In 1871, as is generally known, Mr. Waite was appointed one of the counsel in the matter of the Alabama claims, to prepare the case of the United States and present the same before the Court of Arbitration at Geneva. While the most prominent part was assigned to the senior counsel, Mr. Cushing, it is the opinion of those familiar with the arguments, including Mr. J. C. Bancroft Davis, that Mr. Waite contributed in a very large degree to the success of the case of the United States, and thus to the peaceful settlement of long standing and bitterly contested questions of the gravest national concern. A writer in the Boston Evening Transcript, date of Dec. 6, 1874,—Mr. A. H. Hoyt, to whom we are indebted for many of the facts here recorded,—very accurately describes the characteristics of the chief justice at that time as follows: "He has the reputation of possessing a vigorous intellect, which very readily and clearly grasps the facts and the law of a case. He has a sound and well-balanced judgment and a large share of practical common sense. He is blessed with robust health, is industrious in his habits, and possesses an equable temper. His appointment was not prompted by motives of party or political policy. He will enter into his office untrammelled by close political alliances, and free from the biases and prejudices engendered and fostered by party spirit and party contests." The truth of these words has been more than proven by the dignity, ability and impartiality with which Mr. Waite has filled his high office,—an office in the esteem of many the most important and honorable in the gift of the American people. In Washington, as in Toledo, Mr. Waite's home is one of unostentatious comfort rather than elegance, commendably in contrast with those of many men at present prominent in political circles at the national capital. His home and private life may be said, in brief, to present a notable example of the simplicity, quiet dignity, and domestic virtues which should characterize the home and life of a republican citizen in exalted station. Those who have enjoyed familiar acquaintance with him speak of him as affable, thoroughly unaffected, as a good conversationalist, well informed in history, literature, philosophy, and the sciences, and as a close student of social, financial, and all political questions of the day. His interest in these respects is evidenced by his connection with the management of the "Peabody Fund," as a trustee, and with the important non-partisan movement in the direction of political education recently inaugurated by the American Institute of Civics, a corporate institution, national in scope, of whose advisory board he is president.
Judge Waite was married to Miss Amelia C. Warner, of Lyme, Conn., Sept. 21, 1840. Mrs. Waite is a woman of fine mind, engaging manners, and great force of character, and is in every way worthy of the position in life to which her husband's distinguished abilities have exalted her. Of their living children all save one—Miss Mary F. Waite, highly esteemed because of her personal qualities and her deep interest in philanthropic and charitable work—have gone forth from the home roof to occupy honorable positions in homes of their own. Judge Waite and family are communicants and active co-operators in the work of the Protestant Episcopal church.
We have traced the descent of the Hon. Morrison R. Waite to Remick, a grandson of Thomas and Mary Bronson Wait, of Lyme. Among other grandsons of Thomas was Marvin, who became a noted member of the Connecticut bar, having his office in Lyme, where he was a partner of Gen. Samuel Holden Parsons, a nephew of Gov. Matthew Griswold. Marvin Wait was a member of the electoral college chosen after the war, and cast his vote for Washington. He was nineteen times made a member of the Connecticut General Assembly, was several years judge of the county court, and was one of the commissioners for the sale of the state's land in the northwestern territory. Judge Marvin Wait was the father of that honored citizen of Connecticut, Hon. John T. Wait, LL.D., who was born in New London, and graduated at Washington (now Trinity) College, Hartford, in 1842, held the office of state attorney in 1863, headed the electoral ticket cast for Lincoln in 1864, was elected to the state Senate in 1865, and in 1866 presided over that body. In 1867 he was speaker of the national House of Representatives, and from that time to the present has been almost regularly returned to that body, where he has a recognized position as one of the ablest, most upright, and most influential of its members. He is familiarly known in New London, where, with his family, he has always resided, as "Colonel Wait," and is not merely esteemed, but beloved, by his fellow-citizens of all parties and creeds.
From these notes concerning Gamaliel Wayte and his descendants we now turn to his elder brother Richard.
Richard Wayte was born in England in 1596. His name first appears upon the colonial records Aug. 28, 1634, when, at the age of thirty-eight, he was admitted to the church in Boston, his younger brother, Gamaliel, having been admitted in the previous year. It appears that he took the freeman's oath March 9, 1637, and that November 30 of the same year, in company with his brother Gamaliel, he was found guilty of too much sympathy with the religious views of Mr. Wheelwright and Mrs. Anne Hutchinson, and by a judgment very suggestive of the church militant, was thereupon sentenced to be disarmed. This enforced retirement to the walks of peace was of brief duration, as in 1638 we find him an active member of the "Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company." In 1640 he united with other residents of Mt. Wollaston in a petition for the formation of the town of Braintree. In 1647 he was sent as an officer with a message to the Narragansett Indians, and went on a similar errand in 1653. In 1654 we find him occupying the honorable and difficult position of marshal of the Massachusetts colony, a post which he seems to have filled to the satisfaction of the colonists for many years, and in which he was succeeded, as will be seen, by his son Return. In the same year (1654) he took an important part in an expedition against the Narragansett Indians. October 20, 1658, on account of services in the Pequot war and elsewhere, he received from the General Court a grant of 300 acres of land, "in the wilderness between Cochituate and Nipnop, 220 acres on a neck surrounded by Sudbury River, great pond, and small brook, five patches, 20 acres meadow, and 60 acres on northeast side Washakum Pond," all now included in Framingham, Mass., and a part of which is supposed to be now occupied by the Lake View Chautauqua Assembly, whose Hall of Philosophy stands on the summit of the elevation still known as "Mt. Waite." In 1659 Marshal Wayte was voted £5 from the public treasury in recognition of "his great and diligent pains, riding day and night, in summoning those entertaining Quakers to this court." October 16, 1660, his prowess was recognized by an appointment as "governor's guard (John Endicott at that time occupied this position) at all public meetings out of court."
From these fragmentary records we learn enough to indicate that the first marshal of the Massachusetts colony was a man of no ordinary character. His was a semi-military position, devolving upon him, not only the duty of executing the ordinary behests of the General Court, but of acting an important part as an aid to the governor in devising means for the defence of the colonists against their Indian foes. Marshal Waite was proprietor of a tailoring establishment, and an owner of real estate on Broad Street. He was twice married, and was the father of fourteen children—eight by his first wife, who died in 1651, and six by his second wife, Rebecca Hepbourne. Of these, three died at an early age; two (Nathaniel and Samuel) are not mentioned in their father's will; of the eight remaining, three only were sons. These, Return, Richard, and John, each married and left children. Return, one of the sons of Marshal Wayte, born in 1639, was an officer in the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company, was his father's successor as marshal, and also succeeded to his father's business. It appears that in 1679 he imported "part of the show that appeared at Gov. Leverett's funeral," taking a personal part in the ceremonies. He died in 1702, aged sixty-three years. He had seven children by his wife Martha. The name of his first born, Return, is connected with the romantic story so charmingly told in "The Nameless Nobleman," a book published by Ticknor & Co. He married, in 1707, the heroine of this book, Mary, the wife of the nobleman, Dr. Francis Le Baron. Thomas, his second son, born in 1691, was a well-to-do shopkeeper, owning land on Leverett's Lane, Queen Street, Cornhill, and elsewhere, including a tenement on King Street, known as the "Bunch of Grapes." He was for twenty years or more a deacon in the first church, to which he left, in his will (proved in 1775), a silver flagon with twelve shillings for each of its poor.
The third son of Marshal Return, and grandson of Marshal Richard, was Richard Waite, third of the name, born Oct. 21, 1693, and married to Mary, daughter of John Barnes, in 1722. He was a resident of Middleboro, in 1715; Taunton, in 1718, and afterward of Plymouth, save for a short time, when he purchased a residence on Leverett's Lane, paying for the same £3,700, owning also other property on Cornhill. He conducted a profitable business as a merchant in the coasting trade, and was himself for many years captain of a vessel plying between Plymouth and New London. He had eleven children, three sons and eight daughters. Of these Richard, the fourth of the name, was born in Plymouth, Oct. 6, 1745. Members of the family having previously gone to Vermont (giving a name to Waitsfield), Richard, after a brief residence in Boston, removed to that state, settling at Bennington, and from there went to the pioneer region in the "Black River Country" in New York, settling at Champion. He married Submit Thomas, at Hardwick, Mass., in 1747, and had nine children, four of them sons. Of these, James, born at Bennington, Vt., May 13, 1789, married at Dummerston, Vt., Esther L. Coughlan, who was the daughter of an Irish gentleman, and a woman of fine culture and great personal attractions. He spent the chief part of his life upon the estate in Champion occupied by his father.
Of his seven children, one, Rev. Hiram Henry Waite, M. A., born Aug. 13, 1816, lately pastor of the Waverly Congregationalist Church, Jersey City, N. J., and now of the Congregationalist Church, Madison, N. Y., is well known among Congregational clergymen as an able, faithful, and successful minister, his services, wherever he has labored, having been signally blessed in every way. He married in 1843 S. Maria Randall at Antwerp, N. Y., by whom he has now living three daughters and one son, Henry Randall Waite, Ph. D., of West Newton, Mass., who is prominent among the younger representatives of this ancient New England family. On the maternal side his descent is traced from the Randalls and Carpenters of New Hampshire, stocks from which have sprung many notable men. Both his paternal and maternal grandfathers were soldiers in the war of 1812; his ancestors were also active participants in the war of the Revolution, and at a still earlier date, as we have seen, participants in the wars with the Narragansetts and other Indian tribes. To his Puritan ancestry we may trace his sturdy independence, his originality, and persevering industry; while to his Celtic progenitors may be due something of his generous and genial nature. He graduated in 1868, at Hamilton College, with an excellent reputation as a scholar and thinker; and in the same year became one of the editors of the Utica Morning Herald, where his abilities as a critical and literary writer soon gained recognition. Subsequently he studied theology at Union Theological Seminary in the city of New York, and in 1872 visited Europe.
He supplied the pulpit of the American Chapel in Paris for a short time, and afterward visited Rome, where he was invited to assist in the establishment of what became under his labors a flourishing and useful church for resident and visiting Americans, the first for English-speaking people tolerated within the walls. In the pastor's parlors, facing the windows of the Propaganda Fide, many notable assemblies were gathered. Here were taken the first steps toward the organization of a union of the Sunday-school forces in Italy. Here were held important meetings of the Italian Bible Society, and here was organized the first Young Men's Christian Association in Italy, its members including Italians of every evangelical faith. He established a Bible training school for Italian young men, so planned as to secure the approval and co-operation of Italian ministers of every denomination, and was also instrumental in the establishment of a school among the soldiers of the Italian army stationed in Rome, out of which grew a church, composed wholly of men in the military service, its creed being that of the Apostles. Many persons, native and foreign, assisted on the occasion, memorable in the history of religious progress in Rome, when the sacrament of the Lord's Supper was administered to these modern soldiers of Cæsar's household. This work has been efficiently continued to this day under other direction, and thousands of ex-soldiers in all parts of Italy have borne with them to their homes the influence of their Catholic Christian training in the Scuola of the Chiesa Evangelica Militare.
Dr. Waite's inquiries early led him to look upon sectarianism as one of the most serious obstacles to the progress of evangelical truth in Italy, and to the belief that the presentation of a united Christian front, in agreement upon the fundamental truths of the gospel, was essential to that influence upon the mind which would bring the most hopeful elements among the Latin peoples into practical unity with Protestant Christianity. He therefore energetically espoused the cause of Christian unity, of which the church in Rome, in its ingathering of worshippers of all creeds, was made a notable example.