Leadership Quote by Benjamin F. Wade

Wade’s sentence hits like a gavel because it weaponizes the founding myth against the people most eager to wrap themselves in it. He opens with the pious catechism of the Declaration - “all men are born free and equal” - then yanks the floor out with “but of late,” a phrase that drips with disgust at how quickly principle evaporates when power is on the line. The pivot is doing all the work: it’s not that the doctrine failed; it’s that a certain class of white men have chosen to live as if it never applied.

The insult is surgical. “Some men are born slaves” isn’t a literal claim about race; it’s an accusation of moral servility. Wade is aiming at Northern appeasers, party trimmers, and “Union” men willing to barter away abolition for a quieter politics - figures who, in his telling, are enslaved to expedience, patronage, or the Southern slavocracy’s threats. Calling them “born slaves” denies them the flattering narrative of being coerced; it suggests a personality type, a congenital cowardice.

Then comes the cruel twist: he “regret[s] that they are not black.” It’s a deliberately offensive inversion meant to expose hypocrisy. If these men were Black, Wade implies, their submission would be legible and socially condemned; as white men, their deference can masquerade as prudence or patriotism. The line turns racial visibility into a moral spotlight: he wants their abasement to be as unmistakable as the country has made Blackness. In the pre-Civil War and wartime fights over slavery and Reconstruction, that’s Wade’s larger project - forcing the nation to admit that the real stain isn’t agitation, but accommodation.