Schuyler Colfax

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Schuyler Colfax
Signature of Colfax

Schuyler Colfax (born March 23, 1823 in New York City , New York , †  January 13, 1885 in Mankato , Minnesota ) was an American politician and from March 1869 to March 1873 the 17th  Vice President of the United States during the first term by President Ulysses S. Grant . Since December 1863 he sat in the House of Representatives , to which he had been a member since 1855, as its spokesman .

Life

Schuyler Colfax, who came from a poor background, started working in a trading company when he was ten. Three years later he moved with his mother to Indiana , where he accepted a job as an auditor for St. Joseph County in 1841 .

In 1845 Colfax founded the St. Joseph Valley Register newspaper , through which he soon exerted great influence as a member of the Whig Party . In 1848 the Whigs elected him because of his political abilities as a delegate to the Philadelphia convention ( Whig National Convention ), at which he received the office of secretary. In 1854 he was elected to the United States House of Representatives as a Republican for the ninth constituency of Indiana . At the beginning of his parliamentary career, he had made a name for himself through his fight against slavery . In 1861 he became chairman of the commission for transport and dealt with the construction of railway connections to the west, which was realized in the Central Pacific Railroad .

Elected Speaker of the House of Representatives on December 7, 1863 , he made himself very popular in this position through his temperance and firmness, so that in the presidential election in 1868 he was elected as running mate of the victorious President Ulysses S. Grant into the office of Vice President, which he took up on March 4, 1869. Since he was also President of the Senate by virtue of his office , he was one of only two people who presided over both chambers of Congress on the same day (the other was John Nance Garner on March 4, 1933, who was also the Speaker of the House moved to the vice-presidency). Like other vice presidents at the time, Colfax was de facto without political influence. He was not a close confidante of President Grant and therefore exercised no influence on government policy. Instead, I was mainly occupied with the (unspectacular) management of the Senate and performed ceremonial tasks. In the run-up to the presidential election in 1872 , he was not nominated again because of numerous scandals and corruption affairs in his party; he handed over the office to his successor Henry Wilson on March 4, 1873 and was again active as a businessman. He died of a heart attack on January 13, 1885 .

Commemoration

Cities in Iowa , North Carolina , Illinois , Washington , Wisconsin , Indiana , and Louisiana and the counties of Colfax County, Nebraska and Colfax County, New Mexico are named after him.

In culture

Colfax was portrayed by Bill Raymond in Steven Spielberg's film Lincoln .

literature

  • Jules Witcover: The American Vice Presidency: From Irrelevance to Power. Smithsonian Books, Washington, D. C. 2014, ISBN 978-1-5883-4471-7 , pp. 164-173 (= 17. Schuyler Colfax of Indiana ).

Web links

Commons : Schuyler Colfax  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Remarks

  1. Charles Curry Aiken, Joseph Nathan Kane: The American Counties: Origins of County Names, Dates of Creation, Area, and Population Data, 1950-2010 . 6th edition. Scarecrow Press, Lanham 2013, ISBN 978-0-8108-8762-6 , p. 66 .