The American Vice Presidency (30 page)

In 1844, Colfax got married and the next year purchased the local paper, renaming it the
St. Joseph Valley Register
. Now a confirmed Whig, he became a delegate to the party’s national convention in 1848 and to its state convention in the following year to write a new Indiana constitution. There he led an effort against a provision barring blacks from settling in the state and those already there from buying land. His labors failed, but the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 finally achieved the same end.
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In 1851, as the Whig candidate for Congress from his district, he narrowly lost to the incumbent Democrat. Then in 1854, with the Whigs in disintegration, he ran again and won, but this time as an anti-slavery Know-Nothing, an emerging new nativist party that more prominently
opposed alcohol, immigrants, and Catholics. The first Know-Nothing lodge was opened in the state that year, and Colfax specified he would remain in the ranks only for its anti-slavery plank. The Know-Nothings, a hodge-podge of disaffected Republicans, Democrats, and Whigs, split over the Kansas-Nebraska Act and quickly fell apart, and in 1856 Colfax retained his seat as a Republican.

As the threat of secession over the slavery issue grew, his voice in the House and in the party against its extension into the West became more prominent, and he traveled widely, speaking in support of preservation of the Union. When the war came and the Southern states did pull out, the House Republicans took over the majority, and his chairmanship of the House Post Offices and Post Roads Committee positioned him as a major dispenser of patronage within the House. In 1863 he was elected Speaker, and with his power to appoint committee chairmen, his popularity and support climbed.

As Speaker, Colfax proved to be a fair and cordial arbiter of the House rules, with an occasional flair for the dramatic, and he frequently directly counseled President Lincoln on matters of state. As the war’s end approached, Colfax discussed Lincoln’s plans with him for reconciliation with the South and for its reconstruction. On April 14, 1865, with the armed conflict over, Lincoln invited the Speaker to join his party that night at Ford’s Theater. Colfax declined, but when he was awakened later and told of the tragedy, he rushed to the president’s bedside, across the street from the theater.
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After Lincoln’s funeral, Colfax was soon obliged to confront the reconstruction plans of the new president, Andrew Johnson, which did not square with his own understanding of what Lincoln had been considering and with what Colfax himself favored. In his campaign for reelection in 1864, he had been happy to have the support of Johnson, who had just been made Lincoln’s running mate for his second term. Colfax had praised him then as “that loyal, Jackson-like and heroic Senator from Tennessee,” and in April 1865 in eulogizing Lincoln he had said of Johnson, “Andrew Johnson, to whom the public confidence was so quickly and worthily transferred, is cast in a sterner mold than he whose place he fills. He has warred on traitors in his mountain home as they have warred on him; and he insists, with this crowning infamy filling up their cup of wickedness,
that treason should be made odious, and that mercy to the leaders who engendered it is cruelty to the nation.”
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But Colfax was not encouraged subsequently when Johnson proceeded during the summer and fall of 1865 to undertake presidential reconstruction with no regard to the congressional leadership. The Speaker later said that prior to the assassination he had tried to convince both Lincoln and Johnson of the wisdom of calling a special session of Congress to consider how best to bring the rebel states back into the Union. Before that happened, he wrote a friend, “I want to be very certain that a majority of their voters are—not merely whopped back into the Union, as they say—but heartily devoted to the Union & ready to fight with us agst. all its enemies at home or abroad, now & in the future.”
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In November 1865 Colfax made a major speech in Washington that was among the first serious cautions about presidential reconstruction at the hands of Johnson. He warned that Southerners who only months earlier were “struggling to blast this nation from the map of the world” were proposing to enter Congress in the next session “to resume their former business of governing the country they struggled so earnestly to ruin.” He noted that the Constitution gave each house of Congress the exclusive right to judge the qualifications of elected members, adding, “And I apprehend they will exercise that right.” While commending conditions laid down by Johnson as “eminently wise and patriotic,” he called for ratification of new Southern state constitutions that would protect the personal and property rights of black freedmen. He expressed confidence that when the executive and legislative branches compared their views, they “would cordially cooperate.”
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According to an entry in the diary of Gideon Welles, Johnson’s inherited navy secretary, the new president referred to Colfax in conversation with several cabinet members as “this little fellow … shoved in here to make a speech in advance of [Johnson’s] message, and to give out that the principle enunciated in his speech was the true policy of the country.” Radical Republicans were quick to praise Colfax for arguing that black suffrage and other rights be part of Reconstruction, but the conservative
Chicago Times
editorially commented that the Republicans had “conspired to defeat the work of restoration already done and happily carried forward by the president, and Schuyler Colfax was a leading conspirator among them for that purpose.”
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When the Thirty-Eighth Congress convened that fall, the reelection of Colfax as Speaker of the House was considered a test of his Reconstruction views. If so, he passed it easily, defeating James Brooks of New York. Applauded as he took the chair, he told the members, “It is for you, Representatives, to do our work as faithfully and as well as did the fearless saviors of the Union on their more dangerous arena of duty. Then we may hope to see these vacant and once abandoned seats around us gradually filling, until this Hall shall contain Representatives from every State and district.”
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Colfax then appointed a joint House-Senate committee to “inquire into the condition of the States which formed the so-called Confederate States of America” as to their eligibility to send representatives to either house, with none seated until this was done. Some aspirants who perhaps optimistically came to the chamber were sent away. Despite Colfax’s hope for harmony with the White House on Reconstruction, he eventually had to face reality with Johnson’s veto of the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill and other vetoes. He predicted that Congress would override the veto of the Civil Rights Bill passed afterward in 1866, and he was right. Soon after, he told some Indiana callers that they had to look to Congress, not to the executive, for “legalized reconstruction.” And he condensed his position thus: “Loyal men shall govern a preserved Republic.”
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Johnson’s vetoes and the general aspect of his reconstruction policy of lenience to the South, particularly to political figures who had supported the Confederate side and sought readmission to Congress, were intolerable to Colfax and to many other Radical Republicans and moderates in the Republican Party. Along with these actions was evidence that the president was considering the creation of a new party that could be the vehicle for his election to another term in his own right. In June he invited delegates from all thirty-six states to the District of Columbia, and supporters called for a National Union convention in Philadelphia for the same purpose, the first of four such gatherings elsewhere over the summer and fall.
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By the spring of 1866, talk of impeaching Johnson spread rapidly among the Radical Republicans. As Speaker, Colfax was sympathetic but took no leadership role. The obvious grounds for action against Johnson were his reconstruction plans, but many in Congress believed that impeachment could be sought only for specific illegal, indictable acts, which he was careful not to commit.

The congressional elections of 1866 went badly for Johnson. He fared well in the South, but the congressional Republicans built their strength in the North and won a two-thirds majority in both houses, enabling them to override any subsequent presidential veto. When Congress returned in December 1866, the emboldened Radicals introduced a resolution creating a committee to investigate possible impeachment, but it failed the necessary two-thirds vote. In January 1867, another motion, this one charging the president with high crimes and misdemeanors, including abuse of power, corruption in making appointments and granting pardons, and election tampering, passed and was sent to the House Judiciary Committee. But it was shelved there.

Meanwhile, Congress had passed the Tenure of Office Act, curbing the president’s power to remove postmasters and others from positions of patronage. A provision was added stipulating that cabinet officials were to hold their offices for the duration of the term of the president who had appointed them, plus one month, subject to removal by and with the advice and consent of the Senate.

Johnson quickly vetoed the act and the latest reconstruction legislation written by Congress but was overridden. He seemed to acquiesce, not wanting to give his critics legitimate grounds for impeachment, and the threat seemed to fade for a time. Then, on July 29, 1867, when Johnson fired Secretary of War Edwin Stanton without Senate approval, in violation of the Tenure of Office Act, Colfax was convinced the president had to be impeached, an action now devoutly desired by the Radical Republicans. It fell to the genial “Smiler” Colfax to bring the moderates along as well while demonstrating fairness in the chair.

On February 24, 1868, the House voted overwhelmingly for the impeachment resolution, with every Republican in favor. Despite the subsequent Senate acquittal of Johnson, there was no possibility that the Republicans would nominate him in the next presidential election, so he pursued, hopelessly, a nomination by his old Democratic Party. The immense popularity of the Civil War hero U. S. Grant assured his Republican nomination for the presidency, and Colfax was one of several men considered as his running mate. He resisted overtures to run for governor of Indiana or for the U.S. Senate, but he was clearly interested in the Republican vice presidential nomination.

The main prospect at the outset was Senator Benjamin F. Wade, the president pro tem of the Senate, but at the party convention in Chicago, Colfax was nominated on the sixth ballot. As a teetotaler, some delegates saw him as a ticket balancer, offsetting Grant’s notable propensity for hard liquor. The social Smiler Colfax, now a widower who taught Sunday School and spoke at temperance meetings, was a popular choice. In the Democratic Party, which bypassed the only recently acquitted Johnson of impeachment charges, Governor Horatio Seymour of New York was nominated.

With Grant resisting speech making, Colfax pitched in against Seymour, and in defense of the Civil War he did not hesitate to “wave the bloody shirt” against unrepentant rebels, “murderous traitors with their shirts and their hands red with the blood of murdered Union men.” In Detroit, Colfax told prospective Democratic voters, “When you go to the ballot box and drop in that ballot by which you and other millions of our country rule this land and control its destinies, you are going side by side, if not in actual proximity yet in the spirit, in principle and in soul with the men on the battlefield who sought to kill you for our adherence to the flag.… they drew the bead upon you; they aimed at your heart because you were faithful to the allegiance which they themselves repudiated. God’s providence turned aside that bullet, but if the men with whom you are going to vote could have led the way you would have been bleeding in your graves. Now go and vote with them if you want to.”
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Many Democrats struggled against allegations of being on the wrong side of the war and in return played the race card by questioning black suffrage and other Reconstruction policies. But Grant and Colfax won comfortably, with Grant’s stature as the North’s hero of the war dominant. A fellow congressman, Godlove S. Orth, wrote the vice president elect: “I believe your chances to succeed Grant are at this time better than those of any living man. To keep them in this condition will require the constant action of yourself & friends.”
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Only weeks after the election, Colfax married a second time, at age forty-five. His bride, Ellen Wade, about fifteen years his junior, was the niece of Senator Ben Wade. She presided over the Colfax home, which was open to many of her husband’s political associates, including a host of journalists he befriended as former colleagues of the press. But after ruling over the House for fourteen years as Speaker, Colfax found presiding over
the Senate as vice president a letdown. In that post he had no patronage, a severe disappointment for the former Speaker who had made a career, and a host of friends, in dispensing it.

He was in demand as a speaker around the country, however, often addressing religious and temperance meetings. Although he was known for receiving and keeping gifts in office, he insisted he did not speak for money, writing in 1871 that he had not “spoken at all” at any event where admission was charged.
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But in 1868 Colfax, always deeply interested in railroads in connection with expansion of the American West, had acquired some steeply discounted railroad stock from a colleague, Congressman Oakes Ames of Massachusetts, about which he later would have much regret.
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During the 1870 congressional elections, he pointedly announced that at only age fifty he would not be seeking reelection to the vice presidency in 1872. The announcement immediately launched speculation as to why and what he would be doing thereafter. Railroad magnate Jay Cooke, then planning construction of the Northern Pacific Railroad, sounded him out about a job in Washington looking after interests in acquiring land grants, federal appropriations for advance construction, and protection for workers in the Indian territories. Cooke later wrote that he thought “Mr. Colfax would combine his editorial, political and oratorical talents” to help achieve the project, for which he would be paid twenty-five thousand dollars a year. The offer was attractive to Colfax, who had never made much money, but he turned it down, noting he would otherwise have to resign the vice presidency.