Businessman journalist politician
Schuyler Colfax was born on March 23, 1823, in New York City to Schuyler Colfax Sr. (born August 3, 1792), a bank teller, and Hannah Delameter Stryker, who had married on April 25, 1820.
His father died before the son's birth, and his mother subsequently married a Mr Matthews.
He studied law, but was never admitted to the bar.
He attended the public schools of New York until he was ten, and then became a clerk in his step-father's store, removing in 1836 with his mother and step-father to New Carlisle, Indiana.
From 1863 to 1869 he was Speaker of the House.
With presidential candidate Ulysses S. Grant, Colfax won election in November.
In 1868 he had presidential aspirations, and was not without supporters.
He accepted, however, the Republican nomination as vice-president on a ticket headed by General Grant, and was elected; but he failed in 1872 to secure renomination.
During the political campaign of 1872 he was accused, with other prominent politicians, of being implicated in corrupt transactions with the Credit Mobilier, and a congressional investigation brought out the fact that he had agreed to take twenty shares from this concern, and had received dividends amounting to $1200.
In 1845 he established the St Joseph Valley Register, which he published for eighteen years and made an influential Whig and later Republican journal.
After brief work as a reporter he bought the South Bend Free Press and made it the chief Whig organ in northern Indiana.
In 1854 he took an active part in organizing the "anti-Nebraska men" (later the Republican Party) in Indiana, and was elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1854, serving until 1869.
At the close of the Civil War he was a leading member of the radical wing of the Republican party, advocating the disfranchisement of all who had been prominent in the service of the Confederacy, and declaring that " loyalty must govern what loyalty has preserved. "
He was a member of U. S. House of Representatives from Indiana's 9th district.
On October 10, 1844 Colfax married childhood friend Evelyn Clark. She died childless in 1863. On November 18, 1868, two weeks after he was elected vice president, Colfax married Ellen (Ella) M. Wade (1836-1911), a niece of Senator Benjamin Wade. They had one son, Schuyler Colfax III (1870-1929), who served as mayor of South Bend, Indiana from 1898 to 1901.
