Ohio History Journal

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Ben Wade and the Negro

Ben Wade and the Negro

 

By HANS L. TREFOUSSE*

 

 

 

IT HAS LONG BEEN A MATTER OF DISPUTE whether the rad-

ical Republicans of one hundred years ago were really sincere

in their professions of friendship for the Negro. Were they

merely interested in economic gains for their followers and

political preferment for themselves, making use of the Negro

question simply to hide their true objectives, or were they

genuinely concerned with uplifting the downtrodden race?

This question of motivation is brought into especially sharp

focus when it is discovered that radical leaders actually had

private prejudices against the very people whom they pub-

licly professed to befriend. Could a man be sincere in his

advocacy of Negro rights while he was privately subject

to the same preconceived notions against which he struggled

publicly? Perhaps some light may be shed upon this prob-

lem by an examination of the relationship between Benjamin

F. Wade and the Negro.

For many years it has been the fashion to sneer at Ben

Wade as a vulgar extremist whose accession to the presi-

dency was fortunately averted by the one vote which acquitted

Andrew Johnson in the impeachment trial.1 And while other

radicals have found defenders, Ben Wade has been more

or less forgotten.

This neglect is wholly unjustifiable. The bluff, outspoken

judge from the Western Reserve, who defied doughfaces, Cop-

* Hans L. Trefousse is assistant professor of history at Brooklyn ,College.

1 For example, Claude Bowers, The Tragic Era: The Revolution After Lincoln

(Cambridge, Mass., 1929), 88; George Fort Milton, Abraham Lincoln and the

Fifth Column (New York, 1942), 43; Burton J. Hendrick, Lincoln's War Cabinet

(Boston, 1946), 268.