Federal troops in Tennessee turned Vallandigham over to the Confederate Army on May 25, 1863. In June, President Davis of the Confederate States, having no use for Vallandigham, orders him to Wilmington, North Carolina to be guarded as an "alien enemy." That same month. Peace Democrats in Ohio nominate the the exiled and incarcerated Vallandigham for Governor. A committee of the Democratic convention demanded that President Lincoln reverse his ordered exile of Vallandigham. Lincoln refused. "Must I," Lincoln lamented, "shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wiley agitator who induces him to desert?" In October, Vallandigham, now exiled by the Confederate States to Canada, would be defeated for the Ohio Governorship by Democrat John Brough from Marietta.
On June 14, 1864, one year after being exiled, Clement Vallandigham slips back into the country and arrives in Ohio wearing a feeble disguise that fails to deceive the Federal agents watching him. Soon, he will be appointed National Commander of the radical "Sons of Liberty," a secret anti-war organization also known as the "Knights of the Golden Circle." Throughout the summer of 1864 Vallandigham will conspire with the Confederate agents in a bizarre plot to effect the release of 20,000 prisoners of war in Ohio, Illinois and Indiana.
"Hon. C.L. Vallandigham is at his home in Dayton, enjoying the rights of a freeman once more. He returned of his own will and pleasure, as he had a right to do, without asking the permission of the usurper Lincoln. His arrest and banishment was an infamous outrage - a mean act of despotic power, which never ought have been countenanced."
~ The Circleville Democrat ~
Friday, June 24, 1864
The newspaper, a highly-partisan Democratic paper also reports in full a speech by Vallandigham to the Democratic Convention at Hamilton, Ohio. The masthead of the paper proudly proclaims; "The Constitution as it is - the Union as it was." The so-called "Peace" Party flourished for a time, but ultimately faded away and the war, as wars eventually do, came to an end. Vallandigham returned to the practice of law and gave up any further ambitions of political glory.
In June of 1871, Clement Vallandigham, defending an Ohio man charged with murder, requested a change of venue to Warren County, Ohio. There, in his hotel room at the Golden Lamb Inn at Lebanon, Ohio, Vallandigham was rehearsing his final arguments to the jury. He would suggest that his client was innocent and that the victim had actually killed himself accidentally. To demonstrate the freak accident he proposed, Vallandigham planned to pull a similar pistol from his trouser pocket to demonstrate how it might accidentally fire. While practicing his arguments in his room at the Golden Lamb, Vallandigham pulled the pistol and, ironically, it fired, sending a bullet into his abdomen at point blank range. Clement Vallandigham, the notorious Southern-sympathizer from Ohio, once banished from the Union by President Lincoln, died the next morning at the age of fifty-one.
Copyright ©2001, M.T. Mitchell
In 1871, Charles Darwin himself could have cited Vallandingham as the recipient of a Darwin Award.
Thanks!
Thank you again, Rome. The other day, I glibly remarked that at least Vallandigham was no political dynasty (or we would know it), but now I'm not so sure. As I do a bit of genealogical research, I will pursue for a Vallandigham/Dean connection. Get back to you if I find something. LOL.
"Hon. C.L. Vallandigham is at his home in Dayton, enjoying the rights of a freeman once more. He returned of his own will and pleasure, as he had a right to do, without asking the permission of the usurper Lincoln. His arrest and banishment was an infamous outrage - a mean act of despotic power, which never ought have been countenanced."
Sounds an awful lot like Cindy Sheepdip, don't it?
Great story.