I can't make my mind up about Schuyler
Colfax (above). Was he a crooked, intriguing politician, as a wise man once
said, or was he a working class hero who rose to the second highest
office in the land by his own honest efforts? As the media types like
to prattle, he had an appealing story. He entered this world in New
York City, heir to a prominent family name, but his father had died
of tuberculosis five months before he was born. That made the infant
and his mother Evelyn, a burden on the family. In November of 1836
she married an ambitious widower, 24 year old George W. Mathews. The
following summer Mathew's moved his new wife, his 11 year old stepson
and his own daughter by train and canal boat to the the
glacier-washed flat lands of northern Indiana, along the Michigan
border. Mathews opened a general store in the village of New
Carlisle, but his real interest was politics. Three years later, in
1841, he was elected on the Whig Party ticket as auditor of St.
Joseph County. So he moved the family again, to the county seat, at
the south bend of the St. Joseph River - South Bend, Indiana.
Fifteen year old Schuyler was hired as his stepfather's deputy.
At 19 the fair haired, soft blue eyed Schuyler and a
partner pooled their resources to buy a failing weekly newspaper,
which they renamed the “St. Joseph Valley Register”. In their
premier editorial they declared their paper “shall be inflexibly
Whig...On the issue of slavery we shall take the middle ground...we
shall be fixedly opposed to enlarging the borders of slavery even one
inch...and shall hail with happiness the day the Southern States
shall...adopt a feasible plan for emancipation...”
They had just 250 subscribers, and
ended the first year $1,400 in debt. But by 1844 they had made the
paper such a success that Schuyler Colfax could afford to marry, and
ten years later the teetotaler was elected to Congress, as a member
of nascent Republican Party. He was just 31 years old.
In Congress they called the short Hoosier “Smiley” Schuyler, because of his ready
grin and amiable nature. But there was a brain behind the benign
smile and crude enunciation, and his ambition burned bright. Four
years later, with his help Republicans won control of the House of Representatives,
and in 1860, the White House itself. Schuyler expected to given a
cabinet post, perhaps Postmaster General - he had chaired the postal
committee in Congress. But he was told in a private conversation “Mr.
Lincoln said...that with the troubles before us I could not be spared
from Congress...” Instead Lincoln picked Caleb Smith, also from
Indiana. After this rebuff, Schuyler drew closer to the Radical
Republicans, demanding immediate emancipation of all slaves.
In 1862, in a stunning election upset,
nervous Pennsylvania voters responded to the idea of four million
slaves suddenly being freed by replacing radical Republican Speaker
of the House Galusha Grow with the pro-union Democrat William Henry
Miller. In Grow's absence, Schuyler campaigned to win the now vacant
Speakership. And again Lincoln (above) moved to block him, urging his
political ally Montgomery Blair to campaign against Schuyler because
he was “"a little intriguer...aspiring beyond his capacity,
and not trustworthy” In one of Lincoln's few failures, the
popular Schuyler easily won election as Speaker of the House, despite
his Hoosier twang and lack of diction - he'd left public school when
his family left New York.
His approach to being Speaker was
described as “a slap-dash-knock-'em-down-auctioneer style.” He
knew the rules of the House by heart, and used then to keep the
government moving to support the war effort. He also helped to push
through the transcontinental railroad funding bills, a matter close
to Lincoln's heart, as before the war he'd been a lawyer defending
the railroads.
But Schuyler had also become a confidant of the
humorless Radical Republican Secretary of the Treasury Salome P.
Chase, who in the fall of 1862 tried to squeeze his rival, moderate
William Seward, out of Lincoln's cabinet. Schuyler was not among
the Congressional delegation which in December went to the White
House to demand Lincoln fire Seward, and he was not there the next
night when Lincoln confronted the conspirators, and forced Chase to
retreat. After this lesson in power politics, Schuyler tried to move
closer to Lincoln.
When Schuyler's wife died in 1863,
Lincoln attended her funeral. And after the crucial 1864 election was
won, Schuyler assisted the President by helping to removed the thorn
of Chase from his cabinet. He worked to convince the pompous Secretary
to exchange his cabinet post for the robes of Chief Justice. And on
April 14, 1865, just before leaving for a tour of the California end
of the transcontinental railroad, the Speaker met with the President.
At that meeting Lincoln invited Shulyer to accompany him to the
theatre that night, but Schuyler begged off. And so Schuyler missed
being an eyewitness at the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
After the war it was Schuyler Colfax
who oversaw passage of the Thirteen Amendment, abolishing slavery in
the United States. Later he led the forces that impeached Lincoln's
reluctant successor, President Andrew Johnson. The impeachment trial failed
in the Senate by one vote. But two years later, Schuyler used that half victory to maneuver against 11 other candidates to win the nomination for Vice President,
on the 11th ballot alongside Presidential nominee
Ulysses Simpson Grant. However that nasty victory left Schulyer
with new enemies, and ensured that Grant would never trust him. Still
Schuyler made history, because with his election that November he
became the youngest Vice President in history, and also the first man
to have presided over both the House of Representatives and the
Senate. (In 1932 Texan John Nance Garner became the second.)
Two weeks after the election, Schuyler
married again, this time to 34 year old Ellen M. Wade, niece of
Ohio Senator Benjamin Wade. For a few weeks he was on top of the
world. Then in January of 1869 Francis Adams Jr. broke the details of
the Credit Mobilier scam in magazine North American Review.
Before construction began in 1865, the men
who sat on the board of the Union Pacific Railroad had created a general contractor company called Credit Mobilier, and awarded them the contract to actually build the
eastern end of the transcontinental line. They, of course, also sat
on the board of Credit Mobilier. And they ensured that every bill
Mobilier submitted, no matter how outrageous or inflated, was paid by
the Union Pacific. Over the four years of construction, Credit
Mobilier was siphoning off every dime (and more) that a patriotic
public paid for UP stock. By spreading Mobilier stock around
congress, any obstructions were overcome, so that, in May of 1869,
when the last rails were joined at Promontory Summit, the Union
Pacific was $18 million in debt ($245 billion today), while everyone
holding stock in the little known Credit Mobilier made out like
bandits – which they, of course, were.
When asked about stock dividends he had
received from Mobilier, Schuyler (above, center, in his Odd Fellows robes) insisted “I am an honest man...I
never took anything that wasn't given to me.” It was probably the
dumbest thing he ever said, so dumb, he may have never said it, but also so accurate, it stuck. Shortly there after Grant privately urged his
Vice-President to resign. Grant insisted he wanted to appoint
Schuyler as Secretary of State . “In all my heart I hope you will
say yes,” wrote Grant. But Schuyler knew that as Veep he could only
be removed by a messy impeachment trial, while cabinet members could
be simply fired, and he refused the offer.
However he did announce, just two years
into his term, in September of 1870, that after almost two decades in
Washington, “My ambition is all gratified and satisfied.” Luckily, so was his fortune. He had
decided to retire from politics, he said. Schuyler didn't mean it of
course, he was only 47 years old. But the announcement forced his
critics to move onto criticizing somebody else. Then, as he had done
in the past, as the next election approached, Schuyler announced
that reluctantly, at the urging of his friends, he had decided to
stand for re-election for “the old ticket”. Then he dropped a
bombshell. Since the Credit Mobilier scandal had tainted the party,
he suggested that maybe Grant should be replaced at the top of the
ticket
Grant's response was what you might
expect. He decided to replace Schuyler Colfax with Senator Henry
Wilson, of Massachusetts - known as the “Natick Cobbler”. It was
an odd choice, since most people in Washington figured the shoemaker
was responsible for the defeat at the First Battle of Bull Run,
because he had leaked Union battle plans to his mistress and
Confederate spy, Rose Greenhow. But Wilson was a loyal radical
Republican, and the Credit Mobilier scandal had already split the
party, with newspaperman Horace Greeley running on the “Liberal
Republican” ticket.
Determined to avoid an open floor fight
at the Philadelphia convention, the internecine warfare went on in the
backrooms, as Schulyer and Wilson/Grant supporters tried to
out-promise and out-threaten each other. It was decided on the first
ballot, sort of. Schulyer received 308 ½ votes, and Wilson got 399.
Immediately the Indiana delegation ask to change their vote, and
quickly Wilson became the unanimous choice. The clever man from South
Bend had been out flanked. Grant and Wilson won, and Schulyer was
out, but not forgotten.
In January of 1873 Schulyer was called
before a House committee, where under oath he denied receiving a
$1,200 check for Credit Mobilier dividends. But the Committee had a
bank deposit slip for that amount in Schulyer's own hand. Democrats
in the house voted to impeach the likable Colfax, but the Republicans
saved his behind. But he was, finally, done in Washington. The next year, when
the stock market imploded, brought down by the failure of the Union
Pacific railroad, a bankrupted investor was heard to complain, “It
was all Schulyer Colfax's fault, damn him.”
So, not yet fifty, the orphan returned
to South Bend, determined to rebuild his reputation. Where future
generations of disgraced politicians would go on cable TV, Schulyer
Colfax went on the lecture circuit. Here his amiable and folksy veneer
earned him generous speaking fees. And in the stories he told, old
opponents became close intimates. He claimed that in 1864 Lincoln
had confided his horror at the cost of war. “Why do we suffer
reverses after reverses! Could we have avoided this terrible, bloody
war!” his Lincoln said. It might have happened that way, but
although the sentiment fits Lincoln's other quotes, the words seem
far too melodramatic.
Schulyer made a good living, but the
travel was exhausting. On Monday, January 12, 1885, he left his home
in South Bend, Indiana, to give a speech in tiny Rock Rapids, Iowa.
Schulyer took a train to Chicago, where he transferred to the
Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad. At about ten the next
morning he arrived at their station on Riverfront Street in Mankato,
Minnesota (above). In the bitter cold he had to rush, dragging his luggage,
three- fourths of a mile to the Union Pacific station on 4th
Street.
The problem was, it was -30 Fahrenheit
(-34 Celsius), and it took him almost thirty minutes to make the
bitter journey. Five minutes after arriving at the station, he
suffered “a fatal derangement of the heart's action”, and dropped
dead. Nobody knew who he was until they checked the papers in his
pockets. Oh, how the mighty had fallen. He was not yet 60 years old,
and left his widow and only child an estate valued at $150,000 ($3.5
million today).
A newspaper man penned the ambitious
Shulyer Colfax's best epitaph: “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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