Horace White (American National Bibliography)

According to White's own recollections, the advent of the Free Soil movement in 1848 made him determined to become a journalist so that he could fight against slavery. In 1853 he accepted a position on the Chicago Journal and reported the renewed sectional strife caused by the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. His marriage in 1856 to Martha Root, daughter of a prominent abolitionist, encouraged his activist career. (They had no children.) As assistant secretary for the National Kansas Committee, he helped arm John Brown (1800-1859) and other militant free soilers in Kansas. In 1857 he returned to journalism with a new Republican newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, and became captivated by Abraham Lincoln. The two men often traveled together while White covered the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858 with a stenographic reporter for the state's leading Republican newspaper.

White stayed closely allied to Lincoln as a coauthor of his 1860 campaign biography and vowed to the new president that he and other young Republicans stood ready to "plunge into blood to the horses bridles" to defend the new administration.