How Lincoln spoiled his own legacy

How did Lincoln pick a running mate so primed to undermine some of his hard-fought-for objectives when the opportunity arose?

The simple answer is politics. Without advising his first vice president, Lincoln just prior to the 1864 National Union Convention passed the word to party leaders that he wanted Johnson, a pro-Union Southerner, and they generally accepted the political rationale for abandoning Hamlin, who was from a safe Republican state. From the start, Johnson vowed that his prime concern was opposing the secession of the Southern states, including his own. Indeed, in 1860, when Southern Democrats had broken away and had chosen John Breckinridge of Kentucky as their presidential nominee, Johnson had declared: “The blood of secession … is not on my head.” Predicting Lincoln’s election that year, he proclaimed, “When the crisis comes, I will be found standing by the Union.”

But Johnson had a political dark side, one Lincoln knew well: The senator did not share Hamlin’s zeal for an end to slavery. For political purposes, Johnson sometimes spoke in conciliatory terms of treatment toward indentured blacks, but he was far from an abolitionist. Explaining how a son of the South could accept emancipation of the slaves, he argued that more whites than blacks were being freed, because blacks were being given the opportunity to find their way in what he vowed was still “a white man’s government.”