Supporting Lincoln’s war against the South and the war against the Constitution are what some consider the higher crime than that of being a Copperhead.
Yea, I can imagine that traitors would be inclined to support traitors.
The Confederacy didn’t seem to think so. After Vallandigham’s trial and conviction, Lincoln ordered his deportation to the Confederacy under a flag of truce. He was sent to Wilmington, North Carolina by President Davis and put under guard as an “alien enemy.”
This did not stop Vallandigham, however. He began to advise the Confederacy to not conduct any military campaign North into Pennsylvania, as it would interfere with the political campaign of Lincoln’s rival, Democrat George B. McClellan, even though McClellan had repudiated the Democrat party’s anti-war platform, and insisting on peace only if the Confederacy vied for peace *and* returned to the Union.
It indicated to the Confederacy that Vallandigham was less interested in peace than Democrat political power in the North. And he later proved this by traveling by blockade runner to Bermuda, then Canada, from where he ran for governor of Ohio. He lost in a landslide, but created much acrimony in the state.
He talked to a Confederate representative in Canada about plans for forming a Northwestern Confederacy, consisting of the states of Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois, by overthrowing their governments.
He requested money for weapons from the Confederates. Vallandigham refused to handle the money himself and it was given to his associate James A. Barrett. Part of the Confederate plan was to liberate Confederate prisoners of war. The intended revolt never materialized.
So, top to bottom, the Confederacy was right to look at him through a jaundiced eye. As with the modern Operation ANSWER, anti-war movement, run by Maoist Marxists, peace was never seen as an end, but a means to something entirely different.