Francis Wharton

Francis Wharton, 1854

Francis Wharton (March 7, 1820 – February 21, 1889) was an American legal writer, theologian, and educator.

Life

Wharton was descended from an accomplished Quaker family in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, although his father had become an Episcopalian in 1812. Born in 1820, Wharton graduated from Yale in 1839, read law in his father's office, and was admitted to the bar in 1843. He became prominent in Pennsylvania politics as a Democrat. He served as assistant attorney-general in 1845. In Philadelphia, he edited the North American and United States Gazette. From 1856 to 1863, he was a professor of English, History, and Literature at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio.

Wharton married Sidney Paul in 1852. After her death, he remarried in 1860 to Helen Elizabeth Ashhurst, with whom he had two daughters. Wharton took orders in the Protestant Episcopal Church in 1862, and was the rector of St. Paul's Church, Brookline, Massachusetts from 1863 to 1869. From 1871 to 1881, he taught ecclesiastical polity and canon law in the Protestant Episcopal Theological School at Cambridge, Massachusetts, and during this time he lectured on the conflict of laws at Boston University.

For two years thereafter he traveled in Europe, and after two years in Philadelphia Wharton went to Washington, DC, where he was lecturer on criminal law (1885–1886) and then professor of criminal law (1886–1888) at Columbian (now George Washington) University. In 1885–1888 he was solicitor (or examiner of claims) of the Department of State.

During the last two years of his life, Wharton amassed revolutionary diplomatic correspondence and edited them into a six volume work, published in 1889, the year of his death. This edition (authorized by Congress) of the Revolutionary Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States (6 vols, 1889, ed. by John Bassett Moore) superseded Jared Sparks's compilation.

Wharton was a "broad churchman" and was deeply interested in the hymnology of the Episcopal church. Wharton was also interested in Christian apologetics, and he wrote an essay on the relationship between apologetics and jurisprudence that was published in The Princeton Review in 1878. He received the degree of LL.D. from the University of Edinburgh in 1883, and was the foremost American authority on international law. He authored the doctrine in criminal law (Wharton's Rule of Concert of Action) that to form a conspiracy takes one more person than is necessary to commit the crime (i.e. it takes two people to gamble. Therefore, two people gambling cannot be guilty of conspiracy to gamble, though three can).

Publications

• A Treatise on the Criminal Law of the United States (1846; many times revised)
• State Trials of the United States during the Administrations of Washington and Adams (1849)
• A Treatise on the Law of Homicide in the United States (1855)
• with Moreton Stillé, A Treatise on Medical Jurisprudence (1855)
• A Treatise on Theism and Modern Skeptical Theories (1859), in which he applied rules of legal evidence to modern skeptical theories
• A Treatise on the Conflict of Laws (1872; 3rd ed. 1905)
• A Treatise on the Law of Negligence (1874)
• A Commentary on the Law of Agency and Agents (1876)
• A Commentary on the Law of Evidence in Civil Issues (1877; 3rd ed. 1888)
• a companion work on Criminal Evidence
• "Recent Changes in Jurisprudence and Christian Apologetics," The Princeton Review, Vol. 2, no. 1 (July–December 1878) pp. 149–168. (This is accessible via http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/m/moajrnl).
• Commentary on the Law of Contracts (1882)
• Commentaries on Law (1884)
• Digest of the International Law of the United States (3 vols 1886).
• Wharton, Francis; Moore, John Bassett, eds. (1889). The revolutionary diplomatic correspondence of the United States. Vol. I. Washington : Government Printing Office.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link)
• Wharton, Francis; Moore, John Bassett, eds. (1889). The revolutionary diplomatic correspondence of the United States. Vol. II. Washington : Government Printing Office Washington.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link)
• Wharton, Francis; Moore, John Bassett, eds. (1889). The revolutionary diplomatic correspondence of the United States. Vol. III. Washington : Government Printing Office.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link)
• Wharton, Francis; Moore, John Bassett, eds. (1889). The revolutionary diplomatic correspondence of the United States. Vol. IV. Washington : Government Printing Office.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link)
• Wharton, Francis; Moore, John Bassett, eds. (1889). The revolutionary diplomatic correspondence of the United States. Vol. V. Washington : Government Printing Office.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link)
• Wharton, Francis; Moore, John Bassett, eds. (1889). The revolutionary diplomatic correspondence of the United States. Vol. VI. Washington : Government Printing Office.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link)

References

• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Wharton, Francis". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 28 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 575.
• Memoir (Philadelphia, 1891) by his daughter, Mrs. Viele, and several friends.
• J. B. Moore's "Brief Sketch of the Life of Francis Wharton," prefaced to the first volume of the Revolutionary Diplomatic Correspondence.

External links

• Works by or about Francis Wharton at the Internet Archive
• Biography at virtualology.com under his ancestor Thomas Wharton Jr.