as Delegate from Kansas. Nevertheless, the House passed a bill for the relief of Kansas-repealing the "bogus laws" and providing for the election of a new Legislature -which was tabled in the Senate. Important measures of the session were an Enabling Act for Minnesota, an act enlarging the free list and reducing the tariff, an act to aid in laying a telegraph cable across the Atlantic, and acts providing for an overland telegraph and a wagon and mail road to the Pacific.

In connection with the tariff bill, Colfax interested himself in getting sugar placed on the free list with the poor man's other luxuries, tea and coffee, contending in a set speech, February 5th, 1857, that the existing ad valorem duty of thirty per cent was as impotent to sustain unprofitable sugar works as it was needless for revenue, the Treasury being full to overflowing, and sugar-planting, after sixty years of high protection, in a moribund condition. These positions he supported with an abundance of statistical facts, showing his mastery of the subject. Unable to carry this, he urged the substitution of a specific duty of one and a half cents on brown and of two cents on loaf sugar per pound, for the absurd ad valorem duty, which, rising with the price of sugar, increased the more the less it was needed, and vice versa. The Legislature of his State supported him by memorializing Congress on the subject. No doubt, opportunity serving, nine out of ten of the voters of the entire country would have sustained him; but his proposition was rejected. All other interests affected by the bill had their agents on hand to look out for them, while free sugar, being everybody's, was really nobody's business. It had to stand on its own merits, sustained by such members only as felt it to be a duty; and they had to meet, as was to be expected, the united opposi tion of the Louisiana delegation. Since that day the country must have paid in bounty to the sugar-planters of Louisiana five times as much as the entire interest is worth, and free sugar is still in the future. Colfax was an advocate of protection, as long as he lived, but of protection judiciously applied. At that time he believed that free

sugar would strengthen the new party of freedom, and he could not appreciate the consistency of Protectionists who opposed free sugar while favoring free salt and free wool. Taken vigorously to task by Mr. Greeley in the Tribune for alleged recreancy to protection, he defended his position with equal vigor in the columns of that paper.'

Certain so-called "corruption cases," affecting several members of Congress and some press reporters, threw the country and Congress into a panic in the course of this session. Mr. J. W. Simonton having charged corruption in connection with the passage of certain bills in his letters to the New York Times, and Mr. Paine, of North Carolina, having stated that a fellow-member had offered him fifteen hundred dollars for his vote in a given case, a special committee was appointed to investigate the subject. Simonton proved a contumacious witness, and it was proposed to commit him to custody pending a hearing at the Bar of the House. Colfax thereupon contended for his right to be heard at once on being taken into custody, and this course was adopted. After listening to his reason for not answering-that it would be a breach of confidence --the House ordered him to be kept in close custody by

1. Mr. Greeley writes him, on Christmas day, 1856: "I have just been talking to you about sugar (in the Tribune), with tears in my eyes, almost. You seem to me (in the milder sense) a very unprincipled politician. I don't know whether this sugar move isn't worse than your vote to extend the right of suffrage to aliens or your Know-Nothing obligation to deprive adopted citizens of the substantial benefits of citizenship. [The reader knows that he never took that obligation.] I think I shall have to get Fremont to come out a red-mouthed Catholic, to qualify him for your ardent support in 1860. Convey my most devout wishes for all good fortune to Mrs. Colfax, who isn't a politician, except reasonably, and who shall have my vote for member of Congress, if she wants it, when Women's Rights are acknowledged. I wish the present Congress could be sent home, and the members' wives left to legislate in their stead. Do you think they would have passed that scandalous Compensation Bill? No, sir; not by a heap! Remember me to two or three of the best folks in Washington; try to get that Compensation Bill amended to some purpose; and don't forget that the egg-nog (is there another g?) that they dispense about these days in Washington is a very slippery drink in icy weather, and not precisely accordant with the principles of the Sons of Temperance."

Again, on the 28th: "I am sorry the hardness of your heart and blindness of your understanding didn't permit you to see the perverseness of your course with regard to sugar; but I won't argue the case over again. If they believe not Moses and the prophets, etc. Let sorghum get half the start that wool has to-day, and I'll vote with you to take the duty off of sugar, as I would now vote to take it off of wool, not shufflingly, as Lew Campbell's bill does, but manfully and wholly. As to your Know-Nothingism and the opposite, we'll agree to let one of them balance the other, and hold you just about right on five years' probation, with safeguards against frauds."

the Sergeant-at-Arms, if he persisted in his contumacy till the close of the session. Colfax voted for this order, on the ground that after what he had said, tainting the whole House, Simonton should, in justice to the innocent, give the name of the accused.

The House imprisoned Simonton, and the investigating committee at once reported a bill, breaking down all the protection which the common law throws around a witness, and clothing a committee of Congress with Star Chamber powers in such cases. With eleven others, Colfax voted against this bill, believing it to be his duty not to give "the vote of our district for such hasty and extraordinary legislation." The Senate quickly and almost unanimously passed the bill, few members of either House actually approving it, still fewer voting against it, for fear of misconstruction.

The investigating committee proceeded with its work, finally reporting a resolution to expel four members of the House and exclude two reporters from the floor. A long and heated debate occurred near the end of the session, Colfax unflinchingly maintaining that these men, as all others, should have fair treatment. He would certainly vote to expel for bribery, he said, but not on impeached, and surely not on secret, ex-parte, mutilated, and partly suppressed testimony. Two members resigned, no one was expelled, and the reporters were excluded from the floor. Of the many men who in this instance displayed the merely animal instincts which most men do in a panic, Colfax was not one.

The burden of the argument for the act was that it was necessary to ferret out corruption among Congressmen. Yet the first case in which its functions were invoked was the investigation of John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, a political case; and the contumacious witness defeated its purpose by submitting to imprisonment until the session had expired. The Thirty-seventh Congress repealed the prom inent features of the law, as thieves were enriching them selves under it, and avoiding prosecution by going before investigating committees and testifying to their own guilt.

Years afterward Colfax wrote in the New York Independent that he and Burlingame had agreed together that, despite the threats of political ostracism, they would vote against the bill, if not amended, even though it should consign them to private life.

"For that vote, in his ensuing Congressional canvass, the writer was most bitterly arraigned and denounced, on the stump, in the press, and in all possible ways. Thousands of circulars, charging him with shielding Congressional corruption, were scattered broadcast, as well as carried by colporteurs into nearly every house in his district. But he cheerfully accepted the issue, and in a hundred public speeches proclaimed and justified this vote, for which he was so severely condemned by his opponents. The result was that his majority was nearly double that which he had received at his previous election, five to seven hundred ahead of the State ticket in his district, proving, if proof were needed, that it is better for men in public life to seek to be right than to be popular."

All the endeavors of the Western members to call up the River and Harbor bills, inclusive of the bill which Mr. Colfax had introduced to continue the improvement of the one Lake port of Indiana, at Michigan City, were defeated by "filibustering;" and as they could not command a vote to suspend the rules, the bills failed. On the last day of the session Mr. Colfax procured the passage of a resolution increasing the pay of the hard-working Journal Clerk of the House to the same amount paid the Chief Clerk under the Secretary of the Senate.

Some time during this session his wife's sister, Mrs. McClaughry, wrote Mrs. Colfax :

'William Hunt, one of our neighbors, who recently emigrated to Lee County, Ill., says 'Colfax' is one of their watchwords, and the people worship him there. If ever you have experienced sensations of pride and happiness so intense as to bring tears into your eyes and it was impossible to repress them, you can judge with what feelings I have watched Schuyler Colfax's course in Congress, and heard encomiums passed upon him by those whose opinions I have always deemed worthy of honor. And when Mr. Briggs took me by the hand and said to me, A nobler man and one more worthy of honor than Schuyler Colfax never lived,' I was foolish enough to cry about it."

Such was the commentary of one of his fair countrywomen on his services in his first Congress.

CHAPTER IV.

THIRTY-FIFTH CONGRESS.

1857-1859.

COLFAX AND WHEELER.-EDITORIAL COMMENTS ON CURRENT EVENTS. -THE FREE-STATE PARTY IN KANSAS CARRY THE LEGISLATURE.— THE LECOMPTON CONSTITUTION.-CONGRESS ORGANIZED BY THE ADMINISTRATION.-ON THE INDIAN AFFAIRS COMMITTEE.—Attitude AND RECORD.-ATTEMPT TO ADMIT KANSAS UNDER AN ALIEN CONSTITUTION.-DEFECTION OF DOUGLAS.-CONFIDENTIAL CONFERENCES WITH DOUGLAS.-DOUGLAS AND BUCHANAN DIFFER BUT Slightly. -COLFAX SPEAKS AGAINST THE LECOMPTON INIQUITY.—RenOMINATED, HIS OPPONENT AVOIDS A JOINT CANVASS.-" A PROUD PERSONAL TRIUMPH."-VOTES FOR THE ADMISSION OF OREGON.-TENDENCY OF THE TIMES, EDITORIAL CORRESPONDENCE.-AGAINST LANDGRABBING, ESPECIALLY TO EXTEND SLAVERY.-THE SLAVE POWER CRUMBLES IN THIS CONGRESS.

UPON the adjournment, sine die, of the Thirty-fourth Congress, Mr. Colfax resumed his editorial duties, announcing that he had associated Mr. Alfred Wheeler with him, in both the editing and publishing of the Register. The paper would be found in its humble sphere, he said, faithful to the rights of freedom, although Presidents and Senates, Courts and Cabinets, should combine to crush them out. For eleven years, less occasional absences, he had conducted the paper alone, a work as pleasant to him as he trusted the result of it had been to his patrons. Each twelvemonth had seen the circle of its readers enlarge, and now, as for some years past, the Register had more subscribers than any weekly paper in the State outside of the capital. During the whole of that long term it had never failed, not even when the office was burned, to appear on the day of publication; and the new firm, Colfax & Wheeler, would endeavor to maintain the same regular