THE SPITTING LYON

 

I can prove the regularity of Senator William Blount's lower intestinal functions, because his enemies in the U.S. Senate depended on them. Their trap was sprung on Monday, 3 July, 1797, while Blount was visiting “The Necessity” behind Philadelphia's “Congress  Hall” (above).  

The arrogant and regular Mister Blount had to go downstairs and out the back of the building to the "Little Shed" in the walled garden (above, far right).  But the Federalists need not rush because Blount took his time – such things should never be hurried.  By the time he returned to his seat,  the letter had been read and William Blount's political career was in the toilet.  I'll bet even Matthew Lyon, the “Spitting Beast of Vermont”, was pleased with this toilet revolt.

“Dear Cary”, the letter began, “I wished to have seen you before I returned to Philadelphia,...I believe  the plan...will be attempted this fall...(and) in a much larger way then we talked about....I shall probably be at the head of the business on the part of the British...You must take care...not to let the plan be discovered by...any other person in the interest of the United States or Spain.. signed, William Blount.”

The plan was the invention of John Chisholm, who owned a tavern (above) across the street from Senator Blount's Knoxville, Tennessee mansion. Chisholm figured it was only a matter of time before Spain would be forced to sell their American colonies to France. And if France controlled Louisiana and Florida, they might deny American ships access to New Orleans. That would bankrupt all the western farmers in Tennessee and Kentucky.  So Chisholm planned was to use local militia and Creek Indians to capture Pensacola and New Orleans, in the name of the British Empire - who would then promise to allow Americans to use New Orleans as if they owned it.

It was a fantasy of course, but sitting his heavily mortgaged Knoxville mansion (above) Senator Blount thought this was a great idea. And the more he thought, the more he thought it was his idea - particularly after he had improved it by creating a well paid job for himself as the British agent running New Orleans. So Blount wrote this letter to James Cary, who was a translator with the Creek Indian nation in eastern Tennessee.  Senator Blount expected Cary to convince the Creeks to supply most of the manpower for this conspiracy.  

Instead, Cary shared the letter with his bosses in the War Department, who immediately shared it with President John Adams (above).  Now, Adams was a Federalist and he saw a chance to embarrass his own Vice President, Thomas Jefferson, who presided over the Senate and was also the leader of the opposition party, the Democrat-Republicans - of whom Senator William Blount was an important member.

So Adams sent a copy of the "Dear Cary" letter to Federalists in the Senate (above), but insisted it be kept secret until Senator Blount could do nothing to stop the reading of the letter in public. Blount's regular morning toilet trip provided that opportunity.

By noon half of Philadelphia (above) wanted to hang Blount as a traitor, and the other half was trying to deny they had ever met him.  The President's wife even said it was too bad America did not have the guillotine. Senator Blount was arrested trying to slip out of town. Dragged in front of the Senate he denied writing the letter, despite everyone in the room recognizing his handwriting. He was arrested at once, but then allowed to post bail. And once free he hightailed it back to Knoxville – where being part of an anti-government conspiracy had made him something of a hero.  

A week later the Senate voted 25 to 1 to impeach and expel him (above), making him the first politician to be impeached in the new republic.  For the next six months both parties downstairs in the House of Representatives, Federalists and Democrat-Republicans, tried to make the impeachment of Senator Blount work for them in the upcoming 1798 Congressional elections. And that is how our story came to involve an expectorant infused Congressman from the Green Mountain State.

His name was Matthew Lyon, and he had been a Second Lieutenant in the Green Mountain Boys when they captured Fort Ticonderoga in 1776. The next year General Horatio Gates ordered Captain Lyon to take 60 men north to the Onion River, on the Canadian border. And just as they arrived, they heard rumors of  500 Indians coming to attack them. Lyon said later, “The soldiers considered themselves sacrificed”, and they decided to retreat.  Despite Lyon trying to convince his independent minded soldiers to stay, they high tailed it for safer climes. 

The prickly General Gates (above) ordered Lyon arrested and tried before a military court. Convicted of failing to maintain discipline among his men, Matthew lost his command. However he was not reduced in rank. Captain Lyon later fought bravely in the battles of Bennington and at Saratoga, rising to the rank of colonel. After the war the Vermont hero twice ran for election to Congress as a Democratic Republican. Both times the Federalists used the court martial to imply he was a coward. However, third time was the charm, and in 1796 he finally won election.  Two years later he was even re-elected.

And that was how Lyon ended up delivering a speech from the well of the House chamber (above) on Tuesday, 30 January, 1798. In his speech Lyon chastised the Connecticut Federalists for not defending the honor of their citizens by backing the impeachment of Senator Blount. That suggestion brought Federalist Connecticut Congressman Roger Griswald to his feet. As Lyon stepped away from the podium, Griswald, in his best snarky voice, asked if Lyon would be defending the people of Connecticut with his wooden sword.

Now, Lyon never had a wooden sword. Occasionally, an officer convicted of cowardice would be required to wear a wooden sword, as a way of embarrassing him before the army. That had not happened in Lyon's case, because he was not accused of running from the enemy. General Gates' later career provided ample evidence of the General's cowardice and incompetence, as Lyon's later career provided evidence of his courage and brains. But that was reality, and politics is about image - just ask John Kerry who was Swift Boat'ed over 200 years later.

Well, Lyon had been hearing this Federalist taunt for twenty years.  And hit in the back of the head with it, the Green Mountain boy in Lyon reacted instinctively. He spun on Roger Griswald, and spit in his face. We can assume it was pretty disgusting logy. The forty year old Lyon was a tobacco user, and mouth wash and dentistry were still in their infancy.  And then, having expectorated his piece, Lyon turned his back on Griswald again.  In the words of an historian, from that moment “No man in the whole Republican party...(not even) Thomas Jefferson...was so hated and despised (by the Federalists) as Matthew Lyon.”  Griswald went ape and charged at Lyon.

Cooler heads from both sides rushed to separate the two combatants.  And then, this being Congress, the argument about the traitor Senator Blount became about the “spitting Lyon” and the hot head Griswald.  Federalists wanted Lyon impeached for “gross indecency” - for spitting on a college - making him the first Congressman honored with an ethics charge.  Democrat-Republicans wanted Griswald censured for the insult,  making him the second Congressman so honored. In the end, both charges were dropped. So two weeks later, it got worse.

On Thursday 15 February, Roger Griswold entered the house chamber carrying a cane he had been loaned by a friend. He walked directly to Matthew Lyon's desk, and without warning began beating the Democrat-Republican with the stick. Covering his head, Lyon struggled to his feet, and retreated toward the fire pit, meant to take the morning chill off the chamber. He grabbed a pair of tongs from the wood pile, and began an insane fencing duel with his attacker (above). Again, cooler heads separated the two.

The spitting only made the attacks on Matthew Lyon's honor louder. One bad Federalist poet even managed to include the insult into an ode to a theatrical Boston pig. “You boast your little pig can spell the hardest word; But did your little pig ever wear a wooden sword?....Though your piggy screws his snout in such learned grimaces, I defy the squeaking lout to spit in Christians’ faces...,Then tell us no more of your little grunting creature, But confess that the LION is the GREATEST BEAST in nature.”  As I said, he was a bad poet.

The Spitting Lyon so angered the Federalists members of Congress,  it made it easier for them to pass both the Alien and the Sedition Acts, the second of which was signed on 14 July, 1798, six months after the assault by and on the “Spitting Lyon.”  It's actual title was “An Act for the Punishment of Certain Crimes” (above), the crimes being writing or publishing anything false or malicious against members of the government.  It also forbid the defendant from pleading the truth of their writing as a defense. Three months later, on 10 October, The Democratic Republican Matthew Lyons was convicted under the Sedition Act, and sentenced to four months in jail.

But Representative Lyon had the last laugh.  Twice.  First he was re-elected from his jail cell, with 55% of the vote. Then, the Presidential election of 1800 was a tie, and thrown into the House of Representatives. The contest became a 35 ballot knock down drag out between Democratic Republicans Jefferson and Democratic Republican Aron Burr, all engineered by the lame duck Federalist Congressional majority.  The issue was finally settled on the 36^th ballot, when the Federalist Representative from Vermont abstained. This allowed Matthew Lyon, the Democrat-Republican from Vermont, to cast the deciding ballot making Thomas Jefferson the third President of the United States.

So it turned out, Senator Blount's act of betrayal did not end up preventing Jefferson from winning the White House. The arrogant and ambitious Blount did not witness the victory, having died in his home (above) during an epidemic in March of 1800. The next year Matthew Lyon moved to Kentucky, and won election to Congress from that new state six times, finally retiring in 1811, and dying in 1822. The Spitting Lyon, the Green Mountain Beast, was then buried in the Blue Grass state (below). And what a shame we have allowed his memory to fade, in part because we insist upon neutering our "founding fathers" - denying,  them and us, our shared humanity, warts and all. The valuable lessons are usually in the warts, you know.

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SIYSPHUS ON THE WABASH

 

I want to take you back to a time when there were just two million Hoosiers in the whole wide world, and yet Indiana had 13 seats in the United States House of Representatives and 15 electoral votes.  And there arose upon that mole hill an ego determined to push those 15 votes up Mount Olympus and to sacrifice his reputation and the sanity and security of the entire state in the effort.

Indiana was and is the smallest state west of the Allegheny mountains but was also a crucial "battleground" state, oscillating like a bell clapper, clanging first Republican and then ringing Democratic, changing six times between 1876 and 1888, swinging each time at the whim of some 6,000 reasonably fickle independent voters. And upon that oscillating foundation stood our anti-hero.

The impeller of these rhythmic revolutions came in the winter of 1885 when the dynamic Democratic Governor Isaac Gray (above), dreamed of becoming President of the whole United States. Now, such ambition was not an impossible dream, as another Hoosier politician would shortly prove – Republican Benjamin Harrison.  First step for both men was  to become a United States Senator.   And since at the time Senators were elected by the state legislature, which was split pretty evenly along party lines, Governor Gray came up with a clever plan to ensure himself  the initial stepping stone of U.S. Senator. 

First the Democratic Governor jammed through a gerrymander redistricting of the state legislative offices, re-designing ten traditionally Republican state assembly seats so they would more likely elect Democrats instead. This would prove to be such an outrageous power grab, a Federal court would finally declare it unconstitutional in 1892.  But Gray's knew the voters would take their revenge far sooner than the courts.

So, in the summer of 1886, Grey convinced his Democratic Lieutenant Governor, Mahlon Manson (above) to take early retirement. Then Grey scheduled a special election to refill the post that fall, along with the General Assembly election, 

And as Gray had expected, the Republican base was so energized by the Democratic gerrymander, that their party was swept back into power that November with a 10,000 vote majority, recapturing seven of those redistricted Assembly seats that were supposed to go Democrats.  (The state Senate, remained unchanged at  31 Democrats and 19 Republicans.)  

But more importantly for Governor Gray, the newly elected Lieutenant Governor was a Republican, Robert Robertson (above).  Thus, should Democrat Gray offer his resignation as Governor in exchange for his election as U.S. Senator, the Republican dominated General Assembly would probably go along because that would make the Republican Robertson the new Governor. Clever. Complicated, but clever.

Yes, Grey (above) was clever enough to be worthy of Machiavelli. But his plan faced one insurmountable hurdle. Governor Isaac Grey was without doubt the most hated Democratic governor among Democrats, in the entire history of the state of Indiana. He was the original DINO -  a Democrat in Name Only.

Twenty years earlier, at the close of the Civil War, this same Isaac Grey,  had been the Republican Speaker of the state Assembly (above).  To pass the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, making ex-slaves American citizens, and giving black males the right to vote,

Speaker Grey (above) had literally locked the doors, preventing Democrats from bolting the building and thus denying a quorum to the Republican majority. While the trapped Democrats sulked in the cloak room, Speaker Grey staged successful votes for the three Constitutional Amendments. It had been a brutal scheme, again worthy of Machiavelli, - much like Gray's latest plot. 

But the Democrats never forgot Grey had counted them as "present but not voting",  even after he had switched to the Democrats and gave them the Governorship.  And as the Assembly session for 1887 opened, these hard liners were willing to set the state on fire if they could also burn up their Governor's Presidential dream boat.

The Indiana State Senate (above)  was about to come into session at  9:35 on the morning of Saturday 24 February, 1887, when Republican Lt. Governor Robertson entered the second floor chambers to take his seat as the new President pro tempore of the Senate.  But a flying squad of Democrats physically blocked him from reaching the dais. He shouted from the floor, "Gentlemen of the Senate, I have been by force excluded from the position to which the people of this state elected me.” 

But at this point the out going President pro tempore, Democratic State Senator Alonzo Smith, ordered doorkeeper Frank Pritchett, to remove the Lt. Governor, “...if he don't stop speaking.”

As the doorkeeper and his assistants advanced on Roberts, the duly elected president pro tempo announced, “They may remove me. I am here, unarmed.” Smith testily responded, “We are all unarmed. We are fore-armed, though.” 

That belligerent mood was now general in the chamber. Lawyer, and founder of a law school, Republican State Senator Mark Lindsey De Motte (above) from Porter county shouted something from the floor, and acting President Smith ordered him to take his seat. Responded DeMotte, “When he gets ready, he will.”

Doorkeeper Bulger caught Robertson "...by the throat, and with the other hand by the shoulder" and threw him, "...some fifteen (or) twenty feet from the steps of the chamber's dais"  As he did a Republican State Senator shouted that if he went, all the Republicans were going with him. Past and current Rebel President Pro tem Smith shouted back, “They can go if they want to. They will be back, ” he predicted. 

At this point Republican State Senator Henry Underwood Johnson (above) challenged the chair directly, telling him, “No man will be scared by you.” “You're awfully scared now, “ said the Democrat. “Not by you”, answered Johnson. It sounded like children had taken over the state senate.

A general fight now broke out in the Senate chamber, with the outnumbered Republicans giving such a good account of themselves that one Democrat drew a pistol and – BANG! - shot a hole in the brand new ceiling of the still unfinished statehouse. Into the acrid gun smoke and sudden silence this unnamed Democrat announced that he was prepared to start killing Republicans if they kept fighting.

With that, Lt. Governor Robertson was thrown out of the Senate and the doors were locked and bolted behind him. As the official record notes those were “...the last words spoken by a Republican Senator in the 55th General Assembly.” The Indiana Senate then tried to get back to business, appropriately taking up Senate bill 61, setting aside $100,000 for three new hospitals for the mentally insane. It was decided it was self evident the state was going to need them, and the measure was approved by a vote officially recorded as 31 Ayes, 0 nays and 18 “present but not voting”. Ah, revenge must have seemed sweet for the Democrats – for about half an hour.

Outside in the central atrium (above), the gunshot had attracted a crowd, mostly from the Republican controlled House on the East side of the capital. Faced with a bruised and enraged Robertson, the Republicans caught his anger. Similar fights sparked to life in the chamber of the General Assembly  and a “mob” of 600 angry Republicans descended upon every wayward Democrat in the building, punching and kicking them, and, if they resisted, beating them down to the marble floors of the brand new “people's house”.

Eventually, the pandemonium returned to its source; the Republicans laid siege to the Senate chamber. They beat against the doors, and smashed open a transom. Vengeful Republicans poured in and the haughty Democrats were assaulted in their own chamber and thrown out of it. 

By now Democrat Governor Grey (above), down in his offices on the first floor, had heard the ruckus upstairs, and had called in the Indianapolis Police. Four hours after the legislative riot had begun, order was restored to the capital of Hoosier democracy. History and many newspapers would record it as the “Black Day of the Indiana Assembly.”

The following Monday the triumphant Republican dominated Assembly dispatched a note to the battered Democratically controlled Senate, that the Repubs would have no further correspondence with the Dems. Snap of finger dismissal. The Senate counter-informed the lower house, ditto, and same to you.. State government in Indiana ground to a halt. Lt. Governor Robertson never presided over the Senate, and Governor Gray never served as a Untied States Senator. 

He came to be known as the “Sisyphus of the Wabash”, after the legendary Greek king, renown for his avariciousness and deceit, punished by the gods with pushing a rock up a hill he never summited.  A few years later Hoosiers elected to choose their Senators by popular vote,  I suppose under the theory that the general population of drunks and lunatics could do no worse then the professional politicians had already done.  And they were most certainly correct.

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MISTER SMILEY

 

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? If it helps, Abraham Lincoln never trusted him. But, as the media types like to prattle, he had an appealing story. 

The smiler 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 newborn 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-plowed 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 (above). 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 (above), 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 as Postmaster.  After this rebuff, Schuyler drew closer to the Radical Republicans, demanding immediate emancipation of all slaves.

In 1862, in a stunning midterm 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. But 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 remove 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 14 April, 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 theater that night, but Schuyler begged off. And so Schuyler missed being an eyewitness at the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

It was Speaker Schuyler Colfax who oversaw passage of the Thirteen Amendment, abolishing slavery in the United States, and after the war, the 14th Amendment, which gave African Americans the right to vote.  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 11^th 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, the widower 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 the 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 siphoned 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 (above), the Union Pacific was $18 million in debt ($245 billion today). Meanwhile  everyone holding stock in the little known Credit Mobilier made out like bandits – one of whom was Schuyler Colfax.

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 (below) - known as the “Natick Cobbler”. 

It was an odd choice, since most people in Washington figured the shoemaker (above) 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 (above), the internecine warfare went on in the backrooms, as Schulyer and Wilson 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 handwriting.  Democrats in the house voted to impeach the likable Colfax, but the Republicans saved his behind.  Still, he was, finally, done in Washington. The next year, when the stock market imploded, brought down in part 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 (above)  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 the words seem far too melodramatic.

Schulyer made a good living, but the travel was exhausting. On Monday, 12 January, 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 4^th 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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