Man without a country. (Flashback).

To know nothing of what happened before you were born is to remain ever a child--Cicero

As we walk down a rutted dirt road leading into the historic Batavia Cemetery in New York on its annual Civil War candlelight tour, we halt before a somber man seated at a desk. He wears no uniform; he carries no gun. He is Ohio Congressman Clement L. Vallandigham, who claims to be imprisoned in a "military bastille for no other offense than my political opinions."

If most visitors have never heard of Clement Vallandigham, Dick Crozier (a Republican who has played the Democratic dissenter in re-enactments for five years) gives them something to think about. "I state that someday, decisions will be made not by local people but by politicians in distant Washington. People look at me and say, `Oh, that's where it happened--that's how we ended up with this omnipotent government.'"

Clement Vallandigham was the lawyerly son of a Presbyterian minister. A conventional Democrat of states' rights sympathies and devotee of Edmund Burke, he was a friend neither to slavery ("a moral, social, and political evil") nor to the Negro. Like Lincoln, Vallandigham reverenced "the Union," though he wished to preserve it by conciliation (Republicans said "appeasement") rather than bloodshed.

In February 1861, one month before Lincoln took office, Rep. Vallandigham proposed amending the Constitution so as to divide the country into four sections--North, West, Pacific, and South. Presidents could be elected and controversial legislation enacted only by gaining a majority of votes from all sections.

Vallandigham's plan died aborning; war came. But whereas the leader of the Midwestern Democrats, Stephen Douglas, fell in behind Lincoln, Vallandigham became the most outspoken antiwar voice in Congress.

The whiskers had barely curled on the President's new beard before Vallandigham was charging him with having launched "a terrible and bloody revolution" whose features were death, taxes, a swollen executive branch, and the erosion of personal liberties.