From Ashtabula County, the names that will come at once to the reader’s mind are those of Joshua R. Giddings and Benjamin F. Wade, both of a national fame inseparable from the history of the struggle with slavery. Giddings was first to cast his lot with the almost hopeless cause of freedom, but the fiery nature of Wade served to keep it warm in the hearts of its later adherents and to spread its light. Neither of these great Ohioans were Ohioans by birth. Giddings was born in Athens, Pennsylvania, in 1795, and came to Ashtabula County in 1806, where he dwelt until within a few years of his death, which took place at Montreal in 1864, while he was Consul General for Canada. He studied law, and succeeded at the bar before he entered political life. He was then twenty years in Congress as representative from the Ashtabula district, which promptly returned him when he was expelled from the House of Representatives for presenting a petition against slavery. His courage was so unconscious that he seemed never to assert it in his long career of defiance at Washington, but it never failed him in the presence of the dangers that often beset him there. In early life 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.