The powerful support you gave Governor Hicks during the darkest hour of your State's history, prompted him to take and maintain the stand he did, and thereby saved your State from secession and consequent ruin.
All those things, as well as your unremitted labors in the cause of reconstruction, I doubt not, are well known and remembered by the members of Congress at that period.
I also well know in what high estimation your services were held by President Lincoln: and I can not leave the subject without sincerely hoping that the Government may yet confer on you some token of acknowledgment for all these services and sacrifices.
B. F. Wade.
Very sincerely, your friend,
On the 28th of February, 1873, three years after his leaving public life, Judge Wade addressed the following letter:
To the Chairman of the Military Committee of the United States Senate:
Dear Sir:—I have been requested to make a brief statement of what I can recollect concerning the claim of Miss Carroll, now before Congress. From my position as Chairman of the Committee on the Conduct of the War, it came to my knowledge that the expedition that was preparing, under the special direction of President Lincoln, to descend the Mississippi River, was abandoned, and the Tennessee expedition was adopted by the Government in pursuance of information and a plan presented to the Secretary of War, I think the latter part of November, 1861, by Miss Carroll. A copy of this plan was put into my hands immediately after the fall of Forts Henry and Donelson. With the knowledge of its author I interrogated witnesses before the Committee to ascertain how far military men were cognizant of the fact. Subsequently President Lincoln informed me that the merit of this plan was due to Miss Carroll; that the transfer of the armies from Cairo and the northern part of Kentucky to the Memphis and Charleston Railroad was her conception, and was afterwards carried out generally, and very much in detail, according to her suggestions. Secretary Stanton also conversed with me on the matter, and fully recognized Miss Carroll's service to the Union in the organization of this campaign. Indeed, both Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Stanton, the latter only a few weeks before his death, expressed to me their high appreciation of this service, and all the other services she was enabled to render the country by her influence and ability as a writer, and they both expressed the wish that the Government would reward her liberally for the same, in which wish I most fully concur.
B. F. Wade.
We give extracts from letters written Miss Carroll by Judge Wade, after his retirement from public life: