Lincoln arrested a seditious congressman.
And also arrested senators...here's one sent packing:
Vallandigham, the Notorious
Clement Vallandigham, a notorious anti-Union zealot from Ohio was banished from his own country by Abraham Lincoln. He would not go peacefully though, nor could he remain long away from the war that fueled his hatred. Eventually, he would die in as bizarre a fashion as he had lived.
Clement Laird Vallandigham, a former Ohio Congressman from Dayton, Ohio was largely responsible for a growing and vocal opposition to the Civil War. The reportedly handsome young lawyer, son of a Presbyterian minister, was the undisputed leader of the Copperheads ("Peace Democrats") in the Northwest. He was also a notorious, thinly-veiled, Southern sympathizer who made speeches, to anyone who would listen, calling the war, "wicked and cruel," and which was quite obvious to all. Then however, Vallandigham strayed beyond the realm of reality and suggested that the Republicans only wanted to end slavery to further their quest for a dictatorship. The government had little tolerance for such reckless and inflammatory remarks. Unfortunately for Vallandigham, "treason" was then a clay-like concept that would be molded to suit the needs of the war effort.
On May 5, 1863, a Company of the 115th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, dispatched to Dayton, Ohio by special train, broke into Vallandigham's house at 3:00 A.M. and arrested him. The former Congressman was taken from his home in a nightshirt and quickly transported to Cincinnati where he would be tried by a military commission the following day on charges of "treasonable utterances." Riots broke out in Dayton in response to the arrest, with fires destroying an entire city block. Troops from Columbus and and Cincinnati were brought in and martial law declared. Vallandigham was soon convicted of aiding the Confederates, and on May 19, 1863 President Lincoln ordered Secretary of War Stanton to see to it that Vallandigham was banished to "beyond the military lines of the United States and not be permitted to return, under threat of arrest."
Federal troops in Tennessee turned Vallandigham over to the Confederate Army on May 25, 1863. In June, President Davis of the Confederate States, having no use for Vallandigham, orders him to Wilmington, North Carolina to be guarded as an "alien enemy." That same month. Peace Democrats in Ohio nominate the the exiled and incarcerated Vallandigham for Governor. A committee of the Democratic convention demanded that President Lincoln reverse his ordered exile of Vallandigham. Lincoln refused. "Must I," Lincoln lamented, "shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wiley agitator who induces him to desert?" In October, Vallandigham, now exiled by the Confederate States to Canada, would be defeated for the Ohio Governorship by Democrat John Brough from Marietta.
On June 14, 1864, one year after being exiled, Clement Vallandigham slips back into the country and arrives in Ohio wearing a feeble disguise that fails to deceive the Federal agents watching him. Soon, he will be appointed National Commander of the radical "Sons of Liberty," a secret anti-war organization also known as the "Knights of the Golden Circle." Throughout the summer of 1864 Vallandigham will conspire with the Confederate agents in a bizarre plot to effect the release of 20,000 prisoners of war in Ohio, Illinois and Indiana.