A city in the month of peace

22 MAY 1865

South Bend became a city in the spring the war ended: On May 22, 1865 — six weeks after Appomattox — the town incorporated as a city, taking for its motto the single word "Peace," and on June 5 it held its first city elections, choosing William G. George as its first mayor. The city had 3,832 people at the war's eve census and would count 7,206 five years later; the charter-year city was still a river town with two races of mills, a college up the hill and wagon and plow shops on the make — but the form it took in 1865, a mayor and council under a city charter, is the form it keeps. Today's government is the descendant: a strong mayor-council system, a Common Council of nine — six elected by district and three at large — an elected city clerk, and the county and city governments sharing the County-City Building downtown. The Government section of this record keeps the whole line of mayors and councils.

The Civil War decade gave the young city one more name worth the Story of South Bend section's notice, for the country heard of it: Schuyler Colfax, a young editor who had come to the St. Joseph Valley as a boy and in 1845 bought the South Bend Free Press and renamed it the St. Joseph Valley Register — his paper for nine years, and northern Indiana's leading Whig, then Republican, journal — went from South Bend to Congress in 1855, to the Speaker's chair of the U.S. House through the war years, and in 1869 to the Vice Presidency under Grant. His mansion stood on the river bluff, and for two generations "Colfax of South Bend" was the city's second-most-famous address after Notre Dame's. The People section carries his full record — including the scandal that ended his career — and the Story of South Bend section passes on: a city of 7,000 had produced the Speaker of the House and the Vice President within its first decade as a city, and then the factories came and made its name a different way.

Sources:

1. City of South Bend — the incorporation of May 22, 1865, the motto "Peace," the first elections of June 5, 1865, and William G. George as first mayor; the present mayor-council form, the nine-member council, the elected clerk and the County-City Building.
2. U.S. Census Bureau, decennial censuses — South Bend, 3,832 in 1860 and 7,206 in 1870.
3. U.S. House of Representatives, Office of the Historian, and U.S. Senate historical records — Schuyler Colfax of Indiana, Speaker 1863–1869 and Vice President 1869–1873.
4. Willard H. Smith, "Schuyler Colfax: Whig Editor, 1845–1855," Indiana Magazine of History — Colfax's 1845 purchase of the South Bend Free Press with Albert W. West and its renaming as the St. Joseph Valley Register.
5. government and people sections, this record — the mayors, the councils and Colfax in full.