Chief Justice Salmon Chase, who would preside over the trial in the Senate, was also from Ohio, and he too wanted to be president. He, too, hated Wade. Wade, for his part, rightly saw Grant as his rival for the Republican nomination, and knew that unless something dramatic happened—such as Johnson’s removal from office and Wade’s ascension to the presidency—Grant was almost certainly going to be the nominee. Virtually every major politician involved in the trial thus had issues other than Andrew Johnson’s innocence or guilt on his mind.
