"Bluff" Ben Wade's New England Background

WHEN the Radical Republicans picked Bluff Ben Wade to succeed Andrew Johnson as President, they signed the death-warrant of impeachment. Fellow-traveler of the abolitionists for many years, the uncompromising Senator from Ohio was too direct, too blunt, too advanced to unite the Republican Party. He had come out for woman suffrage; he was given to unanticipated agrarian forays and anti-speculation diatribes. He had growled when Union Pacific business intruded upon discussion of his bill for reconstructing the South.l In an action unprecedented in any candidate aspiring to the presidency, he had gone out to Kansas a few months before the vote on Johnson's removal and arrayed Labor against Capital in a way which caused the banker, Henry Cooke, to shudder and the young Clemenceau, viewing the Washington scene with Gallic objectivity, to write off Wade's chances of becoming the next Chief Executive.2 Wade had a long record of obstructionism. Before clashing with Andrew Johnson, he had been a primary thorn in Lincoln's side. On one occasion, the Senator angrily told the President that he was the father of every military blunder made in the war and that Washington was not one mile from hell at the moment. Lincoln replied that as far as he was concerned, hell was located one mile from the White House.3 He referred, of course, to the Senate and House buildings where Wade and Chandler, Sumner, Stevens and Henry Winter Davis-the Jacobin Club, as the President's secretary called them-were doing their utmost to prod and push their President out of what they considered his unaccountable slowness

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