SKETCH OF ANDREW DICKSON WHITE. 551 



besides his wife, for Europe. The civil war then raging in 

 America had stirred him deeply, and his had been no slight share 

 in sending to the field the young manhood of the North. Now, 

 arrived in Europe, a new task confronted him. In answer to the 

 pro- Southern correspondents of the London press, who were mis- 

 leading the English public as to the resources and the character 

 of the North, and bade fair to win for the Confederacy the recog- 

 nition, if not the intervention, of Great Britain, he dashed off his 

 A Word from the Northwest, perhaps the most telling defense of 

 the Unionist cause ; and this he followed up with effective letters 

 in the journals of England and the Continent. Returning in 1863 

 to the financial cares which demanded his presence in Syracuse, 

 he found in domestic politics a fresh field for his powers as a 

 writer and orator, and in the autumn of that year was sent by his 

 native county of Onondaga to the Senate of New York. 



Of this body, in which he sat till 1867, he was, though its 

 youngest member, from the first a man of influence. Against the 

 peace sympathies of Governor Seymour he was an eloquent and 

 effective advocate of the aggressive prosecution of the war. 

 Though a director of the New York Central Railroad and a resi- 

 dent of the city most dependent on the Erie Canal, he did loyal 

 service as an opponent of the dictation both of railway and of 

 canal ring. His intelligent interest in civic affairs earned him a 

 place on the legislative Committee on Municipal Reform, where 

 he was especially concerned in the organization on its present 

 basis of the Health Department of New York city. But it was as 

 chairman of the educational committee, or Committee on Litera- 

 ture, as it was called, that there opened to him the largest oppor- 

 tunities. He was able to carry through a great extension of the 

 normal school system for the training of teachers. What was 

 more, the beneficence of the national Government seemed to put 

 within reach what had long been the dearest dream of his pub- 

 lic life. 



Even while a boy at the Geneva College, as he paced rebel- 

 liously the shore of Seneca Lake, he had begun to frame in his 

 thought the great university, worthy of the greatest State of the 

 Union, by which New York should some day make needless all 

 petty sectarian institutions. When Gerrit Smith had later talked 

 of endowing a university in central New York, he had offered the 

 half of his own fortune for such an object. The dream ripened 

 during his years at Michigan. " It is now just about ten years 

 ago," said George William Curtis in 1868, " since I was in the 

 city of Ann Arbor, the seat of the University of Michigan, . . . 

 and I sat at night talking with my friend, a New York scholar. 

 Professor of History in that institution. . . . There, in the warmth 

 and confidence of his friendship, he unfolded to me his idea of the 



