Clement Vallandigham was born in Lisbon, Ohio, in 1820. After attending Jefferson College and the Union Academy, he studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1842. Vallandigham worked as a lawyer in Dayton, Ohio, and in 1845 became a member of the Ohio House of Representatives. A member of the Democratic Party, Vallandigham was elected to Congress in 1858. A supporter of state's rights and slavery, at the outbreak of the Civil War he became a leading opponent of President Abraham Lincoln. With Fernando Wood, the mayor of New York, he helped to form the Peace Democrats (Copperheads). Vallandigham's views were unpopular in Ohio and he was defeated in the 1862 election. In 1863 Vallandigham made a serious of speeches attacking the Lincoln administration. He was arrested in May 1863 and charged with violating general order No. 38 which threatened punishment to those declaring sympathy for the enemy. Found guilty by a military commission, he was sentenced to imprisonment. Soon afterward Lincoln intervened and commuted his sentence to banishment behind the Confederate Army front lines. After the war Vallandigham returned to Ohio and became a leading critic of the Radical Republican. In postwar years the Democratic party declared him persona non grata at its 1866 Philadelphia convention, a meeting of old Federals and recently reconstructed Southern Democrats, where it was felt his presence was disruptive. After he lost a bid in 1867 for election to the state senate, he resumed his law practice. In a Lebanon, Ohio, hotel on June 16, 1871, a gun went off while he was demonstrating to other attorneys how a defendant's supposed victim may have accidentally shot himself. He died the following day.
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