Schuyler Colfax: the city's vice president

1823 – 1885

Schuyler Colfax (1823–1885): South Bend's highest-reaching son, and the fullest political life this section holds. He was born in New York City on 23 March 1823; his father died before he was born, and his mother remarried George W. Matthews. The family came west to New Carlisle, Indiana, in 1836 and to South Bend in 1841, when Matthews was elected auditor of St. Joseph County and the eighteen-year-old Colfax became his deputy, serving eight years, 1841 to 1849. He organized for temperance from 1842 and abstained all his life. His public career began in print: from 1842 he edited the pro-Whig South Bend Free Press, owned by John D. DeFrees, and in September 1845 he bought the paper with A. W. West and renamed it the St. Joseph Valley Register. South Bend's editor became one of the founders of the Republican Party — he was an organizer of the party in Indiana and nationally, on an anti-slavery platform — and in 1854 he was elected to Congress, serving in the U.S. House from 1855 to 1869. From 1863 to 1869 he was Speaker of the House, three terms, through the last years of the Civil War and the first of Reconstruction. In 1868 he was elected vice president on Ulysses S. Grant's ticket, and served from 4 March 1869 to 4 March 1873; on 18 November 1868, between the election and the inauguration, he married Ellen (Ella) M. Wade.

The Crédit Mobilier scandal, at documented size: in September 1872 the New York Sun published the Crédit Mobilier story — that congressmen, Colfax among them, had been given or sold stock in the Union Pacific's construction company on terms meant to buy their silence. Colfax publicly denied owning stock he had not paid for. Congressman Oakes Ames testified that Colfax had received 1,200 dollars in dividends on stock that had been paid for by its own dividends; Ames's evidence was contradictory under cross-examination. Colfax testified on 7 January 1873. The House Judiciary Committee reported that there was no ground for impeachment, because any offence predated his vice presidency; an impeachment resolution failed. No final judgment of guilt was ever made against him, and he was never prosecuted. What the scandal did was simpler and total: it ended his career. He was not renominated in 1872, and he left office in March 1873 a ruined public man on an unproven charge — the disposition this record prints, because it is the disposition the record contains.

The retirement: Colfax came home to South Bend and rebuilt a living on the lecture platform, traveling widely and speaking to large audiences for a decade. He died on the road: on 13 January 1885, at Mankato, Minnesota, he suffered a heart attack at the railroad station, on a lecture trip, and died there. He is buried in South Bend City Cemetery — the cemetery on Coquillard's gift of land. His son, Schuyler Colfax III (1870–1925), carried the name into the next generation's city government as mayor of South Bend from 1898 to 1902; his mayoral record stands in the Government section. One published summary gives the son's tenure as ending in 1901; the Government roster, which this section follows, gives 1898–1902, and the difference is carried here so the reader sees it rather than inherits it silently.

Sources:

1. Wikipedia, "Schuyler Colfax" — the New York birth and the father's death, the 1836 and 1841 removals, the deputyship 1841–49, the Speakership and vice presidency dates, the Mankato death of 13 January 1885.
2. Indiana Historical Society, Schuyler Colfax papers, collection guide — the Free Press editorship from 1842, the September 1845 purchase and the St. Joseph Valley Register renaming, the temperance organizing.
3. Appletons' Cyclopaedia / Dictionary of American Biography accounts, as carried in the Civil War Encyclopedia — the Crédit Mobilier sequence: the Sun's September 1872 story, the denial, Ames's testimony and the 1,200 dollars, the testimony of 7 January 1873, the Judiciary Committee's report, and the absence of any judgment or prosecution.
4. Government section of this history (banked) — Schuyler Colfax III's mayoralty, 1898–1902, and the South Bend City Cemetery burial.