Clement Laird Vallandigham

Clement Laird Vallandigham , 1820-71, American political leader, leader of the Copperheads in the Civil War, b. New Lisbon (now Lisbon), Ohio. He became (1842) a lawyer, was elected to the Ohio legislature (1845, 1846), and was editor (1847-49) of the Dayton Empire, a Democratic weekly. A strong upholder of states' rights, Vallandigham was a U.S. Representative from 1858 to 1863, being defeated for reelection in 1862. On May 1, 1863, in a political speech at Mt. Vernon, Ohio, he declared, among other things, that the Civil War was being fought not to save the Union but to free the blacks and enslave the whites. Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside, then commanding the Dept. of the Ohio, accused him of violating "General Order No. 38," which threatened punishment for those declaring sympathy for the enemy, and Vallandigham was arrested, court-martialed, and sentenced to imprisonment for the rest of the war. President Lincoln commuted the sentence to banishment behind Confederate lines. The Peace Democrats of Ohio nevertheless nominated (July, 1863) Vallandigham for governor, but he was defeated by John Brough . He made his way from the Confederacy to Canada, and from there he returned to the United States and was allowed to go unmolested. In the presidential campaign of 1864, the Democratic platform, representing his views, demanded immediate cessation of hostilities. Made commander of the Sons of Liberty (see Knights of the Golden Circle ), he was the most prominent of the Copperheads. After the war he was an unsuccessful aspirant to Congress.

Bibliography: See biography by his brother, J. L. Vallandigham (1872, repr. 1972); study by F. L. Klement (1970).

Vallandigham, Clement L. (1820–1871),Demo cratic congressman, leading critic of the Lincoln administration during the Civil War. A lawyer and editor active in Democratic party politics from the 1840s, Vallandigham entered Congress in 1858. During the Civil War, he stridently opposed slave emancipation, the growth of central government power, and a harsh war policy against the South, demanding instead a negotiated peace to save the Constitution from Republican depredations. His opponents claimed that he was so militantly antiwar that he espoused treason. He came under military surveillance and was arrested by Gen. Ambrose Burnside after a speech in 1863 whose General Order No. 38 forbade any “habit of declaring sympathies for the enemy” in Ohio. He was tried and convicted by a military commission, not a civil court, and sentenced to prison.



President Abraham Lincoln, sensitive to the potential political damage of a civil liberties martyr, ordered him deported to Confederate territory. Vallandigham went on to Canada, from where he ran for governor of Ohio in 1863; he was soundly beaten. In 1864, his continued peace advocacy cost the Democrats dearly. Whatever their commitment to constitutional liberties, Northern voters were hostile to the Democrats' apparent support for the nation's enemies. The issues of free expression and opposition to wartime policies, even the war itself, raised by Vallandigham's experiences were to reappear in America's later wars and have never been comfortably settled to everyone's satisfaction.
[See also Black Hawk War.]

Bibliography

Frank L. Klement , The Limits of Dissent: Clement L. Vallandigham and the Civil War, 1970.
Joel H. Silbey , “A Respectable Minority”: The Democratic Party in the Civil War, 1977.
Mark E. Neely, Jr. , The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties, 1991.

Joel H. Silbey