The Impeachers by Brenda Wineapple

Author:Brenda Wineapple
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2019-05-20T16:00:00+00:00

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ALL SENATORS WERE to take the same oath that had been administered to Chief Justice Chase, but Indiana Democrat Thomas Hendricks objected to Benjamin Wade’s swearing-in. As president pro tempore of the Senate, Wade would enter the White House if Johnson was convicted; Hendricks argued that Wade should therefore not be allowed to vote: the conflict of interest was obvious.

As a U.S. Senator from Ohio, Wade did have the right to vote—if, that is, the Senate tried impeachment as a legislative body and not as a high court. But the real issue for many was the idea of a President Benjamin Wade. “Three months of Ben Wade are worse than two years of A. J.,” Charles Eliot Norton cried. James Garfield noted that his colleagues were panicky. “ ‘Conviction means a transfer to the Presidency of Mr. Wade,’ ” he reported them as saying, “ ‘a man of violent passions, extreme opinions and narrow views; a man who has never studied or thought thoroughly or carefully on any subject except slavery, a grossly profane coarse nature who is surrounded by the worst and most violent elements in the Republican party.’ ” After quoting his colleagues, Garfield disingenuously added, “now these sentiments are in many respects unjust to Wade,—of course you will understand they are not mine.”

Muscular and stocky, Benjamin Wade was a steam engine, Emily Briggs declared, “built for use instead of ornament.” Unlike Charles Sumner, who favored plaids and purples, Wade dressed plainly, always in a black broadcloth suit with an old-fashioned standing collar. He never wore jewelry, not even a ring. He trafficked in absolutes, and he didn’t let go. Noah Brooks said that Wade possessed “a certain bulldog obduracy truly masterful.” Certainly his support of such scandalous issues as women’s suffrage, equal justice under the law, and paper currency rubbed a number of people the wrong way. He didn’t care. When he brought Congress a bill allowing women the right to their own wages and property, Wade vehemently exclaimed, “I did not do it because they are women, but because it is right.” In 1867, he’d signed a petition recommending Mrs. Frances Lord Bond for a consulate—because, he said, she was qualified.

“That vicious old agrarian, Ben Wade, of Ohio, tells you what is coming,” conservative Southerners despaired: “The ballot for the women and free farms for the free negroes.”

Born in the Connecticut valley, Wade and his family had moved to Ohio, where in his youth he’d worked as a farmhand, a teacher, and a laborer with spade and wheelbarrow on the Erie Canal before studying law with a local attorney and entering briefly into a partnership with the evangelical abolitionist Joshua Giddings. In 1851, as a former state senator and judge of the third judicial district, Wade was sent to the U.S. Senate by a coalition of Whigs and Free-Soilers the same year as Charles Sumner. Both men were contentious opponents of slavery. But Wade wasn’t a windbag. With a brace of pistols in his desk, and a squirrel gun nearby, he put Southern fire-eaters on notice.

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