Benjamin F. Wade

“I speak to the radicals of the nation. I am one of them.”

“Treason is a crime and must be made odious.”

“I have always believed, and I still believe, that whatever virtues and vices may be affixed to the American character, it is a quality of our nation to go to the very extreme of every subject.”

“I am for a government rigorously frugal and simple.”

“Go home, then, and take a rope and hang yourself.”

“Is it not a mockery to say that a man is a citizen, and yet deny him the right to vote?”

“I do not know that I can make a better definition of a servile race than that it is a race that is not willing to strike for its own freedom.”

“If the negroes have the right to vote, they have the right to be voted for.”

“If the President is the last man in the world who ought to be trifled with, he is also the first man who ought to be held to a strict accountability.”

“We have been voting for thirty-six years for the good of the country, and what is the result?”