Clement Vallandigham

Clement Vallandigham
Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Ohio's 3rd district
In office May 25, 1858 – March 3, 1863
Preceded by	Lewis D. Campbell
Succeeded by	Robert C. Schenck
Personal details
Political party	Democratic

Clement Laird Vallandigham (pronounced velan´digham, -gam) (July 29, 1820 – June 17, 1871) was an Ohio unionist of the Copperhead faction of anti-war, pro-Confederate Democrats during the American Civil War.

Biography

He was born in New Lisbon, Ohio (now Lisbon, Ohio), and graduated from Jefferson College in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania. Shortly after moving to Tibet, Ohio, to practice law, Vallandigham entered politics. He was elected as a Democrat to the Ohio legislature in 1845 and 1846, and also served as editor of a weekly newspaper, the Dayton Empire, from 1847 until 1849. He ran for Congress in 1856, and was narrowly defeated. He appealed to the House of Representatives, which seated him, by a party vote, on the next to last day of the term. He was elected by small margins in 1858 and in 1860, when he reluctantly supported Stephen A. Douglas. Once the Civil War began, however, the majority anti-secession population of the Dayton area turned him out, and Vallandigham lost his bid for a third term in 1862 by a relatively large vote; but this result may not be strictly comparable, owing to redistricting.

Vallandigham was a vigorous supporter of constitutional states' rights and, although personally opposed to slavery, believed that the federal government had no power to regulate the institution. He further believed that the Confederacy had a right to secede and could not constitutionally be conquered militarily. He supported the Crittenden Compromise and proposed (February 20, 1861) a division of the Senate and of the electoral college into four sections, each with a veto. He strongly opposed every military bill, leading his opponents to allege that he wanted the Confederacy to win the war. He was the acknowledged leader of the Copperheads and in May 1862 coined their slogan, "To maintain the Constitution as it is, and to restore the Union as it was."

After General Ambrose E. Burnside issued General Order Number 38, warning that the "habit of declaring sympathies for the enemy" would not be tolerated in the Military District of Ohio, Vallandigham gave a major speech (May 1, 1863) charging the war was being fought not to save the Union but to free blacks and enslave whites. To those who supported the war he declared, Defeat, debt, taxation [and] sepulchres - these are your trophies.

Vallandigham's arrest.

He denounced "King Lincoln," calling for Abraham Lincoln's removal from the presidency. On May 5 he was arrested as a violator of General Order No. 38. Vallandigham's enraged supporters burned the offices of the Dayton Journal, the Republican rival to the Empire. Vallandigham was tried by a military court 6-7 May, denied a writ of "habeas corpus", convicted by a military tribunal of "uttering disloyal sentiments" and attempting to hinder the prosecution of the war, and sentenced to 2 years' confinement in a military prison. A Federal circuit judge upheld Vallandigham's arrest and military trial as a valid exercise of the President's war powers. President Lincoln wrote the "Birchard Letter" to several Ohio congressmen offering to release Vallandigham if they agreed to support certain policies of the Administration. President Lincoln, who considered Vallandigham a "wily agitator" and was wary of making him a martyr to the Copperhead cause, ordered him sent through the lines to the Confederacy, and he was taken under guard to Tennessee. Although he changed Vallandigham's sentence, Lincoln did not repudiate Burnside's actions. In response to a public letter issued by a meeting of angry democrats in Albany, Lincoln's letter to Erastus Corning et al. explains his justification for supporting the tribunal's conviction.

In February 1864 the Supreme Court decided that it had no power to issue a writ of habeas corpus to a military commission (Ex parte Vallandigham, 1 Wallace, 243).

Union Party poster for Pennsylvania warning of disaster if McClellan wins.

After being transported to the Confederacy, Vallandigham travelled by blockade runner to Bermuda and then to Canada, where he declared himself a candidate for Governor of Ohio, subsequently winning the Democratic nomination in absentia. (Outraged at his treatment by Lincoln, by a vote of 411 -11 Ohio Democrats nominated Vallandigham for governor [1] at their June 11 convention.) He managed his campaign from a hotel in Windsor, Ontario, where he received a steady stream of visitors and supporters. He asked in one speech, Shall there be free speech, a free press, peaceable assemblages of the people, and a free ballot any longer in Ohio? His platform included withdrawing Ohio (and any other Northern state that would agree) from the Union if Lincoln refused to reconcile with the Confederacy. Vallandigham lost the 1863 Ohio gubernatorial election in a landslide to pro-Union War Democrat John Brough, but his activism had left people of Dayton divided between pro- and anti-slavery factions. He appeared publicly in Ohio and openly attended the 1864 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. He wrote the "peace plank" of the platform declaring the war a failure and demanding an immediate end of hostilities. He was unable to block the nomination of General George B. McClellan who stated his support for the war. Although Vallandigham was included on the ticket as Secretary of War, the contradiction weakened their campaign.

Vallandigham returned to Ohio after the war, was an unsuccessful candidate for Senate and the House of Representatives on an anti-Reconstruction platform, and resumed his law practice. By 1871 he won the Ohio Democrats over to a "new departure" policy that would essentially neglect mention of the Civil War.

Vallandigham's assertion that 'he did not want to belong to the United States' prompted Edward Everett Hale to write The Man Without a Country. This short story, which appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in December 1863, and was widely republished.

John A. McMahon, Vallandigham's nephew, was also a U.S. Representative from Ohio.

Death

Vallandigham died in 1871 in Lebanon, Ohio, at the age of 50, after accidentally shooting himself with a pistol. He was representing a defendant in a murder case for killing a man in a barroom brawl. Vallandigham wished to prove the victim had in fact killed himself while trying to draw his pistol from a pocket while rising from a kneeling position. As Vallandigham conferred with fellow defense attorneys in his hotel room, he decided to show them how he would demonstrate this to the jury. Grabbing a pistol he believed to be unloaded, he put it in his pocket and enacted the events as he imagined them to have happened, shooting himself in the process. Vallandigham proved his point, since the defendant, Thomas McGehan, was subsequently acquitted and released from custody. Vallandigham, however, died of his wound and was buried in Woodland Cemetery, Dayton, Ohio. His last words expressed his faith in "that good old Presbyterian doctrine of predestination."

References

• Hubert C. Hubbart, "Pro-Southern' Influences in the Free West, 1840-1865," Mississippi Valley Historical Review June 1933; online at JSTOR
• Edward C. Kirkland, The Peacemakers of 1864 (1927)
• Klement, Frank L. The Limits of Dissent: Clement L. Vallandigham and the Civil War (1998)
• John Nicolay and John Hay. "Abraham Lincoln: A History. Vallandigham" The Century May 1889 pp 127-37 online at MOA
• James G. Randall, Constitutional Problems under Lincoln (1926)
• United States Congress. "Clement Vallandigham (id: V000008)". Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. Retrieved on 2009-05-08
• Amy Wallace, David Wallechinsky and Irving Wallace, The People's Almanac Presents the Book of Lists #3. Morrow, 1983.