Maverick at Bay: Ben Wade's Senate Re-election Campaign, 1862-1863

MAVERICK AT BAY: Ben Wade's Senate Re-election Campaign, 1862-1863 Kenneth B. Shover During his long political career, the Radical Republican Benjamin F. Wade rarely suffered want of opposition.1 As a self-styled extremist he invited it; at times he reveled in it. But when his second term as United States senator from Ohio neared its end, and he faced a long, difficult re-election campaign, he learned how dear extremism's price could be. Had someone asked him to estimate his chance of re-election at the time the Ohio legislature convened in January, 1862, he would have feigned indifference. Nevertheless, defeat would have cut him deeply; most likely it would have ended permanently what had been a rewarding and significant political career. Far more importantly, however, his defeat could have drastically weakened the power of the Radical Republicans at a critical moment during the Civil War; conversely, his victory, so at least his opponents steadfastly maintained, could have wiped out the promising Union party experiment in Ohio.2 A descendant of sturdy New England stock, Wade was born in 1800 into a large and impoverished family living in the Connecticut 1A grant from the College Research Institute of Texas Western College assisted the author in preparing this manuscript for publication. 2 The fullest treatment of this Senate contest and the Ohio Union party can be found in George H. Porter, Ohio Politics During the Civil War Period (New York, 1911), pp. 74-91, 98-105, 109-112. Because of the limits of his study, however, Porter makes little attempt to place this contest in its national setting, i.e., to examine its relation to the shaping of war policy, Radical Republicanism , or the Union party. H. L. Trefousse, Benjamin Franklin Wade: Radical Republican from Ohio (New York, 1963), is the most recent published study of Wade. For a discussion of various aspects of this general subject, see ibid., pp. 175-176, 192; Donnai V. Smith, Chase and Civil War Politics (Columbus, Ohio, 1931), pp. 58-60; William B. Hesseltine, Lincoln and the War Governors (New York, 1948), pp. 197, 226-227; Henry C. Hubbart, The Older Middle West, 1840-1880 (New York, 1936), pp. 178-206; and Frank L. Hement, The Copperheads in the Middle West (Chicago, 1960), passim. 23 24CI VIL WAR HISTORY River valley of western Massachusetts.3 After long, unrewarding years, beset by an unyielding soil, oppressive taxes, and onerous debts, the Wades joined countless other rural Yankees in search of some western Canaan; in their case, Ohio's Western Reserve. Here, where nineteenth-century humanitarianism flourished, Ben Wade matured , trained for the law, had his moral senses sharpened, embraced abolitionism, and absorbed Whig political ideas. In two terms in the Ohio senate, served between 1837 and 1843, he combined antislavery zeal with fidelity to Whig economic principles , and at the same time acquired a deserved reputation as a tireless party worker and savage stump orator. Unlike his more famous neighbor, Joshua R. Giddings, he neither joined nor approved the Free Soil party, and in 1848 campaigned enthusiastically for the Whig presidential candidate (and slaveholder), Zachary Taylor. Nevertheless, as a reward for past service to the antislavery cause, and enduring party loyalty, a legislature controlled by Whigs and Free Soilers elected him to the United States Senate in 1851. The political upheaval caused by Stephen A. Douglas' Kansas-Nebraska Bill made Wade an early enthusiast of the new Republican party, and until the adoption of the emancipation amendment, his devotion to its initial antislavery credo never wavered. He opposed compromise during the secession crisis, and when war followed, he welcomed it as a more violent but inevitable phase in the decadeslong struggle between two hostile peoples. In December, 1861, Congress established the Committee on the Conduct of the War. From the influential post of chairman of this joint committee, Wade, along with other Radicals, levied intense pressure on President Lincoln to relinquish his precise but limited goal of restoring the prewar Union and embrace their far more encompassing one which, though initially ambiguous, never involved less than the absolute destruction of slavery.4 That Lincoln and Wade interpreted the war's meaning...