Leadership Quote by Benjamin F. Wade

Amazed is doing double duty here: it signals genuine disgust while landing as a clipped piece of moral ridicule. Benjamin F. Wade, a hard-edged Radical Republican, isn’t marveling at human complexity; he’s indicting a particular kind of political cowardice - the kind that treats slavery not as an atrocity to be abolished but as a current to drift with. “Facility” is the knife twist. It implies ease, even comfort: these men don’t just tolerate slavery; they move behind it smoothly, as if the institution leaves a convenient path already cleared.

The phrase “follow in the wake” borrows from travel and shipping. A wake is what a vessel leaves behind: churned water, disrupted, dangerous. Wade’s subtext is that slavery is not merely a policy dispute but a destructive engine that keeps reshaping the nation, and certain politicians are content to ride the turbulence for advantage. He’s also hinting at a broader phenomenon of the 1850s-60s: Northern moderates who condemned slavery in principle but repeatedly accommodated it in practice - through compromises, evasions, and procedural excuses.

Context matters because Wade’s political moment demanded clarity. As the country lurched from compromise toward war and then Reconstruction, “following” slavery meant enabling slave power, then tolerating its afterlives: Black Codes, intimidation, and the soft rebranding of white supremacy as “order.” Wade’s intent is to shame: to frame accommodation not as prudence but as a talent for moral surrender.