Clement Vallandigham
Clement Laird Vallandigham was an American lawyer and politician who was the leader of the Copperhead faction of anti-war Democrats during the American Civil War.
He served two terms for Ohio's 3rd congressional district in the United States House of Representatives. In 1863, he was convicted by an Army court martial for publicly expressing opposition to the war and exiled to the Confederate States of America. He ran for governor of Ohio in 1863 from exile in Canada, but was defeated.
Vallandigham died in 1871 in Lebanon, Ohio, after accidentally shooting himself in the abdomen with a pistol during a courtroom demonstration.
Early life
Clement Laird Vallandigham was born July 29, 1820, in New Lisbon, Ohio, to Clement and Rebecca Laird Vallandigham. His father, a Presbyterian minister, educated his son at home.In 1841, Vallandigham had a dispute with the college president at Jefferson College in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania. He was honorably dismissed, but he never received a degree.
Edwin M. Stanton, the future Secretary of War under President Abraham Lincoln, was Vallandigham's close friend before the Civil War. Stanton lent Vallandigham $500 for a law course and to begin his own practice. Both Vallandigham and Stanton were Democrats, but they held opposing views on slavery. Stanton was an abolitionist; Vallandigham an anti-abolitionist.
Political career
Ohio legislature
Shortly after beginning to practice law in Dayton, Ohio, Vallandigham entered politics. He was elected as a Democrat to the Ohio legislature in 1845 and 1846, and served as editor of a weekly newspaper, the Dayton Empire, from 1847 to 1849.While in the Ohio state legislature, Vallandigham voted against the repeal of the "Black Laws" though he wanted the question put to a referendum by the voters. In 1851, Vallandigham sought the Democratic nomination to be Ohio's lieutenant governor, but the party declined to nominate him.
House of Representatives
Vallandigham ran for Congress in 1856, but he was narrowly defeated. He appealed to the Committee of Elections of the House of Representatives and claimed that illegal votes had been cast. The House eventually agreed, and Vallandigham was seated on the next to last day of the term. The delay was caused by "the division which had arisen in the Democratic party upon the Lecompton question." He was reelected by a small margin in 1858.In October 1859, abolitionist John Brown raided Harper's Ferry, Virginia, seizing the United States Army Arsenal. Vallandigham happened to be passing through the town and joined a group of government officials who interrogated the captured Brown as to his aims, which Brown stated were an attempt to set off a rebellion of slaves to secure their freedom. Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison's newspaper, The Liberator, quoted Vallandingham on Brown:
Following this quotation, The Liberator stated, "This Vallandingham is manifestly as mean and venomous a creature as ever yet crawled in the presence, and performed the dirty work of the Southern slavocracy".
The National Park Service website states, "Vallandigham was a vigorous proponent of states' right , including the right to secede. He believed that the Union had no constitutional right to regulate slavery or to militarily attack the Confederacy". During the Civil War, he was one of Lincoln's most outspoken critics.
Vallandigham was re-elected to the House in 1860. During the 1860 presidential campaign, he supported Stephen A. Douglas, although he disagreed with Douglas's position on "squatter sovereignty", which was used by detractors to describe popular sovereignty.
On February 20, 1861, Vallandigham delivered a speech, titled "The Great American Revolution," to the House of Representatives. He accused the Republican Party of being "belligerent" and advocated a "choice of peaceable disunion upon the one hand, or Union through adjustment and conciliation upon the other." Vallandigham supported the Crittenden Compromise, which was a last-minute effort to avert the Civil War. He blamed sectionalism and anti-slavery sentiment for the secession crisis. Vallandigham proposed a series of amendments to the Constitution. The United States would be divided into four sections: North, South, West, and Pacific. The four sections would each have the power in the Senate to veto legislation. The Electoral College would be modified, with the term of president and vice-president increased to six years and limited to one term unless two thirds of the electors agreed. Secession by a state could be agreed to only if the legislatures of the sections approved it. Moving between the sections was a guaranteed right.
Vallandigham strongly opposed every military bill, which led his opponents to charge that he wanted the Confederacy to win the war. He became the acknowledged leader of the anti-war Copperheads, and in an address on May 8, 1862, he coined their slogan: "To maintain the Constitution as it is, and to restore the Union as it was." It was endorsed by fifteen Democratic congressmen.
Vallandigham lost his bid for a third full term in 1862 by a relatively large vote, which meant that he would be out of office early in 1863. However, his loss was at least partially caused by the redistricting of his congressional district. Despite this loss, some still considered him to be a future presidential candidate.
As a lame-duck Representative, Vallandigham delivered a speech in the House on January 14, 1863, entitled "The Constitution-Peace-Reunion." In it, he stated his opposition to abolitionism from the "beginning." He denounced Lincoln's violations of civil liberties, "which have made this country one of the worst despotisms on earth". Vallandigham openly criticized Lincoln's preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, charging that "war for the Union was abandoned; war for the Negro openly begun." He also condemned financial interests that were profiting from the war: "And let not Wall Street, or any other great interest, mercantile, manufacturing, or commercial, imagine that it shall have power enough or wealth enough to stand in the way of reunion through peace." Vallandigham added, "Defeat, debt, taxation, sepulchers, these are your trophies." Vallandigham's speech included a proposal to end the military conflict. He advocated an armistice and the demobilization of the military forces of both the Union and the Confederacy.
Post-congressional activities
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. He charged that the war was no longer being fought to save the Union, but it had become an attempt to free the slaves by sacrificing the liberty of white Americans to "King Lincoln."The authority for Burnside's order came from a proclamation of September 24, 1862 in which President Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and made discouraging enlistments, drafts, or any other "disloyal" practices subject to martial law and trial by military commissions.
Arrest and military trial
On May 5, 1863, Vallandigham was arrested as a violator of General Order Number 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. Vallandigham's speech at Mount Vernon, Ohio, was cited as the source of the arrest. He was charged by the Military Commission with "Publicly expressing, in violation of General Orders No. 38, from Head-quarters Department of the Ohio, sympathy for those in arms against the Government of the United States, and declaring disloyal sentiments and opinions, with the object and purpose of weakening the power of the Government in its efforts to suppress an unlawful rebellion."The specifications of the charge against Vallandigham were:
Vallandigham wrote that he knew his public opinions and sentiments aided the Confederate war effort, raised public skepticism against the Lincoln administration, raised sympathy for the Confederate soldiers, and encouraged Northerners to violate the wartime laws of the Union.
The peace proposal of France was true. Vallandigham had been requested by Horace Greeley to assist in the peace plan.
Captain James Madison Cutts served as the judge advocate in the military trial and was responsible for authoring the charges against Vallandigham. During the trial, testimony was given by Union army officers who had attended the speech in civilian clothes, that Vallandigham called the president "King Lincoln." He was sentenced to confinement in a military prison "during the continuance of the war" at Fort Warren, Massachusetts. Vallandigham only called one witness in his defense, Congressman Samuel S. Cox. According to University of New Mexico School of Law Professor Joshua E. Kastenberg, because Cox was another well-known anti-war Democrat, his presence at the military court likely harmed Vallandigham's attempts at arguing his innocence.
On May 11, 1863, an application for a writ of habeas corpus was filed in federal court for Vallandigham by former Ohio Senator George E. Pugh. Judge Humphrey H. Leavitt of the Circuit Court of the United States for the Southern District of Ohio upheld Vallandigham's arrest and military trial as a valid exercise of the President's war powers. Congress had passed an act authorizing the president to suspend habeas corpus on March 3, 1863.
On May 16, 1863, there was a meeting at Albany, New York, to protest the arrest of Vallandigham. A letter from Governor Horatio Seymour of New York was read to the crowd. Seymour charged that "military despotism" had been established. Resolutions by John V. L. Pruyn were adopted. The resolutions were sent to Lincoln by Erastus Corning. In response to a public letter issued at the meeting of angry Democrats in Albany, Lincoln's "Letter to Erastus Corning et al." of June 12, 1863, explained 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.