U.S. Vice President Hannibal Hamlin
The New York Herald reports:
“Mr. Hamlin, the Vice President elect, left his home in Maine, en route for Washington, yesterday. He will arrive in this city tomorrow.”
U. S. Vice President elect Hannibal Hamlin (from Maine; photograph) is currently married to a Baptist family – for the second time. His first wife, Sarah Jane emery, had died from tuberculosis in 1856. Five months later, Hamlin had married his former wife’s younger half-sister, Ellen Vesta Emery. Sarah was a sister of a Baptist minister, and Ellen is a half-sister.
Serving as a U. S. congressman (first as a representative, then as a senator) from 1843 until his election as vice president, Hamlin has long been a consistent and vocal opponent of the extension of slavery.
Following the Civil War, Hamlin joked to Ellen about Baptists, the occasion being an invitation to attend a Baptist church.:
“I do not know precisely what a Christian Baptist is, but I suppose it is to distinguish him from Baptists who are not Christians.”
Sources: Cathcart, The Baptist Encyclopedia, Vol. 3, p. 1301-1302; Mark Scroggins, Hannibal: The Life of Abraham Lincoln’s First Vice President (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1994), p. 296.
