Schuyler Colfax

Biography

Schuyler Colfax was born in New York City in 1823, months after his father's death. Family hardship ended his schooling at ten, and in 1834 his mother's second marriage took the family to Indiana, where his stepfather made him deputy county auditor in South Bend. In 1842 he became editor of the Whig South Bend Free Press, and in 1845 he bought it and renamed it the St. Joseph Valley Register. He was a secretary of the Whig national conventions of 1848 and 1852 and a delegate to Indiana's constitutional convention of 1849-1850.

Elected to Congress in 1854 on the anti-slavery People's Party ticket, he represented Indiana's 9th district from 1855 to 1869. He became an early Republican and a Radical opponent of slavery, chaired the House Post Office committee from 1859 to 1863, and was Speaker of the House from December 1863 until March 1869.

In 1868 the Republicans chose him as Ulysses S. Grant's running mate, and he served as vice president from 1869 to 1873. Having first said he would not run in 1872, he lost the renomination to Henry Wilson. That September the New York Sun linked him to the Crédit Mobilier scandal, and a House inquiry found that he had accepted a gift of railroad stock from Congressman Oakes Ames in 1868. A resolution to impeach him failed, but he left office under a cloud.

Colfax never ran for office again. He became a popular lecturer, especially on Abraham Lincoln, and in 1875 a vice-president of the Indiana Reaper and Iron Company. He died of a heart attack at a railroad station in Mankato, Minnesota, in January 1885.