Wade was born at Hills Parish, Massachusetts, in 1800, and he too was born in utter poverty. He worked on a farm, and then worked with pick and spade on the Erie Canal; but by the time he was twenty-one he knew much science and philosophy through studies he had pursued in a woodchopper’s hut by the light of pine knots. In Jefferson he read law and became Giddings’s partner. He was sent to the United States Senate in 1851 as an antislavery Whig, and he continued to stand four-square for freedom there during nearly twenty years. He was frank, bluff, even harsh in his speech and manner, but kind at heart, and it is told of him that once when he discovered a wretched neighbor robbing his corn crib, he moved out of sight that the man might not know he had been caught in the misdeed to which want had driven him.
Thomas Ewing, at one time United States senator from Ohio, and at all times a leading statesman and lawyer, was a citizen of Athens County, where his father settled in 1798. There the boy led the backwoods life, and struggled with all its adversities in his love of books, until he was nineteen. He loved the woods, too, and his boyhood was not unhappy, though his ambition was for the things of the mind. In his reminiscences, he tells of his early privations and of his delight in the first books which came to his hands: the “Vicar of Wakefield,” which he learned largely by heart, and the “Aeneid” of Virgil, which he used to read aloud to the farm hands on Sundays, and at such other leisure times as they all had amidst the work of clearing the land. At nineteen, he went to earn some money at the Salines on the Kanawha, and then lavished it upon the luxury of three months’ study at Athens. After several years’ labor in the salt works, he entered college at Athens, teaching school between terms, and going to Gallipolis to pick up French among the survivors of the disastrous settlement there. Then he turned to the law, and won his way to ease and honor. One of his daughters, as we know, became the wife of General Sherman, whom he had adopted as his son.
Benjamin Lundy, the meek and dauntless Quaker who was called the Father of Abolitionism, lived a long time in Belmont County, at St. Clairsville, where he founded his Union Humane Society, in 1815, and inspired the formation of like societies throughout the country. He was born in New Jersey, and had settled in Wheeling, Virginia, but life there became un endurable to him from the sight of slaves chained and driven in gangs through the streets, on their way to be sold in the Southern markets. In Belmont County, also, the first native Ohio governor, Wilson Shannon, was born.