8
HEARTENED BY THE RESURGENCE of the Democratic party, as revealed at the state convention, C.L.V. was eager to begin his campaign for reelection. Yet he knew that the odds were against him because earlier that year a Republican-dominated state legislature had redrawn district lines, dropping Preble County from the Third District and adding Warren, with the express purpose of defeating him.1 Preble County held about an equal number of Republicans and Democrats, whereas Warren was strong Republican country. Most of its voters (at least three-fourths) had been Whigs and the antislavery movement had prospered there. Since Vallandigham had gained reelection in 1860 by a very narrow margin, he had a Herculean task upon his hands.
The Dayton congressman got off to a good start in his bid for renomination and reelection. Dayton friends, including Mayor Gillespie and editor Bollmeyer, arranged for a Democratic rally and engaged the city’s largest hall. The Empire’s editorials and party posters brought in an overflow crowd and the smiling sponsors moved the meeting to the Courthouse grounds. In time the presiding officer called Vallandigham to the platform and the Democratic audience gave him thunderous applause.2
He began his speech moderately enough, advising his listeners to follow dual roads: vote the Democratic ticket and obey the laws. “Whosoever should be drafted, should a draft be ordered according to the Constitution and the law,” said Vallandigham, “is duty bound . . . to . . . go; he has no right to resist and none to run away.”3 He did not advise his fellow Ohioans to defy the enrolling officers, to destroy the machinery of the draft, or to resist the authorities. As a well-trained lawyer, he had respect for the law. He would even take time out to make some speeches to help raise troop quotas assigned to Ohio, and he always advised malcontents to obey the laws.4
After paying his respects to law and order, he turned to the business of excoriating the Lincoln administration. He blamed the president’s party for high taxes, depreciated currency, and bad economic conditions. Then he lashed out at the abolition measures passed during the last session of congress and Republican calls for more and more of the same; he drove the spit into Abolition, burning it to a crisp with his fiery ridicule. He also spent some time condemning Lincoln’s suspension of the writ of habeas corpus and the arbitrary arrests perpetrated in Ohio. He restated his views on compromise, asking for a restoration of the Union with a Constitution untarnished and with civil rights fully revived. He wanted “the dear old flag” to fly again in every state and “honored once again in every land and upon every sea.” He ended, however, with a show of defiance, demanding every civil right guaranteed in the Constitution. He would not bow to threat of arrest nor the intimidation of Republican rowdies. Even the menacing knife of the assassin could not change his convictions. He was willing to be a martyr for his political views. He had been born a freeman and he proposed to die one!5
Vallandigham had no trouble in securing the Democratic nomination at the Third District convention of September 4 in Hamilton. No one else sought the honor, all recognizing that the “gerrymander bill” had given the Republicans an edge in the district. Yet at the Hamilton meeting there was plenty of enthusiasm and some false optimism. The Democratic resurgence and Vallandigham’s apparent popularity plagued Republican editors. “Of course it [Vallandigham’s nomination] was very enthusiastically done,” wrote the resentful editor of the Dayton Journal, “for such a political trickster pulls the wires to suit himself. He has determined to ride rough shod over every principle of true Democracy, and has given ample evidence that he will stickle at no means of self-aggrandizement.”6
Vallandigham did not have to wait long to learn who his Republican opponent would be. He had hoped it would be Lewis D. Campbell or Samuel Craighead, both of whom he had defeated in earlier contests. Republicans, including President Lincoln and Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, wanted Vallandigham retired from Congress, and both took a hand in pushing General Robert C. Schenck into the congressional race.
Schenck was a well-known Ohioan. As a Whig he had served four terms in the House of Representatives (1843-1851), gaining there the friendship and confidence of Congressman Abraham Lincoln. Later, 1851-1853, he had served as minister to Brazil, his mission terminating when a Democratic president took office following the election of 1852. In time he became a strong antislavery man, a respected lawyer, and an effective orator. With the coming of the war, Schenck raised a regiment, President Lincoln favored him with an appointment as brigadier general, and he marched off to war.
To friends who urged him to run for congress against Vallandigham, Schenck turned a deaf ear. Then, as if fate had intervened, an incident occurred on the battlefield at Second Bull Run. Late on the afternoon of August 30, while Schenck was gallantly rallying his troops, a fragment of grapeshot struck his right hand. The shot tore an ugly hole just above the wrist and knocked Schenck’s sword to the ground. A plucky aide retrieved the sword and bandaged the wound, and the courageous general urged his troops forward, waving the weapon in his left hand. In time, Brigadier-General Schenck was led to the rear, hustled off to Washington, and quartered in Willard’s Hotel. Next morning a doctor examined the wound, found bones broken and tendons severed, and reported that it would be several months before the anxious general could regain the use of his right hand and return to the front lines.
While Schenck lay in his hotel room cursing his luck, some notable visitors called. Edwin M. Stanton, the secretary of war, paid his respects and the two reminisced about their earlier Ohio days. Chase, who kept his hand deeply immersed in the muddied waters of Ohio politics, also called. He recognized that Schenck’s ill-fortune on the battlefield might be turned into good fortune in the political arena, and urged Schenck to run for Congress in the Third District, saying, “You are the only man who can beat that traitor Vallandigham.”7
President Lincoln also called upon Schenck, trying to convince him that he could do a greater service by sidetracking Vallandigham than by leading a brigade on the battlefield. Furthermore, the president assured Schenck that a major general’s commission would soon be his. Schenck, although Vallandigham’s neighbor in Dayton, bowed to the pressure exerted by Chase and Lincoln. The Republicans subsequently named him their congressional candidate at “a Union convention” in Middletown on September 9, praising him as a man “wise in council and brave in battle.”8
Vallandigham, recognizing that the nomination of Schenck raised the odds against his reelection, nevertheless rode forth bravely into battle. The Democrats had some strange allies during the fall election campaign. Union military failures enabled critics to question Lincoln’s competency as commander-in-chief. Robert E. Lee and “Stonewall” Jackson soundly whipped the Army of the Potomac at Second Bull Run on August 29-30, inflicting heavy losses on the Union troops and giving General John Pope a lesson in strategy and tactics. Less than a month later, the Army of the Potomac checked Lee’s first invasion of the North at Antietam Creek on September 17, but the long, long Union casualty rolls prevented Lincoln from claiming a true victory. Events in the West were equally discouraging. Confederate General Braxton Bragg conducted a spectacular flanking movement against General Don Carlos Buell’s troops, causing the Union army to fall back all the way from northern Alabama to Louisville. Confederates scored a political coup by installing a secessionist governor in Frankfort, Kentucky. Overall, the Union status in the West was considerably worse than it had been a year earlier. Defeatism began to undermine Union morale and Democratic critics of the Lincoln administration stood to reap the harvest.
The economic recession of 1861-1862, especially in the upper Midwest, also served as a Democratic ally. The war boom had not yet fully counteracted the devastating effects of the agricultural, commercial, and banking slump produced by the closing of the Mississippi River and the secession of the Southern states. Sky-high freight rates charged by the east-west railroad lines prevented Midwest farmers from benefitting from the European demands for American foodstuffs. These high rates also gave Western sectionalists such as Vallandigham and Samuel Medary a chance to denounce Eastern capital and New England manufacturers. The editor of the Crisis repeatedly reminded his readers that the selfish Northeast had driven Southern states out of the Union and now tried to make the West its “slave and servant.” New England capital and Northeastern manufacturing extended “their tentacles” westward, imposing a heavy penalty upon a Midwest which had once held the balance of power in the national capital. Vallandigham, like Medary, appealed to sectional prejudice whenever he saw a chance to get more votes.9
Vallandigham also knew how to appeal to racial prejudice. Six of the resolutions which had been adopted on July 4 at the State Democratic Convention had condemned abolition. Democratic editors also catered to the anti-Negro prejudice of the working man. “If the laboring men of this State do not desire their places occupied by negroes,” wrote one Democratic editor, “they will vote for the nominees of the Democratic ticket.”10 Another, in an editorial entitled “Abolition, the Worst Enemy of the Free White Laborers,” ended with a call to action: “Workmen! Be careful! Organize yourself against this element which threatens your impoverishment and annihilation.”11 One of Vallandigham’s Dayton apostles revised the Democratic slogan to show his racial prejudice: “The Constitution as it is, the Union as it was, and the Niggers where they are.”12
Anti-Negro prejudice underwrote race riots in two Ohio cities during the summer of 1862. One broke out in Toledo, where employers hired “contrabands” (Negroes freed by the war) as strike-breakers and “scab labor.” The Cincinnati riot was even more serious; it extended over several days and ended in the burning of many homes in Shantytown, the Negro sector of Cincinnati.13
Lincoln’s preliminary proclamation of emancipation of September 22, 1862, issued during the election campaign, furnished more arguments for Vallandigham and other Democrats to stir the anti-Negro prejudices of Midwesterners. “This is another step in the nigger business,” wrote one of Vallandigham’s supporters, “and another advance in the Robespierrian highway of tyranny and anarchy.”14 Vallandigham, who had predicted that the president would bow to abolition pressure and add a new dimension to the war, pointed with scorn to Lincoln’s proclamation and shouted, “I told you so!”15
Vallandigham’s antiabolition and anti-New England arguments had a strong appeal to three elements of the Midwest’s population. The Irish-Americans in the cities feared that abolition would release a flood of “cheap labor” to compete for the crumbs on their tables. Irish stevedores in Toledo and Irish boathands in Cincinnati instigated the anti-Negro riots in those cities in July of 1862. In addition, Irish-Americans had little respect for Puritanism, which they associated with New England. They objected to New England’s efforts to impose temperance upon the country and they detested the holier-than-thou attitudes expressed by the Yankees. Furthermore, the Republican party was tainted with Know-Nothingism. Irish Catholics, under the prompting of Democrats like Vallandigham, learned to detest abolition and New England, voted the straight Democratic ticket, and became the backbone of the “Copperhead” movement in the cities.16
Many German-Americans, especially those of the Catholic faith, formed the second important element in the Democratic party. They had the same reasons for hating abolitionists, New Englanders, and Republicans as the Irish-Americans had. “The jealousy of the low Germans and Irish against the free negro,” wrote a foreign newspaper correspondent, “was sufficient to set them against the war which would have brought four million of their black rivals into competition for that hard and dirty work which American freedom bestows upon them.”17
Upland Southerners who crossed the Ohio River to preempt the poorer soils of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois formed the third element of the Midwest’s population who readily accepted anti-abolition or anti-New England preachments. They brought their anti-Negro prejudices with them and supported state laws which denied the black man citizenship rights. They became the “Butternuts” of the backcountry, known for hating Negroes, liking “corn licker,” and voting the Democratic ticket. The areas where they lived were characterized by poorer soils, smaller homesteads, and more widespread illiteracy. They mistrusted the sons and scions of New England who wanted to refashion the cultural practices of others in line with the Yankee image. They became “the unterrified, unwashed Democracy,” applauding those speakers most adept at abusing abolition and upbraiding New England. Vallandigham developed a rapport with these backwoods settlers, catering to their prejudices and building a bond of affection. They turned out en masse to hear him, and he came to regard himself as their champion and spokesman, the representative of the common man.18
Vallandigham had no difficulty in convincing Irish-Americans, German Catholics, and Butternuts that they should hate abolitionists and New Englanders. It was more difficult to convince them that Lincoln’s suspension of the writ of habeas corpus and arbitrary arrests should raise their ire. After a number of Ohioans were arrested and carted off to prison, it was easier for the Dayton congressman to make the point that civil rights were vanishing and a despotism developing. John W. Kees of the Circleville Watchman and Dr. Edson B. Olds of the Ohio Eagle in Lancaster found themselves behind bars for speaking too critically of the Lincoln administration. Several other arrests struck closer to home. Taylor Webster, a law student in Dayton and son of one of Vallandigham’s closest friends, was imprisoned for contending that abolitionists had brought on the war and that Democrats ought not to help Republicans coerce the South. Two Presbyterian clergymen, guests in Vallandigham’s home in late July, were arrested in early August in Cincinnati and accused of spying for the Confederacy—rather ridiculous charges. The officials who arrested the clergymen found no evidence that the two belonged to “an association of traitor spies to furnish information for the Southern army”; the searchers did find several of Vallandigham’s congressional speeches in the prisoners’ carpet bags. Although embarrassed officials apologized to the two clergymen, released them, and sent them on their way to Loveland, Ohio, the incident aroused Vallandigham. They had been, said the indignant congressman, arrested “without accusation or legal authority, . . . incarcerated like felons” and searched “like criminals.” Vallandigham, therefore, joined other Democrats in demanding that the voters rebuke the administration for violating citizens’ rights and ignoring constitutional guarantees.19
Republicans tried to stem the Democratic resurgence by appealing to patriotism, and to cover President Lincoln’s transgressions by waving the flag vigorously. Democratic critics of the administration were accused of opposing the government—in Republican parlance the two were one and the same. Vallandigham, of course, received much of the Republican fire. The editors of the Dayton Journal and the Cincinnati Gazette led the Republican effort to discredit the controversial congressman. They depicted him as “a contemptible traitor,” “a defender of secession,” “a pro-slavery apologist,” and “a friend of Jeff Davis.” They made name-calling an art, and claimed that a vote for Vallandigham was a vote to prolong the war, to put Jefferson Davis in the White House, and to institute a conscription system. “Let the infamous Vallandigham, whose votes convict him of no sympathy for the Union [and] whose speeches convict him of being in the full confidence of the conspirators,” wrote one Republican propagandist, “. . . retire from public life as one of the infamous trinity—Arnold, Burr, and Vallandigham.”20
Republican editors often took Vallandigham’s statements out of context, misdated and misquoted his speeches and statements, and even attributed letters to his pen which he had never written. On the eve of the election the Republican press published a forged letter, supposedly written by Vallandigham to a Southern congressman, indicating that he sympathized with secession and supported the rebel cause. Some papers published it on the morning of election day, so that the man maligned would have no chance to repudiate the document before voters marched to the polls.
Republican newspapers also circulated the rumor that Vallandigham had been arrested and evidence unearthed which proved he was guilty of “disloyalty” and had been involved in “treasonable plots.” The story, devised in the telegraph office in Dayton, reached even the New York newspapers. Vallandigham, learning that “the lie” had been sent as a “special” to the New York Herald, rushed a denial to James Gordon Bennett: “Sir—I thank you for your former courtesies and am sorry to trouble you again. But persistent lying demands continual contradiction. The statement that I was ‘arrested’ and that I was implicated in ‘treasonable plots,’ or in any other thing ‘disloyal’ is an imprudent fabrication of the anonymous scoundrel who telegraphed it. How long is the telegraph to be prostituted to such infamous falsehoods?”21 Although Bennett’s New York Herald published Vallandigham’s denial, most Republican newspapers in Ohio played a different game. They published the rumors and lies but ignored Vallandigham’s repudiation of them, for they wanted the rumors to make the rounds and influence the election.
Another outright lie which circulated in the Republican press linked Vallandigham to the Knights of the Golden Circle, a supposedly subversive and secret pro-Southern society with castles in the upper Middle West.22 It was even asserted that “the wily one” was the head of that organization, believed to be involved in a grand plan to take the upper Midwest out of the Union.
Republicans seemed to invent stories and lies about Vallandigham faster than he could deny them. “I know,” wrote one of the Dayton congressman’s disciples, “that almost every charge brought against him has no foundation than the most unscrupulous lying.”23 Perhaps it was proof of the axiom that all is fair in love, war, and politics.
The Republican campaign to unseat Vallandigham received an assist from Lincoln. He made Vallandigham’s opponent a major general and endorsed his heroics at Second Bull Run. Republicans sought to influence voters by discussing Schenck’s wound, and, of course, they compared his patriotic course with that of Vallandigham, a brigadier general (in the Ohio militia) who stayed home to light a fire in the rear.24
On October 14, a gray autumnal day, Ohioans marched to the polls and Vallandigham lost his bid for reelection as Schenck carried the Third District by more than 600 votes. C.L.V. even trailed the Democratic state slate by 400 votes in his own district in a year when Democrats gained ground everywhere in the Midwest. Democrats in Ohio helped their party’s resurgence; they won fourteen of nineteen congressional seats and elected their slate of state officers. The incumbent congressman from Dayton lost a battle while Democrats were winning a war. Two neighboring states, Indiana and Pennsylvania, also rebuked President Lincoln in October elections, and other states, including Illinois and New York, did the same in November. Democrats offered the election returns as proof that the people rejected emancipation, arbitrary arrest, and military incompetency.25
Vallandigham’s friends rejoiced in the anti-Republican trend, but expressed disappointment in his defeat at the hands of Schenck. “The loss the Democracy have sustained in the defeat of the Hon. C. L. Vallandigham,” wrote one dejected supporter, “is a national calamity.”26
Friends offered a variety of reasons for his defeat. Some admitted that the treason campaign against him had paid dividends. Supporters in earlier years had turned their backs upon him in 1862. His friends might defend him, but they could not deny that some of the statements he had made had been used against him, endangering his own political future and damaging the cause of the Democratic party.
Then, of course, there was the gerrymandering—substituting Warren County for Preble County in the redistricting. The incumbent received a 1,320-vote margin in Montgomery and Butler counties, but Warren County, where Schenck carried every township, tipped the scales to defeat Vallandigham. Samuel Medary suggested the real reason for Vallandigham’s defeat in the Crisis: “The abolitionists have only this satisfaction,” he wrote. “They beat him by legislation, not by voting.”27
Republicans, who found very little in the ’62 election returns to cheer about, therefore made much of Vallandigham’s defeat, calling it “glory enough for one day.”28 After he finished serving in the lame-duck session, he would “no longer pollute the national capitol.”29 The editor of the Buckeye State, published in New Lisbon, where Vallandigham had been born and grown to manhood, wrote an editorial thanking God for the fellow’s defeat, claiming he was an agent of Satan rather than the spokesman for many Ohio Democrats:
Let Union men all over the country rejoice, and let the heart of the nation be exceedingly glad! That arch-traitor and chief of Copperheads—that pimp of Jeff. Davis and standing disgrace to his State, Clem Vallandigham, is laid out cold and stark in the embrace of political death. No longer will the presence of this renegade miscreant in the legislative halls of the nation, outrage the loyal men of our State, nor his name be accounted a tower of strength to the enemies of the Republic. The people have sealed his doom, and given him the coup de grace. He is dead, dead, dead —and a loyal people will bury him so deep in the mire of his own infamy, that the stench from his putrid carcass will never offend the nostrils of good men, nor the recollection of his treason and perfidy tarnish the fair fame of the State he has so long misrepresented and dishonored. To the good cause of Union, his defeat more than counterbalances all that is lost in the defeat of our State ticket, and to the butternuts his loss is utterly irreparable. Let the friends of the Union thank God and take courage.30
Vallandigham, abused in defeat as he had been during the campaign, did not openly show his disappointment. Instead, he made the rounds of Democratic jollifications, telling his audiences that the election results repudiated Lincoln and administration policies, including emancipation and arbitrary arrests. He spoke at party “celebrations” in Dayton, Mount Vernon, Hamilton, Hillsborough, and Centreville, Indiana. He always claimed that the election results made Democratic principles respectable again, and never failed to add that he still supported the tenet “The Constitution as it is, the Union as it was.” He always developed a rapport with his audience, repeatedly bringing forth “wild and enthusiastic applause.” This emotional response served as an intoxicant for which he developed an insatiable craving. Often he spoke for three hours, and the more he talked the more he convinced himself of the rectitude of his views and that the Lincoln administration, backed by abolitionists and revolutionaries, was leading the country down the road to ruin. And members of his audience, seeking endorsement of their prejudices, cheered him when he denounced abolitionists, Republicans, and Negroes. Their applause encouraged him to practice partyism and racism.31
Late in October, C.L.V. took the train to New Lisbon to keep a speaking engagement, to give the lie to editorials in the Buckeye State, and to visit his brothers and his aging mother. Democrats arranged an impressive homecoming which featured a parade and a mass meeting. Vallandigham rode in a bedecked carriage at the head of the two-mile-long procession and gave a rousing speech at the enormous rally. New Lisbon paid tribute to her son, even though he had been defeated in the October 14 election.
Several days later, while he was relaxing at his mother’s home, word of a Dayton tragedy reached him via the telegraph wires. J. Frederick Bollmeyer, whom C.L.V. had brought to Dayton to edit the Empire, had been shot by a Republican neighbor during a personal argument. Vallandigham hurried back to Dayton to help bury his friend and to make political capital out of the tragedy. He chose to interpret the shooting as “a political assassination” rather than a personal quarrel. It was, he said, “abolition revenge” for the defeats suffered in the Ohio elections. Bollmeyer had paid for his political principles with his life, and his death was but the opening incident in a campaign to deprive Democrats of their lives and their freedoms.32 Vallandigham talked like a demagogue, trying to whip up passions and indignation. He talked himself into a corner, in fact, emerging as less than the self-disciplined gentleman he imagined himself to be.
After Bollmeyer was buried and affairs in his law office were in order, Vallandigham prepared to leave for Washington to attend the lame-duck session of the Thirty-seventh Congress. Dayton friends organized a “handsome entertainment” in the home of Judge William Morris as a farewell tribute. Thomas O. Lowe, on behalf of the ladies of the city, presented his political patron with a gold-headed cane, suitably inscribed. His friends assured C.L.V. that his views still were those of the Ohio Democracy, that the country still opposed emancipation and arbitrary arrests and still looked toward compromise rather than war as a means to restore the Union. Some also assured him that they wanted him to be the state’s next governor.33
With the cheers of his friends still ringing in his ears, Vallandigham entrained for Washington via Philadelphia. He stayed overnight at the Continental Hotel in the City of Brotherly Love. Philadelphia Democrats knew of his presence in their city and hundreds called upon the congressman from Dayton to pay their respects. They made him feel like a hero rather than a politician defeated in the recent elections. Some encouraged him to organize a crusade for peace. Others lionized him because they believed him a victim of Republican-sponsored hysteria. It was salve for a sore heart.
Next morning Vallandigham departed for Washington to resume his role of Gadfly. He was also destined to be the instigator of a peace crusade—to become a symbol as well as a congressman.
1 William G. Beggs to Samuel S. Cox, 25 March 1862, Samuel S. Cox Papers (microfilm), Hayes Memorial Library, Fremont, Ohio; Crisis (Columbus), 30 April 1862.
2 Dayton Daily Empire, 4 August 1862; Dayton Daily Journal, 4 August 1862.
3 Dayton Daily Empire, 4 August 1862.
4 Thomas O. Lowe to his brother William, 6 September 1862, Thomas O. Lowe Papers, Dayton and Montgomery County Public Library.
5 Dayton Daily Empire, 4 August 1862; Crisis, 13 August 1862.
6 Dayton Daily Journal, 5 September 1962.
7 Quoted in Lloyd Ostendorf, Mr. Lincoln Comes to Dayton (Dayton, 1959), p. 39.
8 Dayton Daily Journal, 10 September 1862.
9 Frank L. Klement, “Economic Aspects of Middle Western Copperheadism,” The Historian 14 (Autumn 1951): 27-44; and idem, “Middle Western Copperheadism and the Genesis of the Granger Movement,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 38 (March 1952): 679-94; both articles explore the relationship between economics and politics in the upper Mississippi Valley.
10 Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, 4 August 1862.
11 See-Bote (Milwaukee), 23 April 1862.
12 Thomas O. Lowe to his brother William, 2 July 1862, Lowe Papers.
13 Cincinnati Daily Commercial, 11, 16-17 July 1862. William H. Lofton, “Northern Labor and the Negro during the Civil War,” Journal of Negro History 39 (July 1949): 251-73; Frank L. Klement, “Midwestern Opposition to Lincoln’s Emancipation Policy,” Journal of Negro History 49 (July 1964): 169-83; V. Jacque Voegeli, Free but Not Equal (Chicago, 1967); all deal with the subject of racism and politics.
14 Stark County Democrat (Canton), 24 September 1862.
15 Dayton Daily Journal, 14 October 1862.
16 Frank L. Klement, The Copperheads in the Middle West (Chicago, 1960) examines the socio-economic base for Democratic opposition to the Lincoln administration.
17 London Times, 1 December 1863. The correspondent was that noted English observer, William H. Russell.
18 John L. Stipp put the historical microscope upon the Democratic areas of Ohio in his excellent doctoral dissertation, “Economic and Political Aspects of Western Copperheadism” (Ohio State University, 1942). The conflict of Southern and Yankee culture is admirably treated in Richard L. Power, Planting Corn Belt Culture: The Impress of the Upland Southerner and Yankee in the Old Northwest (Indianapolis, 1953).
19 Vallandigham, quoted in Dayton Daily Journal, 4 August 1862; Ohio Eagle (Lancaster), 8 January 1863. Also see “Report of the Select Committee on Military Arrests,” in Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Ohio (Columbus, 1863). Elden R. Young, “Arbitrary Arrests during the Civil War” (master’s thesis, Ohio State University, 1924), has too little on arrests of 1862 in Ohio; and Dean Sprague, Freedom under Lincoln (Boston, 1965) does not even mention the arrest of Rev. James H. Brooks, Rev. Robert Hoyt, and Taylor Webster.
20 Pamphlet (author unknown), “The Secession Record of C. L. Vallandigham” (Dayton, 1862). The document probably came off the presses of the Dayton Journal.
21 New York Herald, 5 August 1862.
22 The Golden Circle legend is debunked in part in Klement, Copperheads in the Middle West, pp. 134-49, 244-45, and in a series of articles by the same author appearing in state historical quarterlies, for example, “Carrington and the Golden Circle Legend in Indiana during the Civil War,” Indiana Magazine of History 61 (March 1965): 31-52.
23 Thomas O. Lowe to his brother William, 6 September 1862, Lowe Papers.
24 Dayton Daily Journal, 6-8, 10, 13 October 1862.
25 Many historians have dealt with the theme that the 1862 election returns repudiated Lincolnian policy. See, for example, Harry E. Pratt, “The Repudiation of Lincoln’s War Policy—the Stuart-Swett Congressional Campaign,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 24 (April 1931): 129-40; and Winfred A. Harbison, “The Election of 1862 as a Want of Confidence in President Lincoln,” Papers of the Michigan Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters, 1930, pp. 499-513.
26 Arthur T. Goodman to Alexander Long, 28 October 1862, Alexander Long Papers, Cincinnati Historical Society.
27 Crisis, 22 October 1862. Early in 1862 the editor of the Daily Ohio Statesman (Columbus) (issue of 9 May 1862) labeled the redistricting bill “an infamous swindle.” The charge was grossly partisan, but there was a deliberate effort to change the Third District lines to bring about Vallandigham’s defeat.
28 Ohio State Journal (Columbus), 16 October 1862.
29 Cleveland Leader, 17 October 1862.
30 28 October 1862.
31 Crisis, 12 November 1862; Dayton Daily Empire, 20, 24, 29 October 1862.
32 Hamilton True Telegraph, 6, 13 November 1862; Ohio State Journal, 7 November 1862; Crisis, 26 November 1862; Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, 4 November 1862; Carl M. Becker, “The Death of J. F. Bollmeyer: Murder Most Foul?” Bulletin of the Cincinnati Historical Society 24 (July 1966): 249-69.
33 Lowe’s speech is given in Vallandigham, Vallandigham, pp. 218-21.