1. Clement Laird Vallandigham was an American lawyer and politician who served as the leader of the Copperhead faction of anti-war Democrats during the American Civil War.
37 Facts About Clement Vallandigham
1. 2.
Clement Vallandigham served two terms for Ohio's 3rd congressional district in the United States House of Representatives.
3.
Clement Vallandigham ran for governor of Ohio in 1863 from exile in Canada, but was defeated.
4.
In 1841, Clement Vallandigham had a dispute with the college president at Jefferson College in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania.
5.
Clement Vallandigham was honorably dismissed, but he never received a degree.
6.
Clement Vallandigham was elected as a Democrat to the Ohio legislature in 1845 and 1846, and served as editor of a weekly newspaper, the Dayton Empire, from 1847 to 1849.
7.
In 1851, Clement Vallandigham sought the Democratic nomination to be Ohio's lieutenant governor, but the party declined to nominate him.
8.
Clement Vallandigham ran for Congress in 1856, but he was narrowly defeated.
9.
Clement Vallandigham appealed to the Committee of Elections of the House of Representatives and claimed that illegal votes had been cast.
10.
The House eventually agreed, and Clement Vallandigham was seated on the next to last day of the term.
11.
Clement Vallandigham happened to be passing through the town and joined a group of government officials who interrogated the captured Brown as to his aims, which Brown stated were an attempt to set off a rebellion of slaves to secure their freedom.
12.
On February 20,1861, Clement Vallandigham delivered a speech, titled "The Great American Revolution," to the House of Representatives.
13.
Clement Vallandigham blamed sectionalism and anti-slavery sentiment for the secession crisis.
14.
Clement Vallandigham strongly opposed every military bill, which led his opponents to charge that he wanted the Confederacy to win the war.
15.
Clement Vallandigham lost his bid for a third full term in 1862 by a relatively large vote, which meant that he would be out of office early in 1863.
16.
Clement Vallandigham advocated an armistice and the demobilization of the military forces of both the Union and the Confederacy.
17.
On May 5,1863, Clement Vallandigham was arrested as a violator of General Order Number 38.
18.
Clement Vallandigham's enraged supporters burned the offices of the Dayton Journal, the Republican rival to the Empire.
19.
Clement Vallandigham wrote that he knew his public opinions and sentiments aided the Confederate war effort, raised public skepticism against the Lincoln administration, raised sympathy for the Confederate soldiers, and encouraged Northerners to violate the wartime laws of the Union.
20.
Clement Vallandigham had been requested by Horace Greeley to assist in the peace plan.
21.
Clement Vallandigham travelled to Richmond, Virginia, where he met with Robert Ould, a former classmate.
22.
Clement Vallandigham advised Ould that the Confederate army should not invade Pennsylvania since it would unite the North against the Copperheads during the 1864 presidential election.
23.
However, a letter to the editor of The New York Times gave a different version that Clement Vallandigham had encouraged the invasion.
24.
Clement Vallandigham then left the Confederacy on a blockade runner to Bermuda and from there went to Canada.
25.
Clement Vallandigham then declared himself a candidate for Governor of Ohio and actually won the Democratic nomination in absentia.
26.
Clement Vallandigham lost the 1863 Ohio gubernatorial election in a landslide to the pro-Union War Democrat John Brough by a vote of 288,374 to 187,492.
27.
In Canada, sometime around March 1864, Clement Vallandigham became a leader of the Order of the Sons of Liberty and conspired with Jacob Thompson, and other agents of the Confederate government to form a Northwestern Confederacy, consisting of the states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, by overthrowing their governments.
28.
In late August, Clement Vallandigham openly attended the 1864 Democratic National Convention in Chicago as a district delegate for Ohio.
29.
Clement Vallandigham promoted the "peace plank" of the platform, which declared the war a failure and demanded an immediate end of hostilities.
30.
Testimony confirmed Vallandigham was "Supreme Commander," and James A Barrett was the "Chief of Staff" to Vallandigham.
31.
Clement Vallandigham admitted to conversing with Jacob Thompson, the Confederate agent in Canada.
32.
In 1867, Clement Vallandigham continued his stance against African-American suffrage and equality.
33.
Clement Vallandigham died in 1871 in Lebanon, Ohio, at the age of 50, after he accidentally shot himself in the abdomen with a pistol.
34.
Clement Vallandigham was representing a defendant, Thomas McGehean, in a murder case for killing a man in a barroom brawl in Hamilton, Ohio.
35.
Clement Vallandigham attempted to prove the victim, Tom Myers, had in fact accidentally shot himself while he was drawing his pistol from a pocket while rising from a kneeling position.
36.
In Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee and William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine, Clement Vallandigham defeated Lincoln in the presidential election of 1864 after the South won the Civil War.
37.
In CBBC's Horrible Histories, Clement Vallandigham is played by Ben Willbond.