Benjamin Wade

Benjamin Wade (1800-1878) was a US Senator representing the state of Ohio during the period of the American Civil War. Wade chaired the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. In 1864, he traveled to a US Army hospital in Tennessee to interview survivors of the Fort Pillow "Massacre" in order to compile a report on the action for the Committee. In his interviews he pressured the survivors to exaggerate the brutality of Nathan Bedford Forrest's troops and to implicate Forrest himself in the atrocities for propaganda's sake.