The aftermath of Manassas was repeated.  In the case of Pope, no effort had been spared to save the friend of the Committee, to find some one else on whom to load his incompetence.  The course was now repeated.  Again, the Jacobins raised the cry, “We are betrayed!” Again, the stir to injure the President.  Very strange are the ironies of history!  At this critical moment, Lincoln’s amiable mistake in sending Burnside to Cincinnati demanded expiation.  Along with the definite news of Hooker’s overthrow, came the news that Burnside had seized the Copperhead leader, Vallandigham, and had cast him into prison; that a hubbub had ensued; that, as the saying goes, the woods were burning in Ohio.

Vallandigham’s offense was a public speech of which no accurate report survives.  However, the fragments recorded by “plain clothes” men in Burnside’s employ, when set in the perspective of Vallandigham’s thinking as displayed in Congress, make its tenor plain enough.  It was an out-and-out Copperhead harangue.  If he was to be treated as hundreds of others had been, the case against him was plain.  But the Administration’s policy toward agitators had gradually changed.  There was not the same fear of them that had existed two years before.  Now the tendency of the Administration was to ignore them.

The Cabinet regretted what Burnside had done.  Nevertheless, the Ministers felt that it would not do to repudiate him.  Lincoln took that view.  He wrote to Burnside deploring his action and sustaining his authority.(16) And then, as a sort of grim practical joke, he commuted Vallandigham’s sentence from imprisonment to banishment.  The agitator was sent across the lines into the Confederacy.

Burnside had effectually played the marplot.  Very little chance now of an understanding between Lincoln and either wing of the Democrats.  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.  With the Democrats ringing the changes on the former doctrine of the supple politicians, how certain that their only course for the moment was to lie low.  A time came, to be sure, when they thought it safe to resume their own creed; but that was not yet.

The hubbub over Vallandigham called forth two letters addressed to protesting committees, that have their place among Lincoln’s most important statements of political science.  His argument is based on the proposition which Browning developed a year before.  The core of it is: 

“You ask in substance whether I really claim that I may override all guaranteed rights of individuals on the plea of conserving the public safety, whenever I may choose to say the public safety requires it.  This question, divested of the phraseology calculated to represent me as struggling for an arbitrary personal prerogative, is either simply a question who shall decide, or an affirmation that no one shall decide, what the public safety does require in cases of rebellion or invasion.