the horses he wanted to recover, and let him go.

[Illustration: A Copperhead walks with General Morgan 243L]

It is not known whether this behavior of his friends turned the
copperheads against them or not But in spite of the Morgan raid, and in
spite of all the reasons and victories of a North, the largest vote that
the Democratic party had ever polled, up to that time, was cast in favor
of a man who had been bitterest against the war, and who was then in
exile from his native country because of his treasonable words and
practices. Even three thousand soldiers in the field voted for him, and
this is far more surprising than that forty thousand voted against him.
As we look back through the perspective of history, our state seems to
have been solid for the Union and for freedom; but this is an appearance
only, and it is better that we should realize the truth. It will do no
harm even to realize that the man who embodied the copperhead feeling
was by no means a malignant man, however mistaken.

Clement Laird Vallandigham was born in 1820 at New Lisbon, of mixed
Huguenot and Scotch-Irish ancestry, a stock which has given us some of
our best and greatest men. His father was a Presbyterian minister,
who eked out his poor salary by teaching a classical school in his own
house. Clement was ready for college long before he was old enough to
be received; and when he was graduated from Jefferson College, at
Cannonsburg in Pennsylvania, he came back to New Lisbon and began to
practice law.

So far all the influences of his life should have been at least as good
for the generous side of politics as for the ungenerous; but from the
first he cast his lot with the oppressor. In 1845 he was sent to the
legislature, where he took a leading part in opposing the repeal of the
Black Laws, which kept the negro from voting at the polls or testifying
in the courts. Two years later he fixed his home in Dayton, where
he quickly came to the front as a States Rights Democrat in the full
Southern sense. He was given by a Democratic house the seat to which
Lewis D. Campbell was elected in 1856, and he remained in Congress till
defeated in 1862. Up to the last moment he never ceased to vote and to
speak against the war, because he believed it impossible to conquer the
South; and when he came back to Ohio he kept on saying what he believed.

This brought him under condemnation of General Order No. 38, issued
by General Burnside at Cincinnati,