had been ordered, and, by 1862, the most famous of them, the Alabama, was ready and put under the command of Semmes. The Alabama was built under a veil of secrecy at Laird & Sons in Liverpool, England. Constructed of the finest English oak, to the highest standards of workmanship, it was 220' on deck, 28' beam, with little shear and flush decks. The three-masted bark had wire rigging and two steam engines that turned a single screw. Launched as a “yacht,” she sailed to England’s Western Islands, where her armament, crew and officers came aboard from an English vessel. She carried three 32 pounders on each side. Centrally mounted on the main deck were a 100-pound rifled pivot gun forward of the bridge, a 68-pound pivot gun, a pivot gun in the bow and another aft stern chaser. The guns were Blakely type, built in Liverpool, in 1862. With at least 120 crewmen, most of them British, it was expected to do 13 knots under sail and 15 under steam power. It carried five days’ supply of coal, used mostly for tight maneuvering and in combat. Semmes knew well the waters he sailed, the Atlantic, Carribean and Indian Oceans. The Alabama seemed to appear out of nowhere, strike and disappear into the night, a fog, or below the horizon. It was because of being everywhere and nowhere to be found, that the Alabama was called the “Ghost ship.” It never entered an American port. The North was determined to stop the Alabama. The Kearsarge, built at Kittery, in 1862, was given the task. About twenty other warships were engaged in the search for the Alabama, which had taken or burned a few hundred ships, at an estimated value of $6 million. The steam-and-sail, single-screw Kearsarge, under the command of a former Semmes shipmate, John Winslow, cruised the Atlantic for years looking for the Alabama. The Alabama had entered Cherborg, France, on the English Channel, for repairs. Winslow got word and the Kearsarge was there three days later waiting off shore for the inevitable departure. The Alabama left Cherborg at 10:30 A.M. on June 19, 1864, and, when five miles out, the Kearsarge sailed straight at her. Semmes saw the Kearsarge approach and veered off to port, the Kearsarge followed. The Alabama sailed clockwise, in a circle, and the Kearsarge followed. The Alabama opened fire, but the more-heavily-armed Kearsarge had the edge. The two sailed six more circles, drifting west in the current. Shell after shell smashed through bulwarks, gun ports, rigging and crew. The Kearsarge pounded the war-weary Alabama for an hour until, with decks red and slippery with blood, cluttered with limbs and body parts, she began to sink. Semmes and about forty crewmen climbed aboard the British yacht, which had come alongside as the ship went down. It and other boats had seen the battle. A crowd of an estimated 15,000 spectators watched the battle from shore. With the loss of trade in the south, the reduced ship sales, and the loss of ships to confederate cruisers, the Maine coastal economy was hit hard by the war. Many ships, driven into foreign registry to avoid the cruisers, never returned. Maine lost 9,000 lives in the war, $18 million that was appropriated to raise and support troops and the near devastation of its ocean commerce. The British, the south’s primary cotton customer, had built several warships for the south. After the war, under the “Geneva” awards reparations were paid to the Union, for neutrality violations. The Watts shipyard of Bath built the Samuel Watts one of the largest Down Easters ever built, with his share of the millions paid by Great Britain in the reparations settlement. As the “three month war” ground on to four plus years and costs soared, recruitment went from enthusiastic volunteers to required state quotas, to cash bountys paid for joining, to paid substitutes and outright refusal to go. In mid 1862 Lincoln called for 300,000 more troops. On July 26, at Deer Isle a meeting was called at town hall. Enlistments were at a standstill and they voted to pay a $100 sign up bounty. Hamlin was replaced by Andrew Johnson in Lincoln’s second term. He went on to serve as the collector of customs at Boston and later served in the senate from 1869-81. Retiring to Bangor, he died at his men’s club in 1889. Lincoln was assassinated at Ford’s theater. Semmes, the lawyer, months after Cherbourg, returned to Mobile, where he insisted his rank of general be recognized, so that he could not be tried as a pirate. He was not tried, and later practiced law, taught, wrote rambling books about life at sea and no doubt was the quintessential veteran “captain” of the post-war south. Maine’s coastal economy was revived after the war. Out of the revival came the Down Easter, a deep-water ship that carried the roots of Maine ship design, Maine men and cargo to the end of the days of sail.
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