Leadership Quote by Benjamin F. Wade

Wade is doing what the best Senate bomb-throwers do: feigning uncertainty to sharpen an accusation. "I do not pretend to know precisely" is courtroom coyness, the kind of self-protective throat-clearing that lets him insinuate conspiracy without handing opponents a clean target. He claims ignorance, then immediately declares the plot "pretty evident". The move isn’t logical; it’s rhetorical. It invites listeners to feel they are smart enough to see what the speaker "won’t" quite say.

The phrase "very free communication between that country and this body" carries the sting. Wade frames the Senate not as a deliberative chamber but as a switchboard for foreign influence - a suggestion of divided loyalties at a moment when the United States was repeatedly convulsed by sectional crisis, war rumors, and the question of who actually controlled national policy. He’s pointing at an unseen pipeline: money, patronage, letters, agents, backroom promises. The exact "country" matters less than the charge that senators are acting as proxies.

Then comes the knife twist: "the dwarfish medium". It’s an insult dressed as diagnosis. "Medium" hints at a go-between, a messenger, perhaps a lobbyist or fixer; "dwarfish" reduces that figure to something contemptible, stunted, unworthy - a petty conduit for grand corruption. Wade’s intent is to delegitimize both the alleged foreign connection and the domestic actors enabling it: if the channel is small and shabby, the people relying on it look smaller still. The subtext: you are being played, and not even by impressive players.