Schuyler Colfax

Schuyler Colfax was born March 23, 1823, in New York City. His father died of tuberculosis six months before his birth, and his mother found herself a widow at seventeen. At the age of ten, Schuyler went to work clerking in a store to help support his mother. His mother remarried in 1834, and two years later he moved with his family to New Carlisle, Indiana. He was appointed deputy auditor of St. Joseph County in 1841. From 1842 to 1844, he served as assistant enrolling clerk of the Indiana Senate. In 1845, he founded the St. Joseph Valley Register in South Bend and served as the editor of the influential Whig newspaper for eighteen years. In 1847, Colfax served as secretary of the Rivers and Harbors Convention in Chicago, thus beginning his association with Abraham Lincoln. Schuyler Colfax once said that February 1, 1865, the day Lincoln signed the House resolution for the Thirteenth Amendment outlawing slavery, was the happiest day in his life. He was the last public figure to shake Lincoln’s hand the night he was assassinated and traveled to Springfield on Lincoln’s funeral train. Colfax was a delegate to Whig Conventions in 1848 and 1852. In 1851, he unsuccessfully ran for Congress as a member of the Whig party and declined the Whig nomination for Congress in 1852. Colfax was influential in the organization of the Republican Party in Indiana and was elected to the U. S. House of Representatives as a Republican in 1854. He continuously served in Congress, the last 6 years as speaker, until he was sworn in as Vice President of the United States on March 4, 1869. He held the office of Vice President during the first term of Ulysses S. Grant, but in 1872 failed in his attempt for renomination for a second term. Members of Congress brought charges of corruption against Colfax in 1873 in the Crédit Mobilier of America scandal. He and other noted Republicans were accused of accepting bribes from the Crédit Mobilier, a construction company secretly owned by the directors of the Union Pacific Railroad. He was later cleared of the charges, but his political career was irreparably harmed. He returned to South Bend and made a living on the lecture circuit where he earned more money than he had serving as vice president. He died January 13, 1885, at the railroad depot in Mankato, Minnesota while waiting for a train to take him to his next speaking engagement.

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