by Mike Sherfy, KnoxPages.com reporter
MOUNT VERNON – Many Ohioans played prominent roles during the Civil War era, pointed out Professor Allen Guelzo to his audience on the Public Square on Monday morning. Ohioans Ulysses Grant and William T. Sherman played obvious roles on the battlefield. Ohio Congressman John A. Bingham was the primary architect of the Fourteenth Amendment. Salmon Chase served as Lincoln’s Treasury Secretary. Three future presidents joined Ohio regiments: James Garfield, Rutherford B. Hayes, and William McKinley. Even Johnny Clem, the drummer-boy of Ohio hails from our state.
But Mount Vernon’s claim to any of them is tenuous. Our local connection to this era is less glorious. The plaque on our square honors none of them…but instead commemorates a speech given by a man described by his contemporaries as “a traitor to his own people”, “a burning disgrace”, and a “treble-tongued, hydra-headed, cloven-footed, Heaven-forsaken, Hell-begotten pusillanimous curse”.
This man, Clement Laird Vallandigham, was the subject of Guelzo’s presentation. Professor Guelzo, the Henry R. Luce III Professor of the Civil War Era at Gettysburg College and Director of that institution’s Civil War Studies Program, spoke to an audience of roughly fifty people who braved threatening rain and the noise of a nearby street repair crew to learn more about Mount Vernon’s infamous moment in 1863. The professor did not disappoint as he described Vallandigham’s ill-fated career and placed his speech on Mount Vernon’s Public Square into historical context.
Vallandigham, he pointed out, was the son of a Presbyterian minister and a reasonably successful lawyer in Dayton. Attracted to politics in his early 20s as a Jacksonian Democrat, Vallandigham cut no impressive tenure for himself. “Dreariness seemed to be his companion in politics” summed up Guelzo. In his first bid for public office, Vallandigham lost a county judgeship to a Whig opponent. In 1852, he ran for Congress—and lost to a Whig opponent by 172 votes. Two years later, he tried again…and lost by 2,562 votes. In 1856, he tried yet again…and lost to the same opponent (now a Republican) by 19 votes but was able to have the election overturned by alleging that its outcome had been tainted by the participation of several “colored citizens”. The Democratically-controlled House allowed him to take his seat as the Representative of Ohio’s Third district just in time for the march toward civil war to reach its fever pitch.
As Guelzo described him, Vallandigham seems not to have been a staunch supporter of slavery but was a vicious and furious opponent of “agitation” against that peculiar institution. Maintaining the antebellum status quo was the Ohio congressman’s chief cause, “We are for the Union as it is and the Constitution as it is,” Vallandigham declared. As he saw it, the Constitution gave no one– not any state, not any political party, not any federal officer—the right to meddle with slavery in the states in which it was legal. Therefore, he pointed out, ““We will preserve, maintain, and defend both at every hazard, observing, with scrupulous and uncalculating fidelity, every article, requirement, and compromise of the constitutional compact between these States, to the letter, and in its utmost spirit.”
Much to his chagrin, the 1860 election put Abraham Lincoln—an anti-slavery Republican–in the White House, which, as Guelzo made clear to his audience, sent Vallandigham’s anxieties into overdrive. “For twenty years, the country has been agitated by this subject of slavery,” Vallandigham said in a speech in Detroit. “Men of the North and the West have been taught to hate the men of the South, and Southerners have been taught to hate the men of the North and West. … What will be the inevitable result of the conflict that must ensue?…Human nature has been misread from the time of Cain to this day, if blood, blood, human blood is not the result.”
In that, Vallandigham was (of course) correct. But, once the Southern states seceded and the newly-formed Confederacy pummeled federal troops at Fort Sumter, Guelzo recounted, Vallandigham directed blame and criticism not at the rebels, but at President Abraham Lincoln. As he saw it, it was neither practically nor constitutionally possible for the Union to subdue the Confederacy without “first converting the government itself into a despotism and destroying the last vestiges of freedom.” He deemed Lincoln’s wartime activities to be audacious usurpation of power and the launch of a military despot. Not shy about sharing his concerns, Vallandigham shared them whenever possible. The Ohio legislature, now helmed by Republicans rewarded his efforts by rewriting the boundaries of the state’s congressional districts and gerrymandering his district out from under him.
Vallandigham returned home in March of 1863—a man without a district—to an Ohio that was under the military jurisdiction of General Ambrose Burnside. Burnside, Professor Guelzo suggested, was a luckless general in the field who proved even more hapless behind the line. That spring, he issued orders prohibiting criticism of the civil and military policy of the Administration. Vallandigham might have been out of office…but he was unwilling to stand silent.
On May 1, 1863, Copperhead elements invited him to speak in Mount Vernon’s Public Square. In his talk, Vallandigham challenged Burnside’s authority by characterizing the war as “cruel and unnecessary”. It was, he suggested, “a war not being waged for the preservation of the Union but for the purpose of crushing out liberty and erecting a despotism as well as a war for the freedom of the blacks and the enslavement of the whites.” He warned listeners that Lincoln was “about to appoint military marshals in every district to restrain the people of their liberties, to deprive them of their rights and privileges.” The template for that was Burnside. “The sooner the people inform the minions of usurped power that they will not submit to such restrictions upon their liberties, the better” he continued. “It is high time to defeat the attempts now being made to build up a monarchy on the ruins of our free government.”
That was enough for Burnside, who arrested Vallandigham four days later and imprisoned him in an army barracks in Cincinnati. But, as Guelzo pointed out, it was not the end of the story. Clement Vallandigham had been provocative—and perhaps even crossed the line between offering dissent and giving aid and comfort to an enemy—but he had done so in Ohio where civil courts were open and available. His arrest by the military cast an ugly shadow over the constitutionality of Lincoln’s policies Petitions and protests came from across the North to descend on an embarrassed Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln, however, was a shrewd politician. Recognizing that holding Vallandigham in jail (or hanging him for treason) would be politically difficult and that releasing him without punishment would make the Administration appear weak, he devised a more interesting solution.
He sent Clement Vallandigham to the Confederacy…as though to suggest he might find more congenial company there.
The Confederates were no more interested in Vallandigham than Lincoln was and, within a few months, he had slipped through the blockade to Halifax, Nova Scotia where he announced that he was—from Canadian exile—running for Governor of Ohio.
Vallandigham had achieved some degree of fame—or infamy—but he had severely overplayed his political hand. Ohioans may not have liked how Burnside had treated Vallandigham but that did not mean that they sympathized with Vallandigham’s fulminations against the war effort. He was defeated in the October 1863 gubernatorial election by 100,802 votes.
Nine months later, his political sails deflated, the former congressman slunk back into the United States. He attended the Democratic National Convention only to see George McClellan, a pro-war candidate, receive the nomination. When Lincoln was informed that Vallandigham had returned, Guelzo pointed out, the “supposed despot” ignored him.
That marked the effective end of Vallandigham’s importance on the national stage. After the war concluded, he made two more runs for Congress and was soundly defeated in each attempt. He settled back into his law practice and, in 1871, undertook the defense in a Lebanon murder trial. While demonstrating the murder weapon to the jury, he managed to snag it on his coat pocket and fatally shoot himself. He died the following day, affirming (according to Guelzo) the “good old Presbyterian doctrine of predestination”.
“Hardly ever have the stars in their courses marched against a man so consistently as the unhappy Clement Laird Vallandigham,” the professor concluded.
Following his presentation on the Square, Guelzo and several of his listeners adjourned to Mount Vernon Nazarene University’s Buchwald Center for lunch. His day, however, was not over.
At 7:00 this evening, he will deliver a public presentation at the Gund Gallery’s Community Foundation Theater at Kenyon College entitled, “Abraham Lincoln and the Powers of the Presidency” in which he will consider whether any of Vallandigham’s concerns about despotism may have been warranted.
The plaque commemorating the unhappy Clement Laird Vallandigham remains available for perusal at the West High Street intersection.
