The Vice Presidency is an elegant office whose occupant must find it his principal business to try to discover what is the use of there being such an office at all.As amiable a man who ever served in Congress, good-natured, kindly, cordial, and always diplomatic, Indiana's Schuyler Colfax won the nickname "Smiler" Colfax. Through two of the most tumultuous decades in American public life, Colfax glided smoothly from the Whig to Know-Nothing to Republican parties, mingling easily with both conservatives and radicals. He rose to become Speaker of the House and vice president and seemed poised to achieve his goal of the presidency. Along the way, there were those who doubted the sincerity behind the smile and suspected that for all his political dexterity, Colfax stood for nothing save his own advancement. Those close to President Abraham Lincoln later revealed that he considered Speaker Colfax an untrustworthy intriguer, and President Ulysses S. Grant seemed relieved when the Republican convention dumped Vice President Colfax from the ticket in 1872. Even the press, which counted the Indiana editor as a colleague and pumped him up to national prominence, eventually turned on Colfax and shredded his once admirable reputation until he disappeared into the forgotten recesses of American history.
—Indianapolis Journal, March 7, 1871
As a boy, Colfax attended public schools until he was ten, when he was obliged to work as a clerk in a retail store to help support himself, his mother, and his grandmother. Three years later, his mother married George W. Matthews, and the family moved to New Carlisle, Indiana. Young Colfax worked in his stepfather's store, which served also as the village post office. Townspeople later recalled that Colfax would sit on barrels reading newspapers as they arrived by post. He borrowed whatever books he could get to provide himself with an education. In 1841, the family moved to South Bend, where Matthews was elected as the Whig candidate for county auditor and hired Schuyler as his deputy. Enjoying politics, the boy became active in a "moot legislature," where he gained his first experience in debate and parliamentary procedure.
At sixteen, Colfax wrote to Horace Greeley, editor of the influential Whig newspaper, the New-York Tribune, offering to send occasional articles. Always open to new talent, Greeley agreed and published the boy's writings on Indiana politics, beginning a correspondence and friendship that lasted for the rest of their lives. Colfax also reported on the Indiana legislature for the Indiana State Journal, and when he was nineteen local Whigs engaged him to edit the South Bend Free Press. The young editor described himself as an "uncompromising Whig." He idolized Henry Clay and embraced all of the Whig reforms, taking a pledge of abstinence from alcoholic spirits (but not from the cigars he loved). In 1844 he married a childhood sweetheart, Evelyn Clark, and by the next year was able to purchase the Free Press, renaming it the St. Joseph Valley Register. The writer Harriet Beecher Stowe later proclaimed it "a morally pure paper."
Advancing from
the editorial page into politics, Colfax served as a delegate to the
Whig convention of 1848 and to the convention that drafted a new
constitution for Indiana in 1849. He led the opposition to a provision
in the constitution that barred African Americans from settling in
Indiana or those already in the state from purchasing land. Despite his
efforts, this racial barrier stood until ruled unconstitutional as a
consequence of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1865. In
1851, the Whigs chose Colfax to run for Congress. At that time, Indiana
was a Democratic state and Colfax narrowly lost to the incumbent
Democrat. He declined to run again in 1852. Dismayed over the
disintegration of the Whig party and offended by Senator Stephen A.
Douglas' Kansas-Nebraska Act that repealed the Missouri Compromise,
Colfax again ran for Congress in 1854 as an Anti-Nebraska candidate. His
friend and fellow editor Horace Greeley, who had served a brief term in
1849, encouraged him: "I thought it would be a nuisance and a sacrifice
for me to go to Congress," he advised Colfax, "but I was mistaken; it
did me lasting good. I never was brought so palpably and tryingly into
collision with the embodied scroundrelism of the nation as while in
Congress."
The House of Representatives proved an ideal arena for Colfax's talents. Short and stocky, fair-haired, with a ready smile, he got along well with his colleagues in private but never hesitated to do battle with the opposition on the House floor. When Republicans held the majority, he served energetically as chairman of the Committee on Post Offices and Post Roads, handling the kind of patronage that built political organizations. Never having been a lawyer, he could put complex issues of the day into layman's terms. In 1856, his speech attacking laws passed by the proslavery legislature in Kansas became the most widely requested Republican campaign document. His speech raised warnings that it was a short step between enslaving blacks and suppressing the civil liberties of whites. Watching Colfax battle southern representatives over the slavery issue, James Dabney McCabe recorded that "Mr. Colfax took an active part in the debate, giving and receiving hard blows with all the skill of an old gladiator."
Colfax traveled widely, spoke frequently, and helped fuse the various Republican and antislavery groups into a unified party for the 1860 election. When the southern Democrats seceded and put House Republicans in the majority, he considered running for Speaker, but after testing the waters declined to be a candidate. He resumed his chairmanship of the Post Office Committee. Colfax took a moderate position on emancipation and other issues of the day, maintaining close ties with both wings of his party. He enjoyed direct access to President Lincoln and often served as a conduit of information and opinion from Horace Greeley and other Republican editors. He worked tirelessly on behalf of the Union, recruiting regiments and raising public spirits. Yet antiwar sentiments ran strong in Indiana and many other northern states, and in 1862 Colfax faced a tough campaign for reelection against David A. Turpie. Winning a narrow victory further elevated Colfax within the party at a time when many other Republicans, including House Speaker Galusha Grow, were defeated. When the Thirty-eighth Congress convened in December 1863, House Republicans—with their numbers considerably thinned—elected Schuyler Colfax Speaker, despite President Lincoln's preference for a Speaker less tied to the Radical faction of his party.
Washington newspaper correspondents celebrated the election of one of their own as Speaker and threw a dinner in his honor. "We journalists and men of the newspaper press do love you, and claim you as bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh," said correspondent Sam Wilkeson. "Fill your glasses, all, in an invocation to the gods for long life, greater success, and ever-increasing happiness to our editorial brother in the Speaker's Chair." In reply Colfax thanked the press for sustaining him through all his elections. Trained in journalism, Speaker Colfax applied the lessons of his craft to his political career, making himself available for interviews, planting stories, sending flattering notes to editors, suggesting editorials, and spreading patronage. A widower (his wife died in 1863) with no children, Colfax was free to socialize nightly with his friends on Washington's "Newspaper Row." He hoped to parlay his popularity with the press into a national following that would make him the first journalist to occupy the White House.
The press lavished more attention on Speaker Colfax than they had on Galusha Grow or any of his immediate predecessors. They praised the regular Friday night receptions that the Speaker and his mother held and commended him for the "courtesy, dignity, and equitability which he exhibited in the discharge of the important duties of the chair." It was harder for the press to detect whether Speaker Colfax actually had any influence on specific legislation. He gave the radical firebrands wide latitude, while speaking with moderation himself. At one point, when Radical Republicans were prepared to introduce a resolution in the party conference that defended the Republican record and called for the use of black soldiers in the Union army, Colfax outflanked them with a motion that substituted patriotic flag waving for partisanship, calling instead for all loyal men to stand by the Union. His action was taken as an effort to give the Republican party a less vindictive image that would build a broader base for congressional elections.
On April 14, 1865, Colfax called at the White House to talk over Reconstruction and other matters with President Lincoln before Colfax left on a long tour of the western states and territories. With the war won, Lincoln was in an ebullient mood and held a long and pleasant conversation with the Speaker (whom Lincoln privately regarded as "a little intriguer—plausible, aspiring beyond his capacity, and not trustworthy"). The president invited the Speaker to join his party at Ford's Theatre that night, but Colfax declined. Later that evening, he was awakened with news that the president had been shot and rushed to spend the night in the room where Lincoln died.
Colfax's efforts at party harmony and a moderate course of Reconstruction were short lived. Johnson resented Colfax's preempting his own statement of policy on the subject. The president's plans to reconstruct the South showed little regard for the rights of the freedmen, and he vetoed such relatively moderate congressional efforts as the Freedmen's Bureau bill. His action drove moderate and radical Republicans into an alliance that brought about congressional Reconstruction of the South. Finally, Johnson's dismissal of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton in violation of the Tenure of Office Act convinced even moderates like Colfax that the president must be impeached. Through all of these dramatic events, Colfax's most astonishing success was his ability to retain the support of all sides in his party and to hold House Republicans together. The party defections that saved Johnson took place in the Senate rather than the House.
Colfax stayed in Washington while the Republican convention met in Chicago. His good friend, William Orton, head of the Western Union Telegraph Company, arranged for Colfax to receive dispatches from the convention every ten minutes. On May 21 Colfax was in the Speaker's Lobby when he received Orton's telegram announcing his nomination. Cheers broke out, and the room quickly filled with congressmen wishing to offer congratulations. As he left the lobby, Colfax was greeted by House staff members, who "gathered around him in the most affectionate manner and tendered him their regards." Citizens hailed him as he walked across the Capitol grounds. On the Senate side, Bluff Ben Wade received the news that he had been beaten and said, "Well, I guess it will be all right; he deserves it, and he will be a good presiding officer." The news was received with seemingly universal applause. "His friends love him devotedly," wrote one admirer, "and his political adversaries . . . respect him thoroughly."
For years, Colfax had addressed Sunday schools and temperance revival meetings, quoting from the Bible and urging his listeners to a life of virtue. He won support from the religious magazines as a "Christian Statesman." One campaign biography praised his "spotless integrity" and declared, "So pure is his personal character, that the venom of political enmity has never attempted to fix a stain upon it." Democrats, however, lambasted Colfax as a bigot for the anti-Catholicism of his Know-Nothing past. Republicans dismissed these charges as mudslinging and organized Irish and German Grant and Colfax Clubs to court the Catholic and foreign-born vote. (Although it was not known at the time, U.S. Grant had also once joined the Know-Nothings and apparently shared their anti-Catholic prejudices.)
In November 1868, Grant and Colfax were narrowly elected over the Democratic ticket headed by New York Governor Horatio Seymour. Days after the election, the vice president-elect married Ellen Wade, niece of the Ohio senator he had defeated for the vice-presidential nomination. The groom was forty-five and the bride "about thirty," an attractive and charming woman. By April 1870 their son Schuyler III was born. This domestic bliss would in fact contribute to Colfax's political undoing. As a married man, he found less time to socialize with his old friends in the press, and invitations to the lavish receptions at his new home became harder for reporters to receive, causing considerable resentment among his old friends on Newspaper Row, who thought he was putting on airs. Not a wealthy man, the new vice president could never say no to a gift. He grew indiscreet in his acceptance of everything from sterling silver to free railroad passes. In 1868 Colfax also accepted some railroad stocks from his friend Representative Oakes Ames, who promised handsome dividends. Neither suspected the political price that the stock would ultimately exact.
Colfax predictably changed his mind early in 1872 and acceded to the wishes of his friends that he stand for reelection on "the old ticket." President Grant may have questioned Colfax's intentions. In 1871 the president had sent his vice president an extraordinary letter, informing him that Secretary of State Hamilton Fish wished to retire and asking him "in plain English" to give up the vice-presidency for the State Department. Grant appeared to be removing Colfax as a potential rival. "In all my heart I hope you will say yes," he wrote, "though I confess the sacrifice you will be making." Colfax declined, and a year later when Senator Wilson challenged Colfax for renomination, the president chose to remain neutral in the contest.
For a man who had assiduously courted the press for so long, Colfax found himself abandoned by the Washington correspondents, who overwhelmingly supported Henry Wilson. Colfax's slide in the opinion of the Washington press corps had its roots in a dinner at the beginning of his term as vice president, when he had lectured them on the need to exercise their responsibilities prudently, since in their hands lay the making and unmaking of great men. The reporters had noted archly that Colfax, like other politicians, had never complained about the "making" of their reputations, just the "unmaking." Mary Clemmer Ames, a popular newspaper writer in Washington, attributed Colfax's downfall to envy within the press corps. He did not invite them to his dinners and receptions, so they decided to "write him down." The naturally cynical and skeptical reporters, apparently considering the vice president's sanctimoniousness contradictory to his newfound riches and opulent lifestyle, sought to take him down a few pegs. One correspondent likened Colfax to "a penny dip burning high on the altar among the legitimate tapers of State." By contrast, the reporters liked Senator Wilson, who leaked so freely that they dubbed him "the official reporter of the [secret] executive sessions of the Senate." Colfax bitterly charged that Wilson had invited newspapermen in "nearly every evening, asking them to telegraph that he was gaining steadily, that I did not care for it." When he lost the nomination, the vice president magnanimously shook Senator Wilson's hand, but one observer noticed that his famous smile had become "a whitened skeleton of its former self." At least Colfax's defeat spared him having to run against his old mentor, Horace Greeley, presidential candidate that year on a fusion ticket of Democrats and Liberal Republicans.
On January 7, 1873, the House committee investigating the Crédit Mobilier scandal called the vice president to testify. Ames claimed that, since Colfax had lacked the money to buy the stock, the stock had been paid for by its own inflated dividends. Ames' notes indicated that Colfax had received an additional $1,200 in dividends. On the stand, Colfax swore flatly that he had never received a dividend check from Ames, but his testimony was contradicted by evidence from the files of the House sergeant at arms. Without missing a beat, Colfax insisted that Ames himself must have signed and cashed the check. Then the committee produced evidence from Colfax's Washington bank that two days after the payment had been made, he had deposited $1,200 in cash—and the deposit slip was in Colfax's own handwriting. Taking two weeks to explain, Colfax claimed that he had received $200 from his stepfather (who worked as a clerk in the House of Representatives) and another $1,000 from George Nesbitt, a campaign contributor by then deceased. This story seemed so patently self-serving and far-fetched that even his strongest supporters dismissed it. Making matters worse, the committee disclosed evidence suggesting that Nesbitt, who manufactured stationery, had bribed Colfax as chairman of the House Post Office Committee in order to receive government contracts for envelopes. A resolution to impeach Colfax failed to pass by a mostly party-line vote, in part because just a few weeks remained in his term. The pious statesman had been exposed, and the public was unforgiving. Colfax left the vice-presidency in disgrace, becoming a symbol of the sordidness of Gilded Age politics. Later in 1873, when the failure of the transcontinental railroads to make their bond payments triggered a disastrous financial collapse on Wall Street, plunging the nation into a depression that lasted for the rest of the decade, one ruined investor muttered that it was "all Schuyler Colfax's fault, damn him."
Doggerel from a critical newspaper perhaps served as the epitaph for Schuyler Colfax's rise to national prominence and precipitous fall from grace:
A beautiful smiler came in our midst,
Too lively and fair to remain;
They stretched him on racks till the soul of Colfax
Flapped up into Heaven again,
May the fate of poor Schuyler warn men of a smiler,
Who dividends gets on the brain!
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