1
BRILLIANT SUNSHINE greeted the west-bound Baltimore & Ohio train as it reached the red brick depot in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, at high noon on October 19, 1859. Many of the passengers alighted, some to stretch their legs in a stroll around the station, others to wait for a connecting train. Clement Laird Vallandigham, a second-term congressman from Dayton, Ohio, on his way home from Washington, was one of those who stepped down to the platform at the railroad junction. Natural beauty surrounded him. The town, located at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers, overlooked a picturesque gorge through which the waters plunged white with fury. The rugged slopes of the Blue Ridge Mountains held the village captive but rewarded the observer with a breathtaking view of hardwood trees in autumnal glory.
The brightness of the noonday sun was in contrast to the gloom encompassing the residents of the century-old village. Three days before, on October 16, John Brown and a band of raiders had captured the Harpers Ferry arsenal and seized a number of citizens as hostages. The next day local militia, aided by a company of U.S. marines commanded by Colonel Robert E. Lee, had recaptured the arsenal, killing ten of the defenders and making prisoner Brown and several survivors.
Vallandigham had first heard of the “insurrection” while awaiting his train in Baltimore and speculation about the incident furnished the chief subject of conversation for the passengers while their train puffed its way westward. The Dayton congressman decided to stop over in Harpers Ferry until the evening train to seek first-hand information about the historic event.
Filled with forebodings, Vallandigham wandered through the town inquiring about the raid and the capture of “Old Man” Brown. He wished to learn if any Ohioans belonged to Brown’s band and if any prominent Republicans from the state had furnished money for the ill-conceived enterprise. He found that two of Brown’s sons had died while trying to repel the assault of the marines and that Brown and several wounded raiders were prisoners in the arsenal, where two rooms had been converted into a hospital.
The inquisitive congressman turned his steps toward the armory. Once he stopped to survey the railroad bridge and the magnificent scenery surrounding it. As he stood there in deep reflection, fearful of the country’s future, Colonel Lee came by. The two strangers destined to become symbols of dramatic causes exchanged greetings; Lee offered to conduct Vallandigham into the presence of the wounded Brown. Eagerly the congressman followed his newly-found guide into the sixty-year-old structure and to the office of the army paymaster, where Brown lay suffering from saber and bayonet wounds.
Vallandigham thanked Lee for his services and joined a handful of men surrounding Brown. The group included reporters for the Cincinnati Gazette and the New York Herald as well as two well-known Virginians, Governor Henry A. Wise and United States Senator James M. Mason. In questioning Brown, Wise and Mason were trying to discover the motive for the raid.
Vallandigham noticed Brown’s striking face disfigured with blood by a saber wound, the right cheek begrimed with powder and dirt. Brown’s wounds appeared to be neatly dressed, but his disheveled hair and blood-matted, unkempt gray beard made him look like a grizzled man of seventy although he was but fifty-nine. Despite the pain of his wounds he was full of life, not at all dispirited, and even eager to talk. Since Vallandigham knew both Governor Wise and Senator Mason, he joined them in the interrogation, seeking answers which might incriminate Ohio Republicans and furnish ammunition which he could use politically against Governor Salmon P. Chase, abolitionist-minded congressman Joshua R. Giddings, and editor William F. “Deacon” Comly of the Republican-oriented Dayton Journal. Comly was a personal and political enemy for whom Vallandigham was developing an intense animosity. With a lawyer’s talent for cross-examination, the Ohio congressman soon took over as chief examiner.
“Where did your men come from?” Vallandigham asked. “Did some of them come from Ohio?”
“Some of them,” Brown answered as his eyes shifted toward his new interrogator.
“From the Western Reserve, of course? None came from southern Ohio?”
“Oh yes; I believe one came from below Steubenville, down not far from Wheeling.”
“Have you been in Ohio this summer?” Vallandigham had earlier heard someone suppose that the insurrection had been planned at the Ohio State Fair in Zanesville the previous month.
“Yes, sir.”
“How late?”
“I passed through to Pittsburgh on my way here in June,” the wounded prisoner responded.
“Were you at any county or state fairs there?”
“I was not there since June.”
“Were you ever in Dayton?” Vallandigham evidently hoped he could link some of his political enemies to the treasonable plot.
“No; a year or two since.” The answer must have been disappointing. Perhaps, however, Vallandigham might get Brown to name some other Ohio Republicans.
Just then Senator Mason interrupted to ask the prisoner if talking annoyed or bothered him.
“Not in the least,” Brown quickly retorted, and Vallandigham returned to his questions. Yes, Brown had spent some time in Cleveland and several days in Ashtabula County, the bailiwick of Joshua R. Giddings. Brown refused, however, to say anything that would implicate the congressman. Eager to link Giddings to the Harpers Ferry plot, Vallandigham tried again.
“Will you answer this question? Did you talk with Giddings about your expedition here?”
Brown was too alert to be caught on Vallandigham’s baited hook. “No, sir, I won’t answer that,” he replied, “because a denial of it I would not make, and to make an affirmation of it I should be a great dunce.”1
Unable to get a firm statement from Brown, Vallandigham walked over to Aaron Stevens, one of Brown’s companions, who lay nearby. Stevens groaned occasionally with the pain of his three gunshot wounds. His restless gray eyes wandered from one to another of those around him. Perhaps Stevens might give information which his leader had refused to divulge.
Vallandigham probed. “How recently did you leave Ashtabula County?”
“Some months ago,” Stevens answered without hesitation. “I never lived there any length of time, but have often been through there.”
“How far did you live from Jefferson?”
“Be very cautious, Stevens, about an answer to that,” Brown broke in. “It might commit some friend. I would not answer it at all.”2 Stevens turned over with a groan and ignored those who had gathered about him. He was evidently suffering much from his wounds, although they seemed to have been well treated and skillfully dressed.
Vallandigham returned to Brown’s side to ask, “Who were your advisers in this movement?”
Brown evaded a direct answer. “I have numerous sympathizers throughout the entire North.”
“In northern Ohio?” The questioner was most persistent but Brown refused to be trapped. “No,” he answered, “no more than anywhere else in all the Northern States.”
Senator Mason and Governor Wise had a few more questions. Then, seeing the surgeon coming to dress the prisoners’ wounds, Vallandigham turned his back on Brown, walked out of the door and headed toward the depot.3
The encounter with Brown lasted only twenty minutes, but it made an indelible impression upon Vallandigham. Later he described Brown as one of the most remarkable men he had ever met. Perhaps he sensed in Brown a spirit akin to his own—that of the uncompromising idealist who follows his chosen course regardless of consequences. Yet the two stood at opposite poles of the burning issue of their day, and sprang from vastly different origins.
Although John Brown came of “the best New England stock,” his father was a restless soul who moved from place to place, job to job. His mother and sister, as well as an aunt and three cousins, had been adjudged insane. Brown’s formal schooling was scanty and fragmentary. His business ventures brought failure and frustration. He moved about in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, trying his hand as drover, tanner, stock grower, wool merchant, and farmer. He was a defendant in twenty-one lawsuits for failing to fulfill contracts or pay wages to men he hired, for failure to meet payments on promissory notes, and for neglecting to pay wool-growers whose product he had sold. Brown never ran for public office and the origin of his political views is shrouded in obscurity. He did not find his great mission—freeing the slaves by force—until he reached his fifties. He did not believe in evolutionary change; he said, “What is needed is action—action!” He believed that slavery must be destroyed through a bloody atonement. “I believe,” he said at his trial, “that to have interfered as I have done—in behalf of his despised poor, was not wrong, but right.”4 Unrepentent to the end, Brown was hanged on December 2, 1859.
Clement L. Vallandigham, like Brown, was willing to don the martyr’s cloak, albeit for a very different cause. He too could trace his ancestry back to a Van Lendegham who migrated from Flanders to Virginia in 1690. Several generations later one Michael Van Landegham changed his name to Vallandigham and moved to western Pennsylvania to farm, fight Indians, and speculate in land. His son George (grandfather of the congressman who interrogated Brown at Harpers Ferry) served as colonel in the Revolution, mixed law and farming, and condemned the “foolish and illegal” methods the “Whiskey rebels” used to achieve their ends.5 George’s second son, named Clement (C.L.V.’s father), attended Jefferson College in Washington, Pennsylvania, studied for the ministry, and married a neighboring Scotch-Irish lass named Rebecca Laird.
Several weeks after his ordination and marriage in 1807, the Reverend Clement Vallandigham moved to New Lisbon, Ohio, where he was installed as pastor of the Presbyterian church. He also assumed charge of congregations at Long’s Run and Salem. He raised a family of seven children, preached Calvinist doctrine, and cultivated Puritan virtues. The serious-minded clergyman worshipped duty. “He was ever given to punctuality in his labors,” wrote a friendly critic, “and frequently swam his horse through streams in order to make his appointments on time.”6 He raised his children in an atmosphere of zealous rectitude and most of them became impersonal, serious, ambitious, and strong-minded; duty and self-discipline rather than love and solicitude became basic traits of their character.
The Reverend Clement Vallandigham gave his third son, born on July 20, 1820, his own first name and his wife’s family name. Clement Laird Vallandigham’s mother, unlike John Brown’s, typified strength, perseverance, and respectability.7 Young Clem learned to read at his mother’s knee, developed a love of books, and prepared for college in a school his father maintained in his home. He attended Jefferson College,8 taught school in Snow Hill, Maryland, for two years, and studied law in the office of an older brother. He early appeared destined to enter law and politics, for he was bright, personable, self-assured, and eloquent. At twenty-one he represented his township at a county Democratic convention which adopted a series of resolutions espousing states’ rights—a principle that dominated his life. Joining an older brother’s law practice after admission to the bar in 1842, he rose rapidly in law and politics. Keenly analytical and possessed of an eloquence envied by his rivals, the handsome attorney charmed juries or crowds at political rallies. Although he spoke easily and in resonant tones, his delivery seemed to imply that words were precious, for he closed his muscular lips tightly after each syllable as if doling out some treasure of thought in small coin.9
Vallandigham quickly became known as a Jacksonian Democrat with a strong states’ rights bent and a conviction that the Union should not be split over slavery. He opposed abolitionism from the beginning and always denied the doctrine of the “irrepressible conflict,” even saying, “In my considerate judgment, a confederacy made up of the slaveholding and non-slaveholding states is, in the nature of things, the strongest of all popular governments.”10 In the presidential campaign of 1844, which heralded the coming storm, it was natural for the aspiring young politician to favor James K. Polk. He spoke eloquently and passionately for Polk all over Columbiana County, and gloried in Polk’s election.
Anticipating the sweets of political victory, Vallandigham sought a seat in the lower house of the state legislature, winning handily in the October 1845 election and again a year later. In the legislature he viewed himself as a representative of the common man and a defender of the public interest. Like a true Jacksonian, he criticized the banking and industrial interests. He campaigned futilely to abolish capital punishment. He supported what he thought were the wishes of the majority of Ohioans, voting for a measure which prohibited “people of color” from emigrating into the state. And he chided Whig legislators for opposing the Mexican War. Reciting a long list of grievances against Mexico, he declared the war both just and constitutional. The Democratic party, he said, gladly accepted the responsibility for this war. Whigs, he added, talked like “traitors.” “Sirs,” he declared, shaking his finger at the Whig critics of “Polk’s War,” “if ye will howl over its calamities in the name of the living, by the blood of its slain ye shall have no part in its glories.”11 Vallandigham’s advocacy of war in 1846-1847, and the charge of treason he hurled at its critics, would come back to haunt him nearly twenty years later.
Friends Vallandigham had made in the legislature in Columbus urged him to move to Dayton with the lure of greener fields. Democratic leaders in Montgomery County wished to revitalize the Dayton Western Empire and sought a young and energetic editor. Thomas J. S. Smith, one of Ohio’s elder statesmen, offered Vallandigham the newspaper and a print shop for $150, with permission to take his “own time for payment.”12 Smith put more bait on the hook, offering to share his law practice and offices with Vallandigham. The ambitious young man consulted with his wife of less than a year—he had married Miss Louisa A. McMahon13 on August 27, 1846—and the two decided to accept the offer. Young Vallandigham believed New Lisbon to be a dying community and Dayton a dynamic one. Furthermore, Smith’s offer seemed too good to be true.
The young couple moved to Dayton in August of 1847 and Clem Vallandigham’s “Salutatory Address” appeared in the Western Empire of September 2.14 He soon made the paper a paying venture and the voice of the Democracy of Montgomery County. His law practice grew fast, for his editorials, vigorous and partisan, endeared him to those who lived in the political house Jackson had built. He made a circle of friends. Since a hotel room was unsuitable quarters for a pregnant wife, he bought a fine two-story house at 323 First Street, a choice residential area. The long back lawn sloped down toward the levee which held the Great Miami River in bounds. Two houses away lived Robert C. Schenck, incumbent Whig congressman and one of Dayton’s best-known citizens. It was but six blocks from 323 First Street to the office of the Western Empire.
Within two years Vallandigham tired of the demanding work of running a newspaper. His success in law drew heavily upon his time and he looked for a buyer to take over the flourishing paper. He did not like being chained to an editor’s chair or having to fire offhand upon every passing question and have his thoughts pass away like cancelled checks. He preferred to read and study and ponder, so he felt restricted by newspaper work, with its schedules to be met and columns to be filled.15
The months which followed the sale of the Western Empire (the change in ownership brought a change in name to the Dayton Empire16) were perhaps the happiest of Vallandigham’s life. No longer was he a prisoner in an editor’s office. His wife appeared to have regained her health after the death of their month-old son. The earnings from his law practice enabled them to live comfortably. Politics had not yet become an obsession. He was relaxed and congenial, eager to cultivate friendships for friendship’s sake. He enjoyed hikes through the woods, occasionally trying for bass or trout. He had money enough to add dozens of books to his ever-growing library and to spend long hours over the classics, history, biography, and law cases.17
Events, however, drew him inexorably back into politics. He felt obligated to support the Compromise of 1850, helping to organize a pro-Compromise rally in Dayton. He quarreled with the Comly brothers who edited the Whig-oriented Dayton Journal and espoused abolitionist doctrine. He made a bid for a county judgeship but lost out to a Whig candidate. The following year he sought his party’s nomination for the lieutenant-governorship but that prize also eluded him. In 1852, after a Democratic legislature drew new lines for the congressional districts, he gained his party’s nomination in the Third District, although a veteran politician seemed to have a better claim to the honor. But Vallandigham lost the election to Lewis D. Campbell, the incumbent congressman, who posed as a Whig but had become addicted to Know-Nothingism. The results were close, Campbell edging out the Democratic contender by 147 votes. Democrats had some cause to cheer, however, for Franklin Pierce won the presidency and the right to dispense patronage through the party.
During the next several years Vallandigham added to his reputation as a lawyer. In the April 1855 term of the Court of Common Pleas he won four cases in one week. In one case, it is recorded that the jury’s award to Vallandigham’s client was so unexpected as to leave the judge gasping.18 In law, as in politics, the ambitious barrister aligned himself on the side of the common man against the claims of the banker, the merchant, and the land speculator. Many of his clients were Irish-Americans and German-Americans, invariably Democrats, some of whom were able to pay only with pennies or prayers.
He did well enough at law, however, to pay off the mortgage on his home and set aside some money. He needed a good income to maintain the Vallandigham household, which now numbered five. His wife, rather temperamental, wished to live fashionably and believed that money was meant to be spent. His son Charlie, born in 1854, was oblivious to worldly things. His sister-in-law, Miss Belle McMahon, served as a lady-in-waiting to her less stable sister. A nephew, John A. McMahon, who read law in Vallandigham’s office until his admission to the bar in 1854, also stayed at 323 First Street. Annually the entire entourage took a month-long trip to Cumberland, Maryland, to visit the in-laws. While the women gossiped and exchanged household hints, Vallandigham and his brilliant if eccentric brother-in-law, John Van Lear McMahon,19 took a week-long outing in the Blue Ridge Mountains, communing with nature and hardening their muscles while discussing government, law, and politics.
Vallandigham also found time in Dayton to renew his interest in the militia, a favorite avenue for political advancement. He polished the colonel’s insignia he had brought with him from New Lisbon and organized several new companies, one composed entirely of German-Americans and another largely of Irish-Americans—an effective way to benefit both his law practice and his political ambitions.
Although military activity and occasional hunting and fishing excursions gave C.L.V. some satisfaction, his Calvinist background made him essentially a man of duty. He spent long hours in his law office or in his library at home. He read voraciously almost every book he owned or could borrow. He marched with Caesar’s legions in Gaul, saw the French Revolution through Carlyle’s eyes, and sympathized with the Dutch rebels through Motley. He especially relished biography, whether the subjects were Romans, Englishmen, or Americans. He was also entranced by political writings, especially those which reinforced his states’ rights and law-and-order views. He read and reread Jefferson, combed Calhoun’s Disquisition on Government, and devoured Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution. Burke seemed to be his favorite, for he had nine books by that English statesman in his library.20 Both Burke and Vallandigham advocated conservative views, emphasizing law and order, stability, and social peace. While reading, Vallandigham copied down quotations from Burke, the Bible, the Greek and Roman classics, Shakespeare, and other literary figures, to be corporated into his speeches and lectures. Even his political enemies were impressed with the depth and breadth of his scholarship.
Although Vallandigham had failed in his first three bids for an elective office as a Daytonian, he decided to try again in 1854. He gained the nomination for Congress at his party’s convention without much of a contest. Perhaps no other Democrat in the Third District was eager to take on Campbell, who had announced his intention to run again. In any case, Vallandigham and all Democratic congressional candidates in Ohio fared badly. Campbell defeated his Democratic opponent by 2,565 votes, a victory of landslide proportions. All eleven Democratic incumbents lost their seats. In all, the widespread reaction to the Kansas-Nebraska Act cost every Democratic congressional candidate an office.21
The Democrats, defeated and dejected, looked toward the next presidential election with apprehension. Vallandigham, still mixing law and politics, attended the state Democratic convention of January 8, 1856, as a delegate from Montgomery County. He served on the resolutions committee and helped draft the planks which deplored radicalism and recommended the election of Democrats to check the tide of abolition and egocentric sectionalism. He was also named one of the four at-large delegates to the Democratic National Convention scheduled to meet in Cincinnati on June 2. Vallandigham appreciated the honor. It was an indication that he had come of age as an Ohio politician.22
At Cincinnati, C.L.V. helped James Buchanan secure the nomination over Stephen A. Douglas and Franklin Pierce. Douglas was still a rising star and Pierce’s skirts were unclean, for he had flirted with Know-Nothingism. Since Vallandigham expected to run for Congress again, he was sure Buchanan would be more popular than Pierce with the Irish-Americans and the German-Catholics of his district. Douglas still suffered from the public reaction to the Kansas-Nebraska Act which he had pushed through Congress.
Vallandigham again bet on the right horse, and, in the closing hours of the convention, his fellow-delegates named him to membership on the Democratic National Committee as a tribute to his ability.
After returning home, Vallandigham set to work for Buchanan’s election. He gave the main speech at the Dayton ratification meeting, praising Buchanan and predicting his election. Then he took to the hustings, partly to promote Buchanan and partly to enhance his own chances for the congressional nomination in the Third District in order to take on Lewis D. Campbell a third time.
After gaining the coveted honor at the Democratic district convention which met in Eaton on July 24, C.L.V. hit the campaign trail with renewed energy, visiting nearly every village and picnic grove in the Third District. He spoke in his own behalf, praised Buchanan, criticized Republicanism and radicalism, and extolled the Democratic party’s virtues. Bidding for the votes of the Irish-Americans and German-Catholics, he exposed Campbell’s ties to Know-Nothingism. He also tried to frighten voters with the dire prediction that a Frémont and Republican victory would bring on a national crisis.
Campbell countered with charges that Vallandigham was a candidate of the slaveholders and slave-catchers, an unworthy opponent whose overweening ambition made him seek positions for which he was unqualified. Stung, the Democratic candidate charged the incumbent with being inconsistent, inept, and indecent. He delighted in reading derogatory statements made by Campbell’s Republican rivals. He “nailed Campbell’s hide to the fence” and threw tar at it with reckless abandon. It seemed as if the Third District congressional candidates were more interested in character assassination than in the issues of the day.23
In the elections of October and November 1856, Buchanan won the presidency and eight Democratic candidates wrested congressional seats from Republican contenders. But Clement L. Vallandigham lost again. It was close, 9,338 votes to 9,319—a margin of only 19. “The defeat of Mr. Vallandigham and the triumph of the trickster and shifting politician, Lewis D. Campbell,” wrote one Democratic editor, “is about the only disagreeable event of the late elections.”24
Vallandigham’s friends urged him to contest the election, hopeful that a Democratic-controlled Congress might find an excuse to deny Campbell his seat. There seemed to be a valid case, for quite a number of “colored citizens” had cast Republican votes despite the fact that Ohio law expressly denied them the ballot. “The nigger has crawled out of the wood pile,” wrote the editor of the Dayton Empire, “and slipped into a place where, under the Constitution, he has no business. We insist that this colored business shall be fully investigated.”25 “We rather think,” added the racist-minded editor, “that a Democratic Congress will prefer the representative of the white men.”26
The man who had failed at the polls in three bids for a congressional seat now took his case to the House of Representatives. The contest was protracted and exhausting. Vallandigham expected to get the vote of all Southern Democratic congressmen, but the issue was clouded and complicated by Know-Nothingism. Some Southerners, such as John A. Gilmer of North Carolina, were close personal friends of Campbell. Both belonged to the Know-Nothing hierarchy and fraternal loyalties transcended party lines. Furthermore, Douglas and President Buchanan had quarreled over bringing in Kansas under the Lecompton Constitution, and Douglas’s friends in Congress feared that Vallandigham, if given a seat, might vote in support of the president’s policy. Finally, on May 25, 1858, just two weeks before the end of the first session of the Thirty-fifth Congress, Vallandigham gained the contested seat by a narrow vote, and Lewis D. Campbell received a consolation prize in the form of a full year’s salary. Then the two supposedly archenemies packed their bags and headed home, passengers on the same train. The ride gave them an opportunity to ease the enmity which the long and bitter contest over the Third District seat had engendered.27
Vallandigham also collected the full session’s salary (a total of $4,200), but gained much more in intangible benefits. He had a chance to become acquainted with every member of the House, making close personal friends of some to whom he was greatly indebted. Highest on this list was Lucius Q. C. Lamar, Mississippi congressman and slaveholder.
Sixteen months later, homeward bound from Washington, where he had attended a meeting of the Democratic National Committee, Vallandigham stopped over in Harpers Ferry for his twenty-minute interview with John Brown. If the South was the incarnation of evil to Brown, the region was an object of high regard to Vallandigham. He traced his ancestry back to “Ole Virginy.” Great uncles had migrated to Kentucky and North Carolina.28 His wife came from a slave state, although her father was a merchant rather than a slaveholder. Although he had earlier expressed the view that slavery was morally wrong,29 he believed (like Lincoln in 1861) that slavery was sanctioned by the Constitution and that the national government had no right to touch that “domestic institution.” More important perhaps than ties of kinship were the friendships Vallandigham had made with Southerners, such as Lamar of Mississippi and John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, during the contest for the congressional seat. Although some Southern congressmen had procrastinated for months before giving him Campbell’s seat, Vallandigham still owed them a debt of gratitude. Since the Dayton congressman had a reputation for being loyal to his friends, he resented the efforts of abolitionists to depict all Southerners as licentious, inhuman, and contemptible.
Vallandigham cherished his Southern ties, while John Brown spoke scornfully of white men who held black men in bondage. Although Vallandigham and Brown were both Ohioans, but for the dogmatism with which each cloaked his convictions, they were poles apart.
1 New York Herald, 21 October 1859; Cincinnati Daily Gazette, 21 October 1859. The conversation, based on the account in the Herald, also appears in James L. Vallandigham, A Life of Clement L. Vallandigham (Baltimore, 1872), pp. 113-19 (hereafter cited as Vallandigham, Vallandigham). Dorothy E. Filing, “Ohio and John Brown’s Raid at Harpers Ferry” (master’s thesis, Ohio State University, 1944), contains information not found in the standard biographies of Brown. Mary Land, “John Brown’s Ohio Environment,” Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly 57 (January 1948): 24-47, throws additional light upon “Old Brown’s” Ohio connections.
2 Quoted in James Redpath, The Public Life of Captain John Brown (London, 1863), p. 201.
3 New York Herald, 21 October 1859; Vallandigham, Vallandigham, p. 119.
4 Life, Trial and Execution of Captain John Brown known as “Old Brown of Ossawatomie,” with a Full Account of the Attempted Insurrection at Harper’s Ferry (New York, 1859), p. 55.
5 Vallandigham, Vallandigham, p. 4.
6 Harold B. Barth, History of Columbiana County, Ohio (2 vols., Indianapolis, 1926), 1: 113.
7 Most of the information about Clement L. Vallandigham’s ancestry and family life comes from his brother’s biography of him. Some additional information can be gleaned from the Vallandigham Papers, Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland. These papers contain 219 items, mostly letters which were written to C.L.V.’s paternal and maternal grandfathers.
8 He entered the college as a junior, and completed one year before going off to Maryland to teach. He returned to Jefferson College but dropped out before the term’s end, whether because of an argument with the president or because two professorial positions were unfilled is a debatable point. See Vallandigham, Vallandigham, pp. 24-25, and George S. Vallandigham to Rev. M. Brown (president of Jefferson College), 23 January 1841, Vallandigham Papers.
9 William W. Armstrong, “Personal Recollections,” published in Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, 20 March 1886. References to Vallandigham’s early political activities are found in the Ohio Patriot (New Lisbon), 27 August 1841, 22 July and 5, 12, 19 August 1842.
10 Congressional Globe, 37 Cong., 3 sess., “Appendix,” p. 55.
11 Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Ohio, 1846 (Columbus, 1847), pp. 40-42.
12 Dayton Daily Journal, 26 September 1852.
13 She was the daughter of William McMahon of Cumberland, Maryland, and a sister of the well-known nonconformist John Van Lear McMahon of Baltimore. Clem Vallandigham met his wife-to-be when she was visiting a sister in New Lisbon.
14 Dayton Western Empire, 2 September 1847.
15 Armstrong, “Personal Recollections,” Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, 20 March 1886.
16 Dayton Tri-Weekly Bulletin, 1 June, 2 July 1849. Vallandigham sold his share to William Ramsey of Wooster, Ohio, and the paper was then owned by Fitch & Ramsey. Ramsey became the new editor.
17 Francis T. Brown, “Recollections of C. L. Vallandigham,” St. Paul Pioneer, 21 June 1871.
18 Dayton Daily Journal, 20 April 1855; Dayton Daily Empire, 20, 27 April 1855. The judge, George B. Holt, had led the bolt which brought defeat to Vallandigham in his first bid for a seat in Congress.
19 Newton D. Mereness, “John Van Lear McMahon,” in Dictionary of American Biography, ed. Dumas Malone (20 vols., New York, 1933), 12: 137-38, characterized C.L.V.’s brother-in-law as a person possessed of “uncouth manners, unbridled temper and proud spirit.” He was a great student of the law and a widely-known orator who repeatedly turned down chances to enter politics. His son, John A. McMahon, after being admitted to the bar in 1854, became the junior partner in the firm of Vallandigham & McMahon.
20 Appraiser’s report (re Clement L. Vallandigham), Probate Records (Packet No. 9875), Montgomery County Court House, Dayton. The inventory indicated that Vallandigham’s personal library exceeded 1,200 books, with another 263 volumes in his own law library.
21 Dayton Daily Journal, 27 November 1854. The twenty-one victorious candidates included twelve Republicans, eight Whigs, and one Free Soiler.
22 Dayton Daily Empire, 10, 12 January 1856. Vallandigham won the honor over such well-known Ohio Democrats as David Tod, Washington McLean, and Thomas W. Bentley.
23 Dayton Daily Journal, 12, 15 September 1856; Dayton Daily Empire, 4 October 1856.
24 Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, 18 October 1856.
25 Dayton Daily Empire, 17 October 1856.
26 Ibid., 18 October 1856.
27 Congressional Globe, 35 Cong., 1 sess., pp. 2316, 2387; Dayton Daily Empire, 31 October, 13, 30 December 1856, 28 January, 17, 24 February, 31 March, 11 April, 7, 28 May 1858.
28 James L. Vallandigham to George L. Vallandigham (a brother), 18 March 1837, Vallandigham Papers.
29 Vallandigham to Stanley Matthews, 31 January 1850, transcribed letter in Stanley Matthews Papers, University of North Carolina Library, Chapel Hill.