Ross was what the Republicans were looking for. He spoke out against Johnson in the Senate and voted to reject Johnson’s ouster of Stanton. Solid, just like Senator Pomeroy, his fellow Kansas senator, one of Johnson’s harshest critics. As soon as he 
got to Washington, Ross read a statement on the Senate floor supporting the Republican attitude toward Reconstruction. In the 
next two years he would vote with the majority without exception.

Then Johnson was impeached. Some Senators noticed that Ross wasn’t so certain of himself anymore. Ross’ comment to Senator Sprague of Rhode Island was a little spooky: “Well, Sprague, the thing is here, and so far as I concerned, though a Republican and opposed to Mr. Johnson and his policy, he shall have as fair a trial as an accused man ever had on this earth.” Fair? Who said anything about fair? Sprague passed a note around the floor that “Ross was shaky.” 

Shaky was a bad thing to be around this time. Ross wrote in his autobiography, “From that hour, not a day passed that did not bring me, by mail and telegraph and in personal intercourse, appeals to stand fast for impeachment and not a few were the admonitions of condign visitations upon any indication even of lukewarmness.”

When Ross refused to participate in the Republicans’ poll, he was really in for it. He wasn’t alone of course – the six other Republican “traitors” were pestered right along with him. But Ross was in many ways singled out. After all, he hadn’t come right out and said either way what he’d do – and that’s what made it so maddeningly suspenseful. 

There was supposed to be no suspense about this. Besides, Ross’ abolitionist record, his shouts about Lane at that Lawrence meeting…he was a Kansan, after all, and he had come here, from there, to do a duty. What was the holdup? Senator Charles Sumner wondered as much: “It was a very clear case, especially for a Kansas man. I did not think that a Kansas man could quibble against his country.” 

And it really was the country.  At least the Northern part, which wanted to taste the victory it had just sacrificed its soldiers to win; it wanted to storm the South. Andrew Johnson’s moderate positions did not make him a popular man. And call it the lack of TV and rock and roll, but this was a time in the country’s history when people got into their politics. It was spectator sport, the talk of the nation, even in ordinary times. The country lived and breathed politics. 

Throw in the bitterness of the Civil War, the controversy over Reconstruction, impeachment, and the Senator who would decide how it all fell out, and you have a white-hot national spotlight. Edmund Ross quickly became a household name. He was written about in the newspapers and discussed on street corners. The amount of spying on him to try to get a hint of how he would vote may have been unprecedented for a United States Senator. 

The New York Tribune noticed, and reported what Ross was going through. He was “mercilessly dragged this way and that by both sides, hunted like a fox night and day and badgered by his own colleagues … now trod upon by one Army and now trampled by the other.” Both sides said they had clues as to how Ross would vote, and cautiously counted him on their side. 

Thaddeus Stevens’ words in the House of Representatives were still ringing in everyone’s ears: “Let me see the recreant who would vote to let such a criminal escape. Point me to one who will dare do it and I will show you one who will dare the infamy of posterity.”

There were bribes. You bet there were bribes. Sure, there were letters and telegrams, a deluge every day, but that was nothing compared to the bribes. Heck, Ross’ brother was offered a huge bribe just to guess how Ross would to vote. The presidency of the United States was on trial here, and the amount of the bribes reflected it. Ben Butler, the “butcher” and the House prosecutor, grew impatient: “There is a bushel of money! How much does the damned scoundrel want?”

It was May 15. The trial vote was the next day. Ross got yet another telegram.

To E.G. Ross:
Kansas has heard the evidence and demands the conviction of the President. 
D. R. Anthony and 1,000 Others

Ross was getting an idea of how Jim Lane felt. Heck of a thing, being Senator from a state like Kansas. Ross, this odd, unknown, remarkable man, wrote back:

To D. R. Anthony and 1,000 Others: 
I do not recognize your right to demand that I vote either for or against conviction. I have taken an oath to do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws, and trust that I shall have the courage to vote according to the dictates of my judgment and for the highest good of the country.
E.G. Ross

The next morning spies watched Ross eat breakfast. 

The gallery was packed the next day. Scalpers sold tickets to the gallery for ridiculous sums. The floor was crowded not just with Senators, but chairs crammed in for all the House members, cabinet, and the lawyers. One Senator who was seriously ill was carried in to the chamber. You think he was going to miss this vote?

Crowded as it was, it was eerily quiet. People were overwhelmed by the suspense. Ross wrote later that there was “a subsidence of the shuffling of feet, the rustling of silks, the fluttering of fans, and of conversation.” 

The voting began. Halfway through, twenty-four Senators had already voted “guilty.” It was Ross’ turn. Ten more “guilties” were in the bag and another a near cinch. But that was it. Ross’ “guilty” was needed to seal the deal, or break it. 

The Chief Justice tensely asked, “Mr. Senator Ross, how say you? Is the respondent Andrew Johnson guilty or not guilty of a high misdemeanor as charged in this Article?”

Ross would later write:

I almost literally looked down into my open grave. Friendships, position, fortune, everything that makes life desirable to an ambitious man were about to be swept away 
by the breath of my mouth, perhaps forever. It is not strange that my answer was carried waveringly over the air and failed to reach the limits of the audience, or that repetition was called for by distant Senators on the opposite side of the Chamber.

So Ross cleared his throat and declared his vote again: “Not guilty.” Everyone heard it this time. People recoiled in disbelief and disgust, slamming into the backs of their chairs. The article had failed. It was May 16, 1868. The Senate took ten days off to overhaul the remaining articles and to try to admit new states to the Union who could produce “guilty”-voting Senators. But when the Senate reconvened, there were still 54 Senators. The rest of the articles failed, all by one vote –Ross’. Impeachment had failed. Andrew Johnson would stay in office by one vote. 

'I do not recognize your 
right to demand that I 
vote either for or against 
conviction. I have taken
an oath to do impartial 
justice according to the Constitution and laws.' 

'By the firmness and 
courage of Senator Ross, 
the country was saved 
from calamity greater 
than war, while it 
consigned him to a 
political martyrdom.'

Johnson, in fact, had a more rewarding political epilogue than Edmund Ross. Ross’ career was over. He was vilified for his deciding “not guilty” vote. Remember “D.R. Anthony and 1,000 Others”? They wired to tell Ross “Kansas repudiates you as she does all perjurers and skunks.” And if Ross hadn’t been thinking about Jim Lane around the day of the vote – the Senator under pressure who shot himself, leaving Ross with his seat – no less than a Kansas Supreme Court Justice sent Ross a telegram as a reminder: “The rope with which Judas Iscariot hanged himself is lost, but Jim Lane’s pistol is at your service.” 

A Kansas paper wrote, “On Saturday last Edmund G. Ross, United States Senator from Kansas, sold himself, and betrayed his constituents, stultified his own record … and to the utmost of his poor ability signed the death warrant of his country’s liberty.” It went on to compare Ross to Benedict Arnold, the famous Revolutionary War traitor. The New York Tribune called him “a miserable poltroon and a traitor.” Most Congressmen wouldn’t even greet him in the hallways as he served out his term. He wanted to explain his vote, but no one would listen.

Ross lost his election in 1868. He lost in 1872. He switched to the Democratic party and ran for governor. He lost. By now Johnson was back in the Senate. Ross had nowhere to go. His family lived under constant verbal and physical attack. As Ross wrote to his wife shortly after the trial, “Millions of men cursing me today will bless me tomorrow for having saved the country from the greatest peril through which it has ever passed, though none but God can ever know the struggle it has cost me.” None of the other Republicans who voted to acquit Johnson were ever re-elected to the Senate.

Not long after Johnson, Ross moved his family out to the New Mexico territory and went back to what he started doing forever ago, before he joined that mob to rescue the runaway slave and got in the way of American political history. He open a printing shop and ran a newspaper. 

It was Grover Cleveland, the first Democrat to win the White House since impeachment, who appointed Ross governor of the territory two decades after he left the Senate. Cleveland was part of another footnote of history: he convinced Congress to repeal the Tenure of Office Act as unconstitutional. 

By the time Ross was awarded a pension for his service in the Civil War, history had begun to redeem him. Former Congressional colleagues spoke publicly about his courage and integrity. The same papers that savaged him decades before printed kinder histories now: “By the firmness and courage of Senator Ross, the country was saved from calamity greater than war, while it consigned him to a political martyrdom, the most cruel in our history.”

Just before his death in 1896, Ross wrote The Impeachment Trial of Andrew Johnson. He printed it in his shop.
 

You get to the end of the story, through all the bitterness and threats and speeches, all the intense, vicious hatred swelling around the nation, and the fact stares back at you in the face: Edmund Ross didn’t like President Andrew Johnson. 

Ross’ book, years after the whole ordeal, helped to shed some light. As it turns out, Ross was about the only one looking at the bigger picture in 1868. He was the only one who zoomed out and saw what was at stake for the American political system. This wasn’t about Andrew Johnson or Edmund Ross. It wasn’t about Ben Wade, or Ben Butler. 

In a large sense, the independence of the executive office as a coordianate branch of the government was on trial... If ther President must step down ... a disgraced man and a political outcast ... upon insufficient proofs and from partisan considerations, the office of the President would be degraded, cease to be a coordinate branch of government, and ever after be subordinated to the legislative will. It would practically have revolutionized our splendid political fabric into a partisan Congressional autocracy.... If Andrew Johnson were acquitted by a nonpartisan vote ... America would pass the danger point of partisan rule and that intolerance which so often characterizes the sway of great majorities and makes them dangerous.

If the president had been tossed out by a bloodthirsty Congress for little
more than “stepping on a dog’s tail,” it would have set a dangerous precedent. Presidents’ heads would have rolled like billiard balls after that. They could have been impeached and convicted at the drop of a hat from then on any time they looked at Congress the wrong way. A conviction of Johnson would have made it normal or at least less shocking the next time around. And 
there were a lot of Andrew Johnsons to come after that – the Grants, Benjamin Harrisons, and Rutherford B. Hayes of the world, weak and unpopular presidents elected by narrow margins, who also presided over tense political times, who could have had a quick trip to the chopping block. 

It would have made a paper kite out of the Constitution, which calls for balance of powers among the three branches of government, and designs impeachment only as a last resort when the President is seriously impeding the Constitution, not just when he fudges on technicalities. Congress would have come to dominate our national government.

There’s also the issue of Reconstruction. Who knows what Congress would rushed into law under President Wade? And maybe Wade would have 
stayed, come November. Johnson was needed as a buffer for the radicals’ revenge, for the stability of a still tenuous nation.

It’s not that Andrew Johnson was worth liking as a president. He wasn’t worth ruining a career for. He was a weak president, hapless when it came to negotiating and communicating his ideas, rude when talking to or about his opponents. Besides, he was a dead duck in November 1868, even with his acquittal.

But the Constitutional point here is, let the voters throw him out. That’s their job – not for bitter opponents engaged in petty squabbles. Edmund Ross knew that. He knew he wasn’t fighting for Johnson, he was fighting for the presidency as a whole. He was fighting for Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan, who would someday capture the sentiments and ideals of a nation, and put a face on America. 

It was Kennedy who summed it up in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, 
Profiles in Courage. Kennedy, a Senator in 1956, and devoted a chapter
of his book to Ross, becoming one of the first to tell Ross’ story to the country. He wrote:

In a lonely grave, forgotten and unknown, lies 'the man who saved a President,' and who as a result may well have preserved for ourselves and our posterity consitutional government in the United States - the man who performed in 1868 what one historian called 'the most heroic act in American history, incomparably more difficult than any deed of valor upon the field of battle' - but a United States Senator whose name no one recalls: Edmund G. Ross.