Benjamin Franklin "Bluff" Wade was an American politician who served as one of the two United States Senators from Ohio from 1851 to 1869.
Background
Benjamin Franklin "Bluff" Wade was the tenth of eleven children of James and Mary (Upham) Wade, was a native of Feeding Hills, a hamlet near Springfield, Massachussets. His father traced his descent from Jonathan Wade of County Norfolk, England, who emigrated in 1632 and became an honored citizen of Medford, Massachusetts Bay Colony. His mother was the daughter of a Baptist clergyman of West Springfield. Decius S. Wade was his nephew. He reared amidst the poverty and hardships of a New England farm.
Education
Wade received little education in childhood, save that acquired from his mother and at a local school in the winter months.
Career
With his parents he moved in 1821 to the frontier community of Andover, Ohio, where two of his brothers had gone a year earlier. For the next few years he was by turns a farmer, drover, laborer, medical student, and schoolteacher in Ohio and New York state, but about 1825 he settled down to the study of law in Canfield, Ohio, and in 1827 or 1828 was admitted to the bar. Diffidence in public speaking threatened his ambitions at the outset, but perseverance gradually made him a vigorous advocate, and partnerships with Joshua R. Giddings in 1831 and Rufus P. Ranney in 1838 brought him a wide and successful practice in northeastern Ohio. On May 19, 1841, he was married to Caroline M. Rosekrans of Ashtabula and they took up their residence in Jefferson, Ohio, his place of practice. She bore him two sons, James F. and Henry P. Wade, and with them survived him. Once established in the law, Wade turned his attention to politics and public office. After a term as prosecuting attorney of Ashtabula County he was elected to the state Senate in 1837. There he identified himself with the anti-slavery element; his outspoken opposition to a more stringent fugitive-slave law in Ohio is said to have been responsible for his failure to be reelected in 1839. But he was returned to the Senate for a second term in 1841 and was chosen by the legislature in 1847 to sit as president-judge of the third judicial circuit. His forceful and business-like methods on the bench, together with his rising popularity, commended him to the Whigs in the legislature and in 1851, apparently without effort on his part, he was elected to the United States Senate. Twice reelected as a Republican, he served until March 3, 1869. Wade's entrance into the Senate in the early fifties was eventful in the history of slavery and the Union. Rough in manner, coarse and vituperative in speech, yet intensely patriotic, he speedily became a leader of the anti-slavery group in Congress.
At heart an abolitionist, he supported a move in 1852 to repeal the Fugitive Slave Law and denounced the Kansas-Nebraska Bill. He also opposed the several efforts to win Kansas for slavery and almost every other measure or device for the promotion or protection of the system. When the controversy in the Senate became intensely personal and Wade was much involved, he entered into a secret compact (1858) with Simon Cameron and Zachariah Chandler whereby they pledged themselves to make their own the cause of any Republican senator receiving gross personal abuse, and to "carry the quarrel into a coffin". He was an ardent supporter of the proposed homestead legislation of the period, saying in 1859 that it was "a question of land to the landless, " while the bill to buy Cuba was "a question of niggers to the niggerless". During the secession crisis of 1860-61 he took his stand on the Republican platform of 1860, and as a member of the Senate Committee of Thirteen voted against the Crittenden proposals, holding that the time for compromise had passed. With the outbreak of war, Wade became one of the most belligerent men in Congress, demanding swift and decisive military action. Personally a fearless man, he played a dramatic part in momentarily stemming a portion of the Union retreat from Bull Run (July 21, 1861). When the army was reorganized he pressed vigorously for another forward movement, and when McClellan delayed, Wade became one of his sharpest critics. With Senators Chandler and J. W. Grimes he was instrumental in setting up the Committee on the Conduct of the War. From the moment of its creation the Committee, under Wade's chairmanship, became a violently partisan machine, suspicious of the loyalty of those who ventured to dissent from its wishes and bent upon an unrelenting prosecution of the war. Its members worked in close cooperation with Secretary of War Stanton, a kindred spirit whom Wade had urged for that office, but they were generally critical of the President. The Radicals succeeded in having Wade elected president pro tempore of the Senate when that office became vacant. According to the statute then in force, he would have succeeded to the presidency in the event of Johnson's removal. But it appears that the prospect of Wade's succession really became an embarrassment to them, for many of the conservatives felt that he would be no improvement and might prove less satisfactory than Johnson. Wade himself voted for Johnson's conviction despite the fact that he was an interested party. So expectant was he of success that he began the selection of his cabinet before the impeachment trial was concluded. Thwarted in his presidential ambitions by Johnson's acquittal, and having failed of reelection to the Senate, Wade sought the second place on the ticket with Grant in 1868. However, after leading on the first four ballots in the Republican convention, he lost the nomination to Schuyler Colfax. Upon his retirement from the Senate in 1869 Wade resumed the practice of law in Ohio. He became general counsel for the Northern Pacific Railroad and served for a time as one of the government directors of the Union Pacific. In 1871 Grant appointed him a member of the commission of investigation which visited Santo Domingo and recommended its annexation. Seven years later he died in Jefferson, Ohio.
Politics
Like other Radical Republicans in Congress, Wade seemed temperamentally incapable of understanding Lincoln and deplored his cautious and conservative policies. He himself favored drastic punitive measures against the South, including legislation for the confiscation of the property of the Confederate leaders and the emancipation of their slaves. He was not overburdened with constitutional scruples where measures that he favored were concerned. At the same time he decried the President's "dictatorship" and found Lincoln's clement reconstruction policy, announced on December 8, 1863, particularly obnoxious. When he and Henry Winter Davis attempted to counteract it by a severe congressional plan, embodied in the Wade-Davis bill, and Lincoln checked this by a "pocket veto, " announcing his reasons in a proclamation (July 8, 1864), their indignation was unbounded. The resultant Wade-Davis Manifesto (August 5), a fierce blast, condemned the President's "executive usurpation" as a "studied outrage on the legislative authority" and insisted that in matters of reconstruction Congress was "paramount and must be respected". Previously Wade had joined with others in endorsing the Pomeroy circular, designed to replace Lincoln with Salmon P. Chase, but when that project collapsed and the Manifesto aroused a storm of disapproval in Ohio, he gave his support to Lincoln in the closing weeks of the election contest in 1864. But he continued to resist the President's reconstruction policy, characterizing it as "absurd, monarchical, and anti-American". The accession of Johnson to the presidency in April 1865 was hailed by Wade and his faction as a godsend, and they hastened to make overtures to him in behalf of their own measures. When to their surprise he took over Lincoln's policy, Wade dubbed him either "a knave or a fool, " and contended that to admit the Southern states on the presidential plan was "nothing less than political suicide". From December 1865 onward, along with Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens, and other vindictive leaders, he waged a persistent campaign against Johnson, pressing for the enactment of the congressional program, including the Civil Rights, Military Reconstruction, and Tenure of Office bills. At the opening of the session in December 1865 Wade promptly introduced a bill for the enfranchisement of Negroes in the District of Columbia, and supported Negro suffrage in the campaign of 1866, although he was willing to readmit the Southern states if they ratified the Fourteenth Amendment within a reasonable time. His methods leave the impression that he, like Stevens, was ready to resort to almost any extremity in order to carry through the congressional policies or gain a point.
Views
Quotations:
"I have always believed, heretofore, in the doctrines of the Declaration of Independence, that all men are born free and equal; but of late it appears that some men are born slaves, and I regret that they are not black, so all the world might know them. "
"As a Senator I am opposed to duelling. As Ben. Wade, I recognize the code. "
"I know how easy it is for some minds to glide along with the current of popular opinion, where influence, respectability, and all those motives which tend to seduce the human heart are brought to bear. "
"Sometimes it leads me even to hesitate whether I am strictly correct in my idea that all men are born to equal rights, for their conduct seems to me to contravene the doctrine. "
"I may fall here in the Senate chamber, but I will. never make any compromise with any such men. "
