WHITE, Stephen Van Culen, banker, born in Chatham county, North Carolina, 1 August, 1831. His father was a Quaker and opposed to slavery, and as he declined to do police duty to prevent negroes holding meetings at night after the Nat Turner insurrection, was compelled to leave the state. He moved his family by wagon to Greene (now Jersey) county, Illinois, when Stephen was six weeks old, and engaged in farming. The son was graduated at Knox college, Illinois, in 1854, studied law in St. Louis with Benjamin Gratz Brown and John A. Kasson, was admitted to the bar, 4 November, 1856, and began practising in Des Moines. He soon acquired high rank as a lawyer, and was retained in many important cases before the United States court. In 1861, in the case of the United States vs. Hill, he successfully defended the only treason case that was ever tried in Iowa, and in 1863 he saved to investors many millions of dollars, which the state courts had repudiated, by a successful argument in the United States supreme court in the case of Gelpke vs. Dubuque, involving the constitutionality of municipal bonds issued in aid of railroads. In 1864 he was acting United States district attorney for Iowa, and attended to all the civil and criminal business of the government. In 1865 he removed to New York and engaged in banking, and in 1882 he organized the banking-firm of S. V. White and Co. He was elected representative in congress from Brooklyn in 1886, and was appointed a member of the committee on post-offices and post-roads. Mr. White has been noted as a banker for his large and bold operations in the interest of the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western railroad. He has long been a member and trustee of Plymouth church, is an expert astronomer, owns a private observatory, and on the organization of the American astronomical society, in 1883, was elected its first president.