Clement Vallandigham. He defended a man charged with murder by fatally shooting himself.
By Curt_Anderson January 1, 2024 4:15 pm Category: Trivia (0.0 from 0 votes)
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Ripped from the pages of Wikipedia. See the links below to read about a man who was intimately connected to a remarkable number of historical events and figures.
Abraham Lincoln pardoned, commuted or rescinded the convictions of 343 people. Among them were Clement Vallandigham.
Clement Laird Vallandigham (July 29, 1820 – June 17, 1871) was an American lawyer and politician who served as the leader of the Copperhead faction of anti-war Democrats during the American Civil War.
Vallandingham was pro-slavery, described in a hostile newspaper as "perform[ing] the dirty work of the Southern slavocracy". He was always a vigorous supporter of those "states' rights". He believed the federal government had no power to regulate any legal institution, which slavery at the time was. He also believed the states had an implied right to secede and that, legally, the Confederacy could not militarily be conquered.
He served two terms for Ohio's 3rd congressional district in the United States House of Representatives. In 1863, he was convicted by an Army court martial for publicly expressing opposition to the war and exiled to the Confederate States of America. He ran for governor of Ohio in 1863 from exile in Canada, but was defeated.
In Canada, sometime around March 1864, Vallandigham became a leader of the Order of the Sons of Liberty and conspired with other agents of the Confederate government to form a Northwestern Confederacy, consisting of the states of Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois, by overthrowing their governments.
A most unfortunate accidental demise
Vallandigham died in 1871 in Lebanon, Ohio, at the age of 50, after he accidentally shot himself in the abdomen with a pistol. He was representing a defendant, Thomas McGehean, in a murder case for killing a man in a barroom brawl in Hamilton, Ohio. Vallandigham attempted to prove the victim, Tom Myers, had in fact accidentally shot himself while he was drawing his pistol from a pocket while rising from a kneeling position. As Vallandigham conferred with fellow defense attorneys in his hotel room at the Lebanon House, later the Golden Lamb Inn, he showed them how he would demonstrate this to the jury. Selecting a pistol he believed to be unloaded, he put it in his pocket and enacted the events as they might have happened, snagging the loaded gun on his clothing and unintentionally causing it to discharge into his stomach.
Although he was fatally wounded, Vallandigham's demonstration proved his point, and the defendant, Thomas McGehean, was acquitted and released from custody (only to be shot to death four years later in his saloon). Surgeons probed for the pistol ball, thought to have lodged in the vicinity of Vallandigham's bladder, but were unable to locate it, and Vallandigham died the next day of peritonitis. His last words expressed his faith in "that good old Presbyterian doctrine of predestination".
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