Wha-Whi: Whaley through Whiting

See below for annotated biographies of American abolitionists and anti-slavery activists. Sources include: Scribner’s Dictionary of American Biography and Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography.


WHALEY, Kellian V., Member of the U.S. House of Representatives, voted for Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery.

(Congressional Globe; Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress 1774-1927 (1928)


WHEATLEY, Phyllis, 1753-1784, Senegal, Africa, African poet.  Phyllis Wheatley was taken as a child in Senegal and transported to the United States in 1761.  She was bought as a slave by merchant tailor John Wheatley and his wife.  She was taught to read and write by the family.  By her early teens, she began writing poetry.  By 1770, her poems were published.  She published her only book, Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral.  She had published a poem on George Washington in 1770.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 10, Pt. 2,:

WHEATLEY, PHILLIS (c. 1753-December S, 1784), poet, was born in Africa. When she was about eight years old she was kidnapped and brought in a slave ship to Boston, where she was purchased by John Wheatley, a prosperous tailor of Boston, to be trained as a personal servant for his wife. Phillis, who had been chosen for her appealing charm and sensitive face in spite of physical delicacy, responded at once to her new surroundings. Encouraged by her owners, she made rapid progress. "Without any assistance from School Education," wrote Wheatley, "and by only what she was taught in the Family, she, in sixteen Months Time from her Arrival, attained the English Language, ... to such a Degree as to read any, the most difficult Parts of the Sacred Writings, to the great Astonishment of all who heard her" (Poems on Various Subjects, post). She also read extensively in Greek mythology, in Greek and Roman history, and in the contemporary English poets. She early became something of a sensation among the Boston intellectuals, and when she translated a tale from Ovid, it was published by her friends.

Her first verses, written when she was about thirteen years old, were entitled "To the University of Cambridge in New England." They were followed by "To the King's Most Excellent Majesty," written in 1768, "On the Death of Reverend Dr. Sewell," 1769, and other occasional poems. In 1770 An Elegiac Poem on the Death of the Celebrated Divine George Whitefield, was published. These are not only remarkable as examples of precocity but, though without originality and revealing the influence of Pope and Gray, are excellent work of their kind. (in 1773 her health was failing rapidly and Nathaniel Wheatley, the son of John, took her to England.) She had already corresponded with Lady Huntingdon, Lord Dartmouth, and others, who now received her cordially. (In addition to her gift for writing she appears to have been an unusual conversationalist and to have had no little personal charm. Her popularity in London was immediate and great. The first bound volume of her poems, published while she was abroad, entitled Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), was dedicated to Lady Huntingdon.) Her visit was cut short by the serious illness of Mrs. Wheatley, who died soon after Phillis' return. Wheatley survived his wife only a short time and their daughter died a little later. By this time Phillis ]lad been freed. In 1778 she was married to John Peters, a free negro. He is said to have been "not only a very remarkable looking man, but a man of talents and information." According to tradition, "he wrote with fluency and propriety, and at one period read law." He was disagreeable in manner, however, and "on account of his improper conduct, Phillis became entirely estranged from the immediate family of her mistress" (Memoir and Poems, post, p. 29). He was not able to give her the care her delicate health required, and of her three children, two died in early infancy. Phillis herself, after undergoing hardships, died in Boston, alone and in poverty, when little more than thirty years old; her last child was buried with her in an unmarked grave. In 1834 Memoir and Poems of Phillis Wheatley was issued, the memoir being written by Margaretta M. Odell. The Letters of Phillis Wheatley, the Negro-Slave Poet of Boston appeared in 1864.  

[B. H. Gregoire, An Enquiry Concerning the Intellectual and Moral Faculties and Literature of Negroes (1810), translated by D. B. Warden; Jared Sparks, The Writings of George Washington, volume III (1834); R. W. Griswold, The Female Poets of America (1849); C. F. Heartman, Phillis Wheatley: A C1itical Attempt and a Bibliog. of Her Writings (1915); Phillis Wheatley (Phillis Peters): Poems and Letters (1911), ed. by C. F. Heartman, with appreciation by Arthur Schomburg; B. G. Brawley, Early Negro American Writers (1935).]


WHEATON, Charles A., New York, abolitionist leader.

(Sorin, Gerald. The New York Abolitionists: A Case Study of Political Radicalism. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Corporation, 1971)


WHEATON, Josephus, clergyman, Holliston, Massachusetts, anti-slavery advocate. Gave memorable anti-slavery sermon. 

(Dumond, Dwight Lowell, Antislavery: The Crusade for Freedom in America, University of Michigan Press, 1961, pp. 147-149)


WHEATON, Laban M.,  Massachusetts Abolition Society, Vice-President.


WHEELER, Charles, New York, American Abolition Society.

(Radical Abolitionist, Volume 1, No. 1, New York, August 1855)


WHEELER, Edmund, New York, American Abolition Society.

(Radical Abolitionist, Volume 1, No. 1, New York, August 1855)


WHEELER, Ezra, Member of the U.S. House of Representatives, voted for Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery.

(Congressional Globe; Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress 1774-1927 (1928)


WHEELER, J. R., New York, American Abolition Society.

(Radical Abolitionist, Volume 1, No. 1, New York, August 1855)


WHEELER, Newell, New York, American Abolition Society.

(Radical Abolitionist, Volume 1, No. 1, New York, August 1855)


WHEELER, William Almon (June 30, 1819-June 4, 1887), vice-president of the United States. He was active in politics, at first as a Whig, and after 1855 as a Republican. He was district attorney of Franklin County, 1846-49; assemblyman, 1850-51, serving during his second term as chairman of the ways and means committee; state senator and president pro tem Pore of the Senate, 1858-60; member of Congress, 1861-63;

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 10, Pt. 2, pp. 57-58:

WHEELER, WILLIAM ALMON (June 30, 1819-June 4, 1887), vice-president of the United States, was born at Malone, New York, the only son and the second child of Almon and Eliza (Woodworth) Wheeler. He came from early Puritan stock, an ancestor, Thomas Wheeler, having been a resident of Concord, Massachusetts, in r637 and later a founder of Fairfield, Connecticut. Both his grandfathers were Vermont pioneers and soldiers of the Revolution. In 1827 his father, a promising young lawyer, died leaving no estate, and his mother supported herself and her children by boarding students at Franklin Academy. Young Wheeler worked his way through the academy and in 1838 entered the University of Vermont. During the next two years he led a studious and undernourished existence, once living on bread and water for six weeks.

Leaving college because of financial difficulties and an affection of the eyes, he returned to Malone and studied law under the direction of Asa Hascell. He was admitted to the bar in 1845, and on September 17 of that year married Mary King. After six years, during which he seems to have been unusually successful, he retired from active practice to manage a local bank. In 1853 he was appointed trustee for the mortgage holders of the Northern Railway and in that capacity conducted the business of the company until 1866.

Meanwhile he was active in politics, at first as a Whig, and after 1855 as a Republican. He was district attorney of Franklin County, 1846-49; assemblyman, 1850-51, serving during his second term as chairman of the ways and means committee; state senator and president pro tem Pore of the Senate, 1858-60; member of Congress, 1861-63; and president of the state constitutional convention, 1867-68. His honors in state politics came to him probably because he was capable and independent; yet never openly attacked the Republican state machine. In 1869 he again entered Congress and was at once made chairman of the committee on Pacific railroads. Four years later Senator Roscoe Conkling [q.v.], with Grant's tacit approval, intrigued to make him speaker instead of James G. Blaine [q.v.]. Wheeler refused to become a party to the plan, partly because Blaine promised to make him chairman of the committee on appropriations-a promise that was never kept-and partly perhaps because of a morbid obsession that his health. was precarious which afflicted him in his later years. But for the influence of his wife and 'his friends he would have resigned his seat and retired to Malone to die. In 1874 he was appointed on a special committee to investigate a disputed election in Louisiana, which had threatened to result in the collapse of civil government in the state. The so-called " Wheeler adjustment" which he proposed proved satisfactory to both parties. With these exceptions his Congressional career was uneventful. He rarely spoke except when he had immediate charge of a bill on the floor. Then he was forceful, persuasive, and adept in parliamentary tactics. In a period when public morals were low he maintained a reputation for scrupulous honesty. Once he indignantly rejected a gift of railroad stock. When the "salary grab" Act of 1873 became law he converted his excess salary into government bonds and had them canceled so that neither he nor his estate could benefit from the measure. He refused to approve a complimentary appropriation for a post-office building at Malone.

When Wheeler was first suggested for the vice-presidency he was practically unknown. Hayes wrote to his wife in January 1876, "I am ashamed to say, Who is Wheeler!'" (Diary, post, III, 301). His nomination that year was the result of an attempt to secure a harmonious balance of sectional elements in the party. During the campaign he spoke logically, though not eloquently, in favor of civil service reform, honesty in administration, and federal assistance in raising educational standards in the South. As vice-president, he was a good presiding officer of the Senate. He cared little for the office, however.. His wife had died March 3, 1876, and he found his chief diversion in frequent calls on the Hayes family. Hayes thought him "a noble, honest, patriotic man" (Ibid., IV, 50). If he had succeeded to the presidency, Wheeler would probably have made few changes in policy. In 1881 he became an inactive candidate for one of the senatorial seats made vacant by the resignations of Conkling and Thomas C. Platt [q.v.], and the next year declined an appointment to the newly created tariff commission. He had no children. At his death nearly all his estate was bequeathed to missions.

[A. G. Wheeler, The Genealogical and Encyclopedia History of the Wheeler Family in America (1914); F. J. Seaver, Historical Sketches of Franklin County (1918); C. R. Williams, Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes, volumes III (1924), IV (1925); W. D. Howells, Sketch of the Life and Character of Rutherford B. Hayes (1876); Biographical Directory American Congress (1928); D. S. Alexander, A Political History of the State of New York, volume III (1909); G. F. Hoar, Autobiography of Seventy Years (1903); New York Tribune, June S, 1887.]

E. C. S.


WHILLISTON, John P., Massachusetts Abolition Society, Vice-President, 1841-42; 45-46.


WHIPPER, William J., 1804?-1876, free African American, abolitionist, reformer, activist, writer, advocate of non-violence, temperance activist.  Whipper was born in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.  Moved to Philadelphia in the 1820s, then to Columbia, Pennsylvania, where he became a successful businessman.  Using his wealth, he helped hundreds of fugitive slaves to escape to freedom in Canada. 

(Dumond, Dwight Lowell, Antislavery: The Crusade for Freedom in America, University of Michigan Press, 1961, p. 340; Mabee, Carleton. Black Freedom: The Nonviolent Abolitionists from 1830 Through the Civil War. London: Macmillan, 1970, pp. 36, 57, 58, 62, 64, 71, 92, 106, 134, 187, 193, 197, 203, 248, 276, 277, 293, 298, 305-307, 337, 342, 390n15; Rodriguez, Junius P., Slavery in the United States: A Social, Political, and Historical Encyclopedia, ABC-CLIO, 2007, p. 44; Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., & Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds. African American National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2013, Volume 12, p. 6).  Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 10, Pt. 2, pp. 84-85:


WHIPPLE, Charles K., Boston, Massachusetts, abolitionist, American Anti-Slavery Society, Manager, 1836-1837, Executive Committee, 1840-1841.  Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, 1846-1860.


WHIPPLE, George, 1805-1876, Oberlin, Ohio, New York, abolitionist, clergyman, educator.  Secretary of the anti-slavery American Missionary Association (AMA).  American Anti-Slavery Society, Manager, 1839-1840.  American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, Executive Committee, 1844-1855, Treasurer, 1846-1855.  Teacher at Lane University.  Professor and principal, Oberlin College.  Met with President Lincoln at the White House regarding economic support for freed African Americans.  Worked in Freeman’s Bureau after the Civil War.  Agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS). 

(Dumond, Dwight Lowell, Antislavery: The Crusade for Freedom in America, University of Michigan Press, 1961, pp. 163, 165, 185; Mabee, Carleton. Black Freedom: The Nonviolent Abolitionists from 1830 Through the Civil War. London: Macmillan, 1970, pp. 153, 235, 403n25; Rodriguez, Junius P., Slavery in the United States: A Social, Political, and Historical Encyclopedia, ABC-CLIO, 2007, p. 166; Letters, American Missionary Association)


WHIPPLE, Levi, Muskingham County, Ohio, Ohio Anti-Slavery Society, Vice-President, 1835-39.


WHIPPLE, Prince, ? – 1797, African American, slave, soldier in Revolutionary War, abolitionist.

(Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., & Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds. African American National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2013, Volume 12, p. 10)


WHITAKER, William, N. Salem, Massachusetts, Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, Vice-President, 1837-40.


WHITCOMB, James, Michigan, abolitionist, American Anti-Slavery Society, Manager, 1837-1839.


WHITCOMB, Rueben Jr., Howard, Massachusetts, Massachusetts Abolition Society, Vice-President, 1846.


WHITE, Albert Smith (October 24, 1803- September 4, 1864), lawyer, representative and senator, jurist. He served once more in the House of Representatives as a Republican from March 1861 to March 1863. His most notable activity was the introduction of a resolution for the appointment of a select committee to propose a plan for the gradual emancipation of slaves in the border states (Congressional Globe, 37 Congress, 2 Session, p. 1563). As chairman of such a committee he reported bills for indemnifying the loyal owners of slaves in Maryland, Missouri, and other states. Although the plan had the warm support of President Lincoln, it was not popular with White's constituents and cost him his renomination.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 10, Pt. 2, pp.

WHITE, ALBERT SMITH (October 24, 1803- September 4, 1864), lawyer, representative and senator, jurist, was a descendant of Thomas White, an early settler of Weymouth, Massachusetts. He was born at the family homestead at Blooming Grove in Orange County, New York, the son of Nathan Herrick and Frances (Howell) White. The father was the presiding judge of the Orange County court for twenty years. The son was graduated from Union College in 1822, studied law at Newburgh, was admitted to the bar in 1825, removed to Indiana the same year, and, after brief periods at Rushville and Paoli, in 1829 settled permanently in Tippecanoe County, residing either at Lafayette or on his farm near Stockwell. In 1830-31 he was assistant clerk of the Indiana House of Representatives, and for the four succeeding years was clerk of that body.

In 1836 he was elected to a seat in the national House of Representatives as a Whig, and in March 1839 was elected to the Senate. In the House he served on the committee on roads and canals, and introduced a few resolutions, but refrained from active participation in debates. With Oliver Hampton Smith [q.v.] as his colleague, he took his seat in the Senate, December 2, 1839, at the opening of the Twenty-sixth Congress. A few days later he was appointed a member of the committee on Indian affairs and from the beginning of the third session of the Twenty-seventh Congress until the close of his term, in March 1845, he was chairman of that committee. He became an important member of the committee on roads and canals, and served effectively (1841-45) on the committee to audit and control contingent expenses. When in 1852 the bill for apportioning the membership of the House of Representatives among the several states was before the Senate, he delivered a scholarly and cogent address in favor of "popular" as against "party" representation and advocated measures for the security of the federal government rather than the rights of the states (Congressional Globe, 27 Congress, 2 Session, p. 583).

Between 1845 and 1860 White was engaged in the practice of law and in the building of railroads in the valley of the Wabash. He was the first president of the Lafayette and Indianapolis Railroad, and for three years was manager of the Wabash and Western Railroad. He served once more in the House of Representatives as a Republican from March 1861 to March 1863. His most notable activity was the introduction of a resolution for the appointment of a select committee to propose a plan for the gradual emancipation of slaves in the border states (Congressional Globe, 37 Congress, 2 Session, p. 1563). As chairman of such a committee he reported bills for indemnifying the loyal owners of slaves in Maryland, Missouri, and other states. Although the plan had the warm support of President Lincoln, it was not popular with White's constituents and cost him his renomination. On his leaving the House, Lincoln appointed him (appointment confirmed, March 7, 1863) one of three commissioners to adjust claim s of citizens of Minnesota and Dakota on account of depredations committed during th e Sioux Indian massacre on the Minnesota frontier in August 1862. A second appointment by Lincoln (confirmed January 18, 1864) made him judge of the United States District Court for Indiana, a position he held until his death at his residence near Stockwell. White was a man of small physique and thin visage, with a large aquiline nose. He was well versed in belles-lettres, and in legal and political lore. He married a member of the Randolph family of Virginia and was survived by his widow, two sons, and two daughters.

[G. W. Chamberlain, History of Weymouth, Massachusetts (1923), volume IV; B. F. Thompson, History of Long Island (1918), volume II; E. M. Ruttenber and L. H. Clark, History of Orange County, New York (1881); W.W. woollen, Biographical and Historical Sketches of Early Indiana (1883); C. W. Taylor, Bench and Bar of Indiana (1895); Register of Debates.  First Session, Twenty-fifth Congress (1837); Indianapolis Daily Journal, September 6, 9, 1864.]

N. D. M.


WHITE, Andrew Dickson (November 7, 1832-November 4, 1918), university president, historian, diplomat, educator.  Co-founder and first President of Cornell University.  Opponent of slavery. 

(Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume VI, pp. 467-468; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 10, Pt. 2, p. 88)

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 10, Pt. 2, pp. 88-93:

WHITE, ANDREW DICKSON (November 7, 1832-November 4, 1918), university president, historian, diplomat, came of English stock. A little before 1650 his ancestor, John White, husbandman, with a partner, James Phips, bought a tract in Maine just east of the Kennebec; and after Phips's death White married his widow. Their second son, Philip, saved with the rest in 1676 from the Indians by his shipbuilding half brother William Phips (the later Sir William), who sailed with them to Boston, was apprenticed to a "housewright" at Beverly, where soon he took to wife a daughter of Andrew Mansfield of Lynn. Their descendants pushed westward, and at Monson their great-grandson Asa White (b. 1750) throve as a builder and owner of mills. (For the whole pedigree see New England Historical and Genealogical Register, July 1919, p. 237.), His eldest son, Asa (b. 1774), migrated in 1798 to the rising village of Homer in central New York and prospered as its miller till in 1815 a fire was his ruin. Horace (1802-1860), the elder of his two sons, thus forced to self-reliance, proved an able man of business, and was already well-to-do when in 1831 he married Clara Dickson (1811-1882), only child of the prosperous Andrew Dickson, the district's assemblyman, who had come from Middlefield, Massachusetts, and of his wife, Ruth Hall, from Guilford, Connecticut.

Andrew Dickson White, Horace's elder son, born at Homer, was but seven when in 1839 his father moved the family to Syracuse, where he was now a banker and soon a man of wealth. The boy, an eager learner, after training in the schools of Syracuse, private and public, coveted a course at Yale. But his mother had revolted from the New England Calvinism of her village home to become an Episcopalian, and her husband, won by her to religion, was now a zealous churchman. First to a parish school the boy must go, then to the young Geneva College (now Hobart) nearby. He had been from childhood a champion of his mother's church, and always remained so; but the church college he could stand for only a year. When sent back he went into hiding till his father consented to his entering Yale. There he found himself in "the famous class of '53." He was already a wide and thoughtful reader; and, spurning marks, he was by preference a reading man. He was on the "Lit," belonged to Phi Beta Kappa, and took the Clark, Yale Literary, and De Forest prizes. Of his teachers Theodore Dwight Woolsey [q.v.] meant most to him; of his friends none more than Daniel Coit Gilman [q.v.], with whom he now set out for study abroad. A semester at Paris with teachers like Laboulaye, a year as an attaché to the American legation at St. Petersburg (1854-55), a semester at Berlin under Boeckh and Raumer, Ritter and Lepsius-Ranke he could not follow -then a ramble through Italy with Henry Simmons Frieze [q.v.] as a companion, and he was back at Yale for his A.M. There he chanced to hear Francis Wayland [q.v.] urge college men to a career in the West; and after a graduate year at Yale, he became professor of history in the University of Michigan, taking with him as his wife Mary Outwater, a Syracuse neighbor's daughter whom he married on September 24, 1857.

He was only twenty-five. The fraternity boys thought him a freshman and lugged his bags to his hotel. But, says Charles Kendall Adams, then his pupil: "His instruction in history was a genuine revelation to those accustomed to perfunctory text-book work. ... He not only instructed, ... he inspired" (H. B. Adams, The Study of History in American Colleges and Universities, 1887, p. 98) To the efforts of President Henry Philip Tappan [q.v.] to make the University of Michigan more like the universities of the European continent he gave hearty support. But in this he was no mere disciple. From his freshman days at Geneva College he had been dreaming of an American university more stately, more scholarly, more free than those he knew. Yale, with its single course, its chairs filled from a single sect, its great scholars wasted in recitation-hearing, did not satisfy him. Abroad with Gilman he had been an eager observer, and European universities had delighted him by their scientific spirit, their freedom of teaching and of study, the breadth of their instruction, the learning and charm of their lectures. He had been at Michigan scarcely a year when to his fellow New Yorker, George William Curtis [q.v.], he unfolded his dream of a state university for New York; and no sooner had the death of his father brought him private wealth than he took steps toward the fulfillment of this dream. From Syracuse, where he was settling his father's estate, he addressed (September 1, 1862) to his friend and fellow liberal, Gerrit Smith [q.v.], an appeal to join him in founding "a new University, worthy of our land and time." To this, he wrote, his own earnest thinking and planning had been given for years. It should exclude no sex or color; should battle mercantile morality and temper military passion; should afford "an asylum for Science-where truth shall be sought for truth's sake," not stretched or cut "exactly to fit 'Revealed Religion' "; should foster "a new Literature not graceful . . . but earnest" and "a Moral Philosophy, History, and Political Economy unwrapped to suit present abuses in Politics and Religion"; should give "the rudiments, at least, of a Legal training in which Legality shall not crush Humanity"; and should be "a nucleus around which liberal-minded men of learning ... could cluster" (Cornell Alumni News, August 1931, p. 445). His plan for it shows provision not only for languages and mathematics, philosophy and history, law and medicine, but also for agriculture and engineering, and generously for the natural sciences. But Gerrit Smith, stricken in years and in health, could not help; and White himself, worn by teaching and business and by his efforts on behalf of the North in the Civil War, was forced to seek rest abroad.

Returning late in 1863, he found opportunity thrust upon him. His Syracuse town fellows, split between two rivals for a place in the state Senate, named him, though absent, as a compromise; and 1864 found him not only a senator, but chairman of the Senate's committee on education. This gave him large part in codifying the state's school laws and in creating its new normal schools; and it made him the guardian of that vast landed endowment which by the Morrill Act of 1862 the federal government had given the states for education in "such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts;'' but "without excluding other scientific and classical studies." New York's share, the largest, was nearly a million acres and had not been parceled out to her existing colleges. The "People's College," a new enterprise, had indeed a lien upon it all; but its friends had not yet met the conditions of the grant, and Senator Ezra Cornell [q.v. ] of Ithaca, who had built up a fortune through the electric telegraph, but at heart was still a farmer, was asking half for a new agricultural college, offering to add a cash endowment. Chairman White would hear of no division and won Cornell to his own plans and to a larger gift. Together they drew the charter of a new university, whose site Cornell made Ithaca, whose name White made Cornell. Its educational clauses, all White's, ensured instruction not only in agriculture and the mechanic arts, but also in "such other branches of science and knowledge as the Trustees may deem useful and proper." "Persons of every religious denomination, or of no religious denomination," were to be "equally eligible to all offices and appointments"; and at no time should "a majority of the board be of any one religious sect, or of no religious sect." The whole land grant was asked; but Cornell in return pledged campus, farm, and a half million dollars. Nay, more; he proposed to locate the lands, as the state could not do, turning over to the university the proceeds of their eventual sale. A sharp struggle with rivals and this charter was granted-in April 1865. Most novel in the new institution were:  (1) its democracy of studies, the natural sciences and technical arts not segregated, as elsewhere, but taught with the humanities under one faculty and in common classrooms; (2) its parallel courses, open to free choice and leading to varying but equal degrees; (3) its equal rank for the modern languages and literatures and for history and the political sciences; (4) its large use of eminent scholars a s "non-resident professors"; (5) its treatment of university student, as men, not boys, the in teachers as their friends and companions.

White now thought his task done. His ambitions were a scholar's and writer's. The Michigan chair was still his, and Yale was urging on him the headship of her new school of fine arts. Political office, if he wished it, was within his grasp. But Ezra Cornell would not go on with the university without White as president. White hesitated; but he accepted and set about gathering teachers and equipment. For his non-resident group he won Agassiz and Lowell, George William Curtis, Theodore Dwight, James Hall, Bayard Taylor [qq.v.]. Goldwin Smith, whom he had hoped to tempt from England as a nonresident, came, to his joy, as a resident instead; but in the main his resident faculty was of young men.

Despite its heresies the young institution won friends and gifts; and when at its opening, in 1868, six hundred students enrolled, success seemed assured. To the faculty White turned over the care of discipline and of matters curricular. The routine of administration he also gladly devolved on others. His to plan and to create; his to be spokesman to the outer world. His too to teach; and teaching was still his joy. For himself he had reserved the chair of history, though he dealt only with that of Europe. His lectures were always written, and with care; and never was he so busy that some new lecture was not under way. But to his written words he was never a slave. He broke away from them for an anecdote, a personal experience, a direct appeal. He would leave his desk, come to the edge of his platform, and "just talk." But, whether he talked or read, his students were to him live men and women-men and women about to go out to play a part, perhaps a leading part, in the live world of which he spoke. That they might follow his thought, and without waste of attention, he put always into their hands a printed outline; but he had it interleaved for their own notes. It was for them he built up his great library; and not alone with books for research-though fresh research went, if possible, with every lecture-but with books that had themselves made history, first editions, copies that great men themselves had thumbed, the documents, placards, caricatures, left over from the times themselves. These to make his lectures live he showed his students; or, better still, welcomed them to his house for their closer study. His house was a museum of such treasures-the house which from his own purse he built to be Cornell's presidential mansion. But not his classes alone heard' White. Whatever one studied at Cornell, one found time for the President's lectures; and, since at Cornell there was no bar to auditors, half his audience was always of faculty and townsfolk.

His pen, always prolific, was busy now in championing his educational theories and in defending the university and its founder against attacks. Fiercest of the critics were those who called the new school "godless" because in the care of no religious group. White showed in answer how almost every step in the advance of education and science had had to meet such charges from the pious, but how religion as well as science had been the gainer by freedom of teaching and research. This reply, at first but a lecture, grew to a magazine article, then in 1876 to a booklet, The Warfare of Science; and in the same year his Paper-Money Inflation in France, born of his lectures on the French Revolution, took book form for use against the currency juggling then urged on Congress.

Meanwhile, to the University fortune had been harsh. Its working capital had proved inadequate, and its western lands, now subject to state tax, had made it "land-poor." Ezra Cornell, whose purse for a time met every deficit, was all but ruined by the panic of 1873; and White, whose salary and much more had from the first gone to the University or its students, had now to dip more deeply into his own purse and his fellow trustees' to meet debts and finish buildings. The University escaped ruin, but in 1874 Cornell died and White's financial cares grew ever heavier. There had to be respites: in 1871 President Grant made him one of the commission to visit Santo Domingo and report on its fitness for annexation (Dominican Republic. Report of the Commission of Inquiry to Santo Domingo, 1871), and in 1872 a trip to the coeducational institutions of the West was needed as a text for his report favoring the admission of women to Cornell. But by 1876 his health was breaking; and the next two years he spent abroad, his pen soon busy on fresh chapters for his Warfare of Science and on a series he called "the warfare of humanity," that is, the war against such inhumanities as slavery, torture, witch-persecution. With this new course he came back in 1878 and tried to resume his duties. But his health was still precarious, and in the spring he welcomed the call of President Hayes to the post of minister to Germany. At Berlin his routine duties were heavy, though not uncongenial, and for diplomacy he was fitted, not only by training, but also by his social tastes, his affability, his liking for affairs. But it was as a scholar that best he bore the mantle of Bancroft and of Bayard Taylor. With German men of letters and science his ties grew close, and for Americans studying abroad he could do much. In 1881, when he returned, the University's fortunes seemed of better hope through the great bequest of Mrs. Fiske, but soon the Fiske will suit cast its gloom over all, and White's last years as president were crippled still by Cornell's poverty, though near their close the first great sale of western lands gladdened the outlook. White found time to be a leader in the fight for civil service reform, and in 1884 helped found the American Historical Association, becoming its first president. Alas, his health grew frailer, he had served Cornell for twenty years, and other tasks were clamoring to be done. In 1885, happy that his old Michigan pupil Charles Kendall Adams [q.v.] was made his successor, he sailed abroad to rest and write.

First came months of recuperation, with Mrs. White, in England and beyond the Channel. They were hardly back, in 1887, when her sudden death left him prostrate. From the blow he rallied but slowly, seeking comfort in penning a memorial. With returning vigor he sought solace in travel, making now a visit to Egypt and to Greece; but first he transferred to Cornell's shelves his rich historical library, while in his honor her departments of history and politics became The President White School of History and Political Science. When he returned late in 1889, his health proved so restored that he not only could resume research, but again become a lecturer; and during the next years he gave courses at many university centers, from Philadelphia to New Orleans. Stanford University, whose first president he could have been, made him a non-resident member of her faculty; and he journeyed thither as the guest of his friend Carnegie, with whom in his private car he visited Mexico and zigzagged through all the region beyond the Rockies. It was now too that he found (September 10, 1890) a second wife in Helen Magill, a daughter of President Magill of Swarthmore, herself a scholar and teacher.

Late in 1892 President Harrison called him again to the nation's service as minister to Russia. His success there must have satisfied the Washington authorities, for despite the change in 1893 of president and party he was kept there till, in 1894, he insisted on resigning (relieved November 1). But what he could achieve by no means satisfied him. The imperial court, as of old, he found corrupt and fickle, and his best efforts were thwarted by the minor rank of the American legation and its relatively scanty means. Distraction he found in acquaintanceships at court and in society, interested notably by Tolstoi and by the reactionary Pobedonostzeff. Then, too, he found time to work on, and on his return to Ithaca to complete, his History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (2 volumes, 1896). But before this was out of press President Cleveland had named him to' the commission charged to find "the true divisional line between Venezuela and British Guiana," then in controversy with Great Britain. His congenial associates included his old friend Gilman, and the year was spent pleasantly in research at Washington; but ere its end Great Britain had consented to a judicial arbitration, and the commission published only the reports of its experts. White was still in Washington when the new president, McKinley, made him ambassador to Germany. Since his former service there he had shown himself a friendly interpreter of the "new Germany" and of German thought, and his appointment was welcome to German-Americans and in Berlin. But commercial rivalries had chilled German friendship and the Samoan squabble was at its height. Then came the Spanish- American War and the questions as to the fate of the Spanish colonies. In Foreign Minister Billow, White had found a temper like his own, and their affable good sense dispelled the clouds. To him, however, the great event of these years was the Hague Conference (1899). He had long urged the folly of war, but did not at first take very seriously the Czar's call "to put an end to the constantly increasing development of armaments." Called to head the American delegation, he awoke to the opportunity. So, too, had President McKinley and Secretary Hay awakened, and their delegates were charged to work not only for the exemption from seizure, during war at sea, of all private property not contraband of war-America's old claim-but also for an international court of arbitration. For the former claim they could gain no hearing; but White submitted for record a memorial and up. held it in a careful speech (F. W. Rolls, The Peace Conference of the Hague, 1900, pp. 307- 20). For the court of arbitration the day was won, and for the international commissions of inquiry urged by White. But not without a struggle. Alfred T. Mahan [q.v.], the naval member of the American delegation, whose able books on the history of sea-power gave his opinions weight, was averse to aught that threatened the efficiency of war; and the German Emperor, who had studied his books, proved so hostile that for long the conference threatened to shatter on the opposition of Germany and her allies. To allay this White did his utmost, and with at least a measure of success. Due wholly to him was the most dramatic event of the conference the celebration by the Americans of their July 4th by laying a laurel wreath on the tomb of Grotius, the father of international law, with an address in his honor by White.

He returned to Berlin with prestige heightened, and the next years brought him many honors. But death dealt him heavy blows. In July 1901, there died at Syracuse his only son, long a sufferer. September saw the assassination of President McKinley, grown a warm personal friend. But Theodore Roosevelt, who followed, was to White no stranger. Together at the Chicago convention of 1884, as delegates at large from New York, they bad fought for the naming of George F. Edmunds, but together had stood by Blaine, the Republican presidential candidate; and their friendship had not lapsed. But the old diplomat had long resolved to leave at seventy the public service; and in November 1902 his resignation took effect.

Even at Berlin he had found time for much else than diplomacy. Andrew Carnegie had invited from him suggestions for the use of his great wealth; and the invitation was not neglected. In 1900 White urged on him the building of a Palace of Justice to house the International Tribunal at The Hague. The idea had come from his colleague of the conference, the great Russian jurist De Martens; but White made it his own, and it was he who eventually won from the generous Scot both the Palace of Peace and its great library of international law. In 1901 he tried to interest him in the project for a national university at Washington, and with such success that in May he could disclose the plan to his friend Gilman and in September spend a week with Carnegie at Skibo. What came of it was the Carnegie Institution of Washington, started early in 1902 with Gilman as president and White as a trustee. He was also an adviser and became a trustee of Carnegie's foundation for international peace.

Nor had his pen been idle at Berlin. His autobiography, long under way, and a biographical volume based on his university lectures were well advanced when he retired; and now, set free from cares official, he took quarters with his family it Alassio on the lovely Riviera, west of Genoa, where by May of 1904 the first task reached completion. Returning then to Ithaca he could send to press the Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White (2 volumes, 1905) and rest a while among his friends. The lectures, finished at more leisure, appeared in 1910 as Seven Great States men in the Warfare of Humanity 'With Unreason. The seven-Sarpi, Grotius, Thomasius, Turgot, Stein, Cavour, Bismarck-were the heroes about whose deeds, by the biographical method he loved best, he had woven much of his course on the history of modern states; but into their story he had worked also a part of his older lectures on the "warfare of humanity." A later task was unforeseen. In Canada came danger of currency inflation and a public-spirited Toronto business man asked leave to print and circulate his Fiat Money in France (1896), a revision of his earlier work. Once more-in 1912, at eighty-he revised it, but "for private circulation only." Not till 1933 was this edition published in the United States.

At last he welcomed quiet, his routine broken mainly by his winter trip to Washington, for his duties as regent of the Smithsonian Institution and trustee of the Carnegie Institution. In 1914 the great war seemed the defeat of all his efforts for peace; but it could not rob him of his hopefulness or of his fairness, and happily he lived to see it all but ended. In late October of 1918 he gave a dinner to Lord Charnwood, then lecturing at Cornell. His mind was clear, and he as chatty as ever; but he seemed weary and he did not come downstairs again. On November 4 he died. There survived him his second wife and two daughters (one by each marriage), with a daughter of the elder of these and the two sons of his oldest daughter.

In person White was of barely middle stature, slender, brown-haired, bearded; in dress fastidious; in bearing kindly, though not 'Without reserve; in temper active, buoyant, generous. Never robust, he gained great powers of work from a careful regimen; but he was subject to periods of sick headache, and for years his life was threatened by a throat ailment due to exposure in his drives to Ithaca during Cornell's early days. Walking was his exercise and books his only sport; travel and music were his recreation and his medicine. All the fine arts he loved; but architecture gave him greatest joy the world over. The school for it at Cornell was his creation and his pet. An inveterate reader, above all of biography, he was also a charming raconteur and never failed to note down a good story. He was deeply reverent and with a profound faith in God, but never other-worldly. His ambition it was to serve his age and to deserve remembrance. His students he used to urge to give themselves to some great cause, and many were the great causes to which he was himself devoted. Foremost in his youth was doubtless antislavery; in his prime the freeing of inquiry and of teaching; in his old age the abandonment of war and a sterner dealing with high crime. But he was even more a man of action than of speech, and he hoped to be judged, above all, by his work as university founder and moulder.

[For his life the ample source is his Autobiography (1905), into which are absorbed all his earlier autobiographic articles. Appended to it is a list of his writings. His correspondence, with diaries and MSS., is still in the keeping of the Cornell University library; but letters and papers subsequent to his retirement, in 1885, from the presidency of Cornell are to be deposited in the Library of Congress. Of value for his life are the tributes in the Cornell Era for November 1912 at his eightieth birthday, and those at the unveiling of his statue on the Cornell campus, printed in the Cornell Alumni News, June 24, 1915. Best informed of the histories of Cornell are E. W. Huffcut, Cornell University, 1868-1898 (in the U. S. Bureau of Education's "Circulars of Information" for 1900) and the cooperative work bearing the name of W. T. Hewett, Cornell University: A History (1905). On these and on the writer's own memories as pupil, librarian, secretary, friend, this sketch is based.]

G. L.B.

Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume VI, pp. 467-468:

WHITE, Andrew Dickson, educator, born in Homer, New York, 7 November, 1832. He was of New England parentage, studied one year at Hobart college, New York, and passed the remainder of his collegiate course at Yale, where he was graduated in 1833. After graduation he spent about two years in Europe, chiefly at Paris and Berlin, in the prosecution of historical studies. He was also attaché to the American legation in St. Petersburg for six months, and travelled on foot through many of the historical localities of the continent, especially in northern and western France. He returned home in 1856, studied history for one year at Yale, and in 1857 was elected professor of history and English literature in the University of Michigan. In 1862 he resigned in consequence of impaired health, returned to Syracuse, where he had formerly resided, was elected to the state senate for that place, and was re-elected in 1864. While state senator he introduced bills that codified the school laws, created the new system of normal schools, and incorporated Cornell university. In 1867 he became first president of Cornell, which post he filled until failing health compelled him to retire in 1885. He visited Europe in 1867-'8 for the purpose of examining into the organization of the principal schools of agriculture and technology and of purchasing books and apparatus for his university at the request of its trustees. In January, 1871, he was appointed one of the U. S. commissioners to Santo Domingo, and aided in preparing the report of the commission. He was president of the Republican state convention of New York in October, 1871, and was U. S. minister to Germany from 1879 till 1881. From his own resources President White contributed about $100,000 to the equipment of Cornell university, and on 19 January, 1887, be endowed the new school of history and political science in that institution with his historical library numbering 30,000 volumes, besides 10,000 valuable pamphlets and many manuscripts, all of which cost him more than $100,000. As a permanent tribute to him the board of college managers decided to designate the new school as “The President White school of history and political science.” Besides contributions to periodicals, he has published “Outlines of a Course of Lectures on History” (Detroit, 1861); “A Word from the Northwest” (London, 1863), in response to strictures in the American “Diary” of Dr. William Howard Russell; “Syllabus of Lectures on Modern History” (Ithaca, 1876); “The Warfare of Science” (New York, 1876); “The New Germany” (1882); “On Studies in General History and in the History of Civilization” (1885); and “A History of the Doctrine of Cornets” (1886).  Appletons’ Cyclopædia of American Biography, 1888.


WHITE, Charles Ignatius (February 1, 1807-April 1, 1878), Roman Catholic priest and editor. While in Washington, White erected a parochial school, St. Matthew's Institute, and St. Stephen's Church; established St. Ann's Infant Asylum, a chapel for colored persons, and a home for aged blacks.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 10, Pt. 2, pp. 94-95:

WHITE, CHARLES IGNATIUS (February 1, 1807-April 1, 1878), Roman Catholic priest and editor, son of John and Nancy (Coombs) White, who were of old Maryland families, was born in Baltimore and educated in the local schools and at Mount St. Mary's College, Emmitsburg. As a seminarian, he studied theology at St. Sulpice in Paris and spent a year in the Sulpician novitiate at Issy prior to his ordination to the secular priesthood in Notre Dame Cathedral by Archbishop Hyacinthe de Quelen (June 5, 1830). On his return to Maryland, Father White served as a curate at Fell's Point (1830-33), as an assistant and as rector of the cathedral in Baltimore (1833-43), as professor of moral theology at St. Mary's Seminary (1843-45), from which he later received the degree of S.T.D. (1848), as pastor of St. Vincent de Paul's Church (1845), as pastor at Pikesville, where he erected a church (1849), and finally as rector of St. Matthew's Church in Washington, D. C. (1857- 78), where he became widely known in ecclesiastical and secular circles as a scholarly preacher and as an influential priest. Although a preacher on such important occasions as episcopal consecrations, a second choice for the see of Charleston in 1843, a secretary of the Third Provincial Council of Baltimore (1837) and a theologian at the Fourth Council (1840), and the only priest who had known intimately the nine archbishops of Baltimore, he was never elevated beyond the priesthood. His most severe critic, James Alphonsus McMaster [q.v.] of the Freeman's Journal, admitted that he was exemplary in character, pious, severe in temperament, and aristocratic in bearing, but feared that he had not been preserved from the Gallican tendencies of Paris.

While in Washington, White erected a parochial school, St. Matthew's Institute, and St. Stephen's Church; established St. Ann's Infant Asylum, a chapel for colored persons, and a home for aged negroes; introduced the Society of St. Vincent de Paul for social work among the poor; and compiled St. Vincent's Manual (2nd ed., 1848). As a musician and artist, he was intelligently interested in hymnology and architecture. Yet his greatest contribution was as an editor and as "one of the outstanding literary figures in the American priesthood" (Peter Guilday, The Life and Times of John England, 1927, II, 551). With the Reverend James Dolan, an early social worker in Baltimore, he founded and edited the Religious Cabinet (1842), which was continued as the United States Catholic Magazine (1843-48). Later he founded and edited the Metropolitan Magazine (1853). These magazines compared favorably with contemporary secular publications. Indeed, it was their erudite character that proved their undoing because of a lack of patronage among an uneducated constituency. In 1849 White assisted in founding the archdiocesan weekly paper, the Catholic Mirror, which he edited until 1855. In addition, he compiled under varying titles the annual Catholic directory (1834-57), issued a revised edition of J. L. Balmes' Protestantism and Catholicity Compared in Their Effects on the Civilization of Europe (1850) and a Life of Mrs. Eliza A. Seton (1853) which passed through several editions, published a. revised edition of Chateaubriand's The Genius of Christianity (1856), translated from the French of Charles Sainte-Foi, Mission and Duties of Young Women (1858), and added a chapter on the Church in the United States to the English translation of Joseph E. Darras' General History of the Catholic Church (1866).

[M. J. Riordon, Cathedral Records (1906); Cath. Encyclopedia; F. E. Tourscher, The Kenrick-Frenaye Correspondence (1920); New York Freeman's Journal, April 13, 1878; Cath. Mirror, April 6, 1878; Sadlier's Cath. Directory (1879), p. 41; address of Archbishop James Gibbons [q.v.] in In Memoriam; a Record of the Ceremonies in St. Matthew's Church ... on the Occasion of the Funeral of Its Late Pastor Reverend Charles I. White (1878); obituary in Evening Star (Washington, D. C., April 1, 1878.]

R. J. P.


WHITE, George Leonard (September 20, 1838-November 8, 1895), conductor of the Jubilee Singers of Fisk University.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 10, Pt. 2, pp. 100-101:

WHITE, GEORGE LEONARD (September 20, 1838-November 8, 1895), conductor of the Jubilee Singers of Fisk University, was born at Cadiz, New York, the son of William B. and Nancy (Leonard) White. From his father,. a blacksmith who in his spare time played in a local band, he derived a love of music. He attended public school until he was fourteen, when his formal education came to an end. At twenty he was teaching in Ohio and had acquired considerable reputation as a choir leader. With one or two associates he gathered the colored people of the neighborhood and taught them in Sunday schools, the singing in which he led his pupils forming a considerable part of the curriculum. In the. early days of the Civil War he joined the "Squirrel Hunters" to defend Cincinnati from the Confederates under Kirby-Smith. Later, as an enlisted man in the 73rd Ohio Regiment, he was at the battles of Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, and served until discharged for illness in 1864. After the war he went to Nashville, Tennessee, where he was briefly employed in the quartermaster's department, and then entered the service of the Freedmen's Bureau, under Clinton B. Fisk [q.v.]. In 1867 he was appointed instructor of vocal music at Fisk University, Nashville, which had just been founded by the American Missionary Association, and subsequently became a trustee and treasurer of the institution.

In 1870, when it seemed likely that Fisk University must close unless money could be raised, White suggested taking a group of students on a concert tour. He finally won the consent of the trustees and in October 1871, with a band of nine singers, started out. Although they were penniless, only recently emancipated, untutored except for the training White had given them, they repeatedly won hostile crowds and indifferent audiences to enthusiastic admiration, and in March 1872 returned to, Nashville with twenty thousand dollars they had earned over and above their expenses. After resting only a week, they started out again with some new recruits, going first to the World Peace Jubilee in Boston. Here their presence was the great feature of the occasion and they received an ovation. In April 1873 they sailed for England and in a tour of Great Britain met with the same astonishing success that had been theirs in America. Subsequently they toured England again and visited the Continent, raising in all more than $90,000 for Fisk University and spreading through the civilized world a new understanding and respect for the character and the capacities of the freed men. They finally disbanded in Hamburg in 1878. The testimony of all connected with the venture is that without White it could never have taken place. A man of faith, he had great courage and devotion to his work and to the students he had trained. He was extraordinary, too, in his musicianship; although almost entirely self-taught, he maintained standards of performance so high that only his personal influence over the singers kept them from wearying and rebelling. "His ear was exquisite," wrote an associate; "in passages of almost incredible power he would not tolerate anything that was not pure tone" (Fisk Herald, October 19rr, pp. 5, 6). "He would keep us singing all day until we had every passage ... to suit his fastidious taste," said one of the singers (Ibid., p. 30).

At Saratoga, Minnesota, August II, 1867, White married Laura Amelia Cravath, a missionary of the American Missionary Association and a sister of Erastus Milo Cravath [q.v.], first president of Fisk University. She died in Glasgow, Scotland, during the first tour of the singers. On April 12, 1876, during the second European tour, he married Susan Gilbert, a fellow teacher at Fisk, chaperon to the young women among the singers. Forced by an accident in 1885, from which he never fully recovered, to give up his work with the Jubilee Singers, he taught music at the state normal school, Fredonia, New York; in 1886-87 he was at Biddle (later Johnson C. Smith) University in North Carolina; and in later years, with his wife, was connected with Sage College, Cornell University. He died at Ithaca, in his fifty-eighth year, after being stricken with paralysis. His wife, with a son and a daughter of his first marriage, survived him; his eldest son had died in 1890.

[G. D. Pike, The Jubilee Singers (1873) and The Singing Campaign (1875); Fisk, Herald, October 1911; annual reports of the American Missionary Association, 1867-76; information as to certain facts from white's daughter, Miss Georgia L. White.]

M. G.


WHITE, Horace (August 10, 1834-September 16, 1916), journalist, economist.  Deeply stirred by the events in "bleeding Kansas," he soon became assistant secretary of the National Kansas Commission. As such it was his duty to receive and forward money, arms, ammunition, and supplies of all kinds to the Free State pioneers among them John Brown and two of his sons and to outfit parties of new settlers who passed through Iowa and Nebraska to the scene of the conflict. In 1857 he himself went to Kansas with the expectation of becoming a settler and a leader of the anti-slavery forces. In 1858 he reported on the Lincoln-Douglas debates,  and began a warm friendship with Abraham Lincoln and also with Henry Villard [q.v.], then correspondent of the New York Staats-Zeitung.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 10, Pt. 2, pp. 104-105:

WHITE, HORACE (August 10, 1834-September 16, 1916), journalist, economist, was born at Colebrook, New Hampshire, the son of Horace White, a physician, and his wife, Eliza Moore. As agent of the New England Emigration Company, Dr. White founded the town of Beloit, Wisconsin, where his wife and two sons joined him in 1838. Entering Beloit College in 1849, at the age of fifteen, Horace was graduated four years later. He at once entered journalism and in 1854 became city editor of the Chicago Evening Journal. The following year he was made Chicago agent of the New York Associated Press. This place, also, he held but a short time for, deeply stirred by the events in "bleeding Kansas," he soon became assistant secretary of the National Kansas Commission, As such it was his duty to receive and forward money, arms, ammunition, and supplies of all kinds to the Free State pioneers among them John Brown and two of his sons and to outfit parties of new settlers who passed through Iowa and Nebraska to the scene of the conflict. In 1857 he himself went to Kansas with the expectation of becoming a settler and a leader of the anti-slavery forces.

Returning to Chicago to make final arrangements, he was induced by Dr. C. H. Ray, editor of the Chicago Tribune, to accept a position on that paper, of which he was a minority stockholder until his death. In 1858 he reported for it the Lincoln-Douglas debates, thus beginning a warm friendship with Abraham Lincoln and also with Henry Villard [q.v.], then correspondent of the New York Staats-Zeitung. At the outbreak of the Civil War the Chicago Tribune made White its Washington correspondent, permitting him also to hold the important position of clerk of the Senate committee on military affairs, which position gave to him a remarkable insight into the conduct of the war. In 1864 he formed, with Henry Villard and Adams Sherman Hill, in later life the distinguished Boylston Professor of Rhetoric in Harvard University, the first news agency to compete with the Associated Press, serving the Chicago Tribune, Springfield Republican, Boston Advertiser, Cincinnati Commercial, Rochester Democrat, and the Missouri Democrat of St. Louis. Villard took the field with the Army of the Potomac, and White and Hill covered Washington. With the dose of the war this syndicate was dissolved and White became editor-in-chief of the Chicago Tribune, remaining as such until his resignation because of ill health in 1874.

In 1877 he joined Villard, then receiver of the Kansas-Pacific Railroad, in the service of that enterprise, subsequently being appointed treasurer of the Oregon Railway & Navigation Company when Villard became president. In 1881 the latter purchased the New York Evening Post, and the Nation, and placed at their head the distinguished triumvirate, Carl Schurz [q. v.], Horace White, and Edwin L. Godkin [q.v.], in order to continue the then failing Nation, and to establish a politically independent daily newspaper devoted to the highest political and social ideals. The triumvirate lasted, however, only a little more than two years, at the end of which time Schurz retired and Godkin became editor, with White in charge of the financial and economic policies of the two journals. In this field White at once took a position of high authority. His book Money and Banking, Illustrated by American History, first published in 1895, was in 1935 still a standard textbook in schools and colleges. When Godkin retired in 1899, White became editor-in-chief of the Evening Post, which position he held until his retirement because of failing health in i,903. A profound Greek scholar, he published The Roman History of Appian of Alexandria,, Translated from the Greek (1899), and, in his retirement, wrote The Life of Lyman Trumbull (1913), besides editing various financial textbooks. In 1908 Governor Charles E. Hughes of New York appointed him chairman of a commission on speculation in securities and commodities, authorized by the legislature of the state. Its report recommended no action by the legislature and placed upon the stock exchange itself "the duty of restraint and reform." Eight of the fourteen recommendations were adopted by the governors of the exchange.

Of exceptionally strong character, White enjoyed the complete respect and the warm regard of friends and associates. He was always more the scholar and the philosopher than the journalist or executive. His modesty was extreme; his repugnance to public appearances, unconquerable. He had an extraordinarily strong grasp of fundamental economic truths which nothing could disturb. A convinced free-trader and an old-fashioned liberal of the Manchester school, he, like Godkin, threw himself passionately into the Evening Post's opposition to the annexation of Hawaii, to the American governments' attitude in the Venezuelan imbroglio with England in 1895, and to the war with Spain and the conquest of the Philippines, in all of which opposition he and his associates were actuated by complete devotion to the American ideal as they understood it. Like Godkin, too, he was rigid in upholding the literary and scholarly traditions of the Evening Post, the editorial page of which was £or thirty-seven years one of the most distinguished in American journalism. White was married first to Martha Root of New Haven, Connecticut, who died in 1873, and second, in 1875, to Amelia Jane McDougall of Chicago, Illinois, who died in 1885. He was survived by three daughters.

[Printed sources include obituary, autobiographical sketch, and editorial in Evening Post (New York), September 18, 1916, and One Hundredth Anniversary Edition of the Post, November 16, 1901; Allan Nevins, The Evening Post; A Century of Journalism (1922); 0. G. Villard, John Brown (1910); Memoirs of Henry Villard (1904); Who's Who in America, 1914-15. Most authorities give the year of White's birth as 1834, but his daughter states that a note in his own handwriting gives the year as 1833.]

O. G. V.


WHITE, Jacob C., Jr., 1837-1902, African American, educator, reformer, abolitionist, Free Produce advocate. 

(Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., & Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds. African American National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2013, Volume 12, p. 31)


WHITE, Jacob Clement, Sr., 1806-1872, African American, abolitionist, businessman, father of Jacob C. White, Jr.

(Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., & Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds. African American National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2013, Volume 12, p. 32)


WHITE, James, Essex County, New Jersey, abolitionist.  Manager, 1833-1840, and founding member of the American Anti-Slavery Society, December 1833.

(Abolitionist, Volume I, No. XII, December, 1833)


WHITE, Lydia, Society of Friends, Quaker, abolitionist.  Original founding member of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society in 1834.

(Drake, Thomas. Quakers and Slavery in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950, p. 140; Rodriguez, Junius P., Slavery in the United States: A Social, Political, and Historical Encyclopedia, ABC-CLIO, 2007, p. 416; Yellin, Jean Fagan and John C. Van Horne (Eds). The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994, pp. 69, 161, 163, 278-279)


WHITE, T. Joiner, New York, American Abolition Society.

(Radical Abolitionist, Volume 1, No. 1, New York, August 1855)


WHITE, Stephen Van Culen (August 1, 1831-January 18, 1913), banker, congressman,  Stephens father Hiram White, who hated slavery intensely, refused to do police duty during the wave of dread that swept over the South as a result of Nat Turner's insurrection in 1831, and when Stephen was only six weeks old the family was forced to leave the state.  An ardent opponent of slavery, White wrote articles for the Republican party during Fremont's presidential campaign in 1856.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 10, Pt. 2, pp. 119-120:

WHITE, STEPHEN VAN CULEN (August I, 1831-January 18, 1913), banker, congressman, was born in Chatham County, North Carolina, the son of Hiram and Julia (Brewer) White. His mother belonged to a Carolina family and his father was descended from a Pennsylvania Quaker who migrated to North Carolina after the close of the Revolutionary War. Hiram White, who hated slavery intensely, refused to do police duty during the wave of dread that swept over the South as a result of Nat Turner's insurrection in 1831, and when Stephen was only six weeks old the family was obliged to leave the state. They settled in a log cabin near Otterville, Jersey County, Illinois, not far from the junction of the Illinois and Mississippi rivers. White attended the free school founded by Dr. Silas Hamilton in Otterville, helped about his father's farm and grist mill, and trapped forbearing animals. With the help of an elder brother he prepared for Knox College at Galesburg, Illinois, where he received the degree of A.B. in 1854. On leaving college he kept books for a mercantile house in St. Louis for eight months and then entered the law office of B. Gratz Brown and John A. Kasson [qq.v.]. An ardent opponent of slavery, White wrote articles for the Republican party during Fremont's presidential campaign. He was admitted to the bar on November 4, 1856, and in the same year moved to Des Moines; Iowa. Here he practised until the end of 1864, during which year he was acting United States district attorney for Iowa.

In the beginning of 1865 he moved to New York state, making his home in Brooklyn. Although he was admitted to the local bar he did not practise, but instead joined the open board of brokers and became a member of the banking and brokerage firm of Marvin & White, with offices in Wall Street. After the failure of this house in 1867, White went into business by himself. In 1869 he became a member of the New York Stock Exchange. He soon became known as a daring, though not always successful, stock manipulator, especially in the shares of the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad. In 1872 he was obliged to suspend for the second time in consequence of losses sustained through the great fire in Boston. In 1882 he formed the partnership of S. V. White & Company. He was elected as a Republican to the Fiftieth Congress in 1886 and served one term (1887-89), declining a renomination. In 1891 he tried to corner the corn market, but miscalculated the available supply and failed for almost a million dollars instead of making the huge profit he had counted upon. His creditors, however, having faith in his honesty and ability, cancelled their claims against him and returned to him his $200,000 remaining assets. He was readmitted to the stock exchange on February 15, 1892, and by the end of that year had paid off the last of his obligations, with interest.

A warm friend of Henry Ward Beecher [q.v.], whose legal expenses in the famous Beecher Tilton trial he is said to have defrayed, White vas a trustee of Plymouth Church from 1866 till 1902 and its treasurer from 1869 till 1902. In that year he retired £rem much of his business activity to give time to his avocations. Frequently called "Deacon," although he never held the office, he was in his day a well-known and picturesque figure in Wall Street. He was a short, stocky man with a full beard, quick and alert in his movements, cordial -in manner, and always attired in a frock coat with a soft, tun1ed-down collar and a black string tie. An astronomer with one of the finest telescopes in America owned by a private individual, he was one of the organizers of the American Astronomical Society, founded in 1884, which subsequently became the department of astronomy of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences. In February 1857, at Stanton, Illinois, he married Eliza M. Chandler, by whom he had a daughter.

[Biographical Directory American Congress (1928); Fiftieth Congress: Official Congress Directory (1888); Who's Who in America, 1912 -13; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, January 18, 1913; New York Times, January 19, 1913.]

H. G. V.


WHITE, W. A., U.S. Congressman, member of the Free Soil Party.

(Wilson, Henry, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, Volume 2.  Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1872, 345; Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress 1774-1927 (1928); Congressional Globe). 


WHITE, William, free African American, co-founded Free African Society in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1787

(Rodriguez, Junius P., Slavery in the United States: A Social, Political, and Historical Encyclopedia, ABC-CLIO, 2007, p. 156)


WHITE, William, Bishop, 1748-1836, Pennsylvania, Episcopal Bishop, Vice-President, 1833-37, and founding officer and head of the Philadelphia auxiliary of the American Colonization Society in 1817.  White supported missionary societies, and advocated colonization as a “safe, gradual, voluntary and entire emancipation of slavery.” 

(Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume VI, pp. 476-477; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 10, Pt. 2, p. 121; Staudenraus, P. J. The African Colonization Movement, 1816-1865. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961, pp. 39, 72, 213)

Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume VI, pp. 476-477:

WHITE, William, P. E. bishop, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 4 April, 1748; died there, 17 July, 1836. His father, Colonel Thomas White, removed to Philadelphia from Maryland in 1745, and married Esther, widow of John Neuman, and daughter of Abraham Hewlings, of Burlington, New Jersey, 7 May, 1747. There were two children of this marriage, William, and Mary, who became the wife of Robert Morris. William entered the English department of the College and academy of Philadelphia at the age of seven, and at ten the Latin-school. He was graduated in 1765, and soon began his theological studies, which he completed in 1770. In October of this year he sailed for England to obtain holy orders, bringing such testimonials that, although he was several months under the required age, he obtained from the archbishop of Canterbury a faculty allowing him to be ordained. He was ordered deacon in the Chapel royal, St. James's palace, Westminster, 23 December, 1770, by Dr. Young, bishop of Norwich, acting for the bishop of London, who had episcopal oversight of all the colonies, and was ordained priest in the chapel of Fulham palace, 25 April, 1772, by the bishop of London. He sailed for this country, where he arrived on 13 September, and soon afterward became assistant minister of Christ and St. Peter's churches. On 11 February, 1773, he married Mary, daughter of Captain Henry Harrison, mayor of Philadelphia. Within a few years he became rector of the united parishes of Christ, St. Peter's, and St. James's. The degree of D. D. was given him by the University of Pennsylvania in 1782, it being the first honorary degree of that college. All the clergy of Philadelphia sided with the colonies during the Revolution, none more zealously than Dr. White. Upon the occupation of Philadelphia by the British forces, he removed in September, 1777, to Harford county, Md., but he returned after the evacuation, and resumed his duties. Then began the long and trying struggle to sustain the life of the church, in which he took an active part. Almost despairing of success in obtaining the episcopate, which was essential to the reorganization of the church, Dr. White, in August, 1782, put forth a pamphlet with the title “The Case of the Episcopal Churches Considered” (Philadelphia, 1782), in which he advocated the appointment of superintendents, with similar powers, to take the place of bishops in the government of the church. This plan, which found favor largely in the middle and southern states, was bitterly opposed by the clergy of Connecticut, and negotiations for peace having advanced to the point of probability, the pamphlet was withdrawn from circulation, and the plan was abandoned. On 27 March, 1784, the clergy of the city of Philadelphia, and lay representatives from its parishes, met in Dr. White's study to take steps for the organization of the church in Pennsylvania, which meeting resulted in the assembling of a council in Christ church, 26 May, 1784, the first council in which laymen had been represented. Proposals were sent out to the churches in other states to meet in general convention, Dr. White's letters helping largely in bringing about this result. The first meeting of that body was held in New York in October, 1784, though delegates were sent only on the authority of their several parishes. On Tuesday, 27 September, 1785, clerical and lay deputies from several states met in Christ church, Philadelphia, and organized as a general convention, of which Dr. White was chosen president. Steps were taken at once by the appointment of committees to draft a constitution for the church, and to prepare a schedule of necessary alterations in the liturgy. Dr. White made the original draft of the constitution, and also prepared an address to the archbishops and bishops of the Church of England, asking for the episcopate at their hands. He was also largely instrumental in giving shape to the liturgy and offices of the Prayer-Book which were to be submitted to the authorities of the Church of England with the address. At the convention of the diocese of Pennsylvania in 1786 he was elected its first bishop, and sailed for England in company with Dr. Samuel Provoost, of New York, seeking consecration, arriving in London. 29 November, 1786. After many delays, and the passage of a special enabling act by parliament, he was, with Dr. Provoost, at last consecrated in the chapel of Lambeth palace, 4 February, 1787, by the archbishops of Canterbury and York, and the bishops of Bath and Wells, and Peterborough. He reached Philadelphia again on Easter Sunday, 7 April, 1787, and entered upon his trying duties, not the least of which concerned the recognition of the consecration of Bishop Seabury, in all of which his mild temper and broad charity were effective in restoring peace and harmony to the councils of the church. He was appointed chaplain to congress in 1787, which office he held till 1801. Besides his episcopal duties, he was foremost in many public charities and enterprises, and held the presidency of the Philadelphia Bible society, dispensary, Prison society, Asylum for the deaf and dumb, and Institution for the blind. He died at the advanced age of eighty-eight, after living to see the church in the states thoroughly organized and rapidly growing, and consecrating eleven bishops. His remains were buried in the church-yard of Christ church, but in December, 1870, were removed and placed beneath the floor of the chancel. The centennial anniversary of his consecration was appropriately celebrated in Lambeth palace, London, and in Christ church, Philadelphia. Besides the “Pastoral Letters” of the house of bishops (1808-1835), five addresses to the trustees, professors, and students of the General theological seminary (1822-'9), and episcopal charges, Bishop White published “Lectures on the Catechism” (Philadelphia, 1813); “Comparative View of the Controversy between the Calvinists and the Arminians” (2 vols., 1817); “Memoirs of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America” (1820; 2d ed., with continuation, New York, 1835); and “Commentary on Questions in the Ordination Offices” and “Commentary on Duties of Public Ministry” (1 vol., 1833). His “Opinions on Interchanging with Ministers of Non-Episcopal Communions, Extracted from his Charges, Addresses, Sermons, and Pastoral Letters,” appeared in 1868. See his life by Reverend Dr. Bird Wilson (Philadelphia, 1839). Portraits of Bishop White have been painted by Gilbert Stuart, Thomas Sully, and Henry Inman. The accompanying vignette is copied from a drawing by James B. Longacre. Appletons’ Cyclopædia of American Biography, 1888.


WHITEALL, James, abolitionist, founding member, Electing Committee, Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, April 1787.

(Basker, James G., gen. ed. Early American Abolitionists: A Collection of Anti-Slavery Writings, 1760-1820. New York: Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, 2005, pp. 92, 102; Nathan, 1991)


WHITEHEAD, Jonathan, Franklin County, Ohio, Ohio Anti-Slavery Society, Manager, 1835-36.


WHITFIELD, James Monroe, 1822-1871, African American, abolitionist, orator, poet, supported African American emigration, Black nationalism.

(Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., & Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds. African American National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2013, Volume 12, p. 53)


WHITING, William, Concord, Massachusetts, abolitionist, Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, Vice-President, 1853-60-.


WHITING, William E., New York, New York, abolitionist, American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, Executive Committee, 1844-55, Treasurer, 1846-55.



Sources:
Dictionary of American Biography, Volumes I-X, Edited by Dumas Malone, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930.

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Volumes I-VI, Edited by James Grant Wilson & John Fiske, New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1888-1889.