Colonel Charles Denby (June 16, 1830 – January 13, 1904) was a U.S. Union officer in the Civil War and diplomat. He was the father of Edwin C. Denby, a U.S. Representative from Michigan, and later Secretary of the Navy, and Charles Denby, Jr., a diplomat.
Family and early life
Denby was born in Mount Joy in Botetourt County, Virginia to Nathaniel Denby and Sarah Jane Harvey. Denby’s maternal grandfather, Mathew Harvey, was a soldier in Lee’s Legion during the American Revolution. Denby received his early education at the Tom Fox Academy, Hanover County, Virginia.
During his early youth, Denby’s father, a Virginia ship-owner and interested in European trade, was appointed to a post at Marseille, France. His functions there were similar to those of a consul-general, but the post was then known as Naval Agent of the United States. On taking up his post, Nathaniel Denby took his son with him, where attended the College Royal at Marseille and became fluent in the French language. Denby later attended Georgetown College, Washington, D.C., and the Virginia Military Institute, from which he graduated with high honors in 1850.
After graduating, Denby went to Selma, Alabama, where he taught school for three years. In 1853, he moved to Evansville, Indiana, which remained his home until his death. Evansville was then a town of six thousand inhabitants, which, from its position on the Ohio River, at the terminus of the Wabash and Erie Canal, seemed destined to a great development. At Evansville, Denby devoted himself to the study of law and to newspaper work. He represented his county in the Indiana House of Representatives during the session of 1856–57. While in the legislature, Mr. Denby became acquainted with Martha Fitch, daughter of U.S. Senator Graham N. Fitch, of Indiana, and they were afterward married.
Political career
After resignation, he resumed the practice of law in Evansville. Denby was active in the Democratic Party, and upon the election of Grover Cleveland as President, he was put forward for a post in the diplomatic service and on May 29, 1885, he was appointed Minister to China. Denby remained at the post through 1898—the United States’ longest serving envoy to China to date—through the administrations of Cleveland’s first term, Republican Benjamin Harrison, Cleveland’s second term. He resigned a little more than a year into the administration of Republican William McKinley, and would be succeeded by Edwin H. Conger.
Upon his return to the U.S. in September 1898, Denby was appointed a member of the commission to inquire into the conduct of the Spanish–American War. Even before the adjournment of that commission, he was made a member of the first commission to the Philippines (the Schurman Commission), together with Admiral George Dewey, General Elwell Stephen Otis, Jacob Gould Schurman, the President of Cornell University, and Professor Dean Conant Worcester, of the University of Michigan.
Later Life
After retirement from official life, Denby settled down at his old home at Evansville, Indiana, and devoted himself to literary labors, study, and the pleasures of home life. He died of heart failure, at the age of seventy-three years, at Jamestown, New York, to which city he had gone to deliver a lecture