Prior to the War, the three Wade brothers were a farmer, a teacher, and a student. Terry Utley Wade – farmer. Henry Wadsworth Wade – teacher. William Bannister Wade – student. As new settlers from the troubled border regions of Kentucky in 1858, they challenged the hard, savage Texas frontier to carve out a new life. They were to become the future of the newly-recognized state of Texas, a countryside that was quickly being swept up in a tumultuous tragedy – the American Civil War. As the bloody struggle stretched into year after tragic year, the three brothers were forged into deadly instruments of war in the vaunted Confederate Cavalry of the Western theater, wreaking havoc on Union forces with their carbines and shotguns from their dismounted formations, and spewing death on horseback from their accurate pistols.
Terry was the quiet and intense older brother, distant on the surface behind his quiet intensity; yet brilliant under fire, constantly looking out for his two younger brothers. W.B. or “Will”, the baby brother and brunt of concern for the entire Wade family, would prove himself more than capable in the bloody crucible of combat. Though just a young kid, Will could be relied upon at the desperate height of battle. And Henry, the Captain of Company B, 6th Texas Cavalry was popular with the men, cunning on horseback, a natural scout, and frighteningly accurate with his pistols and carbine.
At places like the Indian Nations, Elkhorn Tavern, Corinth, Holly Springs, Thompson’s Station, Yazoo, Atlanta, and Franklin the Wade brothers and the rest of Company B under Henry’s leadership established themselves – along with the 6th Texas Cavalry Regiment – into a crack cavalry unit lauded by friend and enemy alike. Generals Forrest, Johnston, Sherman, Grant, and even Robert E. Lee acknowledged the courageous exploits of the Texas Brigade of which the 6th Texas Cavalry was a part.
The Atlanta campaign would demand over 140 consecutive days with little respite from fighting: A battle or skirmish every day, over a duration of almost six months, rarely happened in other wars yet was daily reality in the vicinity of Atlanta in the hot summer of 1864. Due to horrendous losses, Company B ceased to exist after the fall of Atlanta; and Henry was elected commander of a crack group of 40 scouts, all officers of the Texas Brigade whose units had likewise been depleted in the great meat-grinder of the Civil war. These men became known as Wade’s Scouts or Wade’s Supernumary Scouts.
Henry’s older brother Terry would eventually return to Texas for the duration of the war in late 1863, leaving Will and Henry to fight on with the likes of Sul Ross, Red Jackson, and Nathan Bedford Forrest. With the fall of Atlanta, a greatly depleted Texas Cavalry Brigade, totaling the remnants of four threadbare Regiments including the 6th, marched north into Tennessee under the command of General John B. Hood in the heart-breaking and brutal campaign to eject the Federal Army from Tennessee. After what became a gut-wrenching failure, Henry and Will rode and fought on with the Texas Cavalry until the end of the war, eventually surrendering to Federal forces in Alabama and returning home to Texas in 1865.
The aftermath of this divisive War resonates to the present in historical and cultural ramifications and in the memories of our ancestors on both sides of our now-unified divide who were inadvertently taken from their livelihoods and families and pulled into the business and politics of war. For the rest of his life, Henry Wadsworth Wade would live with the horrific memories of his experiences in the war that very nearly tore the United States to pieces in four long years of bloody combat.