Chase was elected U.S. senator from Ohio in 1849 as a Free Soiler and the state’s governor six years later as a Republican. In Congress, Chase found common ground with Charles Sumner in abolition and literature, but their friendship did not prevent him from seeing a bright side to the drubbing that nearly killed Sumner: It would do more to show “the true character of the men” who supported slavery “than ten thousand speeches” would do.
During an uneventful term as a governor pressing for teacher training and prison reform, Chase expected his standing in the new Republican Party to make him a national figure. But when a political bulletin listed the leading presidential candidates for 1860, Chase was not among them. At the Baltimore convention, he got only forty votes.
• • •
Two days after Lincoln’s inauguration, Chase was away from Washington when, without consulting him, the new president nominated him as secretary of the Treasury. By the time Chase returned to the capital, the Senate had already confirmed him.
After trying in vain to decline the job, Chase turned out to be a shrewd and innovative choice. Citing the wartime emergency, Chase expanded the list of tariffs to boost revenue, and he successfully assumed for the federal government those taxing powers that had been left to the states.
With support from Jay Cooke, the Philadelphia banker, Chase raised $500 million in new federal bonds. He overcame his own antipathy to paper money and, with the support of Thaddeus Stevens, oversaw the first printing of federal bills, called “greenbacks.” Looking toward future campaigning, he designed them with an etching of himself. When he ordered U.S. coins stamped “In God We Trust,” Chase was acknowledging a religious faith strengthened by his many bereavements.
Along the way, Chase aroused bitter hostility from the conservative Blair family. Lincoln was turning often for advice to Francis P. Blair, a Jacksonian Democrat living in Maryland, whose son and namesake, Francis, Jr., had labored to keep Missouri in the Union. A brother, Montgomery Blair, was Lincoln’s postmaster general and had defended Henry Seward against Chase’s attempts to oust him.
The Blairs accused Chase of corruption, but since they could not prove the charge, Lincoln maintained an adroit balance between the two camps. With the death of the eighty-seven-year-old Chief Justice Taney, Lincoln was resolved to placate Chase’s Radical friends by naming him to replace Taney, even though Montgomery Blair pressed aggressively for the position. When Chase was chosen, Frank Blair told his brother that the appointment “shakes my confidence in the president’s integrity.”
Lincoln had misgivings of his own. He worried that Chase might use his position on the Court to promote one last try for the presidency. If Chase would finally give up that ambition, Lincoln said, he was sure that he would be “a great judge,” and he would rule dependably for the newly freed black men during the looming struggle over reconstruction. Finally, Lincoln concluded that he “would despise myself if I allowed personal differences to affect my judgment of his fitness for the office.”
In the Senate, Charles Sumner called Taney’s death “a victory of Liberty and the Constitution” and praised Chase’s appointment. The one Radical not celebrating was Chase’s daughter from his second marriage. Catherine Jane Sprague had grown up to be free-spending and socially ambitious, and when she married William Sprague, a wealthy cotton merchant and senator from Rhode Island, Kate had envisioned herself presiding over the White House one day as her widowed father’s hostess. Chase’s friends speculated that he had pursued the presidency so fervently in order not to disappoint her.
When a jubilant Sumner hurried to tell Chase that he had been confirmed for the Court, he was confronted by an outraged Kate. She snapped, “You too, in this business of shelving Papa?”
Despite his daughter’s dismay, Chase was sworn in as Chief Justice on December 6, 1864. Now, three years later, if the Radicals prevailed, Salmon Chase might never become president. But he might oversee the deposing of one.
Benjamin Wade
CHAPTER 11
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN WADE (1868)
NOW THAT REMOVING ANDREW JOHNSON from the presidency had become more than a Radical dream, national attention was turning to his replacement. At the beginning of the Fortieth Congress, the Senate had elected Benjamin Wade over William Fessenden as its president pro tempore. If Johnson were convicted, rough-edged Ben Wade, with his impressive command of profanity, would inherit the White House.
It was not his cursing that made Wade an anathema to all Democrats and many conservative Republicans; it was his lifelong fight for the rights of blacks, women, and working-class men.
Born in 1800 on a farm outside Springfield, Massachusetts, as one of eleven children, Wade received little formal education but developed an early antipathy to all formal religion. And yet, observing him later in life, his critics blamed his unyielding sense of right and wrong on a Puritan upbringing.
At twenty-one, Wade went by wagon to Ashtabula County, Ohio, to join three older brothers on a farm they had hacked out on cheap Western land. Restless and ambitious, he left within two years to work as a drover, taking herds of cattle to the lucrative market in Philadelphia. With the threat of a stampede to keep them alert, drovers were known for their coarse invective in spurring on their livestock. The young man mastered the art, which contributed to his becoming known as “Bluff” Ben Wade.
He kicked around the frontier, laboring with immigrants to build the Erie Canal but all the while envying a brother who had become a lawyer. When a retired congressman agreed to tutor Wade in the law, he threw himself into the challenge, although he found the studies daunting, and addressing any audience but cattle left him tongue-tied.
By twenty-eight, however, Wade had been confirmed by an Ohio county court as an attorney. He joined forces with an eloquent abolitionist named Joshua Giddings, and together they prospered.
Like Andrew Johnson and Andrew Jackson before him, Wade had grown up resenting being poor and exploited. Unlike them, however, Wade drew on that resentment to champion equality for every race and gender.
Wade made his first tentative steps into local government when the financial panic of 1837 forced him and his partner to seek the steady pay of public office. Wade won a seat in the state senate as a Whig; Giddings moved to the U.S. Congress.
In Columbus, Wade crusaded against Ohio’s early version of the Black Codes, which denied Negroes the ballot, jury service, and entrance to public schools, but he lost his campaign to repeal them. During a debate over a local fugitive slave law, Wade’s remarks were shunted to a late hour, much as Pinckney Pinchback’s had been in New Orleans. But when he finally rose from his seat at 2 a.m., ineloquent Ben Wade showed that he had found his voice:
“Until the laws of nature and of nature’s God are changed,” Wade said, “I will never recognize the right of one man to hold his fellow man a slave. I loathe and abhor the cursed system; nor shall my tongue belie the prompting of my heart.”
And if Southerners could not see the festering misery of slavery, “Then away with your hypocritical cant and twaddle about equality and democracy!”
Wade concluded, “Mr. Speaker, it is because I love and venerate my country that I wish to wipe away this, her deepest and foulest stain. To be blind to her faults would be weakness, to be indifferent to them, unpatriotic.”
Democrats in the chamber did not bother to respond. When they prevailed in an 8 a.m. vote, they adjourned to a nearby restaurant with slave owners from Kentucky to celebrate with champagne. And they defeated Wade in the next election.
Through an era of political parties splitting and dissolving, Wade held to his principles. When the Whigs managed to send him back to the state legislature, he defended Oberlin College from attacks by parents who accused its abolitionist faculty of promoting treason and loose morals.
Like Charles Sumner, Wade was past forty when he surprised friends by taking a wife. Caroline Rosekrans, the daughter of a prosperous New York merchant, had been edging toward spi
nsterhood before a trip to Ohio introduced her to Wade—tall, heavy, swarthy, and ready for marriage—and she accepted his proposal.
Although “Cad” Wade shared her husband’s passion for politics, after she had given birth to two sons, she endorsed his decision to withdraw for a few years to build up their savings. It troubled Wade that the older boy, James, showed signs of inheriting his own early diffidence. “As the world goes,” he wrote to his wife, “brass is more valuable than gold.”
Eleven years had passed by the time a federal Fugitive Slave Law was enacted, harsher than the version Wade had protested in Ohio. As he explained, “I cannot and will not swallow that accursed slave bill. It is a disgrace to the nation and to the age in which we live.”
His former law partner, Joshua Giddings, was running for the Senate on the Free Soil ticket, hoping to join Senator Salmon Chase, who had been sent to Washington from Ohio in 1849 as an antislavery Democrat.
But a deadlock in the state legislature forced politicians to look for a compromise candidate. On the twenty-eighth ballot, they settled for uncompromising Ben Wade and elected him Ohio’s junior senator. Giddings, although he had come to dislike Wade, was gracious in defeat and endorsed him. Salmon Chase, who had supported Giddings, worried that Wade might waver in his opposition to slavery.
His misgivings reached Charles Sumner, who could only hope that Wade would “be true to the inspirations of his early life.” In New York, Henry Seward got encouraging word about Wade’s politics but no clue that their very different temperaments would make friendship impossible.
In Washington, Wade enjoyed being a senator, even when his exposure to a wider world left him befuddled. He was ill at ease at formal dinners hosted by ambassadors he considered “generally fools or cowards.” At the theater, the former cattle driver professed to be shocked to hear the language of Othello spoken in mixed company. “And then,” Wade complained, “after the obscenity, they must all be butchered before your eyes in a manner as rude as the butcher shops in Cincinnati.”
Wade’s summing up: “I think Shakespeare was a coarse vulgar barbarian with very little wit.”
Throughout the decade before the war, Wade was one of a handful of senators—along with Sumner, Seward, Chase, and John Hale of New Hampshire—who were committed to ending slavery. Theirs was a radical position, but they were not yet called Radicals.
In the Senate, where Wade was in daily contact with Southerners, he offended one of them to the point of being challenged to a duel. Wade turned him away by saying that as a man he was ready, but as a senator he opposed dueling.
By the time of Wade’s re-election in 1856, he had concluded that trying to appease the South was futile. Despite his earlier rejection of dueling, when Preston Brooks attacked Sumner, Wade challenged all of Brooks’s allies: “I am here to meet you.” As a product of the frontier, Wade was believed to be an excellent shot, a reputation enhanced by rumors that he had showed up in the Senate with two pistols to display on his desk.
Before the 1860 election, Wade was mentioned as the Republican presidential nominee, a possibility that upset Salmon Chase, who wrote to Cad Wade to suggest that her husband stand aside. Chase assured her that only his concern for Wade’s health prompted him to write.
When Wade did not go to the Chicago convention, the New York editor Horace Greeley was among those pleased that he had stayed away. Greeley admitted that Wade was “a good soul” but deplored his speeches and his lack of religion. “I know it isn’t as bad to have no religion as to be even suspected of Catholicism,” Greeley wrote, “but better to avoid the issue entirely.”
On the third ballot, it was Wade’s friend David Carter who broke with Chase and guaranteed the nomination for Lincoln.
When war came, Wade pushed for daring moves by the military. He admired Ben Butler’s rash occupation of Baltimore and matched him in nerve when he traveled out of Washington by carriage to inspect the battlefield at Bull Run. As Wade arrived, the ranks of Union soldiers were breaking and running.
Wade pulled his carriage across the route for their retreat, grabbed up his rifle, and shouted to his companions, “Boys, we’ll stop this damned runaway!”
They held off the defectors until the Second New York Regiment arrived to force the men back to battle.
The experience left Wade soured on the army’s leadership and ready to support a challenge to Lincoln in the next election. He had summed up Henry Seward as “by nature a coward and a sneak” and Lincoln simply as “a fool.”
But he applauded vigorously when Lincoln replaced Simon Cameron as secretary of war with Edwin Stanton, another Ohio lawyer. Sharing Stanton’s frustration at George McClellan’s inertia, Wade used his position as a senator to bully the officers under McClellan’s command. Once, faced with the prospect of another Union retreat, Wade objected to providing an escape route. “If any of them come back,” he said, “let them come back in coffins.”
Wade no longer made a pretense of being convivial. Invited to a ball at the White House, he returned his invitation with a note: “Are the President and Mrs. Lincoln aware that there is a civil war? If they are not, Mr. and Mrs. Wade are, and for that reason decline to participate in feasting and dancing.”
• • •
Wade may have withdrawn from the social circuit, but within the Senate his influence was rising. Colleagues had come to understand that his rhetoric might be as radical as Charles Sumner’s but he could be considerably more pragmatic. After the assassination, Wade shared in the brief Radical optimism about the new president. He considered Johnson’s stated approach to Southern reconstruction superior to Lincoln’s 10 percent policy and was even slower than Sumner to grasp that Johnson’s intentions were different from his private assurances.
Wade was home in Ohio, recovering from a bout of ill health, when newspapers reported on Johnson’s flood of pardons. He read that Southern politicians were lamenting publicly that secession had failed and were openly opposing voting rights for Negroes. Wade deplored the impact of those developments on the nation but also on his party. Their Republican allies throughout the South would be restoring the rights of “those traitors we have just conquered in the field. It is nothing less than political suicide.”
Instead, Wade called on Northerners to treat the South in the same spirit that the Southerners were prepared to treat their former slaves.
By now, many of his fellow senators saw Wade as their version of Thaddeus Stevens in the House. He had won praise for his chairmanship of the Committee on the Conduct of the War, and no one doubted his integrity. Looking ahead to a showdown with Johnson, Wade’s unvarnished language could be an asset. Already in his midsixties, Wade threw himself into combat with the president so violently that the New York Tribune described even his hair as “pugnacious.”
After the president vetoed the Civil Rights Act, Wade led the movement to increase the Republican majority in Congress by admitting the territory of Nebraska as a state. His stand led to a temporary break with Sumner because Nebraska’s constitution barred from voting any man who was not white. Putting aside his own disapproval, Wade guided the bill successfully through the Senate. The president undid his efforts with a pocket veto, but Wade’s flexibility had impressed the conservatives in his party.
He soon riled them again when he became one of nine senators to brave the prevailing sniggering and apathy to endorse allowing women to vote in the District of Columbia. Writing to Susan B. Anthony in November 1866, Wade pledged himself to equal suffrage “without any distinction on account of race, color or sex.”
Speaking on that point to a crowd in Lawrence, Kansas, he invoked his wife, Cad: If he had not believed she had sense enough to vote, Wade said, he would never have married her.
That quip was less incendiary than the next vow he made—to fight for a redistribution of wealth between workingmen and their employers. Congress “cannot quietly regard the terrible distinction which exists between the man that labors and him that doe
s not,” Wade said. Then, tying together the two strands of his impromptu remarks: “If you dullheads can’t see this, the women will, and they will act accordingly.”
But Democrats won the Ohio legislature, and the voting amendment lost badly. Political observers agreed that Wade had guaranteed he would never be president. Unlike Salmon Chase, Wade did not seem to care.
Yet on March 4, 1867, the Radicals lined up the votes to install him as president pro tem of the Senate. In the absence of a vice president, Wade was now waiting in the wings, ready to assume the presidency if his party could proceed from impeachment to conviction.
Wade promised to make himself familiar with Senate rules “at the earliest period” and to administer them “with promptness and impartiality.”
• • •
As the date of Andrew Johnson’s trial approached, Salmon Chase, like Charles Sumner, was distracted by tumult at home. The Chief Justice shared his house with his daughter and Senator Sprague, and Kate made no secret of wanting to see Johnson vindicated. Reporters were watching guests arrive at Sixth and E Street for signs that Chase was attempting to influence the senators for acquittal.
Inside the house, William Sprague seemed torn, convinced that Johnson should be removed but unwilling to sacrifice his political future if the tide turned. Kate’s anger with his vacillation alarmed her doting father, who wrote to remind her that “the happiness of a wife is most certainly secured by being submissive.”
Kate was having none of that. She planned to attend the trial each day in fashionable dresses that guaranteed her presence could not be ignored.
• • •
At 1 p.m. on March 8, 1868, Chief Justice Chase entered the Senate chamber, and an associate judge, Samuel Nelson, administered an oath of impartiality. Since the U.S. Constitution provided only a vague fourteen words on the subject, Chase had imposed his own rules on the Senate committee overseeing the trial, including his right to cast tie-breaking votes.
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