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.

Vallandigham died in 1871 in Lebanon, Ohio, after accidentally shooting himself in the abdomen with a pistol, while representing a defendant in a murder case for killing a man in a barroom brawl in Hamilton.

In October 1859, a radical abolitionist, John Brown, raided Harper's Ferry, Virginia, seizing the United States Army Arsenal.

He believed and acted upon the faith which for twenty years has been so persistently taught in every form throughout the Free States, and which is but another mode of the statement of the doctrine of the 'irrepressible conflict'—that slavery and the three hundred and seventy thousand slaveholders of the South are only tolerated, and that the millions of slaves and non-slaveholding white men are ready and willing to rise against the 'oligarchy', needing only a leader and deliverer.

He perished justly and miserably—an insurgent and a felon; but guiltier than he, and with his blood upon their heads, are the false and cowardly prophets and teachers of Abolition.

He accused the Republican Party of being "belligerent" and advocated a "choice of peaceable disunion upon the one hand, or Union through adjustment and conciliation upon the other."

He charged that the war was no longer being fought to save the Union, but it had become an attempt to free the slaves by sacrificing the liberty of white Americans to "King Lincoln.

"[19] The authority for Burnside's order came from a proclamation of September 24, 1862 in which President Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and made discouraging enlistments, drafts, or any other "disloyal" practices subject to martial law and trial by military commissions.

38, from Headquarters Department of the Ohio, as "a base usurpation of arbitrary authority", inviting his hearers to resist the same, by saying, "the sooner the people inform the minions of usurped power that they will not submit to such restrictions upon their liberties, the better"; declaring "that he was at all times, and upon all occasions, resolved to do what he could to defeat the attempts now being made to build up a monarchy upon the ruins of our free government"; asserting "that he firmly believed, as he said six months ago, that the men in power are attempting to establish a despotism in this country, more cruel and more oppressive than ever existed before.

[23] Captain James Madison Cutts served as the judge advocate in the military trial and was responsible for authoring the charges against Vallandigham.

[24] During the trial, testimony was given by Union army officers who had attended the speech in civilian clothes, that Vallandigham called the president "King Lincoln.

According to University of New Mexico School of Law Professor Joshua E. Kastenberg, because Cox was another well-known anti-war Democrat, his presence at the military court likely harmed Vallandigham's attempts at arguing his innocence.

[28] Judge Humphrey H. Leavitt of the Circuit Court of the United States for the Southern District of Ohio upheld Vallandigham's arrest and military trial as a valid exercise of the President's war powers.

In February 1864, the Supreme Court ruled that it had no power to issue a writ of habeas corpus to a military commission (Ex parte Vallandigham, 1 Wallace, 243).

[36] On June 2, 1863, Vallandigham was sent to Wilmington, North Carolina, by Confederate President Jefferson Davis and was briefly put under guard as an "alien enemy.

"[37] President Lincoln wrote the "Birchard Letter" of June 29, 1863 to several Ohio congressmen; it offered to revoke Vallandigham's deportation order if they would agree to support certain policies of the Administration.

[46] Vallandigham crossed back to the US "under heavy disguise" on June 14 and gave a passionate speech at an impromptu Democratic convention in Hamilton, Ohio, the next day.

On June 24, 1864, Lincoln drafted a letter to Governor Brough and General Samuel P. Heintzelman and stated to "watch Vallandigham and others closely" and to arrest them if necessary.

[49] In late August, Vallandigham openly attended the 1864 Democratic National Convention in Chicago as a district delegate for Ohio.

In late September 1864, the conspiracy trial of Harrison H. Dodd, William A. Bowles, Andrew Humphreys, Horace Heffren, and Lambdin P. Milligan, members of the Knights of the Golden Circle, a paramilitary organization that had been founded in Cincinnati in 1854, morphed into the Order of American Knights, and become the Sons of Liberty, began in Indianapolis before a military commission.

[60] According to the testimony of Felix G. Stidger, an undercover federal agent who had infiltrated the Knights of the Golden Circle, the plan of Vallandigham was to begin a revolt sometime between November 3 and 17.

Vallandigham returned to Ohio, lost his campaigns for the Senate against Judge Allen G. Thurman[65] and the House of Representatives against Robert C. Schenck[66] on an anti-Reconstruction platform.

He also affirmed "the Democratic party pledges itself to the full, faithful, and absolute execution and enforcement of the Constitution as it now is, so as to secure equal rights to all persons under it, without distinction of race, color, or condition."

He was representing a defendant, Thomas McGehean,[69] 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).

In Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee (1953) and William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine (1990), Vallandigham defeated Lincoln in the presidential election of 1864 after the South won the Civil War.

In Horrible Histories he is shown as an excellent lawyer who is, however, extremely embarrassed by the idiotic way in which he died: by having killed himself by accident while he was defending his client, Thomas McGehean.