Stories from the First Cathedral 37: President Lincoln and Bishop Whipple Continued

On September 15, 1862, Henry Whipple came to President Lincoln's office in Washington accompanied by General Henry Halleck, a West Point graduate, the chief of all Union forces and first cousin to Whipple.

"At six feet two inches tall - nearly as tall as Lincoln - Whipple had a foot's height on the average man of the time. He could nearly look Lincoln in the eye. At forty he was then a dozen years younger than the president and slimmer. In an era in which many men, including Lincoln, wore facial hair, Whipple kept himself clean-shaven. He swept his dark hair back and let it grow long down his neck, in a style some of his Indian acquaintances recognized favorably. That day in the White House, Whipple's appearance would have included a discordant note. He had a bandaged hand, the result of an injury two weeks earlier. He had hurt it while sewing up wounds suffered by white settlers in flight from the Dakotas. The bishop had spent days serving as a nurse in a makeshift hospital he had organized not far from the fighting. At some point, his needle had slipped, and the hand had become painfully infected." (From Lincoln's Bishop by Gustav Niebuhr 2014)

The stage is set for the meeting between two men, who were champions in their own cause to secure freedom for people who were enslaved and persecuted - Lincoln in his focus for freedom for the slaves,  Whipple in his focus on seeking justice for the native people in Minnesota.