Decius Spear Wade

Background

Decius Spear Wade was born near Andover, Ashtabula County, Ohio, the son of Charles H. and Juliet (Spear) Wade. Charles Wade was a farmer, and the son worked on the farm with him.

Education

He studied law in the office of his uncle Benjamin F. Wade, who was a U. S. Senator from 1851 to 1869.

Career

In 1857 he was admitted to practice and established himself in Jefferson, Ohio. He was elected probate judge of Ashtabula County in 1860. The next year he volunteered for three months' service in the Federal army and was made lieutenant, but apparently he soon left the army to resume his duties as judge. He served as probate judge till 1867 and then practised law for two years. In 1871 he was appointed chief justice of Montana by President Grant; he was reappointed every four years until the expiration of his fourth term in 1887. When Wade went to Montana the supreme court judges also acted as district judges, and each of them traveled extensively by stagecoach and on horseback. No decisions of the supreme court were published before 1868, and few precedents had been established. The statutes were vague, and the customs of the miners' courts were the generally accepted law. Litigation, which was extensive, for the most part involved mining claims and water rights in an arid country where the English common law did not seem to apply. Decisions had to be reached by the formation of new principles or by the application of old rules to new conditions. In the case of Robertson vs. Smith Wade's decision in the district court, based on the miners' law, was affirmed by Knowles in the supreme court. In 1872 Congress passed a law opening mineral deposits in public lands and defining in a general way the rights to quartz claims but leaving much to be determined by the courts. Terms had to be defined and rules made governing ambiguous situations. In a long series of cases Wade and Associate Justice Hiram Knowles formulated the mining and irrigation law for Montana. In the first six volumes of the Montana Reports almost half of the decisions were Wade's, and few of them were reversed on appeal. In fourteen out of seventeen cases taken to the United States Supreme Court, his opinions were affirmed. When Wade retired from the bench in 1887 he entered into partnership with Edwin Warren Toole and William Wallace. In 1889 he was appointed a member of a commission to draft a code supplanting the conflicting and confusing laws of the territory. It was adopted by the legislature in 1895, and The Codes and Statutes of Montana was published in the same year. Wade wrote the four chapters on the bench and bar in Montana which appear in Joaquin Miller's An Illustrated History of Montana and a number of newspaper articles on Montana history. He was also the author of a novel, Clare Lincoln (1876). He lived and practised in Helena until 1895, when he returned to Ohio. He died in Ohio near Andover.

Achievements

• He was a judge and state senator in Ohio before serving sixteen years as Chief Justice of the Montana Territorial Supreme Court. As a member of the post-statehood Code Commission, he was one of the main drafters of the Montana Code and the most vocal advocate in the state for codification.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Clare Lincoln

Connections

On June 3, 1863, he married an English girl named Bernice Galpin, by whom he had one daughter.

Father:

Charles H. Wade

Mother:

Juliet (Spear) Wade

Spouse:

Bernice Galpin