Clement Laird Vallandigham (29 July 1820 – 17 June 1871) was a member of the US House of Representatives (D-OH 3) from 25 May 1858 to 3 March 1863, succeeding Lewis D. Campbell and preceding Robert C. Schenck. He was infamous as the leader of the pro-Confederate "Copperhead" faction of the Democratic Party in the US Congress during the American Civil War, and his fierce criticisms of Abraham Lincoln and the war effort ultimately led to his imprisonment and exile in 1863. He accidentally shot himself in 1871 while demonstrating for fellow murder trial defense attorneys how a person could accidentally shoot himself.
Biography[]
Clement Laird Vallandigham was born in New Lisbon, Ohio in 1820, and he was close friends with Edwin M. Stanton before the American Civil War; Stanton funded Vallandigham's law studies. Vallandigham became a lawyer in Dayton, and he served in the State House from 1845 to 1846 and edited the Dayton Empire from 1847 to 1849. An anti-abolitionist, Vallandigham voted against the repeal of the racist "Black Laws", and he was refused nomination for Lieutenant Governor in 1851. He went on to serve in the US House of Representatives from 1858 to 1863, and he became known as a vigorous supporter of constitutional states' rights, low tariffs, and the right to secession. During the American Civil War, he became a fierce critic of President Abraham Lincoln and argued that the Confederacy could not be militarily conquered, and he became the leader of the "Copperhead" faction of the Democratic Party, which advocated for a negotiated peace with the Confederacy and an immediate end to the war without abolition. He lost for re-election in 1862 due to redistricting, and, on 14 January 1863, he delivered a speech which militantly attacked Lincoln as a despot, criticized the Emancipation Proclamation for making the Civil War a war for the negro and not for the Union, said that Wall Street and other moneyed interests should not stand in the way of peace, and advocated an armistice and the demobilization of both the Union Army and the Confederate States Army. On 5 May 1863, he was arrested for charging that the war was an attempt to free the slaves by sacrificing white people's liberty to "King Lincoln", which violated Ambrose Burnside's general order that declaring sympathies for the enemy would be punishable by imprisonment in Ohio. On 19 May 1863, President Lincoln exiled Vallandigham to the Confederacy, where he was detained by the Confederates as an "alien enemy". He later left the Confederacy on a blockade runner to Bermuda, and he went into exile in Canada, losing in his gubernatorial bid for Ohio while in exile. He returned to Ohio on 15 June 1864 and attended the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and Lincoln decided to allow him to return, although while being watched. Vallandigham helped to form the party's platform of immediate peace with the Confederacy, and the conflicting views of the party and its presidential candidate George B. McClellan - who advocated for the peaceful reunion of the Confederacy and the Union - led to the party's defeat in the 1864 presidential election. After the war, he continued to oppose black suffrage and equality, and he failed to return to the US Congress. He died in Lebanon, Ohio after accidentally shooting himself; in an ironic tale, he had been representing a man who was accused of killing a man in a barroom brawl. At his hotel room, he attempted to show his fellow defense attorneys how a gun could accidentally be fired on oneself if the trigger was snagged on the person's clothing while rising from a kneeling position. Vallandigham re-enacted the exact movement, and, sure enough, he fatally wounded himself with a gunshot to the abdomen. His client won the case as a result, only to himself be killed four years later in another saloon brawl.