A Kansas senator cast the deciding vote to acquit a president. It destroyed him. The truth is more complicated than the myth.
This is the next installment of Courage and Consequence — a series about relatively unknown individuals in history who made courageous decisions under extraordinary pressure, and had to live with what followed.
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On the morning of May 16, 1868, Edmund Gibson Ross walked into the United States Senate chamber knowing that the next words he spoke would end his career. He was forty-one years old. He had been a senator for less than two years.
Ross was born in 1826 on a farm in Ashland County, Ohio, the third of fourteen children. His father considered him too frail for fieldwork and apprenticed him at eleven to a newspaper. The boy learned to set type before he learned to shave. By his twenties he was a journeyman printer drifting through Ohio and Wisconsin, absorbing the abolitionist convictions that would define his life. In 1854, he joined a Milwaukee mob that stormed a jail to free Joshua Glover, a fugitive slave seized under federal law. The crowd spirited Glover to Canada. Ross spirited himself to Kansas.
He arrived in 1856 with his wife Fannie, three siblings, and a wagon full of guns. Kansas was bleeding. Pro-slavery raiders had sacked Lawrence. Ross founded newspapers, fought Border Ruffians, and helped draft the free-state constitution under which Kansas entered the Union. When the Civil War came, he enlisted, raised a company of fellow journalists nicknamed “the fighting printers,” and had two horses shot from under him at the Battle of Little Blue River. He mustered out as a major in 1865, his credentials as a committed Republican and abolitionist beyond question.
His path to the Senate was accidental. Kansas Senator James Lane — a Radical Republican who had broken with his party — shot himself in July 1866. Governor Samuel Crawford appointed Ross to fill the vacancy. Crawford expected a reliable partisan. He got something else entirely.
The impeachment of Andrew Johnson was the climax of a three-year war between a Republican Congress determined to remake the South and a president determined to prevent it. Johnson had pardoned thousands of Confederates, returned confiscated land to former slaveholders, and permitted Southern states to enact Black Codes that reinstituted slavery in everything but name. He had vetoed the Civil Rights Act, the Freedmen’s Bureau extension, and the Reconstruction Acts. Congress overrode him fifteen times — more than for any president before or since.
The trigger was the Tenure of Office Act of 1867, which forbade the president from removing Senate-confirmed officials without Senate consent. Its target was Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, the Radical Republicans’ essential ally inside the executive branch. Johnson fired Stanton anyway. Three days later, on February 24, 1868, the House voted 126 to 47 to impeach — the first presidential impeachment in American history.
The arithmetic was simple and unforgiving. The Senate had fifty-four members. Conviction required thirty-six votes. Republicans held forty-five seats. They could afford to lose nine. By mid-May, six Republican senators had signaled they would vote to acquit. The Radicals held thirty-five certain votes. They needed one more. Every eye turned to the junior senator from Kansas, who had said nothing.
The pressure was savage. Radical leaders subjected Ross to constant surveillance. Kansas newspapers published his name beside the words “traitor” and “Judas.” A Kansas judge sent him a telegram: “The rope with which Judas Iscariot hanged himself is lost, but Jim Lane’s pistol is at your service.” Impeachment manager Benjamin Butler reportedly offered a bushel of money for Ross’s vote. Both sides tried bribery. Neither side was subtle about it.
Ross’s political patron, Perry Fuller — described by historian David O. Stewart as “the leading scoundrel in Kansas politics” — had reportedly secured Ross’s Senate seat through forty-two thousand dollars in bribes to Kansas legislators. Fuller spent the last twenty-four hours before the vote at Ross’s side. He breakfasted with Ross on the morning of May 16. What passed between them has never been established.
When pressed by constituents demanding to know his intention, Ross sent a telegram that revealed nothing and promised everything: he would vote according to his judgment and the Constitution. Then the roll was called.
The chamber was packed. Every seat filled. The galleries overflowed. Admission tickets sold at enormous premiums. Chief Justice Salmon Chase presided. The alphabetical roll reached Ross. Twenty-four guilty votes had been recorded. The next words would decide the presidency.
Ross later wrote: “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.”
His voice wavered. The gallery strained to hear. He was asked to repeat himself. The second time carried: “Not guilty.”
The final tally was thirty-five to nineteen. One vote short. Andrew Johnson remained president of the United States.
The destruction was immediate. A Kansas newspaper declared Ross “dead — dead to honor, dead to liberty, dead to Kansas.” His own Civil War regiment burned him in effigy outside the Topeka Capitol. He received death threats. Friends vanished. He wrote to Fannie that week: “This storm of passion will soon pass away, and the people, the whole people, will thank and bless me for having saved the country.”
They did not. Ross lost his reelection bid. His replacement reportedly bought the seat for sixty thousand dollars in bribes. Ross returned to Kansas, launched a newspaper in Coffeyville. A tornado destroyed the office. He drifted through editorial posts, left the Republican Party, ran for governor and lost. In 1882, broken and poor, he moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico Territory, where he studied law and was eventually appointed territorial governor by President Grover Cleveland. He served four turbulent years fighting the corrupt Santa Fe Ring. Locals who resented his reforms burned him in effigy — an experience he had endured before.
He died in Albuquerque on May 8, 1907, at eighty. His headstone reads simply: “Father.”
Congress repealed the Tenure of Office Act in 1887. The Supreme Court later ruled it unconstitutional. On the legal question, Ross was vindicated.
John F. Kennedy devoted a chapter of Profiles in Courage to Ross in 1956, calling his vote “the most heroic act in American history.” Kennedy’s account drew almost entirely from Ross’s own memoir. Modern historians have been less kind. Stewart’s archival research revealed that within one week of the acquittal, Ross wrote to Johnson requesting patronage appointments, explicitly citing his vote. He demanded a federal post for Perry Fuller. He pushed ratification of a treaty that would have sold eight million acres of Native American land to a railroad at a fraction of its value. At least four other Republican senators were prepared to vote for acquittal if needed, demolishing the lone-hero narrative.
The clean version of this story is that a man of principle saved the constitutional independence of the presidency at the cost of everything he had. The complicated version is that a man entangled with a corrupt political fixer cast a vote that served his patron’s interests, wrapped it in constitutional language, and spent the rest of his life constructing a mythology of sacrifice. The honest version may be that both are true — that principle and corruption coexisted in the same act, as they do in most human decisions made under unbearable pressure.
Ross left no clean answer. If he acted from conviction, he saved the presidency. If he acted from corruption, he saved it anyway.
The Constitution does not ask why a man votes.
It records only that he did.
We inherit the outcome.
We never inherit the motive.
And in a republic, that may be enough — or it may be everything.
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Sources: U.S. Senate Historical Office, “Impeachment Trial of President Andrew Johnson, 1868”; Kansas Memory (Kansas Historical Society); David O. Stewart, Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln’s Legacy (2009); Brenda Wineapple, The Impeachers (2019); John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage (1956); National Constitution Center; Legends of Kansas; U.S. Congressional Biographical Directory.
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Next in this series: Irena Sendler — The Woman Who Smuggled 2,500 Children Out of the Warsaw Ghetto.
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Charles C. Jett is the author of six books, a Professional Certified Coach (PCC), and the creator of Civic Sage (civicsage.com), a civic education platform. A former Naval officer whose innovations in submarine tracking inspired Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan character, he holds a Harvard MBA and has lectured at Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton. He writes at criticalskillsblog.com.