CLEMENT VALLANDIGHARL
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE '' SPEOTATOIL1 Sin,—In your issue of December 4th you refer to Mr. Lincoln's distinction between the deserting soldier-boy and the " wily agitator " Vallandigham, whose words might have influenced the soldier to desert. Of course, Clement Vallandigham was . not merely a " wily agitator." He was a man able and honest, but sadly wrong, who, driven from his place in Congress by the gerrymandering of his election district, and genuinely shocked to see his native State under martial law, said unwise things that procured his arrest and banishment. I had in my hands a few years ago the State paper from which you quote, and in the course of which Mr. Lincoln gave vent to one of his best though least- known witticisms. Vallandigham's fellow-Democrats, in pro- testing against his arrest by the military, had prophesied that if such things were done habitually in time of war, they would become so much a matter of course as to be continued when peace was made. To this opinion Mr. Lincoln characteristically answered that, while he had known many a man to take emetics when ill, he never knew any to make them part of his regular diet when well—which is that fine thing, a genuine argument conveyed in a figure of speech. As a matter of fact, I suppose Vallandigham would not have been arrested by the soldiers but for the zeal of poor Burnside, the military commander in Ohio, fresh from his awful defeat at Fredericksburg. Vallandigham lived long enough to pay a sincere and manly tribute to the dead Lincoln, just as he had once paid such a tribute to the living John Brown.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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