Biography of William Pinkney Whyte (Gloria Chamberlin)
Tocqueville would note “This ceaseless agitation which democratic government has introduced into the political world, influences all social intercourse.” It was in this era that William Pinkney Whyte would help shape the “new civilization” with a long political career.
Ratified in the 18th century, the new American Constitution would be embraced in the 19th century. For as George Washington’s Farewell Address was to mark the unselfish role of anti-partyism and "deference" as a republican virtue, the Age of Jackson with its pro-active suffrage and partisan voting was to mark the age of a new culture of liberal reform as an expression of social egalitarianism and democracy.
It began with the influence of early fundamental republicanism. William Pinkney Whyte was raised in an environment where daughters of the revolution were to instruct their sons in the “principles of patriotism” , young William Pinkney was tutored by R. M. McNally, who had been Napoleon Bonaparte’s private secretary. At age 18 Peabody, Riggs and Co. employed him as a clerk, and by age 20, he was working for the law offices of Brown and Brune in Baltimore where he stayed for a year before entering Harvard Law School. He was admitted to the Maryland Bar when he returned two years later to study under Judge John Glenn, former director of the collapsed Bank of Maryland
In 1847, barely 23 years old and newly married to Louisa D. Hollingsworth, daughter of a well known Baltimore merchant, William Pinkney Whyte was elected as a Democrat to a seat in the House of Delegates from Baltimore City where he served for one term before returning to his law practice in 1851. There, his hopes for a dignified private life as a lawyer were not realized.
The Democratic Party nominated him for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, which was only narrowly lost. In 1853 they nominated him as their candidate for Comptroller of the Treasury, and he won the election.
The 1850s found Maryland amid a transition from agriculture to manufacture; from slave to free, from southern charm to northern determinism. Mineral wealth and resources from the West were needed for industry on the Atlantic seaboard, and huge investments in internal improvements were made by the State to connect the state by canal, road and rail. Some of the richest deposits of bituminous coal lay between the Pennsylvania boarder and the Potomac's north branch, twenty-five miles deep by five miles wide. As soon as the General Assembly chartered the B&O and the C&O, corporations had formed to mine Maryland coal.
In October 1850 the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal reached Cumberland. By 1852, rails linked the Chesapeake Bay and Ohio River with the help of financing by George Peabody, a New Englander with London banking ties, and Johns Hopkins, a Quaker merchant with interest in developing the B&O. Other railroads followed to cross the state. On the water, Maryland was building ships, lighthouses and ports. The Baltimore Clipper added to a vibrant transatlantic sailing tradition with ships built for speed, tonnage and commerce that were world reknown. On the Eastern shore working vessels were built for fishing, oyster harvesting and pleasure.
Because of its industrial labor market, Baltimore was attracting immigrants from free-states and northern states alike, but mostly from Europe. By 1850, the city reached a population of 170,000. Along with most industrial northern cities, most of the new immigrants were active abolitionists. Maryland however, was predominatly an agricultural state with a long tradition of tobacco growing that was labor intensive.
The nation was changing from a rural community to one in which more than half of all Americans lived in cities. Millions of immigrants were flooding into America searching for opportunities and freedom such that modern historians are yet to analyze the full metamorphis that occurred in the cities of the 19th century. For one historian, Jacobson, the overarching struggle of the era was the ongoing struggle between America’s dynamic industrial capitalism and the needs of the nation’s republican institutions: American industry needed markets for its output, raw materials to keep its engines running, and cheap labor to man those engines. Further, intellectuals, statesmen, and many in the public at large also believe that their country’s democracy – its republic “virtues” (espoused by George Washington) needed protection from foreign immigrants, “barbarians.” In Baltimore, it was this polarity of interests that caused tension.
Far from a city of “barbarians”, Baltimore was populated predominantly by hard working Irish immigrants who filled the ranks of the industrial workforce, constituting the popular majority who supported the Democratic party and the tenets of egalitarianism . William Pinkney Whyte’s paternal grandfather, Dr. John Campbell White, had come to America as a physician in 1798 following the Irish rebellion in which he had taken part.
Also in Baltimore was a large population of Germans who contributed largely to the scientific and objective imperative of industrialization. Mechanization and professional specialization would replace conventional moral discipline based on conformity and religion. New thought, new academic institutions would sweep into industrial cities like Johns Hopkins, Clark, and Chicago.
By mid-century, Baltimore had a population of nearly seven thousand Jews amongst whom were leading bankers like the Cohens, and merchants and clothiers like Ettings, Friedenwalds, Hutzlers, Hamburgers, Levys, and Sonneborns.
Absent from the politics of Maryland during the administration of a scandalous Governor Philip Thomas, William Pinkney Whyte would step into his role as Comptroller during the Administration of Governor Enoch Louis Lowe (1850-1853) whose two predecessors, Governors Pratt, and Thomas (Francis, cousin of former Phillip Thomas) had managed to the retire the State’s debt and institute the reform movement and ratify a new state constitution.
The new constitution called for a great increase of elected public officers, including the Comptroller, four Commissioners of Public Works, and a Commissioner of the Land Office. Also to be elected popularly were all Judges, Sheriffs, County Commissioners, Clerks of Courts, Registers of Wills, States Attorneys, Surveyors, Justices of the Peace, Constables and Road Supervisors. Senatorial terms were fixed at four years, and a census reapportionment for seating delegates in the lower house gave each county no less than two members, with four for Baltimore.
Social reform pervaded the city as it would the nation, and many new measures were approved by an electoral majority in Maryland, and by appeal to the General Assembly such as the “obliteration of ancient barbarism – imprisonment for debt”; and funds for the mentally ill.
William Pinkney Whyte's term as Comptroller began on the eve of the Civil War. In 1853 a legislative Committee on the Colored Population pointed to an increase in the Negro population of 164,445 of whom 90,368 were slaves. It declared “That the two races must ultimately separate, the Committee do not doubt.” . Within the next decade, this issue would rend the nation, and nowhere was a state more divided than Maryland.
His term of office as Comptroller, (1853 to 1855) William Pinkney Whyte implemented a system quoted in the General Assembly as
“One of admirable character, and that the details of the office have been so simplified that mistakes or confusion hereafter in the official business of the Comptroller’s office is almost impossible. The careful arrangement of the official vouchers and the uniform precision in all the details of the office evince not only the wisdom of the Constitution in providing the safeguard to the Treasury, but also show the successful manner in which the objects of the Constitution and the several acts of Assembly referring to the department have been observed by Mr. Whyte, the late incumbent.”
The local newspapers would refer to him as a man having…
-----See his term functions here----------
By the end of his term of office in 1855, William Pinkney Whyte did not seek re-election.
Two years later, the Democratic Party again nominated William Pinkney Whyte for Congress. He was defeated, and he protested the corruption of an election system clearly out of control, but the U.S. House of Representatives refused to concur with a report submitted by the Committee on Elections recommending that he be seated. His protest however, would help reform future elections. By 1857, Whyte retired from public life, and for good reason.
In 1858, civil law and order was so threatened by mob protest that prominent Baltimore business and p professional men including clerks and skilled workers formed a City Reform Association, led by slavery opponent George William Brown.
The Governor of Maryland was a democrat, Thomas Watkins Ligion who attempted to reform elections. In the General Assembly, he e faced a coalition of Whigs and American Party men.
Since the 1930s, private groups of elite planters and traditionalists whose agricultural economies had sustained the state for a century and a half, met to discuss the threat to old ways that accompanied the influx of immigrants, asking themselves what had happened to the former influence of the native born. Secretive about their meetings at their lodges, these nativists answered all questions with “I know nothing”:
The “know Nothings” were a product of a fast moving industrialized world in which the telegraph changed the contours of time and space and the new faces of immigrants, race and religion displaced their security, if not subvert their moral and religious impulse into reform impulse such as abolitionism and temperance which was entered wholesale into the political theater. Such political expressions of egalitarianism threatened deferential republicanism, many of who came from rural regions where their economic and social stability was still slave and labor intensive. The Whigs and Know-Nothings merged to become the American Party, and often included in their ranks, the elite industrialists of the north. But their traditional values found little sympathy in Baltimore where political activism engendered the egalitarian aspirations of newly enfranchised workers and recently arrived immigrants
Immigrants in Baltimore were emerging as the new middle class in new social environment and experiences. They were found engaged in politics in their parlor centered homes; embellished commercial and professional workplaces: Their notions of liberalism was represented by a political activity that enlarged individual American freedom such as had never before been seen in America.
Indeed partisanship seemed essential to man’s identity. But it was hard to contain. Unfortunately, participatory democracy spilled from the parlors to saloon brawls and street riots, such that politics tarnished the social respectability of patriotic civic participation, and many good men withdrew from the republican political process, including William Pinkney Whyte, who devoted the Civil War years to his law practice. Campaigns and elections had degenerated to mob rule in Baltimore, such that the State could hardly be brought into alignment with Lincoln’s Union.
As Union troops made their way through Baltimore amid street rioting and uncertainty, Maryland entered the civil war divided and with much acrimony. One of the oldest colonies of the nation, Maryland had been nursed on a tobacco economy that was financed by Europe where the custom of slave owning was acceptable. But located next to the heart of a National government bent on industrialization, tensions mounted, and voters were bullied at the polls to elect Republicans as state leaders who committed 46,000 troops to the Union. From Maryland 20,000 troops however, volunteered for the Confederate south.
After the war, Maryland was faced with a Reconstruction program reserved for secessionist states. Disenfranchised, divided and developing for a modern world, it elected a Democratic “machinery” that produced leaders like Gorman, and Raisin whose brand of "lodge democracy" played a central role in party organization. During these years William Pinkney Whyte remained out of politics, wondering perhaps as he witnessed the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus; the doing and undoing of state constitutions and mob riots of one-party rule, if the new republic would survive.
In 1868 William Pinkney Whyte nominated Horatio Seymour for President as delegate to the Democratic National Convention. On July 14th, upon the invitation by Governor Swan, Whyte was sworn in to complete the term of office in the United States Senate vacated by Reverdy Johnson who resigned for an appointment as Minister to the Court of St. James.. He made left his mark in the highly contentious Congress in December when President Andrew Johnson sent his annual message to Congress to be read.
The civil war was over, but the wounds were still raw. Congress, differing from the President over Reconstruction issues, and following an unsuccessful attempt by Radicals to impeach him, made a motion to dispense with further reading of the President's address. As biographer Frank F. White, Jr. describes
"Whyte rose to defend Johnson, calmly and fearlessly pointing out to his colleagues that the President of the United States was doing his constitutional duty and that Congress had no other alternative except to listen to him. Johnson's detractor withdrew his motion so that his message was read without further incident."
. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Maryland was being overtaken by industrial growth, labor reorganization, professional development and consumerism. The pressure for reform was inevitable.
In 1871 The Democrats nominated him for Governor, and he won the election by 15,000 votes. He was sworn inaugurated on January 10, 1872 and served for slightly more than two years.
Governor Whyte was evidently the first Governor to enjoy the newly built mansion since the old had been sold to the Naval Academy. During his tenure as Governor, the Board of Public Works, reorganized under a Constitutional Convention three years previously in which a standing Committee on Public Works was created to handle all affairs of internal improvements, began to receive offers for the exchange of state bonds for B & O preferred stock. According to biographer Alan Wilbur, "These offers to exchange bonds for railroad stock continued sporadically into 1876, and sizable amount of preferred stock of the B & O was sold in this manner - most of it to Robert Garrett and Company. Minutes of meetings show exchanges amounting to over $430,000 being approved in May 1971 alone. Shortly thereafter, the County of Allegheny was redistricted to become Garrett County. The board also appointed railroad and canal directors.
His administration is noted for comments that he made about agriculture to be in "competition with the agriculturists of the West, and…. to turn our lands to other and more remunerative culture".
The South's postwar economic transformation profoundly affected the course of Reconstruction politics and its ultimate collapse, for as the "Black Code's illustrated, state governments could play a critical role in defining property rights and restricting the bargaining power of planters and laborers . However, Whyte supported the Colored Normal School for the education of freemen even though the state differed with the Federal government over black suffrage. Further, he conceived of a Board of Immigration. And established the State Board of Health and a House of Correction. His term however, was the last of an era of state autonomy, for in the Civil Rights Law of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment, the federal government had established a national principle of equality before the law, investing itself with the authority to enforce the civil rights of citizens against violations by their states.
In Baltimore, where industrialization, characterized by modern historians as the defense of the family and community against the force of industrial growth, was causing massive dislocations, frequent depressions and widespread unemployment, as it was nationwide. These conditions were experienced by diverse, often "antagonistic groups with unequal capacities for shaping public choices."
The continuous theater of politics allowed men to vote as a method of engaging in this conflict between public and private values with reform movements, torchlight parades, party politics, and crusades. Labor unrest was manifested in class conflicts, ethnicity and religion. Industrial production absorbed laborers - and produced consumers - who now became enfranchised with public interests as individuals, separate from traditional ties, producing the Gilded Age suffragists. Moreover, the character of forming "organizations" ultimately produced a centralized national economy. As overseas markets developed, Maryland became a leading industrial state, especially in shipbuilding.
The Legislature of 1874, according to Elihu Riley in his History of the General Assembly of Maryland, elected William Pinkney Whyte to the be United States Senator from Maryland, "restoring Maryland.to the dignity it once held." His term began in 1875, but before taking his seat, he would successfully defend the State's claim to a boundary dispute with Virginia as counsel to the Commission to resolve a boundary dispute.
William Pinkney Whyte served for six years in the Senate of the United States Congress: 1875 to 1881. Whyte early took the position to speak on the stability of the currency. (Footnote here the online reference made for Number 5 Re the Ohio Patent dispute).
Whyte opposed the creation of the Electoral Commission of 1876. The following year, he served as a member of the commission which prepared the bill under which the District of Columbia would be governed for nearly one hundred years. Remarkably, Whyte opposed the "Roach Subsidy Scheme" in 1879 which would have subsidized shipbuilders with government funds. Whyte objected to the proposal on constitutional and economic grounds and protested against the inequity of the entire subsidy principle.
Whyte did not seek reelection in 1880. His wife became ill, and his disagreements with Maryland's other Senator Arthur Pue Gorman was patent. The following year, he was voted Mayor of the City of Baltimore without opposition. He served two terms and retired in 1883 to return to his law practice, during which time his wife Louisa died. In 1887 the Democratic State Convention nominated him for the position of Attorney General which he won over a Republican candidate by 10,000 votes. He held the office until 1891, arguing new points of criminal law that reflected a half a century of changes in American society.
In 1892 he remarried Mary McDonald Thomas, and in 1898 Baltimore Mayor William T. Malster appointed Whyte to be a member of the commission to revise the City's Charter. At the turn of the century, he was named City Solicitor, a post he held for three years during which time he guided Baltimore through the steps by which it would dispose of its interest in the Western Maryland Railroad.
He thought he could retire from public life in 1903, but when Pue Gorman died in June 1906, Governor Warfield appointed Whyte to fill the vacancy in the Senate of the United States Congress left by Gorman.
When the Democratic State convention met in 1907 to adopt the primary system of conduction election, Whyte was enlisted. Thus until his death in 1908, William Pinkney Whyte, grandson to one the first Vice Presidents of America, served in politics less to promote special interests as to develop constitutional frameworks and stable foundations.
According to regional and national newspapers, William Pinkney Whyte was known as "Maryland's Grand Old Man", and was regarded with deep personal affection in the State, and was remembered nationally as sympathetic with the South, having served honorably in public office for sixty-two years. He was buried in the Emmanuel Protestant Episcopal Church.
1 Glen C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin Rude Republic: Americans and their politics in the Nineteenth Century, Princeton University Press, 2000. (P16).
2 See Also Richard P. McCormick, The Second Party System: Party Formation in the Jacksonian Era (Chapel Hill, N.C. 1966); and William E. Gienapp, “Politics Seem to Enter into Everything: Political Culture in the North, 1840-1860” in Stephen E. Maizlish and John J. Kushma, eds., Essays on American Antebellum Politics, 1840-1860, (College Station, Tex., 1982); and, Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852-1856 (New York, 1987). See also, Jean H. Baker, Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, N.Y., 1983)
3 Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters, Cornell University Press, 1980. (p287)
4 See Frank F. White, Jr., The Governors of Maryland 1777-1970 (Annapolis: The Hall of Records Commission, 1970), 179-183.
5 Robert J. Brugger, Maryland: A Middle Temperament 1634-1980, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988 (p230)
6 historians like Michael L. Krenn, Alan Trachtenberg, Robert Wiebe, Richard Hofstadter, Walter LaFeber, Gabriel Kolko
7 Review by Michael L. Krenn of Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and abroad. New York: Hill and Wang, 2000.
8
9 Peter Novick, That Noble Dream, Cambridge University Press, 1988.
10 James H. Fitzgerald Brewer, “Democracy to Mobocracy, 1835-1860” The Old Line State: A History of Maryland, Hall o f Records Commission State of Maryland, 1971.(p71)
11 Ibid., p (73)
12 Insert reference from website, next online…
13 Insert newspaper accounts that apply…
14 Altschusler and Blumin…(p9)
15 Frank F. White, Jr., The governors of Maryland 1777--
1977 (Annapolis: The Hall of Records Commission, 1970), 179-183
16 Alan M. Wilner, The Maryland Board of Public Works, Hall of Records Commission, Department of General Services, Annapolis, Md. 1984, (p62)
17 In that a comprehensive struggle over the shaping of a new labor system followed the civil war for economic survival in the south, new labor rules were set up to resume production : President Jackson in 1865 established a comprehensive system of vagrancy laws, criminal penalties for breach of contract and other measures known as the "Black Codes"
18 Eric Foner, "Slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction" The New American History, Temple University Press, Philadelphia 1997 (p100)
19 Richard L. McCormick, "Public Life in Industrial America" The New American History, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1977, (p108)
20 Insert a location where his work could be found and read, law books case studies etc. Not sure where to go for this…(Later)
March 18, 2000
Spent much of Spring break working on extended biography and social history. His term as Governor will clearly have to be included in his bio.
There is much about Whyte's career which overlaps the Gorman/Raisin history, although he breaks with them and is amongst the Progressives. However, as comptroller, he only held office for one term 1854-56. It was a very significant period of Maryland history.
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