Andrew Johnson sat home in the White
House while his impeachment trial began in the Senate chamber in March of 1868, dreading the prospects of his future. His opponents had the momentum to make 
him the first president ever to be removed from office. Maybe it’s just as well Johnson couldn’t hear Benjamin Butler, the lead prosecuting attorney known as “The Butcher of New Orleans,” calling Johnson the “accidental Chief” and “assassin’s elect,” and arguing that Johnson’s violation of the Tenure of Office Act showed the president’s blatant disregard for the Constitution.

It might have encouraged Johnson, though, to know that his lawyers were putting on quite a show on his behalf. Benjamin Curtis argued that Stanton’s term ended with Lincoln’s assassination and was not protected by the Tenure of Office Act, that the President was clean because he had not successfully removed Stanton, and that the new law was unconstitutional in the first place as it undermined the president’s authority. He questioned the article of impeachment that dealt with Johnson’s scathing anti-Congress speeches two years ago, saying the 
president was being tried for “manners.” 

The parade of witnesses throughout the trial was little more than a formality.  Meanwhile, the Senate only occasionally obeyed the Chief Justice, who was presiding over the trial, and stiff-armed defense evidence from being submitted. Less than two months later, the lawyers wrapped things up with their closing arguments. Prosecutor John Bingham got a standing ovation from the crowded galleries with his closing speech:

May God forbid that the future historian shall record this day's proceedings, that by reason of the failure of the legislative power of the people to triumph over the usurpations of an apostate President, the fabric of American empire fell and perished from the earth! ... I ask you to consider that we stand this day pleading for the violated majesty of the law, by the graves of half a million of matryed hero-patriots who made death beautiful by the sacrifice of themselves for their country.... Position, however high, patronage, however powerful, cannot be permitted to shelter crime to the peril of the republic.

Johnson’s team matched the prosecuting House Managers oration for 
oration, saying the House was making a mountain out of a molehill. 
But even their most passionate speeches seem to acknowledge a foregone conclusion, as did this one by Attorney General Henry Stanberry:

If, Senators, as I cannot believe, but has been boldly said with almost official sanction, your votes have been canvassed and the doom of the President is sealed, then let that jugment not be pronounced in this Senate Chamber.... Seek rather the darkest and gloomiest chamber in the subterranean recesses of this Capitol, where the cheerful light of day never enters. There erect the altar and immolate the victim.

For all the fancy words and dramatic speeches on both sides, Stanberry was right to assume they were falling on deaf ears. All that mattered to Congressional Republicans was their straw poll. Publicly, they announced that conviction was all but a done deal. Privately, they were tortured by the stubborn silence of one crucial Senator – Edmund Ross. 

Publicly, Republicans 
announced that conviction
was all but a done deal. 
Privately, they were 
tortured by the stubborn
silence of one crucial 
Senator – Edmund Ross. 

In Milwaukee, Ross worked as a newspaper printer and gained notoriety for joining a mob to free a runaway slave who had been captured. The incident may have brought out the abolitionist in Ross, for soon after he led a troop of carpetbaggers to Kansas after the controversial Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, to vote to keep Kansas a free state. He joined the Republican party, started an abolitionist newspaper, and helped draft a constitution that certified Kansas as a state – a free state. 

When the Civil War broke out Ross enlisted in the Union army and worked his way up to Major. On one day of battle he had two horses shot out from under him. When the war ended he went back to his newspaper work in Kansas. 

In the spring of 1866 Edmund Ross went to a town meeting in Lawrence, hopping mad. Senator Jim Lane had just voted to uphold President Johnson’s veto of the Civil Rights Bill. What was Lane doing? Ross filled the hall with speeches attacking Lane’s weakness, and many others joined him. Lane was already ill, depressed, and in money trouble, but the meeting may have been the last straw. Lane shot himself on the 1st of July.

The governor knew Lane’s vacant Senate seat was a hot seat. Kansas, a state just ten years old, was still in the middle of Reconstruction controversy. The governor said he was looking to appoint someone with “backbone.” How about a radical anti-abolitionist, a Civil War hero, and one of the outspoken leaders at Lawrence? Senate Republicans would be pleased - Lane’s weakness was annoying; they needed someone they could count on to help override Johnson’s constant vetoes. Senator Ross, welcome aboard.
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