1823.]

BIRTH AND ANCESTRY.

553

SKETCH OF SCHUYLER COLFAX.

SCHUYLER COLFAX was born in a house yet standing in North Moore Street, in the city of New York, on the twentythird of March, 1823-eleven months later than Grant.

His grandfather, William Colfax, a native of Connecticut, was commissioned a lieutenant in the continental army at seventeen, and before the war ended became a brigadiergeneral. He commanded Washington's body-guard and enjoyed his personal friendship. After independence was established he resided in New Jersey, and married Hester Schuyler, a cousin of General Philip Schuyler. Washington stood godfather for their first son who bore his name.

The third son, Schuyler Colfax, became a citizen of New York and teller of the Mechanics' Bank. He died young; and four months afterward, the subject of this sketch was born to a widowed mother.

The slender school education which young Schuyler received never included a lesson in English grammar. It was all obtained in the public schools of New York, and finished at the high school in Crosby Street when he was ten years old. But he was rich in a mother whose character was very lovable and whose life was very beautiful.

For three years after leaving school he was clerk in a store. When he was thirteen, the family-Mrs. Colfax had married again-removed to the village of New Carlisle, in northern Indiana. There, again, for four years, Schuyler worked as a clerk. He was an assiduous reader. Old citizens relate that he used to sit upon barrels in the store, in idle moments, devouring every scrap of newspaper he could find; and make trips on foot, or with the family wagon, to South Bend, where he could borrow books.

When he was eighteen the family removed to South Bend. Mr. Matthews, his step-father, was elected county auditor, and appointed the youth his deputy.

Here, for two years, Schuyler was a leading spirit in a "moot" legislature, and obtained his first facility in debate and his first knowledge of parliamentary law. Politics always fascinated him. At eleven he was so interested in

554

FOUNDS THE SOUTH BEND REGISTER.

[1845.

an election that he visited the polls in New York and Brooklyn to get the earliest intelligence of the result. Now he began to write for newspapers, and soon gained a local reputation and a name for clearness and strength in arguing, both orally and scripturally. All regarded him as a youth of great kindness and integrity and high intellectual promise.

Before he was twenty-one he reported the Indiana State Senate, for the Indianapolis Journal, two winters, at two dollars per day. To his unsuccessful request for an increase of salary, the proprietor replied that the position was gaining him wide acquaintance, which he could one day turn to advantage when he became candidate for Congress. Schuyler laughingly offered to do the work and sell out his chances for three dollars a day.

He was a born journalist, and at twenty-two founded in South Bend the weekly St. Joseph Valley Register. It began with two hundred and fifty subscribers. The end of the first year of unremitting work found him in debt thirteen hundred and seventy-five dollars; but he toiled on cheerily.

Once, his printing-office-upon which there was not a cent of insurance-burned to the ground; but he began anew, and soon had one of the most widely circulated and influential journals in the State. The Register, first whig, afterward republican, advocated zealously the temperance and anti-slavery reforms, was full of interesting selections, and notable for the ability and clearness of its editorials.

In 1848 he was a delegate to and secretary of the national convention which nominated Taylor for the Presidency.

When the Wilmot Proviso-prohibiting slavery in all our territory acquired through the Mexican war-was before Congress, he advocated it earnestly. The Register said :—

"True to the impulses of freedom, the popular branch of Congress has, by its action, given embodiment and form to that public opinion of the Northern States which declares: 'Not another inch of slave territory!' It is, indeed, a manly stand. It makes the pulse of those who hope yet to see the day when the chain of human bondage shall be broken, beat quicker and more gladly. It sounds in the ears of those who prefer anarchy and dissolution to a gradual emancipation, as the knell of the peculiar institution.' And like those Christmas chimes, which Dickens so beautifully portrays as constantly repeating the same language to the poor Briton, so, wherever throughout the whole South this news shall speed, it will seem to every ear, constantly, in expressive language, to ring forth: 'It must fall! It must fall!'"

In 1849 he was a leading and influential member of a convention to revise the constitution of Indiana. He earnestly opposed, with tongue and pen, a clause in the new constitution-which the people ratified at the polls