Henry Benjamin Whipple was born February 15, 1822 in Adams, New York. He was educated at a private boarding school in Clinton, New York, and at Jefferson County Institute in Watertown, New York. In 1839, he attended Oberlin Collegiate Institute, but his health failed and his physician recommended an active business life.

After several years working for his father, a country merchant, Whipple began studying for the ministry in the Episcopal Church. He was ordained a deacon in August 1849, became rector of Zion Church in Rome, New York, in November 1849, and was ordained priest in 1850. Whipple served as rector of Zion Church from 1849-1857, becoming known both for the size and wealth of his parish and for his work among the poor. In 1857, Whipple helped organize and became the first rector of the Church of the Holy Communion, on Chicago's south side, the first free church in the city. He drew his parishioners from "the highways and the hedges" - clerks, laborers, railroad men, travelers, and derelicts - sought converts among the city's Swedish population, and regularly officiated in a Chicago prison.

On June 30, 1859, Whipple was elected the first Episcopal bishop of Minnesota, an office he held until his death more than forty years later. He was consecrated bishop on October 13, 1859, and in December of that year made his first visitation of his diocese, including the Ojibwe missions of E. Steele Peake and John Johnson Enmegahbowh. In the spring of 1860 he moved his family to Faribault, establishing it as the see of the diocese.

During his episcopate, Whipple guided the development of the Episcopal Church in Minnesota from a few missionary parishes to a flourishing and prosperous diocese. For many years, especially during the first two decades of his episcopate, he made regular missionary sojourns by wagon or coach through the rural areas of the state, often in mid-winter, preaching in cabins, school houses, stores, saloons, and Indian villages. Until the diocese was financially secure, he pledged himself to personally support several of its missionary clergy and assumed many other financial obligations of the church. He unified a diocese that at the time of his election was divided into two quarreling factions.

In 1860, Whipple incorporated the Bishop Seabury Mission in Faribault, building it upon the foundations laid by James Lloyd Breck and Solon W. Manny, who in 1858 had founded a divinity school and school for boys and girls. With the help of gifts from eastern donors, the mission developed into three separate but closely connected schools: Seabury Divinity School, Shattuck School for boys, and St. Mary's Hall for the education of daughters of the clergy. Whipple also helped found the Breck School in Wilder, Minnesota, to educate the children of farmers.

Whipple was best known outside of Minnesota for his dedication to the welfare of the American Indians and for his missionary work among the Dakota and Ojibwe of Minnesota. He returned from his first visitation of his diocese with a firm commitment to the establishment of Indian missions and the reform of the United States Indian system. He regularly included Indian villages on his visitations, built up the Episcopal mission to the Ojibwe based at the White Earth Reservation, and appealed for support of Indian missions by addresses throughout the United States and in Europe.

In the early years of his episcopate, Whipple's espousal of Indian reform and commitment to Indian missions earned him the enmity of many whites who hated Indians, and led some of his fellow bishops to look upon him as a fanatic. His attitude was denounced most bitterly after the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862, when, in appeals to the President and in the public press, he opposed wholesale executions and extermination or deportation of the Dakota.

Although a high churchman in doctrine, Whipple preached tolerance of all views which fell within the scope of the church's basic teachings. Urging that the church's task was to "preach Christ crucified" and that sectarian quarrels hindered this mission, he pled for unity among all branches of the Episcopal and Anglican communions, and for harmonious relations among members of all Christian denominations. Both in Chicago and in Minnesota, he worked closely with ministers and communicants of the national Swedish church. His interest in the church's missionary efforts was reflected in his presidency of the Western Church Building Society (1880-1893), his service on several committees and commissions of the General Convention concerned with missionary affairs, and in special missions to Cuba and to Puerto Rico. During the 1880s and the 1890s, his health compelled him to spend several months each year at his winter home in Maitland, Florida, where he held missionary services and built the Church of the Good Shepherd.

Whipple married Cornelia Wright, daughter of Benjamin and Sarah Wright of Adams, New York in 1842. They had six children. Cornelia Whipple died in 1890 from injuries suffered in a railroad accident, and in 1896 Whipple married Evangeline Marrs Simpson, widow of industrialist Michael Hodge Simpson.

Henry B. Whipple died on September 16, 1901.

Biographical information was excerpted from the biographical sketch in the inventory to the Henry Benjamin Whipple papers (see related materials), by Lydia Lucas (1971).