Indiana. Here young Schuyler served four years more as clerk in a country store in New Carlisle, devoting his leisure hours to reading and private study. He must early have manifested the traits of character which have won for him large success and national fame, for we find him at the age of seventeen years appointed Deputy County Auditor. This occasioned his removal to South Bend, the county seat, where his home has been ever since.

At South Bend, he gained time from the performance of his official duties to study State law so thoroughly that he soon came to be regarded as an acknowledged authority in its exposition. He also read general law quite thoroughly, though with no intention of devoting himself to the legal profession; but the knowledge and mental discipline thus acquired, were an important part of the training that prepared him for the duties of that broader profession for which he was being unconsciously fitted-that of an honest, wise, and truly patriotic statesman. During these years, also, his practical education for the future was developing in another direction: he was not simply storing legal lore, he was acquiring the faculty of thought and of expression. He thought and talked on the political questions that engaged popular attention; he wrote out his views so clearly and forcibly as to command for them ready admittance to the columns of the local press. He became a ready, clear and vigorous writer; his articles at the same time gaining favor for themselves by the spirit of fairness and good humor with which he approached every theme. He also acquired much practice as well as a good reputation as a writer, during his employment by the Indianapolis Journal as reporter of the proceedings of the State Senate through several sessions.

CHAPTER II.

MANHOOD AND PUBLIC LIFE.

AT TWENTY-TWO, HE BECOMES EDITOR AND PROPRIETOR of a newspaper.-THE DEBATING CLUB -GOES TO CONGRESS.-HIS MAIDEN SPEECH.-SUCCESSIVE RE-ELECTIONS TO CONGRESS.-IS CHOSEN SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE.-SECOND INAUGURAL ADDRESS.-ACROSS THE CONTINENT.— IS NOMINATED FOR THE VICE PRESDENCY.-LETTER OF ACCEPTANCE.

Having had such training, and having manifested such ability, industry and energy during these years, we are not surprised to find him assuming the proprietorship and editorship of the St. Joseph Valley Register in 1845, when only one year had elapsed since his attaining his majority. Thus, though not a practical printer, not "bred a printer," as erroneously stated by Mr. Lanman in his Dictionary of Congress, he was early a newspaper man, and was long a skillful and influential journalist. He continued his connection with his paper until within three or four years,―during his first two terms in Congress, contributing a regular weekly letter for its columns. The Register in the hands of Mr. Colfax was always able, courteous, dignified, high-toned, in sympathy with the temperance reform, and whatever sought the best interests and improvement of society.

It was a year or two previous to his purchase of The Register that Mr. Colfax began to cultivate with characteristic energy the power of expression in public speech, as he had already been in training for a facile use of the pen. The village debating club, with its regular weekly meetings through the winter seasons, was now the means used, and diligently did he use it, being rarely absent from the meetings or unprepared for an active participation in the debates. An active member of the same club was Hon. John D. Defrees, now at the head of the Government Printing, between whom and Mr. Colfax existed warm friendship, which the lapse of these twenty years

has not impaired: Mr. Colfax's skill and power as a popular speaker are doubtless largely due to the discipline of those winter evening discussions.

In his early political faith and associations, Mr. Colfax was a Whig, and had become influential in the counsels of his party, and when it died he, with many others of its wisest and progressive minds joined the new party of progress-the Republican party. In 1848, he was a delegate to the National Convention, which nominated Gen. Taylor for the presidency, and was one of its secretaries. In 1850, he represented his county in the Constitutional Convention which framed the present State Constitution, and took an active and influential part in its proceedings. He vigorously opposed the exclusion of free colored men from settling in the State, which probably occasioned his defeat the next year when he was a candidate for Congress; but his marked popularity was shown by his being only two hundred and thirty-eight votes behind, in a district before largely Democratic.

In 1852, he declined a re-nomination to Congress, but was again a member and secretary of the Whig National Convention, and was very active during the campaign both with his pen and in the canvass. His district, which he had, by his personal appeal two years before, so nearly carried, was now lost by one thousand votes.

In 1854, he was re-nominated for Congress, and elected by two thousand majority. The previous Congress, the Thirty-third, had passed the famous Nebraska Bill, permitting the extension of slavery into the territories. This aroused in the North a spirit of resistance, and when the Thirty-fourth Congress assembled, December 3d, 1855, there occurred in the House between the anti-slavery-extension members and their opponents a fierce contest for the Speakership which lasted for two months, until February 2d, 1856, and finally resulted in the election of Mr. Banks, the anti-slavery candidate. In the midst of this struggle, the situation became such at one time that a practical Democratic victory seemed almost certain, when the skillful tact of Mr. Colfax happily intervened and saved the day.

His first speech in Congress was delivered in June, 1856, on the bogus 'Laws' of Kansas; it was a masterly effort, and received the high compliment of being printed and distributed to the people of the United States, to the extent of five hundred thousand copies. "By way of driving quite home" (says the popular authoress of "Men of our Times,") "the truths of the case, Mr. Colfax, when he quoted the clause which inflicted imprisonment at hard labor with ball and chain, upon any one who should even say 'that persons have not the right to hold slaves in this territory', lifted from his desk and showed to the House an iron ball of the statutory dimensions (viz., six inches diameter, weighing about thirty pounds), apologizing for not also exhibiting the six-feet chain prescribed with it. Alexander H. Stephens, afterward Vice-President of the Confederacy, who sat close by, asked to take this specimen of pro-slavery jewelry for freemen, and having tested its weight, would have returned it. But Mr. Colfax smilingly asked him to hold it for him until he was through speaking, and while the pro-slavery leader dandled the decoration proposed by his friends for men guilty of free speech, Mr. Colfax, in a few telling sentences, showed that Washington, and Jefferson, and Webster, and Clay, had said the words which would have harnessed them, a quarternion of convicts, into the chain-gang." Mr. Colfax closed as follows:

"As I look, sir, to the smiling valleys and fertile fields of Kansas, and witness there the sorrowful scenes of civil war, in which, when forbearance at last ceased to be a virtue, the Free State men of the territory felt it necessary, deserted as they were by their Government, to defend their lives, their families, their property, and their hearth-stones, the language of one of the noblest statesmen of the age, uttered six years ago at the other end of the Capitol, rises before my mind. I allude to the great statesman of Kentucky, Henry Clay. And while the party which, while he lived, lit the torch of slander at every avenue of his private life, and libelled him before the American people by every epithet that renders man infamous, as a gambler, debauchee, traitor, and enemy of his country, are now engaged in shedding fictitious tears over his grave, and appealing to his old supporters to aid by their votes in shielding them from the indignation of an uprisen people, I ask them to read this language of his which comes to us from his tomb to-day. With the change of but a single geographical word in the place of 'Mexico,' how prophetically does it apply to the very scenes and issues of this year! And who

can doubt with what party he would stand in the coming campaign, if he were restored to us from the damps of the grave, when they read the following, which fell from his lips in 1850, and with which, thanking the House for its attention, I conclude my remarks:

"But if, unhappily, we should be involved in war, in civil war, between the two parties of this confederacy, in which the effort should be, on one side, to restrain the introduction of slavery into the new territories, and, upon the other side, to force its introduction there, what a spectacle should we present to the astonishment of mankind, in an effort-not to propagate rights-but, I must say it, though I trust it will be said with no design to excite feeling,—a war to propagate wrongs in the territories thus acquired from Mexico! It would be a war in which we should have no sympathies, no good wishes-in which all mankind would be against us; for, from the commencement of the Revolution down to the present time, we have constantly reproached our British ancestors for the introduction of slavery into this country.'"

In 1856, while he was still in Washington, Mr. Colfax was again re-nominated for Congress by acclamation and elected by a large majority. Each subsequent election has witnessed the same result, the present being the thirteenth year of his service of his constituents, at Washington. During the Thirty-sixth Congress, (two years from March, 1859), he was Chairman of the Committee on Post-Offices and Post-Roads, and did much towards extending mail facilities among the new mining communities of the West, and also in preparing the way for the establishment of the daily Overland Mail and the Overland Telegraph to San Francisco.

In 1863, he was elected Speaker of the House of Representatives for the Thirty-eighth Congress, and has been continued in the same position by the Thirty-ninth and Fortieth Congresses. The House never had a more popular presiding officer since Henry Clay; his fairness, promptness and good nature, commending him to all.

His re-election to the Speakership by the 39th Congress was by the largest political majority ever given to a speaker of the House. When the vote had been announced by the clerk, all eyes were turned upon Mr. Colfax, whose well-proportioned figure of a medium size, pleasing countenance often radiant with smiles, and style of movement quick and restless yet calm and self-possessed, were already familiar from his previous