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
Born	July 29, 1820 New Lisbon, Ohio
Died	June 17, 1871(1871-06-17) (aged 50) Lebanon, Ohio
Political party	Democratic

Clement Laird Vallandigham (pronounced velan´digham, -gam) (July 29, 1820 – June 17, 1871) was an Ohio resident of the Copperhead faction of anti-war Democrats during the American Civil War. He served two terms in the United States House of Representatives.

Biography

He was born in New Lisbon, Ohio (now Lisbon, Ohio), to Clement Vallandigham and his wife Rebecca Laird. He graduated from Jefferson College in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania.^[1] 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,^[why?] which seated him, by a party vote, on the next to last day of the term.^[why?] He was elected by a small margin in 1858 and again in 1860, when he reluctantly^{[citation needed]} supported Stephen A. Douglas. Once the Civil War began, however, the majority anti-secession population^{[citation needed]} of the Dayton area turned him out, and Vallandigham lost his bid for a third term in 1862 by a relatively large vote. However, this result may not be strictly comparable, owing to redistricting.^{[citation needed]}

Vallandigham was a vigorous supporter of constitutional states' rights. He believed the federal government had no power to regulate a legal institution, which slavery then was. He also believed the states had a right to secede and that the Confederacy could not constitutionally be conquered militarily. Vallandigham supported the Crittenden Compromise and proposed on February 20, 1861 that the Senate and the electoral college be divided into four sections, each with a veto. He strongly opposed every military bill, leading his opponents to charge that he wanted the Confederacy to win the war. Vallandigham was the acknowledged leader of the Copperheads, and in May 1862 he 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 on May 1, 1863, charging that the war was being fought not to save the Union but to free the slaves by sacrificing the liberty of all Americans to "King Lincoln."^{[citation needed]} To those who supported the war he declared, "Defeat, debt, taxation [and] sepulchres - these are your trophies."^{[citation needed]}

Vallandigham's arrest.

Vallandingham "publicly denounced the ‘wicked and cruel' war by which ‘King Lincoln' was ‘crushing out liberty and erecting a despotism,'"^[2] and called for Lincoln's removal from the presidency. On May 5, Vallandigham was arrested as a violator of General Order No. 38. His enraged supporters burned the offices of the Dayton Journal, the Republican rival to the Empire. Vallandigham was tried by a military court on May 6 and 7. He was denied a writ of habeas corpus and was convicted by the military tribunal of "uttering disloyal sentiments" and attempting to hinder the prosecution of the war. He was sentenced to two years' confinement in a military prison. A Federal circuit judge^[who?] upheld Vallandigham's arrest and military trial as a valid exercise of the President's war powers.^{[citation needed]} President Lincoln wrote the "Birchard Letter" to several Ohio congressmen, offering to release Vallandigham if they would agree to support certain policies of the Administration. Lincoln, who considered Vallandigham a "wily agitator", was wary of making him a martyr to the Copperhead cause and thus ordered him sent through the enemy lines to the Confederacy. He was taken under military guard to Tennessee. Although he altered Vallandigham's sentence, Lincoln did not repudiate Burnside's military actions against a civilian. In response to a public letter issued at a meeting of angry Democrats in Albany, Lincoln's "Letter to Erastus Corning et al." explains his justification for supporting the court-martial's conviction.

In February 1864, the Supreme Court ruled 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 sent 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, Ohio Democrats by a vote of 411 -11 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.^[3] 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?"^{[citation needed]} 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. However, he was unable to block his party's nomination of pro-war General George B. McClellan for the presidency. Although Vallandigham was included on the Democratic ticket as Secretary of War, the contradiction between his and McClellan's views weakened Democratic efforts to win voters over.^{[citation needed]}

After the war, Vallandigham returned to Ohio, lost his campaigns^[quantify] for Senate and the House of Representatives on an anti-Reconstruction platform, and then resumed his law practice. By 1871 he won the Ohio Democrats over to a "new departure" policy that would essentially neglect to mention the Civil War.

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

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 bar room brawl. Vallandigham attempted to prove the victim had in fact killed himself while trying to draw his pistol from a pocket when rising from a kneeling position. As Vallandigham conferred with fellow defense attorneys in his hotel room, he showed 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 they might have happened, shooting himself in the process. Vallandigham proved his point, and the defendant, Thomas McGehan, was acquitted and released from custody. Clement Vallandigham, however, died of his wound. His last words expressed his faith in "that good old Presbyterian doctrine of predestination." Survived by his wife, Louisa Anna (McMahon) Vallandingham, and his son Charles Vallandigham, he was buried in Woodland Cemetery, Dayton, Ohio.

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

References

	Biography portal
	American Civil War portal

1. ^ "Clement L. Vallandigham - MSN Encarta". Archived from the original on 2009-10-31. http://www.webcitation.org/5kwR77rR7. 
2. ^ Vance, Laurence (2006-12-04) Bill Kauffman: American Anarchist, LewRockwell.com
3. ^ Buescher, John. "Civil War Peace Offers." Teachinghistory.org, accessed 2 September 2011.

• 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)
• Clement Vallandigham at the 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.

Further reading

• Vallandigham, James L. A Life of Clement L. Vallandigham. Baltimore: Turnbull Brothers, 1872.

United States House of Representatives
Preceded by Lewis D. Campbell	Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Ohio's 3rd congressional district May 25, 1858 – March 3, 1863	Succeeded by Robert C. Schenck

Persondata
Name	Vallandigham, Clement Laird
Alternative names
Short description	American lawyer and politician
Date of birth	July 29, 1820
Place of birth	New Lisbon, Ohio
Date of death	June 17, 1871
Place of death	Lebanon, Ohio