Presidents Day (Feb. 21) provides an opportunity to remember the people who “almost” became U.S. presidents…but landed a tad short of the mark.
At the top of the list is U.S. Senator Benjamin Franklin Wade of Ashtabula County, Ohio, who fell just “one vote shy” of becoming the U.S. president in 1868.
It was a unique event in U.S. history. Ben Wade, a Republican, was the Senate’s president pro tempore when President Andrew Johnson, a Southern Democrat, was impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives.
If the Senate found President Johnson “guilty” of
vague charges of misconduct, Sen. Wade was first in line to replace Johnson and
become president.
Johnson was viewed as a “sitting duck,” easy prey for radicalized Republicans who saw Johnson as a weak and pitiful leader. They wanted to take him down…because they had the numbers.
There were 45 Republicans in the Senate, but only nine Democrats. It was the widest gap in U.S. history.
A two-thirds majority “guilty” vote was required to convict Johnson and remove him as president. The tally was 35-19, so just a single vote enabled Johnson to complete the remainder of his term.
Although 10 Republicans defected
from the party leadership to vote “not guilty,” Senator Edmund G. Ross of
Kansas was cited as being the sole difference-maker. Historian Gil Troy of
Jerusalem, Israel, said that Ross, who was trained as a newspaperman, concluded
the “foundations of the impeachment…were too slender.”
Edmund Ross
In 1956, Ross was elevated from being “a footnote in history” to become one of the Senate’s all-time “rock stars.”
“Profiles in Courage,” a book written by Senator John F. Kennedy, with support from his speechwriter Ted Sorensen, contained short biographies describing acts of bravery and integrity by eight Senators. One was Ross.
Kennedy wrote: “In a lonely grave…lies the man who saved a President, and who as a result may well have preserved for…our posterity, constitutional government in the United States. 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 cruelest in our history….”
“Ross was the victim of a wild flame of intolerance that swept everything before it. He did his duty, knowing that it meant his political death. He acted for his conscience and with a lofty patriotism, regardless of what he knew must be the ruinous consequences to himself. He acted right.”
John Simpkin, who established the Spartacus
Educational website, noted that in 1868, the editor of The Detroit Post
wrote: “Andrew Johnson is innocent because Ben Wade is guilty of being his
successor.”
Simpkin suggests that Ross and the other nine Republicans who voted to acquit Andrew Johnson may have done so purely out of their dislike for Wade, who was described as “prickly, abrasive and unstable.”
Wade was an ornery coot and a constant thorn in the side to President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War years. Wade criticized Lincoln for his unwillingness to completely crush the Confederacy.
Colleagues described Wade as being “abrupt, coarse, obstreperous, combative, pugnacious, cantankerous, confrontational, uncompromising and ‘grim as a bear in ill health.’”
Wade was the head of a
congressional delegation in 1863 that was hell-bent on removing Gen. Ulysses S.
Grant as head of the Union army.”
Lincoln responded to their complaints with the beginning of a story.
“Bother your stories, Mr. President,” Wade snapped. “That is the way it is with you, sir. It is all story – story. You are the father of every military blunder that has been made during the war. You are on the road to hell, sir, with this government.”
Historian J. Michael Martinez of Marietta, Ga., said Wade was quick to welcome Andrew Johnson to the White House after Lincoln was assassinated in April 1865, saying: “Mr. Johnson, I thank God you are here. Lincoln had too much of the milk of human kindness to deal with these damned rebels.”
“Wade grew increasing shrill and infuriated with Johnson,” Martinez said. Wade labeled Johnson as “a headstrong, impudent obstructionist” who deserved to be impeached.
Martinez wrote: “Sen.
William Fessenden of Maine wryly observed, if Johnson ‘were impeached for
general cussedness,’ he unquestionably would be found guilty, but ‘that is not
the question to be heard.’”
Fessenden reasoned that “every president who followed would face impeachment charges if a majority in Congress deemed it a suitable means of influencing public policy. Such a situation was untenable.”
John Roy Lynch, a former
slave from Mississippi who was elected to Congress as a Republican in 1873,
said at the time that “some of the moderate Republican senators who voted for
acquittal of Andrew Johnson did so chiefly on account of their antipathy
to…Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio.”
Wade was an “aggressive man who would be likely to make for himself enemies of men in his own organization who were afraid of his great power and influence…and jealous of him as a political rival,” Lynch wrote.
“Some of Wade’s senatorial Republican associates felt that the best service they could render their country would be to do all in their power to prevent such a man from being elevated to the presidency….”
One was Sen. James Grimes
of Iowa. Partially paralyzed after suffering a stroke, Grimes was carried onto
the Senate floor and helped to stand. He shouted his vote for acquittal.
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