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That opportunity would come at once, should the North be invaded. From Detroit Calhoun went to Columbus, Ohio, from there to Dayton, the home of Vallandigham. He found that that gentleman was the idol of that section. They wanted him to come home. They swore they would defend him with their lives. The whole country reeked with disloyalty to the Federal government.

Burnside, now commanding the troops in Ohio, held that violent denunciation of the Government in a tone that tended to demoralise the troops was treason, since it certainly was not patriotism, and when in May, 1863, Vallandigham made a very violent and offensive speech in Ohio he had him arrested in his house at night, and sent him before a court-martial which imprisoned him.

Turning north, he entered Butler County. Here, as in Indiana, he met only the scowling faces of enemies. “And here is where they worship Vallandigham!” exclaimed Calhoun, passionately. “Here is where they told me almost every man belonged to the Knights of the Golden Circle, and that the whole county would welcome us.

That redoubtable person had fixed his headquarters in Canada, whence he directed his partisans in their vain attempt to elect him Governor of Ohio. Their next move was to honor him with the office of Supreme Commander of the Sons of Liberty, and now Vallandigham resolved to win the martyr's crown in very fact.

In a public matter in the June of 1864 Lincoln gave a demonstration of his original way of doing things. It displayed his final serenity in such unexpected fashion that no routine politician, no dealer in the catchwords of statecraft, could understand it. Since that grim joke, the deportation of Vallandigham, the Copperhead leader had not had happy time. The Confederacy did not want him.

The opportunity to make capital out of the war powers was quite too good to be lost! Vallandigham was nominated for governor by the Ohio Democrats. In all parts of the country Democratic committees resolved in furious protest against the dictator. And yet, on the whole, perhaps, the incident played into Lincoln's hands. At least, it silenced the Jacobins.

In the same month, under the circumstances described in the preceding chapter, Ohio buried Vallandigham under a hostile majority of more than 100,000. The lead thus given by the "October States" was followed by the "November States."

Hosts of men who would willingly have been in opposition to the administration party on questions of economy or of details in the conduct of the war declined to vote for Vallandigham, whose utterances had been the great matter of debate during the canvass, and whose disloyalty being thus brought home to the voters in every neighborhood, had repelled all but the most passionate of his party friends.

Judge Leavitt of the United States Circuit Court denied a writ of habeas corpus in the case. President Lincoln regretted the arrest, but felt it imprudent to annul the action of the general and the military tribunal. Conforming to a clause of Burnside's order, he modified the sentence by sending Vallandigham south beyond the Union military lines.

Soon afterward, in his reply to the New York Democrats, he said: "In my own discretion, I do not know whether I would have ordered the arrest of Mr. Vallandigham." On the other hand, Mr. Blaine states that Burnside "undoubtedly had confidential instructions in regard to the mode of dealing with the rising tide of disloyalty which, beginning in Ohio, was sweeping over the West."