Books: Bishop's Junket

BISHOP WHIPPLE'S SOUTHERN DIARY 1843-1844—Edited by Lester B. Shippee —University of Minnesota Press ($3.50).

Except to churchmen, the name of Henry Benjamin Whipple now means little. But for almost 40 years this energetic, squarejawed, hard-traveling Episcopal bishop of Minnesota was a U. S. figure to be taken seriously: a man of affairs who exerted his influence from the poverty-stricken, remote frontier post of Faribault, Minn.; a missionary who was denounced by Senators and generals for his defense of the Indians after the Sioux Outbreak in 1862; an ecclesiastical leader who conferred with Queen Victoria and Abraham Lincoln, preached in most of the cathedrals of England and turned down the bishopric of the Sandwich Islands because he thought his work in Minnesota needed him more. Born in upper New York State in 1822, Whipple studied in the abolitionist hotbed of Oberlin Institute, married at 20, became a "rational abolitionist," a conservative Democrat, a politician, a businessman, before his wife persuaded him to take Holy Orders at 27.

After his death in 1901, a brief, old-fashioned travel diary was found among Bishop Whipple's papers. When he was 21, ill-health had driven him South for the winter, on a long, tedious, weakening journey. He went from New York to Savannah on a first-class merchantman, from Savannah to St. Augustine by steamer, across Georgia "on the worst railroad ever invented," by river boat from New Orleans to St. Louis, up the Ohio on the crowded, dirty Goddess of Liberty ("anything but a goddess," wrote young Whipple sourly). by stage ("far pleasanter than on a rail-road car") from Cincinnati to Cumberland, W. Va.

A lively piece of Americana, Bishop Whipple's Southern Diary is a 208-page volume that contains some shrewd observations on the weakening effects of slavery on the Southern white population, a good picture of Florida justice, a horrified account of New Orleans' fabled immorality, pious reflections mingled with longings for home and loved ones. Henry Whipple loved facts. He noted that the river boat Missouri used 500 cords of wood on its 1,100-mile trip from New Orleans to St. Louis, a third of its round-trip expense of $3,200. He put down the population of the towns he passed, the number of rooms in the St. Charles Hotel in New Orleans, the speed of railroads, the price of cotton. But the most notable feature of his trip was its hardships: he was seasick on the Lancashire going South ("I would not wish an enemy's dog a sorer punishment than this deadly seasickness"), exasperated by the slowness of railroads as well as by the smoke in cars that threatened to "transfer us into bacon," frightened by the possibility that the train would go off the track or a rail come through the floor of the car. On steamers he was afraid of fire. He was relieved when he got into stage-coaches, but on one a driver was drunk, on another a wagon tongue broke, almost tipped them off a mountain. Although he does not say that he regained his health on his strenuous junket, his diary gives the impression that Southern sunshine must have been beneficial, or he could never have stood the trip home.