Home >
Clement Vallangigham's 1871 bizarre death....
Clement Vallangigham's 1871 bizarre death....
Item # 696739
June 17, 1871
THE NEW YORK HERALD, June 17, 1871
* Clement Laird Vallandigham's bizarre death
* American lawyer and politician
Page 7 has a bizarre article headed: "VALLANDIGAM SHOT" with subheads. (see images) He would die the next morning. His death is considered one of the most unusual as he was demonstrating how his defendant's victim accidentally shot himself.
Complete in 12 pages, light toning and minor wear at the margins, generally nice.
wikipedia notes: Vallandigham died in 1871 in Lebanon, Ohio, at the age of 50, after he accidentally shot himself in the abdomen with a pistol. He was representing a defendant, Thomas McGehean, in a murder case for killing a man in a barroom brawl in Hamilton, Ohio. Vallandigham attempted to prove the victim, Tom Myers, had in fact accidentally shot himself while he was drawing his pistol from a pocket while rising from a kneeling position. As Vallandigham conferred with fellow defense attorneys in his hotel room at the Lebanon House, later the Golden Lamb Inn, he showed them how he would demonstrate this to the jury. Selecting a pistol he believed to be unloaded, he put it in his pocket and enacted the events as they might have happened, snagging the loaded gun on his clothing and unintentionally causing it to discharge into his stomach.
Although he was fatally wounded, Vallandigham's demonstration proved his point, and the defendant, Thomas McGehean, was acquitted and released from custody (only to be shot to death four years later in his saloon). Surgeons probed for the pistol ball, thought to have lodged in the vicinity of Vallandigham's bladder, but were unable to locate it, and Vallandigham died the next day of peritonitis.
Category: Post-Civil War
Add to Cart
