Babcock, Amos
Amos C. Babcock Soundex Code B122
The Capitol Syndicate was composed of John Villiers Farwell, Chicago's largest dry goods wholesaler; his brother, Charles B. Farwell, a congressman who had helped organize the Republican Party in Illinois, had sponsored Lincoln for President, and seemed likely to follow him up the trail to the White House; Amos Babcock, another prominent Republican office maker; and Abner Taylor, politically inclined but better known perhaps as the chief contractor in rebuilding Chicago following its Great Fire a decade earlier. Taylor would build the Capital; the others would supply the business and political sagacity necessary to carry off an operation of this magnitude.
Encyclopedia of Illinois (1905), page 30
Amos C. Babcock was born at Penn Yan, N.Y., Sunday, January 20, 1828, the son of a member of Congress from that State; at the age of 18, having lost his father by death, came West, and soon after engaged in mercantile business in partnership with a brother at Canton, Illinois. In 1854 he was elected by a majority of one vote, as an Anti-Nebraska Whig, to the lower branch of the Nineteenth General Assembly, and, in the following session, took part in the election of United States Senator which resulted in the choice of Lyman Trumbull. Although a personal and political friend of Mr. Lincoln, Mr. Babcock, as a matter of policy, cast his vote for his townsman, William Kellogg, afterwards Congressman from that district, until it was apparent that a concentration of the Anti-Nebraska vote on Trumbull was necessary to defeat the election of a Democrat.
In 1862 he was appointed by President Lincoln the first Assessor of Internal Revenue for the Fourth District, and, in 1863, was commissioned by Governor Yates Colonel of the One Hundred and Third Illinois Volunteers, but soon resigned.
Colonel Babcock served as Delegate-at-large in the Republican National Convention of 1868, which nominated General Grant for the Presidency, and the same year was made Chairman of the Republican State Central Committee, also conducting the campaign two years later. He identified himself with the Greeley movement in 1872, but, in 1876, was again in line with his party and restored to his old position on the State Central Committee, serving until 1878. Among business enterprises with which he was connected was the extension, about 1854, of the Buda branch of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad from Yates City, Illinois to Canton, Illinois, and the erection of the State Capitol at Austin, Texas, which was undertaken, in conjunction with Abner Taylor, John Villiers Farwell and Charles B. Farwell, about 1881 and completed in 1888, for which the firm received over 3,000,000 acres of State lands in the "Pan Handle" portion of Texas. In 1889, Colonel Babcock took up his residence in Chicago, which continued to be his home until his death from apoplexy, Saturday, February 25, 1899.
