1868 Schuyler Colfax Campaign Medal DeWitt SC 1868-3 White Metal

An 1868 campaign medalet for Schuyler Colfax, struck in white metal at 28 mm, cataloged as DeWitt SC 1868-3. White metal took the sharpest impression of any of the cheap alloys, which is why so much of the 1860s medalet trade used it. It is soft and it dulls with handling, so bright examples are the exception rather than the rule. Schuyler Colfax of Indiana was Speaker of the House when the Republicans put him on the 1868 ticket beneath Ulysses S. Grant, and the pairing carried 214 electoral votes to Horatio Seymour's 80. Colfax served one term as vice president. The Credit Mobilier disclosures caught him in 1872, the party dropped him for Henry Wilson, and a man who had been talked of for the presidency left public life instead. Pieces struck for the vice presidential candidate alone, rather than for the head of the ticket, are the smaller part of any campaign's output, and DeWitt gave Colfax his own run of numbers to account for them. Ex J. Doyle DeWitt, whose 1959 catalog A Century of Campaign Buttons is the source of the numbering used here, revised and enlarged by Edmund B. Sullivan in 1981. Graded Mint State in hand. Offered raw, without certification. This example has the reflective, prooflike fields recognized on certified pieces of the variety. Stack's Bowers records the white metal issue at about 27.6 mm and notes the same reflectivity on another survivor.