SAMUEL WHITE. The wheels of time move swiftly and surely. Men come and go and are forgotten. But few of the many make such an impression as to leave behind them a record that is remembered. Just one hundred and two years ago, Samuel White was appointed United States Senator by Governor Richard Bassett, to succeed Dr. Henry Latimer, who had resigned the office; and after the lapse of a century it is with difficulty that enough information can be gotten together to make a respectable biography of this man who held the exalted position of United States Senator from Delaware. Investigation establishes the fact that Samuel White was a son of Thomas White, and that he was born in 1770, on the farm of his father in Mispillion Hundred, Kent County, Delaware, a few miles from the village of Whiteleysburg. The father, Thomas White, was known as Judge White, having from 1777 until 1792 served as one of the Justices of the Court of Common Pleas and Orphans' Court of Kent County; during the last two years of that time as Chief Justice. This Court existed under the first constitution of the State, adopted in 1776, but was abolished by the constitution of 1792. Judge White, at the time of his death, was Register of Wills for Kent County. He was one of the large land owners in Kent County and an influential citizen. The White Fac simile of the Signature of Thomas White. In 1777 when Francis Asbury made his advent into Delaware as the pioneer preacher of Methodism, Judge White and his brother Dr. Edward White became much interested in him and in the cause which he represented, and in time, both became converts, and afterwards warm adherents of his faith. Asbury spent much time at the home of the two White brothers, but he became particularly attached to Thomas White, and in his journal speaks of him as his "dearest friend in America," and says that Judge White's home was the only home that he ever had. Asbury never married, and being in the Methodist itinerancy from his early days, had no permanent place of abode. Most of the Methodist preachers were English-born, and one of their tenets was a refusal to bear arms. Denounced by other sects as "noisy, pestilential fellows'' and suspected by the authorities of enmity to the patriotic cause, the Methodists fell into great disfavor during the Revolution. Judge White, because of his adherence to the Methodist cause and his close friendship for Asbury, was suspected, of being at least lukewarm towards the independence of the colonies and so strong did the sentiment become against him that in the autumn of 1777 he was arrested and imprisoned as a Tory. After being separated from his family some weeks, which was a source of great concern and distress to them, he was exonerated and discharged. This was while Asbury was sheltered and cared for on the White plantation. On the death of Asbury in 1816, Rev. Ezekiel Cooper, one of the earliest Methodist preachers from the peninsula, preached a funeral discourse on Asbury in St. George's Church in Philadelphia in the course of which, referring to this period, he said, "Asbury found an asylum, |