The American Vice Presidency (31 page)

Cooke then offered to hire Colfax after he was to leave office, and the vice president said nothing would please him more at that time. Cooke tried again, asking Colfax whether he might accept a temporary position with no government activities at all, but again the answer was no. He told Cooke he would be as helpful to him as he could “without any remuneration whatever,” and that was the end of the offer.
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It turned out, however, that earlier Colfax had taken advantage of a Cooke offer to buy original stock at very favorable price, separate from the stock he had acquired from Ames.
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In August 1871, Colfax was surprised to receive a letter from Grant. The secretary of state, Hamilton Fish, was ailing and wanted to resign. “In plain English,” Grant asked, “will you give up the Vice-Presidency to be Secretary of State for the balance of my term of office?… In all my heart I hope you will say yes, though I confess the sacrifice you will be making.”
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Nothing came of this strange request, when Fish acceded to a petition from Colfax and forty-four senators to stay in office.

One of the vice president’s last notable official duties came in 1872 when he cast a tie-breaking vote for an amendment to an amnesty bill providing equal rights for blacks on public conveyances, in railroad stations, theaters, churches, and schools, and on juries. The proposal, which later was dropped from the bill, was ahead of its time, and Colfax observed of it: “We should either acknowledge that the Constitution is a nullity or should insist on that obedience to it by all, and protection under it to all.”
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In 1872, Grant remained popular and was assured of renomination. But a stock market crash resulting from wild gold speculation in 1869, dissatisfaction with the conduct of the administration and corruption within it, and the emergence of the new Liberal Republican faction all clouded the election outcome. In May, the Liberal Republicans called their own national convention in Cincinnati and nominated the New York publisher Horace Greeley for president. The immobilized Democrats threw in with them, holding no convention of their own.

Meanwhile, Colfax’s original declaration that he would not run again had inspired Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts and friends to jump in. But Colfax suddenly changed his mind. When Wilson was asked by the
New-York Tribune
how Colfax’s change of heart had affected his own position, he replied, “The revocation of the Vice President and his declination was to me a surprise. It placed me in an unpleasant position, and my first impulse was to withdraw from the contest, but by the advice of some of the best Republicans of the land—East, West and South—I leave the question to personal and political friends.” But upon the advice of leading Republicans, Wilson decided to leave the matter in the party’s hands.
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At the Republican convention in Philadelphia in June, with Grant remaining aloof and neutral, Wilson was chosen on the first ballot as his 1872 running mate.

More than two months after the convention, Colfax was implicated in a questionable stock deal in which a finance company called Credit Mobilier, established by the directors of the Union Pacific Railroad in 1867 to underwrite its construction, was investigated on charges of lining the pockets of certain members of Congress. Representative Oakes Ames had been recruited to offer stock to them, including Speaker Colfax; Senator Wilson; Congressmen James A. Garfield, a future president; James Brooks;
and James G. Blaine, a future presidential nominee. Some paid ridiculously low prices for the stock, some did not have to put any money down, and all reaped large dividends. The charges against Colfax had not been aired at the time of his defeat for renomination and hence were not a factor in that outcome.

In January 1873, however, the House investigating committee called Colfax to testify. He had already said he had never owned any of the stock that he had not paid for, but Ames testified that because the retiring vice president lacked the money needed to buy the stock, it had been bought with its rising dividends. Notes produced by Ames indicated that Colfax had received another twelve hundred dollars in dividends, but he denied ever having received the dividend check. When it was turned up in the files of the House sergeant-at-arms and recorded on a bank deposit slip in Colfax’s handwriting, he insisted the money had come from a completely unrelated source. Further, the committee produced evidence that Colfax, as chairman of the House Post Offices and Post Roads Committee, had taken payments for post office contracts.

A resolution to impeach him was introduced in the House but failed to pass on an essentially party-line vote, with members willing to let Colfax off with only weeks left in his term. He remained, however, a disgraced symbol of congressional and Wall Street corruption. Of all the other members of Congress involved, only Ames and Brooks were formally censured by the House. The once highly admired Colfax retired to his home in South Bend. After being asked to deliver remarks at the unveiling of a Lincoln statue in Springfield, Illinois, he embarked on a lucrative turn as a Lincoln lecturer. En route to a speech engagement in Iowa on January 13, 1885, he suffered a heart attack at a railroad station in Mankato, Minnesota, and died, identified only by the papers he carried.

Schuyler Colfax thus left the scene as little more than an asterisk in the history books. He was a foot soldier in the ranks of Radical Republicans and toiled constructively in the cause of congressional reconstruction as Speaker of the House. As such he was widely regarded as a man of genial rectitude. But as vice president in the Grant administration he was a man without a serious mission. Left to the temptations of ill gain, in the end Colfax would be remembered most for the corruption to which he himself contributed. And in his hands, the second office, already held in low regard by many if not most Americans, was further diminished.

HENRY WILSON

OF MASSACHUSETTS

F
ew men who rose to the doorstep of the American presidency had a more unlikely road to that prominence than the man who became President Grant’s vice president in his second term, Henry Wilson. Actually he was born Jeremiah Jones Colbath in the village of Farmington, New Hampshire, on February 16, 1812. For the most pecuniary of reasons, his father, Winthrop Colbath, a poor, unkempt, and hard-drinking ne’er-do-well, named his first child after a wealthy bachelor neighbor in the hope, unfulfilled, that the man would leave his namesake a substantial amount of money if he died childless. The callous act may have contributed in time to the boy’s alienation from the New England aristocracy and fierce identification with the plight of the poor and disadvantaged, a plight that he shared as a youth and an identification that he maintained through his life.

Growing up uneducated in either scholarship or manners, he developed into a rough-hewn troublemaker with a profane tongue, which his mother, Abigail, sought to combat by urging him to read. When he was ten years old, his father placed him as a field hand with a local farmer, committing him to live, work, and obey his “master” until he reached the age of twenty-one. He was not to leave without permission, not to “play at cards, dice, or any other unlawful games … not haunt or frequent taverns, playhouses or alehouses … not commit fornication [or] contract matrimony.” At the end
of this indentured servitude, he would be given “one yoke of likely working cattle” and “one good suit for everyday wear.”
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Rather than rebelling, the young man sold his hard-earned livestock and enrolled briefly in three private academies, eventually becoming a part-time teacher. At age nineteen he took a vow against drinking, including advocating temperance in general. And on his twenty-first birthday he changed his name to Henry Wilson to make a clean break from his unsatisfactory past. He moved to Natick, Massachusetts, where he found a master cobbler to teach him the trade. In time he built a thriving business, making shoes himself and later taking on others to help with that work. On a trip to Washington, D.C., he observed things that set him on his life’s course, scenes ranging from Congress at work to black servitude at its most brutal, featuring the auctioning off of men herded into slave pens. On the way back to New England, he witnessed many of them toiling under close supervision in tobacco fields in Maryland. He vowed to do what he could to combat the glaring evil.

In 1837, while he was teaching school on the side in Natick, a young girl named Harriet Howe caught his eye, and after three years, when she was still only sixteen years old, he married her, bringing more stability to his life. In 1840 as a Whig, he won a seat in the Massachusetts General Court.
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He was reelected in 1842 and then to the state Senate in 1844, at age twenty-eight.

The Whig Party in Massachusetts at the time was split between the economy-driven “Cotton Whigs,” who supported the textile mills in New England and the mills’ link to the cotton plantations of the South, and the moralistic “Conscience Whigs,” whose politics were motivated by opposition to slavery and the economic power it bestowed on the South. As part of the latter group, Wilson argued that if anti-slavery forces in the Whig and Democratic Parties could unite into a party of their own, the Whig Party in the North could become the vehicle to wrest from the South its hold on slavery and its power over the country’s economy. But in time he fell out with the Whigs, and after a flirtation with the new Free Soil and then the Know-Nothing Party, he found a home in the emerging Republican Party.

In 1854, the Know-Nothings in Massachusetts elected Wilson to the U.S. Senate, but he took the seat as a Republican, to some party distress,
teaming with the Republican Charles Sumner as the fiercest of antislavery warriors. When in 1855, during the fight over the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, Sumner delivered a blistering assault on “the crime against Kansas,” Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina walked onto the Senate floor and broke a cane over Sumner’s head. Wilson denounced the “brutal, murderous and cowardly assault,” whereupon Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina, Brooks’s uncle, called Wilson “a liar!” as the president of the Senate called for order.
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Wilson told a friend he feared the same fate as a result of his outspoken anti-slavery views. Newspapers reported that Wilson carried revolvers and a rifle disguised as a walking cane as he came and left the Senate. He wrote a friend asking him to look after his family if anything happened to him.
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Later in the month, when Wilson took a train to Trenton for a Republican organizational meeting, he was accompanied by a bodyguard of armed friends, and he told his audience that “the same power that spilled the blood of the freemen of Kansas had used the bludgeon against Senator Sumner.” And back in Washington when a friend confided his fear to Wilson that the senator would be murdered, Wilson pulled a pair of revolvers from his coat, remarking, “Then two will be killed; I am a pretty strong man.”
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Brooks, meanwhile, portraying the aggrieved party, challenged Wilson to a duel. Wilson refused, saying he would not engage in “the lingering relic of barbarous civilization, which the law of the country has branded as a crime,” nor would he retract his accusation against Brooks for brutal and cowardly behavior. Then he wired his wife: “Have declined to fight a duel, shall do my duty and leave the result to God. If assailed, shall defend my life, if possible, at any cost. Be calm.”
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Across Massachusetts and beyond, Wilson was lauded for his conduct. As a Republican, he was still guided by his commitment to the fight against human bondage but did not seek to eradicate slavery where it already existed in the South. He was more interested in loosening the economic stranglehold that slavery had on the prosperity of the country. In 1859, Wilson was jolted by the raid of abolitionist John Brown on a federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, still within Virginia at the time, as part of an attempt to spark a slave insurrection. He feared that the Republican Party would be blamed for encouraging violence in the quest for an end to slavery and would doom the chances to put one of its own in the White House in 1860.

But the threat passed with the nomination of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin of Maine as his running mate and the politically serendipitous three-way split in the Democratic constituency that brought victory to the Republican team.

Wilson saw the victory as the culmination of his long effort to crush the power of the South, and in his exuberance he sent an unwise signal. At a tumultuous victory celebration in Boston, he exulted, “Tonight, thanks be to God, we stand with the Slave Power beneath our feet. That haughty power which corrupted the Whig party, strangled the American party, and used the Democratic party as a tool, lies crushed in the dust tonight, and our heel is upon it.” And to the southern slaveholders threatening to secede, he challenged, “Go on if you dare! We intend to stand by the Union, come what may.”
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But the South wasn’t listening, didn’t hear, or didn’t care. South Carolina seceded on December 20, ten sister states soon followed, along with the firing on Fort Sumter and the outbreak of the Civil War.