Prominent among them was William Collins Whitney, a very different type of man from the Philadelphians.

Born in Conway, Massachusetts, in 1841, he came from a long line of distinguished and intellectual New Englanders.

At Yale his wonderful mental gifts raised him far above his fellows; he divided all scholastic honors there with his classmate, William Graham Sumner, afterwards Yale's great political economist.

Soon after graduation Whitney came to New York and rapidly forged ahead as a lawyer.
Brilliant, polished, suave, he early displayed those qualities which afterward made him the master mind of presidential Cabinets and the maker of American Presidents.

Physically handsome, loved by most men and all women, he soon acquired a social standing that amounted almost to a dictatorship.