Episode Details

Clement Vallandigham, born in 1820 in New Lisbon, Ohio, left Jefferson College without a degree after a dispute over debate society rules, practiced law in Dayton with a $500 loan from his friend Edwin Stanton, and became a Democratic congressman opposed to abolition. He questioned John Brown after Harpers Ferry, proposed dividing the country into four sections with Senate vetoes, and coined the Copperhead slogan about the Constitution as it is and the Union as it was.

After a May 1863 speech in Mount Vernon defying General Ambrose Burnside's General Order No. 38, soldiers arrested him at night and a military commission convicted him. Lincoln commuted the prison sentence to banishment behind Confederate lines. Vallandigham went on to Bermuda and Canada, ran for Ohio governor from a hotel in Windsor, Ontario, lost in a landslide, and led the secret Order of the Sons of Liberty. In 1871, after urging Democrats to accept the Reconstruction amendments, he shot himself while demonstrating how a victim might have fired his own pistol, and his client was acquitted.

• William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator called him a venomous creature doing the dirty work of the South.
• While in Richmond he advised Confederate officials against invading Pennsylvania.
• He returned from Canada in disguise in 1864, and Lincoln ordered him watched but left alone.
• He wrote the peace plank of the 1864 Democratic platform, which nominee George McClellan rejected.
• His exile inspired Edward Everett Hale's story The Man Without a Country.