Wednesday, April 8, 2026

Confederados #4: Strength in Union for Louisa and Clement Vallandigham



4 Strength in Union by Elsie Ridgley recalling
Louisa and Clement Vallandigham

During the Civil War Southern sympathizers spent time north of the border spying and working against the Union. After Southern surrender many Confederados sought refuge in Canada including members of the Jefferson Davis family. Much traffic, legal and illegal, crossed land and water borders in the 1860s.

Clement Laird Vallandigham (1820-1871)

One unwilling Canadian resident was Ohio politician Clement Vallandigham, deported in 1863 for treasonous activities as head of the “Peace Democrats,” nicknamed the Copperheads after a snake that bites without warning. Born in Ohio, Vallandigham married Louisa Anna McMahon (1820-1871), daughter of a Maryland plantation owner in 1846. They had two sons, one who died as an infant and Charles Noble Vallandigham, born in 1854.

Harper’s Weekly, February 28, 1863

During the Civil War Vallandigham attacked Lincoln and Union war goals. A May, 1863 speech infuriated Major General Ambrose Burnside so much that he broke into the "Copperhead's" Dayton home in the middle of the night and arrested him.

Lincoln banished him to the Confederacy, which did not want him either.

Dixie & the U.S. tossing Vallandigham across the line

After a few weeks in the Confederacy he found passage on a blockade-runner to the Bahamas, then on a ship north to Canada where he established a home in Windsor, Ontario, across from Detroit. 


Louisa and son Charles joined him in Ontario where he ran a losing campaign for Ohio’s governorship in absentia with all the trappings continuing back in Ohio: Song clubs, torchlight parades and speakers supporting "The Man in Exile."

Ohio is not far from Canada, just across Lake Erie

After a year in Canada he illegally crossed the border to Detroit in disguise (a pillow strapped around his waist added pounds) and surprised Ohio Democrats holding a local convention, who welcomed him and elected him a national delegate.



Strength in Union by Jeanne Arnieri 

Lebanon House (now the Golden Lamb) about 1930

After the war the Vallandighams resumed their lives in Dayton where he practiced law. In 1871 his life ended in a strange and dramatic fashion in Lebanon, Ohio when he was 53. Boarding at the Lebanon House above while defending a murderer he planned to clear his client by claiming that the victim accidentally shot himself. Vallandigham showed a friend how that might have happened using a pistol he did not know was loaded. He shot himself in the abdomen and died the next day.

A shattered Louisa visited relatives in Maryland where she died less than two months after Clement.

Louisa’s obituary widely copied from the Baltimore Sun August 15, 1871



Strength in Union by Denniele Bohannon


In 1928 author Elbert Benton looked back 70 years and considered the Copperhead/Peace Democrats a result of the politics of “perverted imagination”---perhaps we’d call it paranoid misinformation---a  personality trait all too familiar today.

The Block
Strength in Union


My Encyclopedia and BlockBase tell us that this simple repeat is called Strength in Union from the Nancy Cabot column in the Chicago Tribune of the 1930s. Burnside and Lincoln banished Vallandigham because they realized he was a grassroots force to weaken Union Strength.  In his treason he became The Man Without a Country, inspiring Edward Everett Hale’s famous story.

Ten inch & fifteen inch options

Post your progress in our Facebook Group ConfederadosQuilt.

Read More

Biography by Clement’s brother:


The Man without a Country by Edward Everett Hale

The Movement for Peace without a Victory by Elbert J. Benton
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89062261854&seq=7



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