Democratic Sentinel, Volume 1, Number 41, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 November 1877 — SUICIDE OF W. F. COOLBAUGH. [ARTICLE]

SUICIDE OF W. F. COOLBAUGH.

A Fear of Physical and Mental Decay the Cause of the Rash Deed. [From the Chicago Tribune.] Among those who were questioned concerning the reasons which led Mr. Coolbaugh to commit suicide was a person who, having been intimately connected with the family for years, was in a position to give as accurate an opinion as can be obtained. “To what do you attribute the act?” asked the reporter. “ To the fact that Mr. Coolbaugh had felt for two or three years that he was a failing man, both physically and mentally; that that robust body which .had borne so mucli, and which he had tasked so severely in his younger days, was beginning to give way, and that his mind was beginning to share the afflictions of the body.” “ Was this so, or did he imagine it?” “I have no doubt it was so, but that he took a gloomier view of it than he should have done. Mr. Coolbaugh was a very ambitious man, and a very sensitive one. He was ambitious of political honors. There had been a time during his residence in lowa when he was on the verge of going to the United States Senate. Prior to that time his political advancement had been continuous and rapid. It was stopped by his removal from lowa to Illinois, but he never abandoned those aspirations which he held in his younger years. It was, perhaps, during the latter part of his life a sort of morbid craving for political preferment which was, looking at it calmly, beyond his reach. He began to see latterly that these dreams were hopeless. “He had also been very proud, prouder than most men can imagine, of his peculiarly high standing in the community. He was intensely proud of being considered the leading banker in the Northwest, of being the man whom everybody consulted, and whom everybody looked up to—the man who guided the financial policy of Chicago and the West. Of late years he had been losing that high standing, and he knew it. “He could not trust himself, and he looked forward at some times to an old age of imbecility and decrepitude. He had had premonitory symptoms of paralysis of the right side. Whenever these intimations came to him, they plunged him into fits of melancholy lasting sometimes only a very short period, and sometimes for days. He tried to fight off these premonitory symptoms by pleasure trips and other forms of recreation. He brooded over Senator Morton’s case. He was horrified at the idea of becoming a paralytic and helpless man, of being an object of nursing and commiseration. I have no doubt that it was under the influence of one of these attacks of melancholy, which came upon him perhaps yesterday or the day before, that he killed himself.”