Ohio representative Clement L. Vallandigham led the Copperhead faction of the Democratic Party in its opposition to the Civil War. In May 1863 he was arrested on treason charges after making a speech against the Lincoln administration. A military court sentenced him to prison, but President Lincoln instead banished him to the Confederacy. Soon after, Vallandigham fled to Canada, where he mounted a failed campaign to become governor of Ohio. Vallandigham spoke before the House of Representatives in January 1863, just a few months before his arrest.

And now, sir, I recur to the state of the Union to-day. What is it? Sir, twenty months have elapsed, but the rebellion is not crushed out; its military power has not been broken; the insurgents have not dispersed. The Union is not restored; nor the Constitution maintained; nor the laws enforced. Twenty, sixty, ninety, three hundred, six hundred days have passed; a thousand millions been expended; and three hundred thousand lives lost or bodies mangled; and to-day the Confederate flag is still near the Potomac and the Ohio, and the Confederate Government stronger, many times, than at the beginning. Not a State has been restored, not any part of any State has voluntarily returned to the Union. And has any thing been wanting that Congress, or the States, or the people in their most generous enthusiasm, their most impassionate patriotism, could bestow? Was it power? And did not the party of the Executive control the entire Federal Government, every State Government, every county, every city, town, and village in the North and West? Was it patronage? All belonged to it. Was it influence? What more? Did not the school, the college, the church, the press, the secret orders, the municipality, the corporation, railroads, telegraphs, express companies, the voluntary association, all, all yield it to the utmost? Was it unanimity? Never was an Administration so supported in England or America. Five men and half a score of newspapers made up the Opposition. Was it enthusiasm? The enthusiasm was fanatical. There has been nothing like it since the Crusades. Was it confidence? Sir, the faith of the people exceeded that of the patriarch. They gave up Constitution, law, right, liberty, all at your demand for arbitrary power that the rebellion might, as you promised, be crushed out in three months, and the Union restored. Was credit needed? You took control of a country, young, vigorous, and inexhaustible in wealth and resources, and of a Government almost free from public debt, and whose good faith had never been tarnished. . . . A thousand millions have been expended since the 15th of April, 1861; and a public debt or liability of $1,500,000,000 already incurred. And to support all this stupendous outlay and indebtedness, a system of taxation, direct and indirect, has been inaugurated, the most onerous and unjust ever imposed upon any but a conquered people.

Money and credit, then, you have had in prodigal profusion. And were men wanted? More than a million rushed to arms! Seventy-five thousand first (and the country stood aghast at the multitude), then eighty-three thousand more were demanded; and three hundred and ten thousand responded to the call. The President next asked for four hundred thousand, and Congress, in their generous confidence, gave him five hundred thousand; and, not to be outdone, he took six hundred and thirty-seven thousand. Half of these melted away in their first campaign; and the President demanded three hundred thousand more for the war, and then drafted yet another three hundred thousand for nine months. The fabled hosts of Xerxes have been outnumbered. And yet victory, strangely, follows the standard of the foe. From Great Bethel to Vicksburg, the battle has not been to the strong. Yet every disaster, except the last, has been followed by a call for more troops, and every time, so far, they have been promptly furnished. From the beginning the war has been conducted like a political campaign, and it has been the folly of the party in power that they have assumed, that numbers alone would win the field in a contest not with ballots but with musket and sword. . . .

Then, sir, there is not an “irrepressible conflict” between slave labor and free labor. There is no conflict at all. Both exist together in perfect harmony in the South. The master and the slave, the white laborer and the black, work together in the same field, or the same shop, and without the slightest sense of degradation. They are not equals, either socially or politically. And why, then, cannot Ohio, having only free labor, live in harmony with Kentucky, which has both slave and free? Above all, why cannot Massachusetts allow the same right of choice to South Carolina, separated as they are a thousand miles, by other States, who would keep the peace, and live in good-will? Why this civil war? Whence disunion? Not from slavery—not because the South chooses to have two kinds of labor instead of one—but from sectionalism, always and everywhere a disintegrating principle. Sectional jealousy and hate—these, sir, are the only elements of conflict between these States; and, though powerful, they are yet not at all irrepressible.

Source: Speeches, Arguments, Addresses, and Letters of Clement L. Vallandigham (New York: J. Walter & Co., 1864), 427–29, 439–40.