Sometimes, when everyone’s at each other’s throat about politics, drastic things can happen.
Like that time when treason was committed on the square in Mount Vernon … if that’s what happened.
It depends on whom you ask. Major General Ambrose Burnside, and by extension, his boss, Abraham Lincoln, thought it was pretty much treason to denounce and mock President Lincoln while a war was going on between the North and South.
The man accused, Ohio politician and former Congressman Clement Laird Vallandigham, most definitely thought he was only doing his patriotic duty. A lot of other people thought it wasn’t treason, too. Unfortunately for Vallandigham, they were found mostly south of the Mason-Dixon Line.
Clement Vallandigham didn’t mind being in the minority. He proudly fought for his belief that the Civil War should be brought to an end immediately, and that peace should be made between North and South.
In his speech, he called the war “wicked and cruel and unnecessary,” and he openly stoked white fears of freed African-Americans.
While these were fighting words in much of the north, Vallandigham knew that there were certain pockets in the north where Southern sympathizers were fairly strong. One such spot in Ohio was Mount Vernon. Settled mostly by Virginians, the town still had many connections to the South, and in the hillier parts of the region, the independent mentality of mountaineers meant that there was not much sympathy with grand national causes.
This made Knox County a hotbed of what were known as “Copperheads,” low-lying, Southern-sympathizers, and that is exactly what drew Vallandigham here on May 1, 1863, to address a crowd on the square.
Perched on the western side of Public Square, approximately in front of the building that now houses the restaurant known as The Joint, Vallandigham told the assembled crowd the war could already have been ended with the assistance of France, who offered to broker negotiations, but that “King Lincoln and his minions” had rejected it.
He railed against despotism, martial law, and the draft. The speech was fiery, and at least some in his audience appreciated it. The Union army officers disguised in plain clothes hidden throughout the crowd, not so much.
When the officers reported the contents of Vallandigham’s speech to Major General Amrose Burnside (the handlebar-mustachioed gentleman after whom sideburns are named) the wartime commander of the Department of Ohio decided that it was time to sever the Copperheads’ leader.
According to Burnside, Vallandigham’s inflammatory speech was in violation of his General Order No. 38, a wartime rule which pronounced that “the habit of declaring sympathies for the enemy will no longer be tolerated in the department. Persons committing such offences will be at once arrested, with a view to being tried as above stated, or sent beyond our lines into the lines of their friends.”
Burnside sent troops and arrested Vallandigham at his law office in Dayton on May 5.
With such phrases as “declaring sympathies for the enemy” being bandied about, things could have gotten much worse for Vallandigham. But Abraham Lincoln was too shrewd to be heavy-handed. He knew that Vallandigham still had a lot of friends and supporters in the Union, so Lincoln never even suggested the full treason treatment. He merely decided that if Vallandigham was so fond of the Confederacy, he should go there.
Troops marched him to the Southern border and sent him over. Vallandigham didn’t stay in the South long. He soon relocated to Canada, where he operated a campaign in absentia for the governorship of Ohio. Though he ultimately lost to a pro-war Democrat, Vallandigham made a healthy showing, with 187,000 votes to the winner John Brough’s 288,000.
Though he kept involved in politics, Vallandigham never held office again.
There was a strange coda to Clement Vallandigham’s remarkable life. In 1871, he was defending a murder suspect in a trial in Lebanon, Ohio. During a recess in the trial, Vallandigham took his legal team to The Golden Lamb Inn, where he was staying, to discuss strategy.
Vallandigham was convinced that his client, Thomas McGehan, was innocent, and that the victim, Tom Myers, had accidentally shot himself. Vallandigham explained to his team that it would have been very easy for the trigger of Mr. Myers’ pistol to have become tangled up in the fabric of his clothes when he took it out, causing the weapon to fire into the victim’s own abdomen.
Vallandigham said that he would demonstrate it in the court, and grabbed a firearm he believed to be unloaded.
Let’s just say that Vallandigham’s demonstration was quite effective. McGehan was acquitted and Vallandigham was buried a couple of days later in Dayton.
The fiesty politician was only 50 when he died, somewhat reformed, now supporting the rights of the recently freed African-Americans, but still in the thick of all the hot-button arguments of the day.
Today, a historical marker stands on the square in Mount Vernon, remembering the day when one of Abraham Lincoln’s fiercest Northern opponents pushed things a little too far.
