Richard A. Ruddy - Edmund G. Ross: Soldier, Senator, Abolitionist

RICHARD A. RUDDY

2013 by the University of New Mexico Press
All rights reserved. Published 2013
Printed in the United States of America

18 17 16 15 14 13 1 2 3 4 5 6

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Ruddy, Richard A., 1939

Edmund G. Ross : soldier, senator, abolitionist / Richard A. Ruddy.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8263-5374-0 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8263-5375-7 (electronic)

1. Ross, Edmund G. (Edmund Gibson), 18261907.

2. LegislatorsUnited StatesBiography.

3. United States. Congress. SenateBiography.

4. Johnson, Andrew, 18081875Impeachment.

5. GovernorsNew MexicoBiography.

6. New MexicoHistory1848

I. Title.

E664.R74R83 2013

978.904092dc23

[B]

2013015142

TO MY WIFE, MARY

.

MY INTEREST IN EDMUND G. ROSS began in part with John F. Kennedys Profiles in Courage. Even before knowing about the Ross chapter in Kennedys book, I was introduced to a collection of photographs of the Ross family kept in the photo archive at the Albuquerque Museum, where I volunteered after retiring from a thirty-year career as a commercial photographer. I was surprised to learn that the Edmund G. Ross in the photographs, then a territorial governor of New Mexico, was the same person as the United States senator from Kansas featured in Profiles in Courage. I would soon discover that Ross played other roles in late-nineteenth-century America: first as a leader in the abolitionist movement in the years before the Civil War and then through his lifework as a newspaper editor and eloquent observer of the extraordinary times in which he lived.

In the spring of 2005 I used the museum images of Ross and his family, combined with additional research I had done, to give a talk to an audience of nearly two hundred people, including a number of Ross descendants. The response to my story of Rosss life was enthusiastic, with many questions and, most notably, the suggestion from several people that I write his biography. In late 2005 I found myself digging ever deeper into the life of this most interesting man.

Three previous biographies of Ross have been written. The first, The Life of Edmund G. Ross by Edward Bumgardner, was published in 1949. The book is based mainly on memoirs by Rosss daughter Lillian Ross Leis. It is a rather short account of Rosss life, mentioning almost nothing of his years in New Mexico. It is notable that Bumgardner realized the shortcomings of his book, and in the foreword he encouraged someone else to unearth more material than has been accessible to me, and write an adequate biography of Senator Ross. In 1960 a fictional account of Rosss life was written by Loula Grace Erdman, told from the point of view of his wife Fannie. Because Many a Voyage is historical fiction, it is not the scholarly work that Bumgardner had in mind in recommending that someone else do the necessary research to write an adequate biography. In 1997 a very short and incomplete biography of Ross, Edmund G. Ross: A Man of Courage, was published by Rosss great-grandson Arthur Elliot Harrington. It was a noble effort by Harrington but very sparse. Yale historian Howard R. Lamar wrote a superb appraisal of Rosss tenure as territorial governor of New Mexico in a 1961 article for the New Mexico Historical Review and in 1966 wrote extensively about Ross in New Mexico for his history The Far Southwest, 18461912. In 1983 Karen Diane Shane wrote an excellent masters thesis about Rosss territorial administration, which I found very useful.

As I learned more about Ross, however, I found that in contrast to Kennedys admiration for Ross, there were a few scholars who were not so sure about Rosss courage. What Kennedy and Rosss critics had in common was a very narrow look at Rosss life, for the most part confining their studies of Ross to the months surrounding the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson in 1868. While I was intrigued by all I had learned about Ross, I became more interested in uncovering the full story of his life and work.

I was fortunate to have a wealth of written material by Edmund Ross himself. He spent the bulk of his adult years as a newspaper editor and publisher, and virtually all of his journalistic writing is extant, nearly twenty years worth of newspaper columns. Because he was frequently separated from his family, there is a reasonable collection of letters saved by Fannie, primarily during his Civil War years and his years in the United States Senate. Unfortunately, because Ross did not save personal letters, only a few of the letters she wrote to him are available. Rosss time in New Mexico as territorial governor is well documented with eight linear feet of documents and letters, mostly available on microfilm. Aspects of Rosss personal life are documented by Lillian Ross Leis, whose informal and unpublished memoir was done in three parts. Although Leiss recollections of her father are reliable and add richness to the Ross story, her historical references were at times not entirely accurate. I was therefore careful to find a second source for confirmation in these circumstances, or, failing that, to avoid using unsubstantiated information. Of course Ross, who was a controversial figure throughout much of his life, had his detractors and supporters, and there is an abundance of newspaper articles that both criticize and praise Ross. Care had to be taken with information derived from journalists who were strongly biased for or against him.

This book assumes that biography is history, that the recounting of the lives of individuals provides multiple ways of understanding the past. Edmund Rosss life reveals a great deal about who we were as Americans in the second half of the nineteenth century. Because Rosss life was a unique collection of experiences, his biography is a one-of-a-kind look at one of the most eventful periods in American history. The abolitionist movement and struggle to bring Kansas into the Union as a free state, the expansion of railroads west of the Mississippi, the Civil War, Reconstruction and the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, the Gilded Age with its greedy politicians and businessmen, as well as the rapid expansion of the United States into the isolated SouthwestRoss played important roles in all of these events. While he has been remembered as the senator who cast a crucial vote on May 16, 1868, there is more, much more, to be known of the life of Edmund G. Ross.