Depew
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
CHAUNCEY MITCHELL, an American lawyer; born in Peekskill, N. Y., April 23, 1834, of Huguenot and Puritan ancestry; was graduated at Yale College in 1856, and was admitted to the bar in 1858. In 1860 he worked for the election of Lincoln; 1861-1862, was a member of the New York Assembly, and served some time as chairman of the Committee of Ways and Means, and as acting speaker; 1863, elected Secretary of State of New York; 1865, declined a renomination, and 1866 was commissioned collector of the port of New York by President Johnson, who afterward tore up the commission in a quarrel. He was appointed United States Minister to Japan, and after holding the commission a month declined, and began his career as a railroad official as attorney for the New York and Harlem Railroad. He was made attorney and director of the consolidated Hudson River and New York Central Railroads in 1869; general counsel of the whole Vanderbilt system in 1875; second vice-president of the reorganized New York Central Railroad in 1882, and president in 1885. His political career since 1866 embraces his unsuccessful candidacy as lieutenant-governor on the Liberal Republican ticket in 1872; his election by the Legislature as a regent of the State University in 1874; his candidacy for United States Senator to succeed Thomas C. Platt, in which he withdrew his name after 82 days of balloting in 1881; his declination of the United States senatorship tendered by the Republicans of the Legislature in 1884; his candidacy for the presidential nomination in the national convention in 1888; and his election to the United States Senate 1899- 1911. In 1905 he was involved in the investigation of the New York life insurance companies and repaid a loan obtained from the Equitable, for a concern in which he was interested. At the same time he resigned his directorship in the Equitable. Two volumes of his orations and after-dinner speeches have been published.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
When Collier's wrote this in 1921 Depew was still alive, in his late eighties, and still a celebrated after-dinner speaker; he died in New York on April 5, 1928, aged 94, having outlived nearly all the Vanderbilt-era railroad men he served. The account's matter-of-fact note that he was "elected by the Legislature" to the Senate describes a system abolished by the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913, so his 1899 election belongs to a vanished practice. Modern historians treat the 1905 Armstrong insurance investigation, which the entry mentions briefly, as the defining blot on his record rather than a passing episode: it exposed how thoroughly corporate retainers and Senate seats overlapped in the era. His volumes of orations are now read, if at all, as period pieces, though his name survives on the village of Depew, near Buffalo.
Written for this edition, 2026.