The Crédit Mobilier Scandal Ruined Schuyler Colfax… Or Did It?

Revisionist history has painted an uglier story of the former Vice President than ever existed during the man's own lifetime

BY AARON HELMAN // POSTED SEPTEMBER 15, 2025

They used to call Schuyler Colfax a politician who had never made a mistake. He'd never had a scandal, never found himself on the wrong side of history, never made an enemy that he couldn't defeat. He was calm when the nation braced for Civil War, steadfast during the conflict, and unwavering in the aftermath.

When Ulysses S. Grant — a man who had never held any political office at any level — won the Presidency, the nation had no reason to be concerned about the General's inexperience. After all, he had the straight and steady hand of Schuyler Colfax to guide him from the Vice President's office.

That was 1868.

Fifty years later, historians started comparing Colfax to Satan.

Revisionist history is surprisingly easy to write. All you need to do is look at a list of things that happened and then ascribe causation from one item to the next to suit whichever narrative you're hoping to write.

In the case of Schuyler Colfax it looks like this:

Schuyler Colfax was a politician with a meteoric rise, but after he was stained with the stink of the Crédit Mobilier Scandal, he never ran for office ever again.

That's all true, of course. But as it usually is, the truth is a little more complicated than the way one Congressional historian wrote it — that Colfax's fall from grace was something as unprecedented and complete as the moment that the angel Lucifer was hurled from the gates of heaven and assigned to become the inaugural resident of Hell.

For the better part of the past hundred years, that historical note has stuck to Schuyler Colfax's legacy in history books and on Wikipedia pages. A man who should be remembered as the most important Congressional figure of the Civil War era is instead remembered a scoundrel with a scandal — if he's remembered at all.

That's a shame for a lot of reasons, but at least we can say it's fortunate that Schuyler Colfax never lived to see any of it happen. During his lifetime, he was only ever honored, revered, and expected. The rest of that stuff wouldn't come until later.

Much later.

The scandal, of course, was real. The scheme was cooked up by unscrupulous railroad barons looking to pocket a few lawmakers who might ask uncomfortable questions. The plan was simple enough — offer Congressmen and Senators discounted railroad stock in exchange for favorable votes.

This wasn't a particularly sophisticated plan, and it wasn't a particularly good one. It was bribery with a paper trail. You already know that bribes aren't supposed to have paper trails.

When the New York Sun broke the story in September 1872, it implicated a who's who of Reconstruction Era Republican leadership: Henry Wilson, the party's new vice-presidential nominee; James Blaine, future presidential candidate; James Garfield, future president. And, yes, Schuyler Colfax.

The story dropped with the kind of partisan timing you would expect. Grant — a Republican — was running for reelection. The Sun, a Democratic paper, was looking to throw a wrench into the works. The Scandal wasn't fake news by any means. It was very real, although it's worth noting that the paper exaggerated the Republican connections to the affair and largely omitted the Democratic connections.

Anyway, Schuyler Colfax wasn't having it. He fired back from South Bend, promising to “touch the fabric of falsehood with the spear of truth.” He pointed out the obvious: he'd been a cheerleader for the railroad since before the stock ever changed hands. Bribing him to vote for it, he said, was like bribing a Methodist minister to support Methodism. In other words, unnecessary.

The skeptics will shout that it's easy to imagine a politician, backed into a corner, willing to say anything and everything in order to cling to power.

But that wasn't Colfax. He wasn't trying to cling to anything. His career in politics was already over, ended before the scandal was ever a whisper. Colfax had served twenty years through Civil War and Reconstruction, enough for any public servant to endure. He was tired. He was newly married. He had business interests to tend to back home. He had a young son.

Around South Bend, Colfax was lauded as a hero. Every election cycle, there came new voices imploring him to run again for office. Colfax denied them every time, insisted he was content in private life. If he would have run, he would have won. He just didn't want to.

There was still the matter of his reputation. Despite his unwavering insistence that he was retired from public life, Colfax was his own staunchest defender against the allegations of scandal. There was an investigation. There were testimonies. There were debates.

In the end, the committee discovered nothing that could stick. Colfax was cleared on all charges. Not everyone was so lucky. A pair of Representatives — Oakes Ames and James Brooks — were censured for their participation in the scheme. Of course, it's worth pointing out that since Colfax no longer a member of Congress, they couldn't have censured him even if they wanted to.

There is nothing so far discovered that proves beyond any reasonable doubt that Colfax accepted the bribes. There's certainly not anything that proves that he didn't. For people in 1873, it was a wholly partisan issue. If you liked Colfax and his party, you probably thought he was innocent. If you were a southern Democrat angry at Colfax's Reconstruction policies, you almost certainly thought he was guilty.

It won't shock you to learn that this political cartoon ran in one of those Democratic papers:

The Crédit Mobilier Scandal ended with a thud. There were those two censures and then there was Schuyler Colfax, left to sit in judgment in the court of public opinion. Everyone else named in the report skated away without too much of a lingering stink. The other Republicans seemed happy enough to let Schuyler Colfax take one for the team, and in that way, maybe Colfax did fall on his own sword. But then, what did he have to lose? He had already decided he was done with politics.

By the end of 1873, the court of public opinion was split right down the middle about Schuyler Colfax, but by 1875, they just didn't care anymore. They'd moved on. By the time the bonkers bartered election of 1876 came around, Schuyler Colfax and his rumored scandals were beyond the collective memory.

Meanwhile, the former Vice President was in South Bend living his best life. He invested in local businesses, helped start the YMCA, served as vice president of the bank, and showed up to make stump speeches at every political rally that invited him. He was a man whose support you desired, not someone whose stain you tried to avoid.

As a political and historical lecturer, Colfax was just about the most in-demand figure on the circuit, crisscrossing the nation to cheering crowds and near-universal acclaim. Towns lit fireworks and boomed cannons when his trains arrived at their stations. Crowds assembled so deep that the latecomers in the back could barely hear his voice and could not make out his face.

It's hardly the welcome you'd expect for a man remembered by most contemporary historians for the weight of his alleged sins. In the case of Crédit Mobilier, there remain arguments to be made for and against Colfax's innocence. But the idea that he was somehow ruined by the controversy is a more modern construct, and it's certainly not reflected in the esteem his life was given until it ended at that Minnesota train station in 1885.

Whatever permanent stain has been attached to Schuyler Colfax belongs to his legacy, but not his life. If he really is remembered today as a man who fell like Satan, that says more about the way history writes villains than it does about Schuyler Colfax himself.