Whipple, Henry Benjamin, 1822-1901

First Episcopal Bishop of the Diocese of Minnesota.

Episcopal Bishop of Minnesota.

Epithet: Bishop of Minnesota

Episcopal Bishop, citrus plantation owner.

Bishop Whipple was the Bishop of the Diocese of Minnesota from 1859 to 1901 as well as the owner of a plantation in Maitland, Fla. that produced oranges and other citrus fruits.

Henry B. Whipple was born February 15, 1822, in Adams, New York, the son of John Hall and Elizabeth Wager Whipple. He was educated at a private boarding school in Clinton, New York, and at Jefferson County Institute in Watertown, New York. In 1838 and 1839 he attended Oberlin Collegiate Institute, but his health failed and his physician recommended an active business life. During the 1840s he worked for his father, a country merchant, purchasing goods from local farmers. He became active in New York politics as a conservative Democrat, and made many political friends who later used their influence in support of his efforts to reform the United States Indian administration.

In March of 1848, Whipple began studying for the ministry in the Protestant Episcopal Church. He was ordained deacon in August, 1849, became rector of Zion Church in Rome, New York, in November, 1849, and was ordained priest in 1850. Whipple served as rector of Zion Church from 1849 to 1857, becoming known both for the size and wealth of his parish and for his work among the poor.

In 1857, upon the urging of Albert E. Neely and others of Chicago, Illinois, Whipple helped organize and became the first rector of the Church of the Holy Communion, on Chicago’s south side, the first free church in the city. He drew his parishioners from “the highways and hedges” -- clerks, laborers, railroad men, travelers, and derelicts -- sought converts among the city’s Swedish population, and regularly officiated in a Chicago prison.

On June 30, 1859, Whipple was elected the first Protestant Episcopal bishop of Minnesota, an office he held until his death more than forty years later. He was consecrated bishop on October 13, 1859, and in December of that year made his first visitation of his diocese, including the Chippewa missions of E. Steele Peake and John Johnson Enmegahbowh. In the spring of 1860 he moved his family to Faribault, establishing it as the see city of the diocese.

During his episcopate, Whipple guided the development of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Minnesota from a few missionary parishes to a flourishing and prosperous diocese. For many years, especially during the first two decades of his episcopate, he made regular missionary sojourns by wagon or coach through the rural areas of the state, often in mid-winter, preaching in cabins, school houses, stores, saloons, and Indian villages. Until the diocese was financially secure, he pledged himself to personally support several of its missionary clergy and assumed many other financial obligations of the church. He unified a diocese that at his election was divided into two quarrelling factions.

In 1860, Whipple incorporated the Bishop Seabury Mission in Faribault, building it upon the foundations laid by James Lloyd Breck and Solon W. Manney, who in 1858 had founded a divinity school and school for boys and girls. With the help of gifts from eastern donors, the mission developed into three separate but closely connected schools: Seabury Divinity School, Shattuck School for boys, and St. Mary’s Hall for the education of daughters of the clergy. Whipple also helped found the Breck School in Wilder, Minnesota, to educate the children of farmers.

Whipple was best known outside of Minnesota for his dedication to the welfare of the American Indians and for his missionary work among the Sioux and Chippewa of Minnesota. He returned from his first visitation of his diocese with a firm commitment to the establishment of Indian missions and the reform of the United States Indian system. He regularly included Indian villages on his visitations, built up the Episcopal mission to the Chippewa based at the White Earth Reservation, and appealed for support of Indian missions by addresses throughout the United States and in Europe.

As an outspoken and prestigious advocate of Indian administration reform, Whipple was looked to as a leader by individuals and organizations concerned with the Indians’ welfare. He corresponded with congressmen, army officers, officials of the United States Department of the Interior, and the Presidents of the United States, urging that the Indians be dealt with honestly, justly and humanely, and that the existing system of Indian administration be thoroughly revised to permit the Indian to live in dignity and decency. He made numerous trips to Washington, D.C., especially during the 1860s, to plead in person for Indian reform and to expose abuses in the Indian service, appealed for support through newspapers and church publications, and lectured on Indian affairs.

Whipple’s suggestions for reform of the Indian system included treating tribes as wards of the government instead of as independent nations; paying annuities in kind rather than in cash; providing practical industrial education for Indians and separate homesteads for those who wanted them; appointing honest Indian agents; dealing with Indians as individuals rather than as tribes; enforcing laws through the use of native police and through trial, by a United States Indian commissioner, of any white men who violated Indian Laws; concentrating different bands of a tribe onto a single reservation; and refusing to permit liquor to be sold to Indians.

In addition to being consulted on Indian affairs by government officials, Whipple served on several commissions authorized to negotiate treaties or to oversee the Indian’s welfare, including the Sioux Commission (1876), the Northwest Indian Commission (1887), several commissions appointed to oversee annuity payments to the Chippewa of Minnesota (1860s), and the United States Board of Indian Commissioners (1895-1901). He also attended several Lake Mohonk Conferences of Friends of the Indian and served on the Episcopal Church’s Joint Committee to Secure Protection of the Civil Law for the Indians (1878-1883).

In the early years of his episcopate, Whipple’s espousal of Indian reform and commitment to Indian missions earned him the enmity of many whites who hated Indians, and led some of his fellow bishops to look upon him as a fanatic. His attitude was denounced most bitterly after Minnesota’s Sioux Uprising of 1862, when, in appeals to the President and in the public press, he opposed wholesale executions and extermination or deportation of the Sioux.

Whipple was acquainted with most of the Episcopal Church leaders of his day, and with many Anglican bishops of the British Isles and Canada. He made several trips to Europe for his health and to attend ecclesiastical conferences. Although a high churchman in doctrine, he preached tolerance of all views which fell within the scope of the church’s basic teachings. Urging that the church’s task was to “preach Christ crucified” and that sectarian quarrels hindered this mission, he pled for unity among all branches of the Episcopal and Anglican communions and for harmonious relations among members of all Christian denominations. Both in Chicago and in Minnesota, he worked closely with ministers and communicants of the national Swedish Church. His interest in the church’s missionary efforts was reflected in his presidency of the Western Church Building Society (1880-1893), his service on several committees and commissions of the General Convention concerned with missionary affairs, and in special missions to Cuba and to Puerto Rico. During the 1880s and 1890s, his health compelled him to spend several months each year at his winter home in Maitland, Florida, where he held missionary services and built the Church of the Good Shepherd. Whipple married Cornelia Wright, daughter of Benjamin and Sarah Wright of Adams, New York, in 1842; they had six children. Cornelia Whipple died in 1890 from injuries suffered in a railroad accident, and in 1896 Whipple married Evangeline Marrs Simpson, widow of industrialist Michael Hodge Simpson.

Henry B. Whipple died on September 16, 1901.