USA > Minnesota > Rice County > History of Rice and Steele counties, Minnesota, Vol. I > Part 29
USA > Minnesota > Steele County > History of Rice and Steele counties, Minnesota, Vol. I > Part 29
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saw, A. C. Frelin ; Webster, G. C. Gilbertson ; Wells, W. E. Bolt- man; Wesley village, Mathias J. Smisek; Wheeling, H. A. Eckert. April 13, William Dennis Parshall died at Faribault, aged sixty-two years. He came to Faribault in 1855. April 24, C. W. Sanford died in Faribault, aged seventy-five years. He came to East Prairie in 1861. May 15, the curfew ordinance enacted in Faribault. May 12, the residence of E. H. Sperry, at Faribault, burned, with Mrs. Kellog, Mr. Sperry, two sons and one daughter. This year was also marked by the paving of several streets in Faribault.
CHAPTER XII.
HENRY BENJAMIN WHIPPLE, D. D., LL. D.
Birth, Ancestry and Education-Influence in Politics as a Young Man-Staff Colonel-Theological Training-Ordination- First Rectorship-Call to Chicago-His Work in the Parish of the Free Church of the Holy Communion-Consecrated Bishop of Minnesota-First Service in His New Diocese- First Service in Faribault-Pioneer Conditions-Beginning of the Bishop Seabury Mission Schools-Shattuck School- Seabury Divinity School-St. Mary's Hall-Work Among the Indians-Service on Treaty Commission-"The Great Apostle of the Red Men"-Honors Abroad-Work in Cuba-Called to the Sandwich Islands-Work in the South- ern States-Distinctions in England-Friend of the Black Man-Visit to Porto Rico-Growth of the Diocese- Domestic Life-Bishop Gilbert-Bishop Edsall-Summary of His Life Work-Opinions and Appreciations by Eminent Men-Triumphant Closing of a Glorious Career-Memorials.
Henry Benjamin Whipple. It has been said repeatedly by men accustomed to a judicions weighing of words, that "No bishop of the Church has ever given more striking evidence of the fact that the highest order of the ministry of Christ belongs not to a diocese alone, but to the whole Church and to the Com- monwealth, than the Right Reverend Henry Benjamin Whipple, of Minnesota."
No brief sketch can adequately describe the rare personality and career of the man whose life, in the last half century, has entered so largely into the history of the Commonwealth of Minnesota, the Republic of the United States and the Church throughout the world.
Henry Benjamin Whipple was born in Adams. N. Y., Feb- ruary 15, 1822. The character, however, of the man and the preparation for his life of noble service to humanity began sev- eral hundred years before this, in the lives of his ancestors, and their descendants, who were among some of the most honorable families of our country. Sixteen of his kinsmen were officers in the Colonial and Revolutionary wars. The grandmother of Stephen Hopkins, one of the signers of the Declaration of Inde-
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RIGHT REVEREND HENRY B. WHIPPLE.
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pendence, was a Whipple. His grandfather, Benjamin Whipple, was in the Navy of the American Revolution, held in honor for the brave and loyal character of its men, among whom was Paul Jones. His father, John Hall Whipple, was a prominent merchant in New York state, honored and esteemed for his high character, integrity and influence as a citizen. His letters to his son Henry, during his school days, written in a clear, copper- plate hand, in their quaint and terse maxims for moral, social and religious principles, were a stimulating influence, and to this as well as to the influence of his mother did he directly owe his sound equipment for future life.
In 1820 Mr. John Whipple married Elizabeth, daughter of the Hon. Henry Wager, one of the electors of Thomas Jeffer- son. She was a woman of rare and noble character, of fine mind, and to her sympathetic love and counsel Bishop Whipple traces the chief impetus of his life-one of her maxims most conspicuously embodied in his whole career having been, "Never be afraid to defend the weak and helpless, and never be afraid of anything, if God is on your side."
He was educated in private schools in the state of New York. At ten years of age he was placed in the boarding school of Professor Avery, in Clinton, N. Y., and next in the school under the care of those cultured men, the Rev. Dr. Boyd and the Rev. Dr. Covert. While a student at Oberlin he lived with his uncle, the Rev. George Whipple, who was professor of mathematics at Oberlin College, of which the noble educator, Dr. Charles Finney, was president. The environment of his boyhood was everything that a Christian home of refinement could make it. At that time there was no Episcopal Church in the western part of New York, and both parents had connected themselves with the Presbyterian Church, although their parents and antecedents had been Episcopalian, and they afterward became communi- cants of the Episcopal Church.
Endowed with a brilliant and receptive mind, and with a charm of manner and spirit of independence which made him a universal favorite with classmates and instructors, the boy pur- sued his studies to early manhood. His fearlessness and high moral standards, together with a contempt for unfair play and injustice of any kind, caused his school days to be marked by many amusing incidents, forerunners of more serious battles in behalf of the defenseless, in after life. His interest in political affairs began when at home for the holidays, when the boy's greatest delight was to be allowed to sit at the feet of his father and his friends-where the principles and science of government were quietly imbibed.
His student life was suddenly interrupted by a severe illness,
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and to prevent a complete breakdown the consulting physicians ordered rest and a change from academic halls to active business life. This was a keen disappointment to both father and son, but as there was no alternative he accepted an offer from his father and for a short time was associated with him in business. His father was a staunch supporter of the old Whig party, but he was a man of broad mind, never allowing himself to seek to interfere with the conscientious convictions of others, and, what- ever his private feeling might have been, he magnanimously recognized his son's right to his own views as a Democrat of the conservative school. The social and political convictions of his family led him to take an active part in the state politics of New York. Through the influence of Governor Dix he was appointed by Governor Marcy, Division Inspector, with the rank of Colonel, on the staff of Major-General Gorse. An army offi- cer who knew him at the time, commenting upon the gallant appearance of the handsome young officer, exclaimed, "What a general that man would have been! When the American Church won its greatest bishop, the United States Army lost a great general !" The brilliant promise which he gave of political usefulness and influence was so marked that two of New York's famous political leaders, Thurlow Weed and Edwin Croswell, remarked when they heard that he had become a candidate for holy orders, that "they hoped a good politician had not been spoiled to make a poor preacher." He was the companion of Hon. John A. Dix when he was canvassing the state of New York in 1844. General Dix, Governor Seymour and many of the friends of his early manhood became his friends at court with the authorities at Washington in Bishop Whipple's later strug- gles for the Indians. His last service in the political field was as secretary of a state convention. About this time an event occurred which changed the direction of his career. Two bril- liant business offers had been made him by well known finan- ciers, who had watched his keen, far-seeing grasp of situations develop and taken note of those gifts which would have unques- tionably launched him on a tide of prosperity and placed his name among those of the great financiers of the country. These offers naturally made their appeal to the young man of action and he undoubtedly would have accepted one of them had not an attack of illness kept his decision in abeyance. In the weeks of enforced seclusion a vision of the needs of perishing humanity took possession of him, recurring again and again, until it finally conquered him by its importunity. Every other consideration paled in the light of this great vision. It was his clear percep- tion of the highest values of life which led him to decide what his life work should be. ITis father and his Bishop, the Rt. Rev.
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Doctor De Lancey, were deeply impressed and gave him their unqualified sympathy and encouragement, undoubtedly recog- nizing in him the promise of a vitalizing future power in the Church.
He received his theological training under that eminent scholar, the Rev. Dr. W. D. Wilson, of Cornell University. On August 26, 1849, he was ordered deacon by Bishop De Lancey in Trinity church, Geneva, N. Y. The following February lie was ordained priest in Christ church, Sackett's Harbor, and was immediately thereafter called to Zion church, Rome, N. Y. In the seven years of his rectorship in Rome he built up a large parish, erected a beautiful stone church, and won the enduring love of his parishioners and fellow citizens. His parish was made up of men and women of culture and note, and a large number of the very poor drawn in from the suburbs of the city. His labors were untiring and his successful experiments in making the poor self-helping and independent foreshadowed the greater work to come. In referring to this period of his life the Bishop said: "It taught me that the poor need our brains more than our alms,"-the germinal of what is finest in enlightened work for the poor.
During his first rectorship he received calls to Grace church, Chicago, St. Paul's church, Milwaukee, and to five or six other flourishing city churches, but none of them appealed to him as "broader fields of action," until one day in 1856 a thrice-repeated call came from Chicago, with a personal visit from Albert E. Neely, of the same city, brother of the late Bishop of Maine, begging him to go to Chicago and begin work among its great multitude of railway men, clerks and artisans. There was no church building, the support of the clergyman and church was dependent on free-will offerings, but there was an army of wait- ing men! Bishop DeLancey said: "You must not go-you will starve!" His friends regarded it as madness. His devoted parishioners saw nothing so vital as that their beloved rector should remain where he was daily seeing the fruits of his untiring energy. But it was a Macedonian cry, which could not be resisted. His convictions were clear.
In order to organize a parish the Rev. Dr. Clarkson, of St. James church, Chicago, afterward Bishop of Nebraska, lent three members of his parish to make up the necessary number and the "Free Church of the Holy Communion" was organized and the Rev. Henry Benjamin Whipple formally called. The Bishop believed, with Dr. Pusey of Oxford, that seats in the Church of God should be free to all, and he here initiated the free church system in the West.
He began his work by visiting the roundhouse of the Galena
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Railway and every shop, saloon and factory within the radius of his jurisdiction, and then plunged into a course of reading and study of railroad and locomotive organization, that he might talk intelligently with the hundreds of operatives upon the subjects most interesting to them, always leading up to higher themes. The men soon learned what his "help at any hour of the day or night" meant, and every Sunday the church was crowded to overflowing.
His knowledge of men and his power over them was as mar- velous as it was lasting. His success soon attracted attention. Generals Burnside and Mcclellan and many men who have become part of our country's history were his devoted parish- ioners. Men and women of other parishes began to come to the inspiring services and here the unerring tact and grace of the man revealed itself in preventing a coldness of feeling among rectors of other parishes, whose vacant pews bore witness to the power of the young rector of "the Church of the Holy Com- munion." Many of the most prominent railroad officials became communicants of this church. The ministrations of his rector- ship in Chicago knew no limit. Day or night he was ready to go wherever called. He visited the prisons, standing ready to help discharged prisoners to honestly establish themselves in wage-earning positions ; and one of the three services every Sun- day was given to the large Swedish congregation of the Church of St. Ansgarius, which, after the return of the Rev. Dr. Uronius to Sweden, became a part of his cure, and was the beginning of his interest in the Scandinavians-an augury of his espousal of their cause, years later, in his own diocese.
At that time the flame of burning strife between High and Low Church seemed to have reached its highest point in Chi- cago, but the young rector, unmindful of everything except the saving of men, went his way, equally beloved by the six invincible representatives of the two Church parties, who remained his devoted lifelong friends. Meanwhile his congre- gation having far outgrown Metropolitan Hall, the "Church of the Holy Communion" was erected, which was burned at the time of the great Chicago fire.
The phenomenal success of Mr. Whipple's work in Chicago was one of the chief factors leading to his election to the Epis- copate in 1859. He was consecrated first Bishop of Minnesota. October 13. 1859. in St. James church, Richmond, Va., at the session of the General Convention, an event full of significance to Minnesota, the Church and the Country.
The striking personality of Bishop Whipple was largely, of course, a temperamental endowment, but it is easy to see how, by the successive events in his life from his boyhood to his ele-
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vation to the Episcopate, those natural endowments were trained and developed, which qualified him for the problems awaiting him, especially in his broad view of the relations of the Govern- ment to the dark races. He was a born orator, graceful and impressive in action, and his musical and impassioned voice of so fine a timbre that, without an effort, it filled the largest of English cathedrals. Discriminating, far-sighted, masterly, and so clear and judicial in his presentation of questions that he was peculiarly fitted to preside over deliberative bodies. Perhaps his most perfect gift was his unfailing spirit of Christian charity, combined with the most sensitive consciousnes of any fault, however small; his frequent expressions of humility, born of ideals so lofty that their radiance left in his own mind no room for personal exaltation. His noble type of face, which at this time was of unique beauty, was clear-cut and ecclesiastical, its youthful hope and high courage gathering to itself, with increas- ing years, the look of holy mastery and power born of the sacred fire within-the fire of consecration and love to God and humanity. It was a face that riveted instant attention in any assembly. Of commanding figure and presence, six feet and several inches in height, he was called, on both sides of the Atlantic, the most picturesque figure in the Anglican Com- munion. The New York "Independent" described Bishop Whip- ple, just after his consecration, as "The prelate who looks more like what one imagines a bishop should be,-with a figure and face an artist would like to paint : being such as one sees in the pictures of Fra Beato, or old frescoes in the Campo Santo at Pisa, where saints with upturned faces and rapt eyes seem to pierce through the clouds of Time right on into the glories of Eternity. Such men are not the glory of one part of the Church alone, but the common property of the Holy Church Universal, of which the Lord is the Living Head."
This was the type of man who, as the youngest in the House of Bishops, came to Minnesota as its first bishop in 1859. To one less hopeful and courageous the outlook upon his new field at that initial visit would have been appalling. He found a vast wilderness stretching over an area of eighty-three thousand square miles, with twenty thousand Indians of three tribes at war with one another. St. Paul was a small town and Minne- apolis a little village. There were not more than fifteen or sixteen small churches and chapels (of frame and log) in the diocese, four parochial clergy, and perhaps a dozen missionary clergy, while the Church was without organization and the newly made diocese, such as it was, divided against itself by wide difference of opinion.
Bishop Whipple held his first service in Minnesota at Wa-
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basha, November 10, 1859, and on the 23d of the same month made his first visit to the Ojibway Indian country. Indian affairs were then at their lowest ebb, without government, pro- tection or personal rights of property, and therefore subject to every evil influence of unscrupulous white men, whose only effort to lighten the darkness of the Indians lay in irrigating their land with the deadly fire-water.
At this first visit the introductory scene, a few miles from the agency, showed a dead Indian by the roadside, a number of bruised and bleeding men lying in torture from wounds received in a drunken fight, a woman scraping bark from a tree to keep her children from starving, and a crowd of half-naked wretches in rags, who gathered around the Bishop with piteous looks as they begged him to give them help. At another point he was met by a strange crowd in blankets, paint and feathers, some with ears cut to represent car-drops, others wearing brass clock- wheels in their mutilated ears, and all covered with barbaric ornaments of beads and metal. "What could you say to such people?" someone once asked the Bishop. "Simply the story of the Great Spirit, with its practical application," was the answer. A mission had been started among the Ojibways a few years earlier by the Rev. Dr. Breck, but the Indians had driven him out of their country and there was little to show for it. Mis- sions had also been started among the Ojibways by other religious denominations, but they had all been abandoned. Upon his first visit to the Lower Sioux Agency the Bishop was met by the Head Chief Wabasha, Wakean Waste, and Taopi, with a story of their wrongs which fired his blood, a condition speaking for itself in the fact that over forty thousand dollars of Indian money "had been expended for schools," and there was no school building, no school, and not an Indian child had been taught to read: and yet the Sioux had suffered far less than the Ojibways. The hatred of the whites for the Indians was rampant. What an outlook! It took courage and fear- lessness unthinkable in these days of peace for the young Bishop, with a vast diocese to administer and build up in every direction, to risk antagonizing at the very outset the men to whom he must look for help in his work, by putting himself on the side of the hated red man.
On one side he was confronted by the ghastly picture of heathenism, degradation, wrong, and outstretched hands plead- ing for help: on the other side bitter hatred for the Indian, and surprise and anger waxing hot in their veins for the Bishop, who boldly called them brothers, and was unflinching in open espousal of their canse to the death. The absolute knowledge of the wrongs which lay behind the Indian wars and uprisings was the
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slogan which called Bishop Whipple to battle. What a splen- did picture rises before one, today, of this Christ-like young Bishop standing in the midst of his vast field of labor, with his clear eyes set eagerly and hopefully toward the Dawn, unmoved by the cries on every side, "Let the Indian alone!" standing for fair play and common justice to the wronged and helpless race, and caring not if he were slain, could he but bear the seal of its enfranchised manhood and womanhood to his Master. It was equal to any venture of those great days of the Crusades, and the Bishop might well have been a picture of Sir Galahad starting on his quest for the Sangreal, as he announced that, "God being his helper, it should never be said that the first bishop of Minnesota turned his back on the heathen at his door."
In these days of better things, when Indian sympathizers are the rule, not the exception among enlightened Christian people, when conferences are convened and, amid comforts and lux- uries, kind Indian friends cheerfully discuss present-day prob- lems, how little is realized of what it meant to be a friend of the Indian in those lurid days! Good and righteous as is the work which the Indians' friends are now trying to do, it but repre- sents the arcadian field of peace after the blood-red soil of battle. The Bishop said, in later years, "Our Indian system has not been reformed, but there is the difference between daylight and midnight in its administration." A long procession of Christian red men, whom the Bishop first knew as painted sav- ages with scalp-trophies at their belts, has passed on, leaving its witness to the fulfilment of his hopes.
On February 19, 1860, the Bishop held his first service in the wooden chapel at Faribault, then a straggling village of frame houses, the Episcopal mission consisting of a rude little chapel in which a parish school was kept, two small frame houses, a little shanty about fourteen by sixteen feet in size, where a few young men who were studying for the ministry were housed, and a few acres of land which had been donated by Alexander Faribault, with a few more acres which had been purchased but not paid for. The bluffs were covered by forest, with a sprinkling of Indian shanties. On the site of the present Shumway chapel the bishop saw a scalp-dance. This was all. Certainly not of sufficient significance to weigh in the balance in deciding the important question of the Cathedral city. It has often been asked why Bishop Whipple chose Faribault for the See city and for the founding of schools, as there were no material advantages in the way of beginnings to offer. Fron- tenac and several other places in the state held out inducements to the Bishop for beginning his work, but the healthfulness and
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beauty of the situation of Faribault and its promise as a grow- ing center marked it as a fitting place for the establishment of schools, and when a delegation of men of different communions waited upon him, the week of his first visitation, and in the name of the town of Faribault cordially offered him a home, with promises to give him their support in his educational work, he accepted it as a providential leading, and Faribault became the See city of the diocese.
In the founding of his schools Bishop Whipple derived much help and inspiration from his visits to the great schools of Eng- land,-Winchester, Rugby, Eton and Harrow, and much val- uable advice from his friends, the Most Rev. Dr. Longley, Arch- bishop of Canterbury, who had been head master at Harrow, and from the Rt. Rev. Dr. Tait, bishop of London, who had succeeded Dr. Arnold at Rugby. How few of the students of today, who go carelessly in and out of the noble school build- ings which now crown the bluff, taking advantages offered them as a matter of course, know or realize what they owe to Bishop Whipple! These schools were not planted after the manner of so many grand collegiate piles, by munificent gifts and rich endowments, but they stand a witness to the prayers, the faith, the perseverance, the courage and the unceasing energy of the Bishop himself, of whom it was said that his faith was of the kind to move mountains. His name should be enshrined in the heart of every student who claims as alma mater one of these schools. They stand, a double witness to the love and confidence in which Bishop Whipple was held by friends at home and abroad, who gave him their gifts not because they had any great interest in western schools, but because Bishop Whipple had an undying interest in them. and they wanted to help him personally.
The first money for Shattuck school came through the Bishop's devoted friend, Dr. Geo. C. Shattuck, of Boston, the founder of St. Paul's school, Concord. The Bishop had so aroused his interest in his educational plans that he said to him one day: "Bishop, I own a tract of land in Illinois. I have promised to give eight thousand dollars to St. James' College, Maryland, within ten years. I will give you this land, and as you sell it yon can use part of the proceeds to pay my sub- scription and keep the rest for your schools." The Bishop's business sagacity brought about fortunate sales. Mr. Felix Brunot, the friend of missions, wanted eighty acres of this land and told the Bishop he would give him three months to get the best offer he could for it, and he would then give him an addi- tional ten dollars for each acre which he could use for his work. An offer for a piece of the land soon came from the owner of
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