| Clement Vallandigham | |
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| Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Ohio's 3rd district |
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| In office May 25, 1858 – March 3, 1863 |
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| Preceded by | Lewis D. Campbell |
| Succeeded by | Robert C. Schenck |
| Personal details | |
| Born | July 29, 1820 New Lisbon, Ohio |
| Died | June 17, 1871 (aged 50) Lebanon, Ohio |
| Political party | Democratic |
Clement Laird Vallandigham (pronounced velan´digham, -gam) (July 29, 1820 – June 17, 1871) was an Ohio politician, and leader of the Copperhead faction of anti-war Democrats during the American Civil War. He served two terms in the United States House of Representatives.
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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, which seated him, by a party vote, on the next to last day of the term. He was elected by a small margin in 1858 and again 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. However, this result may not be strictly comparable, owing to redistricting.
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." To those who supported the war he declared, "Defeat, debt, taxation [and] sepulchres - these are your trophies."
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 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 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).
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?" 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.
After the war, Vallandigham returned to Ohio, lost his campaigns 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" prompted Edward Everett Hale to write The Man Without a Country. This short story, which appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in December 1863, was widely republished.
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.
| 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 |
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