Predestined?

Clement Laird Vallandigham (July 29, 1820 – June 17, 1871) was an Ohio politician, and leader of the Copperhead faction of anti-war Democrats during the American Civil War. He served two terms in the United States House of Representatives. His political activities eventually caused him to be deported to the Confederacy by President Lincoln in 1863. He insisted he was there as a prisoner of war but also remarked that he did not want to be a citizen of the Union. His story supposedly inspired the short story, "Man Without a Country." His stormy political career destroyed by his anti-war activities, he returned to the practice of law.

His story is twisted and confusing enough by itself. His death, however, is the point of this post.

Vallandigham died in 1871 in Lebanon, Ohio, at the age of 50, after accidentally shooting himself in the abdomen with a pistol. He was representing a defendant in a murder case for killing a man in a barroom brawl at the Golden Lamb Inn. 

 Vallandigham attempted to prove the victim, Tom Myers, had in fact accidentally shot himself while 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 Golden Lamb, 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 belly. 

Although he was fatally wounded, Vallandigham's demonstration proved his point, and the defendant, Thomas McGehan, was acquitted and released from custody (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 his bladder, but were unable to locate it, and Vallandigham died the next day of peritonitis. His last words expressed his faith in "that good old Presbyterian doctrine of predestination".