premise: Perhaps in an unconscious act of denial--an inability to face up to his complicated but altogether human motives for voting as he did--the week after his vote, Ross wrote to his  This storm of passion will soon pass away, and the people, the whole people, will thank and bless me for having saved the country by my single vote from the greatest peril through which it has ever passed, though none but God can ever know the struggle it has cost me.
hypothesis: Ross wrote after he vote.