his
people were desperately poor; he had scarcely a thought of school till
he was twenty-three, and it was not until he had conquered from the
wilderness a farm for his father and himself that he found time for
study. He always loved the simplicity of the new country, and when he
came home to the village of Jefferson from the sessions of Congress,
he liked to "turn himself out to grass," as he called it: to put on old
clothes and a straw hat, and walk barefoot through the streets which he
had known when they were forest trails.

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