Our Own Hall of Fame

CLEMENT LAIRD VALLANDIGHAM

 

‘MARTYRED EXILE’

Iron-willed Vallandigham Loved South in North

 

DAYTON DAILY NEWS   MARCH 17, 1961

BY MARY ELLEN LYNCH

Daily News Staff Writer

 

     Clement Laird Vallandigham was probably the only man to ever run for a governorship while legally barred from the state he aspired to govern.

      That was in 1863 and Daytonian Vallandigham, who had been exiled by President Lincoln, ran his campaign from Windsor, Canada.  He lost (and Lincoln messaged the victor: “Glory to God in the highest; Ohio has saved the Union”)

     THE STORMY Vallandigham was born in Columbiana county, the son of a Presbyterian minister who operated a classical school in his home.  Before Clement was two, he had mastered the alphabet and he was only 17 when he entered Pennsylvania’s Jefferson college as a junior.

     Vallandigham went back home as an attorney, and became one of the youngest members of the Ohio Legislature (and the leader of his party in the House) before he came to Dayton in 1847 as a lawyer-editor.

    He was part owner of the Dayton Daily Empire, a Democratic paper he edited with only modest success.  (When he was later arrested and exiled his followers burned down the Republican opposition—The Dayton Journal.)

     In 1856 Vallandigham was elected to congress by a majority of 23 votes (at first it appeared that he had lost by 19) and stayed there until his defeat in 1863.  He was violently anti-Lincoln and passionately opposed to the Civil War, crying that it would lead to “freedom for the slaves, slavery for the whites.”

     Even when the government clamped down on Southern sympathizers, Vallandigham continued his noisy denunciation.  He was arrested, convicted for subversion and banished to the South.  However, Vallandigham found that the South didn’t want him either and he ended up in Canada via Bermuda.  (His wanderings are said to form the basis for Edward Everett Hale’s “The Man Without A Country.”)

     THE DEMOCRATS nominated their “martyred exile” for Ohio governor and he was beaten by 100,000 votes.  But public opinion against his exile was growing and, even before the war was over, Vallandigham was permitted to return to Dayton and resume his law practice.

     On June 17, 1871—when he was 51—Vallandigham died at the Golden Lamb hotel in Lebanon, a death as flamboyant as his life had been.  On the day before the attorney had shot himself accidentally while demonstrating a point in a murder case he was defending. 

     In a way, Vallandigham won his last case.  Re-tried later in Dayton, the defendant was acquitted.

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