The profile of Sen. Edmund Ross is of particular interest today because it deals with the deciding vote he cast in the Senate against the conviction of President Andrew Johnson, who had been impeached by the House of Representatives. The Republicans’ opposite to the Democratic President Johnson was based on his hostility to Reconstruction efforts when newly-friend African-Americans “were struggling to lay the foundation for those rights and privileges which accompany first-class citizenship,” as Bacote put it. Johnson’s conciliatory attitude toward the former Confederate leaders and the planter class that had been the driving force of secession and civil war in the years following Lincoln’s assassination encouraged their political resistance and violent terrorism against former slaves and their white supporters.
Kennedy’s description of Ross’ background does show an appreciation of what the pre-Civil War anti-slavery fight had been:
There could be no doubt as to where Ross's sympathies lay, for his entire career was one of determined opposition to the slave states of the South, their practices and their friends. In 1854, when only twenty-eight, he had taken part in the mob rescue of a fugitive slave in Milwaukee. In 1856, he had joined that flood of antislavery immigrants to "bleeding" Kansas who intended to keep it a free territory. Disgusted with the Democratic party of his youth, he had left that party, and volunteered in the Kansas Free State Army to drive back a force of proslavery men invading the territory. In 1862, he had given up his newspaper work to enlist in the Union Army, from which he emerged a Major. [my emphasis]Kennedy was describing there why the Radical Republicans considered Ross to be a reliable ally against Johnson. But it’s worth pausing to think about what he’s describing there. Ross took part in a “mob rescue” of a fugitive slave, i.e., took part in a forceful action to free a slave who was presumably legally incarcerated as a fugitive. And he was a volunteer in the antislavery and extralegal militia in Nebraska Territory during the Bleeding Kansas confrontation against the proslavery and extralegal militia. The famous Abolitionist John Brown was a captain in the antislavery militia there, too, which is where he won national fame. To put it another way, Ross had been an antislavery guerrilla fighter.
And that’s a reminder of the situation shaping postwar attitudes. The country had been through decades of conflict over slavery and a Civil War that had cost hundreds of thousands of American lives. The Northern Radical Republicans were reacting to what they rightly saw as a President recklessly frittering away the results of victory and even siding with the former enemies.
Kennedy described the political stakes this way, clearly unsympathetic to the Reconstruction cause:
The impeachment of President Andrew Johnson, the event in which the obscure Ross was to play such a dramatic role, was the sensational climax to the bitter struggle between the President, determined to carry out Abraham Lincoln's policies of reconciliation with the defeated South, and the more radical Republican leaders in Congress, who sought to administer the downtrodden Southern states as conquered provinces which had forfeited their rights under the Constitution. It was, moreover, a struggle between Executive and Legislative authority. Andrew Johnson, the courageous if untactful Tennessean who had been the only Southern Member of Congress to refuse to secede with his state, had committed himself to the policies of the Great Emancipator to whose high station he had succeeded only by the course of an assassin's bullet. He knew that Lincoln prior to his death had already clashed with the extremists in Congress, who had opposed his approach to reconstruction in a constitutional and charitable manner and sought to make the Legislative Branch of the government supreme. [my emphasis]Treating the impeachment cause as thoroughly unworthy, Kennedy wrote, “the actual cause for which the President was being tried was not fundamental to the welfare of the nation.” He bases that position on the role that a law called the Tenure-of-Office Act, to which several of the twelve counts of impeachment were related played in the controversy.
But it’s important to recognize that the “actual cause” was Johnson’s obstruction of Reconstruction, including his reckless disregard for the lives and civil rights of the freed slaves. Kennedy, though, argued on legalistic-sounding grounds that the impeachment effort was illegitimate:
But as the trial progressed, it became increasingly apparent that the impatient Republicans did not intend to give the President a fair trial on the formal issues upon which the impeachment was drawn, but intended instead to depose him from the White House on any grounds, real or imagined, for refusing to accept their policies. Telling evidence in the President's favor was arbitrarily excluded. Prejudgment on the part of most Senators was brazenly announced. [my emphasis]As we are now actively discussing again, impeachment is a political process not a judicial one, although there are some judicial-like elements involved, e.g., the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court becomes the presiding officer of the Senate in the impeachment trial of a President. But the “high crimes and misdemeanors” of the Constitutional language on Presidential impeachment does not have to be specific violation of the law.
But thanks to Ross’ vote against impeachment, Johnson remained in office for the remainder of his term, i.e., early 1869, where he could continue to obstruct democratic Reconstruction.
Kennedy styled the trial as high historical drama, calling it “a trial to rank with all the great trials in history - Charles I before the High Court of Justice, Louis XVI before the French Convention, and Warren Hastings before the House of Lords.” (See the references at the end of this post for more on the historical references.)
And he presents Ross as a kind of martyr to the cause of justice (and respect for Executive power!):
Ross's political career was ended. To the New York Tribune, he was nothing but "a miserable poltroon and traitor." ...Ralph Roske challenged this victimhood portrayal in “The Seven Martyrs?” (American Historical Review 64:2; 1959):
Neither Ross nor any other Republican who had voted for the acquittal of Johnson was ever re-elected to the Senate, not a one of them retaining the support of their party's organization. When he returned to Kansas in 1871, he and his family suffered social ostracism, physical attack, and near poverty. ...
Ross moved to New Mexico, where in his later years he was to be appointed Territorial Governor. Just prior to his death when he was awarded a special pension by Congress for his service in the Civil War, the press and the country took the opportunity to pay tribute to his fidelity to principle in a trying hour and his courage in saving his government from a devastating reign of terror.
One of the firmly fixed stereotypes in American history concerns the seven Radical Republicans-William Pitt Fessenden of Maine, Joseph Smith Fowler of Tennessee, James W. Grimes of Iowa, John B. Henderson of Missouri, Edmund G. Ross of Kansas, Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, and Peter Van Winkle of West Virginia-who voted for President Andrew Johnson's acquittal in the celebrated impeachment trial. It has become the accepted view that the seven senators were relentlessly persecuted, not alone during and immediately after the trial, but indefinitely until they were forced altogether from the American political scene. ...And, as Kennedy himself noted, Ross went on to get a gig as a Territorial Governor and a special Congressional pension.
This myth gained wide currency in part because two of the seven acquitters, John B. Henderson and Edmund G. Ross, could not resist adopting this reasoning in their later writings to explain why they did not go further in politics. ...
On the surface, since none of the seven acquitters ever won reelection to the Senate, this belief seems substantiated. Yet if this were an authentic criterion the converse should be true: that a large majority of the Republicans who voted as the party desired should have won reelection. The results are far from conclusive. Out of thirty-five Republican senators who voted for conviction, seventeen-less than half-won immediate reelection as Republicans.
Also:
- For a recent summary of the grounds for impeachment, see Jared P. Cole and Todd Garvey, Impeachment and Removal Congressional Research Service 10/29/2015 version.
- “Charles Stuart became a traitor to his office as king and to England from the moment he sought to unlawfully subvert the proper functioning of English democracy. And what made his conduct all the more ‘treasonous’ was the fact that he had sought to do it with assistance from abroad.” (Michel Paradis, Three Lessons From the First Time a Head of State Was Impeached Lawfare Oct. 3, 2019: accessed 11/08/2019)
- Louis XVI was tried by the revolutionary national convention, found guilty of treason, and was executed by guillotine in 1793.
- William Hastings (1732-1818) was a British colonial administrator in India who was impeached by the House of Commons and acquitted by the House of Lords in a trial that extended from 1788 to 1795. Edmund Burke introduced the impeachment motion against him.
