Benjamin Wade was born in Massachusetts in 1800 and dug the Erie Canal before studying law and practicing in Ohio with antislavery advocate Joshua Giddings. He served as a prosecutor, state senator and judge, was elected to the U.S. Senate as a Whig in 1851 and became a founding member of the Republican Party. His agenda went beyond abolition: he opposed debtors’ prisons and special privileges for corporations and backed women’s suffrage and trade unions. In July 1861 he rode out to watch the First Battle of Bull Run, was nearly captured and used his carriage to block the road during the retreat, then chaired the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War.

He clashed often with Abraham Lincoln, and in 1864 he and Henry Winter Davis wrote the Wade-Davis Bill, requiring 50 percent of a state’s white men to take an ironclad oath, which Lincoln killed with a pocket veto. As president pro tempore in 1868, with the vice presidency vacant, Wade stood next in line when the Senate tried Andrew Johnson, who was acquitted by one vote as moderates balked at Wade’s support for high tariffs, unions and paper greenbacks. He lost his seat when Democrats won the Ohio legislature, was passed over for vice president in favor of Schuyler Colfax, who married Wade’s niece, and died in March 1878 after the Compromise of 1877 ended Reconstruction.

• As head of the Senate Committee on Territories he pushed through the 1862 law abolishing slavery in federal territories.
• He backed the Homestead Act and the Morrill Land Grant Act.
• He and Davis publicly accused Lincoln of acting like a dictator after the pocket veto.
• Johnson’s veto of a bill expanding the Freedmen’s Bureau turned Wade against the new president.
• After leaving the Senate he practiced law and lobbied for the Northern Pacific Railroad.