Clement Laird Vallandigham was a handsome, distinguished, gentleman of forty-one when he entered his second term in the United States House of Representatives from the Third District of Ohio in the fall of 1860. A Peace Democrat, Vallandigham supported the Fugitive Slave Law, opposed the radical Abolitionists, and wholeheartedly embraced the concept of States' Rights for the same intrinsic reasons the Founders did. By all accounts Congressman Vallandigham was an unabashed Constitutionalist.

In fact, as the editor and owner of the Democrat Western Empire in Dayton, Ohio, Vallandigham declared in the paper's inaugural editorial, "We will support the Constitution of the United States in its whole entirety as it came to us from the fathers believing it to establish in principle the very best form of Government which the wisdom of man ever devised."

Vallandigham's district was "western" and democratic by nature and inclination and served as a perfect platform for it representative's pro-Constitutional opinions, political leanings, and personal prejudices. When Mr. Lincoln's war propelled the "west" (i.e. Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, etc.) into a serious economic depression caused by the cessation of river traffic, a dramatic decline in farm prices, a large food surplus, an accompanying bank panic which closed businesses and threw thousands out of work, the "westerners," as they were called, quickly abandoned what little support they'd provided for the Republicans and flocked, increasingly, to Vallandigham's Peace Democrats. They could easily see that all this economic misery in their section was caused by the Republican sponsored Morrill Tariff Act of February 20, 1861. And that the outcome of this economic and political perfidy was the enrichment of Mr. Lincoln's friends, primarily New England's manufacturing elite. Then, with a hubris not seen in America since the knavery of the Yazoo land fraud, the Republicans, with the President's eager approval, passed the tariff act of July 14, 1862 which hurt the "west" even more by reducing the free list and increasing rates on already "protected" items. It does not take a genius to understand that since the central government no longer had the South's purse to drain they turned their fiscal attention to the West.

And while the Republicans brought poverty and misery to the "west" with the pro-manufacturing economic policies the "working class" began to wonder what would happen if abolitionism, another item on the radical Republican agenda, was instituted. Many white laborers in Northern cities feared that freeing the slaves would lower wages and jeopardize existing jobs thus fueling an already virulent Northern racism. Some Republican businessman actually used freedmen as strikebreakers or to lower wages which impacted on recent immigrants, mostly the Irish and Germans, who retaliated by rioting against free blacks in many Northern cities. Congressman Vallandigham spent the first two years of the Lincoln administration taking every opportunity to attack the Presidents' usurpations, including his proclivity to throw people who disagreed with his despotic policies into jail. He even went so far as to introduce legislation that would incarcerate Mr. Lincoln if he continued in his efforts to quiet anti-war editors and other who disagreed with the administration. But in the House of Representatives, controlled by the Republicans and bereft of Southerners, it came to nothing.

Clement Vallandigham's political career came to an end in March of 1863 when the infamous Thirty-seventh Congress adjourned. Several months before the Ohio State Legislature had succeeded in gerrymandering Vallandigham's district by adding pro-Lincoln Warren County and the fiery orator was defeated in his bid for Congress. While he'd been ousted from Congress, Vallandigham, now a nationally prominent Constitutional Democrat, began a western speaking tour. At each stop he denounced the plethora of legislation promulgated by the radical Republicans supporting the empowerment and centralization of the Federal government and his lectures were well received.

When he returned to Ohio he found that the Lincoln Administration had established a "Department of Ohio," comprised of the states of Indiana, Kentucky, Illinois, and Ohio. Clement's brother wrote that the "military district" was, "…placed under the command of General Ambrose Burnside, a rash, weak, and ignorant man, who, evincing at the battle of Fredericksburg his total incapacity to contend with armed rebels at the South, had been sent to control unarmed Democrats in the West…"

Major General Ambrose Everts Burnside left Baltimore on the evening of March 22, 1863 in a pouring rain that portended future failures for Mr. Lincoln's anointed, pro-abolitionist, commander. "Old Brains" Halleck, Lincoln's Number One, informed Burnside that it might be propitious if he invaded east Tennessee where there were "Union" Southerners the president was particularly fond of ensconced in those mountains. He also suggested that his duties included protecting the tender supply lines feeding the Army of the Cumberland which included challenging the South's nimble cavaliers, one of whom, General John Hunt Morgan, was at that moment, enjoying a rapacious Confederate spree at beautiful Mr. Sterling, Kentucky.

And while there was much on the bewhiskered general's plate Halleck also sent along a memorandum concerning "the relation of the military with the civilian population." The memorandum, initially sent to General Rosecrans, was copied to Burnside and suggested that "more rigid treatment of all disloyal persons" was and objective a good Unionist commander could understand.

Further the arriviste Chief of Staff, "…defined loyal, neutral, and avowedly hostile citizens," recommending a course of actions against each group. Ominously he wrote, "…and it is time that the laws of war should be more rigorously enforced against them."

There was plenty of unrest among the citizenry of the Department of Ohio. In Indiana, passage of the Enrollment (Conscription) Act on March 3, 1863 had the opposite desired effect, filling the rolls of the Knights of the Golden Circle (i.e. "Copperheads"). These God fearing Democrats were fed up with Mr. Lincoln's usurpations. They took their stand in one Indiana county and caused a covey of federal provost guards sent to round up deserters fleeing for their lives.

Other violence soon erupted. Democrat newspaper editors in Ohio so infuriated pro-Lincoln federal soldiers, with their anti-government editorials, that the soldiers burnt down several offices.

However, no sooner had the bumbling Burnside "taken command" of the Military District of Ohio, than he began to issue bombastic edicts designed to quell the unrest. Three were singularly offensive; No. 9 declared criticism of the Civil or Military Administrations a crime; No. 15 rescinded the Second Amendment of the Constitution; No. 38 proffered the gibbet for anyone found guilty of "implied treason."

Clement who determined to seek the Ohio governorship saw his opportunity not only to take a stand for the Constitution, but a chance to do a little electioneering as well. At Mt. Vernon, Ohio on May 1, 1863 the Know County Democracy held a giant anti-war rally that drew nearly 20,000 Ohioans. Clement spoke for two hours manifesting what one writer referred to as "manliness, candor, genuine patriotism, and true statesmanship…." He contrasted "between the life-long Unionism of the Democratic party, and the original and continuous disunionism of the Abolition (Republican) party…". And, finally, he attacked the Lincolnites for their "monarchical usurpations.., the disgraceful surrender of the rights and liberties of the people by the last infamous Congress, and the conversion of the government into a despotism," and most of all for their sanguinary war; a war that had sent many an Ohio boy home in a pine box.

General Burnside had a couple of snitches in the audience recording Vallandigham's words and several days later, back home in Dayton, the Democrat was seized by armed Federal soldiers and surreptitiously carried off in the dead of night. Lincoln's chief enforcer, Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton had prepared an order suspending the writ of habeas corpus. However, the president had learned from Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon Chase, an Ohio native, that the Federal judge hearing the case had refused a similar request the previous year and told Stanton to put the order in abeyance.

In the meantime, Democrat newspapers boldly proclaimed Vallandigham's arrest and Dayton's Democracy flew into a rage! A Republican paper, the Dayton Journal, was burnt down prompting Burnside to send federal troops in to quell the rioting. The Dayton Empire, another Democrat paper, published searing headlines; "Will Free Men Submit? The Hour For Action Has Arrived." Soldiers were dispatched to the paper's office and the editor, Mr. John Logan, was taken into custody. On the first floor federal soldiers made a frightening discovery; two hundred stand of muskets and a small brass cannon. Revolution was afoot on the shores of the Miami River!

In the end Vallandigham was found guilty in a military court and was ordered to "close confinement in Fort Warren, Boston Harbor." President Lincoln was deftly able to outmaneuver his pro-Constitutional foes. In a typical Lincolnesque homily the President said, "…Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch the hair of a wiley (sic) agitator who induces him to desert?" In the mind of Abraham Lincoln, Clement Laird Vallandigham, who eloquently defended free speech, freedom of the press, and the right of dissent against the hubris of a consolidated government was a "wiley (sic) agitator."

Lincoln, in a brilliant political maneuver, rescinded the court's ruling and banished him to the Confederacy!

After a few weeks and a circuitous journey through the Caribbean, Vallandigham ended up in Canada. While in passage he received the news that he'd won the Democratic nomination for Ohio governor. He made Windsor, Canada his campaign headquarters and went to work. And while he pulled more votes than any Democrat before, he was "badly beaten."

Something had happened that the Democrats could never have foreseen. In the 1862 elections they had hurt the Republicans as the citizenry grew tired and disgusted with the war and its inevitable tax burdens (including an egregious, unconstitutional, Income Tax), its horrific carnage, the seemingly endless stream of battlefield defeats, and the emancipation of slaves in Confederate territory. But in 1863 Federal victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg coupled with the myth of prosperity and full employment (actually the result of a temporary economic boom in the "northern war industries") bought with the blood of America's young men convinced "large majorities …that they were ready to accept a new day."

The Democracy was soundly defeated, Vallandigham quietly returned to Ohio to practice law, unfettered by the federal government. The defeat of the Democrats in 1863 signaled the rise of New England's capitalist-bourgeoisie as America's dominant political-economic force. In effect, the Republican Party had become the State.

Vallandigham receives short shrift in the history books because he boldly challenged Lincoln's unconstitutional and extralegal pronouncements, therefore he challenged the Lincoln Myth; and no on survives such blasphemy. He stood for the old Republic's first principles and he was defeated by a powerful cabal that portended "vast changes in the arrangement of classes, in the distribution of wealth, in the course of industrial development."

Following the war the Supreme Court heard a case (Milligan) the government brought against the heroic anti-war "Copperheads." They'd been tried for treason, found guilty, and were scheduled for execution. The Court struck down the findings and ruled: "…the Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and peace, and covers with the shield of protection all classes of men, at all times and under all circumstances. No doctrine involving more pernicious consequences was even invented by the wit of man than that any of its provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government." It appears that Supreme Court was concerned with the establishment of laws and executive actions that portended a "police state," President Lincoln's true legacy.

Six years after the war, in one of history's juicier ironies, Clement Laird Vallandigham accidentally shot himself. He was demonstrating how a certain Mr. Meyers had died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound rather than being murdered by his client.

He succumbed on June 17, 1871.