Biography
Clement Laird Vallandigham was a former U.S. Representative from Ohio and the leader of the antiwar 'Copperhead' faction of the Democratic Party during the Civil War. On May 1, 1863, while campaigning for governor of Ohio, he gave a speech in Mount Vernon denouncing the war and the Lincoln administration. Four days later, he was arrested in his Dayton home in the middle of the night by a company of soldiers acting under General Ambrose Burnside's General Order No. 38, which had criminalized 'expressed or implied' sympathy for the enemy.
He was tried by a military commission rather than a civilian court, despite the fact that the civilian courts in Ohio were fully open and functioning, and was sentenced to confinement in a military prison for the duration of the war. President Lincoln, wary of making him a martyr, instead ordered him expelled through the lines into the Confederacy on May 19, 1863. Vallandigham eventually made his way to Canada, where he continued to campaign for governor in absentia (losing badly), and returned to Ohio in 1864 to a quiet welcome that the administration declined to enforce.
The Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal in Ex parte Vallandigham (1864), holding that it had no jurisdiction over military commissions — a ruling the Court would substantially walk back two years later in Ex parte Milligan. Vallandigham's case remains the leading 19th-century American precedent on the limits of executive war power and the prosecution of antiwar speech.
