John Campbell White

John Campbell White (1757–1847) was an executive member of the Society of United Irishmen in 1798 as it prepared in Ireland for insurrection against the British Crown and Protestant-landed Ascendancy. In American exile, he became a leading physician, and prominent anti-Federalist, in the city of Baltimore. Ireland 1757–1798 White was born in Templepatrick, County Antrim, where his father Robert (previously of Larne) had been ordained minister of the Presbyterian congregation in 1755. His father was also a schoolmaster. Among his father's pupils were David Manson who, in his own school in Belfast, was to pioneer the use of play in teaching basic literacy, and Rev. William Steel Dickson who later, with the younger White, was to be a United Irishman. After a "useless run of Irish country schools", Dickson credited the Rev. White with teaching him "to think". It is possible with other Presbyterian ministers of his generation the elder White, either at an academy in Dublin or at the University of Glasgow, had studied with "the father of the Scottish Enlightenment", Francis Hutcheson. In 1778, while working as the apothecary to the Poor House in Belfast, White married Elizabeth Getty (1760–1839). He pursued medical studies at the University of Glasgow (MB 1782), at the University of Edinburgh and at Middlesex Hospital in London. In Belfast he became the attending physician to the Belfast Dispensary, which he had helped to establish in 1792; was an active member of the Belfast Reading Society, serving on its committee; and was a strong campaigner for the establishment of a Free School for poor children. In the midst of early enthusiasm in Belfast for the revolutionary events in France and the revival of the Irish Volunteer movement, White's fellow Glasgow-trained physician, William Drennan, proposed to his friends "a benevolent conspiracy—a plot for the people", the "Rights of Man and [employing the phrase coined by Hutcheson] the Greatest Happiness of the Greater Number its end—its general end Real Independence to Ireland, and Republicanism its particular purpose." White gathered with Drennan's friends in Belfast in October 1791.