The Tramp of Boots on Cobbled Streets (Part 3 of 5)

The tramp of boots on cobbled streets in the dead of night announced the arrival of a company of infantry to the doorstep of Clement Vallandigham’s Dayton home, the officer in charge pounding on the front door.  From an open upstairs bedroom window, Vallandigham demanded to know the meaning of the noisy intrusion.  When told they had been dispatched to place him under arrest, the man refused their access.  Rifle butts smashed in the door, and Vallandigham was arrested.  Marched to the station, he was escorted by train to Cincinnati and imprisoned while awaiting trial.  Incarceration did little to silence the man.  Even behind bars he remained defiant, “I am here in a military bastille for no other offense than my political opinions.” 

Vallandigham’s indiscretions had reached their peak just hours earlier at a May Day political rally.  From war’s inception, the Northern Democrat had been a staunch and vocal critic, advocating a negotiated peace that preserved the institution of slavery and maintained the Union through appeasement of Southern demands.  The Emancipation Proclamation followed by the Conscription Act of March 1863, gave new fodder for his fiery rhetoric.  Hoping to be nominated as the Democratic candidate for the Ohio state governorship, he delivered what some considered a particularly inflammatory speech in Mount Vernon, Ohio, on the First of May.

The May Day rally had been a grand event, including a parade with a horse-drawn float bearing thirty-four pretty girls, one for each of the thirty-four states of the Union.  Thousands thronged to hear the address Vallandigham promised to deliver, many exhibiting the copper lapel pins peculiar to the Copperheads.  Beneath American flags flying atop hickory staffs, Vallandigham voiced a lengthy litany of the sins that plagued the country.  He denounced “King Lincoln” and the tyranny of his administration.  He charged that the war was unconstitutional, as was the President’s suspension of habeas corpus.  He went on to say that the President had no right to emancipate the slaves, that men who were pressed into the military through the controversial Conscription Act recently passed by Congress could no longer be called free men, and that anyone whose right to freedom had been so violated should be encouraged to desert.  Finally, he advocated that the recently issued General Order No. 38 was a usurpation of power that directly contradicted a person’s constitutional rights under the first amendment.

The general order to which he referred hadn’t been issued by President Lincoln or anyone in his administration.  Rather it was the dictate of one General Ambrose Burnside, the infamous commander responsible for the devastating Union defeat at Fredericksburg several months earlier, who had sent wave after wave of his troops to a slaughter  so senseless it led one Rebel officer to comment that it had been “…a pity to kill such brave men”.  The letter of resignation he submitted following the disaster had been rejected, the War Department preferring to reassign him to command the Department of the Ohio, giving him military oversight of four states: Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois, the same states the Copperheads allegedly proposed should secede to form a Northwestern Confederacy.  Despite Copperhead rhetoric, things had been relatively quiet in that sector so War Department officials had hoped that Burnside would be able to serve some useful purpose without bungling his way into controversy.  The general seemed eager to prove them wrong, demonstrating that he could be just as inept administratively as he was on the field of battle.

Issued in mid-April, Burnside’s General Order No. 38 stated that, within his department, “…the habit of declaring sympathy for the enemy will not be allowed.”  It went on to state, “…treason, expressed or implied, will not be tolerated in this department.”  Of course, the intent of the order’s wording and its interpretation was all very subjective.  What constituted sympathies for the enemy or outright treason was a matter of individual opinion or perception.  Nevertheless, as Vallandigham was delivering his impassioned plea to his throng of followers, two of Burnside’s staff officers, attired in civilian clothes to blend in with the crowd, were busy taking notes and recording phrases that they believed had a particularly seditious ring to them.  Hours later Vallandigham found himself under arrest.

Clement Vallandigham