Vallandigham was the incarnation of Copperheadism. I heard his speech of January 14, 1863, in the House, in which he discharged all the pro-slavery virus that he had been collecting from his boyhood days. As a public speaker he had no attractions, but rather, as it seemed to me, the tone and front of a fallen angel defying the Almighty. There was neither humor nor persuasion nor conciliation in his make-up. He was cold as ice and hard as iron. Although born and bred in a free state, he avowed himself a pro-slavery man. In the speech referred to he took two hours to prove the following propositions: (1) That the Southern Confederacy never could be conquered; (2) that the Union never could be restored by war; (3) that it could be restored by peace; (4) that whatever else might happen, African slavery would be "fifty-fold stronger" at the end of the war than it had been at the beginning. General Ambrose E. Burnside, after his defeat at Fredericksburg, had been sent to take command of the Department of the Ohio. Vallandigham was now seeking the nomination of his party for governor of Ohio, and his chances of success were not flattering until Burnside caused him to be arrested for alleged treasonable utterances in a speech delivered at the town of Mount Vernon on the 1st day of May, 1863. He was taken out of his bed at Dayton in the night and carried to Cincinnati, put in a military prison, tried by a military commission, found guilty, and sentenced to close confinement in Fort Warren during the continuance of the war. President Lincoln commuted his sentence to banishment to the Southern Confederacy. He was accordingly sent across the army lines and handed over to his supposed friends, who did not, however, receive him with any touching marks of affection. Under the Act of Congress approved March 3, 1863, it was the duty of the Secretary of War within twenty days to report the arrest of Vallandigham to the judge of the United States District Court for southern Ohio, with a statement of the charges against him, in order that they might be laid before the grand jury, and if an indictment were found against him, to bring him to trial; and if no indictment were found during that term of court, to discharge him from confinement. Any officer, civil or military, holding a prisoner in contravention of that act was guilty of a misdemeanor and liable to a fine of not less than five hundred dollars and to imprisonment in the common jail not less than six months. Accordingly, all the proceedings in the case of Vallandigham subsequent to his arrest were unwarranted and lawless. The arrest itself was, perhaps, permissible under the act, because the President had the right to suspend the writ of _habeas corpus_. When Vallandigham applied for the writ, Judge Leavitt refused it on that ground. The refusal of the writ, however, did not justify the later proceedings.