Henry Benjamin Whipple

• Henry Benjamin Whipple
• Born: February 15, 1822
• Died: September 16, 1901

Episcopal bishop and Indian-rights worker, was born in Adams, New York, the eldest of seven children of John Hall Whipple, a merchant, and Elizabeth (Wager) Whipple. He was descended on both sides from New Englanders with distinguished records of political and military service. After attending local Presbyterian schools, he studied at Oberlin Collegiate Institute, in Ohio, in 1838—39, but was forced to leave on account of ill health. He entered his father’s business and became active in Democratic politics, obtaining a post as a school inspector and serving in the New York State militia with the rank of major. In October 1842 he married Cornelia Wright of Adams. The following year, on his doctor’s orders, he traveled to Florida, then in the throes of the Seminole War, where he first observed official mistreatment of American Indians.

Whipple’s early inclination toward the Episcopal church was strengthened by his wife’s influence. He became a candidate for holy orders in 1848 and was ordained a priest in 1850. He remained in his first parish, in Rome, New York, until 1857, taking a year’s leave for the sake of his wife’s health in 1853-54 and serving as a missionary in Florida. From 1857 to 1859 he organized a new church among the workers of Chicago’s South Side. In 1858 he helped establish the Bishop Seabury Mission in frontier Minnesota; elected first bishop of Minnesota in 1859. he established his home in Faribault, the center of Indian missionary work.

While traveling among the Ojibwa and Dakota people of his diocese, Whipple had ample opportunity to observe the operations of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a complicated network of political appointees and licensed traders who channeled federal appropriations for Indian welfare into the hands of local politicians and businessmen. Appalled by the degrading effects of this system, in 1860 he began a series of appeals to Washington officials for thorough reform modeled on the Canadian system: the government must drop the pretense of tribal sovereignty and frankly acknowledge the Indians as wards; the Indians must be granted individual land allotments; and they must be helped by honest agents and teachers to become civilized—that is, Christian—farmers (the ethnic and religious traditions of native-American peoples were felt by many white missionaries and reformers, Whipple included, to be hindrances to their assimilation). Except for its all-important emphasis on guardianship and gradualism, this program resembled the one later incorporated into the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887, which, however, had the effect of weakening, not strengthening, Indian life.

As further evidence of the Indians’ capacity to become “civilized” and live in harmony with their white neighbors, Whipple cited the many Christian Indians who protected the whites during the Dakota (Sioux) uprising of 1862, an event that Whipple had predicted, and which he blamed on the corruption and greed of white settlers and officials. After doing what he could to calm the white people of Minnesota, who were demanding extermination or removal of the Indians, Whipple went to Washington to intercede with President Abraham Lincoln for the lives of hundreds of Dakota prisoners. Lincoln pardoned most of them, and he promised Whipple, “If we get through this war and if I live, this Indian business shall be reformed.” Whipple then acquiesced in the removal of the Dakota and of the peaceable Winnebago as well. The Ojibwa (Chippewa) were moved to a new reservation in Minnesota, and Whipple was able to obtain a partial enactment of his program for them.

After Whipple’s postwar speaking tours of eastern cities, money for his Indian work began to flow in from philanthropists formerly occupied with the slavery question. From England, too—he had traveled there in 1864-65—he received strong support. Whipple was an excellent orator and raconteur and a commanding platform presence, with his tall, spare figure and shoulder-length hair. He was respected by politicians of both major parties for his worldly experience and practicality as well as for his philanthropy and sincerity. He was appointed to the commission that negotiated with the Dakota after General Custer’s defeat in 1876, and in 1886 was named to the Northwest Indian Commission. In 1896 he became a member of the Board of Indian Commissioners, an advisory body on Indian policy. Throughout this period of government service he continued his paternalistic fight for his “red children,” and he exposed fraud wherever he found it.

Whipple also continued the interest in education that had led him to establish a girls’ school and military, agricultural, and divinity schools, as well as schools at the Indian missions. As an original trustee of the George Peabody Fund, he helped found the Peabody Normal Institute in Nashville, Tennessee. He was an admirer of Captain Richard Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Institute for Indian education, and agreed with Pratt’s religious-reformist credo that “an Indian is like a white man, and that industry, reward of labor, protection of law, and Christian homes will do for the one what it has done for the other.”

Until the year of his death, Whipple remained active in church affairs. He represented the American Episcopal church at several conferences in London and received honorary degrees from Durham, Oxford, and Cambridge universities. In 1900 he traveled to Cuba and Puerto Rico to explore the possibilities for missionary work there.

Benjamin and Cornelia Whipple had six children, two of whom (Cornelia, born in 1845, and John, born in 1856) predeceased their parents. The others were Sarah (born in 1843), Jane (born in 1847), Charles (born in 1849), and Frances (born in 1853). Cornelia Whipple died in 1890. In 1896 Whipple married Evangeline (Marrs) Simpson of Boston, who used part of her wealth to build a large addition to their home as a showcase for the many gifts presented to Whipple by Indian friends, who had given him the name “Straight Tongue.”

Whipple died at his home at the age of seventy-nine of what was diagnosed as neuralgia of the heart. The mourners at his funeral included many Indians from among the hundreds who had become farmers in Minnesota as a result of his activities.

Most of Whipple’s papers are deposited with the Minnesota Historical Society. His autobiography, Lights and Shadows of a Long Episcopate (1899), contains several addresses on Indian affairs. For his early life and family, see Bishop Whipple’s Southern Diary, 1843-1844 (1937) and C. H. Whipple, A Brief Genealogy of the Whipple-Wright . . . Families (1917). An uncritical biography based on original sources is P. E. Osgood, Straight Tongue (1958). See also The Dictionary of American Biography (1936). More recent appraisals of Whipple’s role in the Indian reform movement are R. W. Mardock, Reformers and the Indian (1971), and D. A. Nichols, Lincoln and the Indians (1979).