White was born on November 3, 1845,[4]: 17  on his family's sugar plantation near Thibodaux, Louisiana, about thirty miles to the west of New Orleans.

[4]: 18  White enrolled in 1858 at Georgetown University, which biographer Robert Baker Highsaw characterized as "probably the best Catholic institution of higher learning in the United States".

[4]: 18  White's Jesuit training influenced his legal philosophy later in life, leading him to emphasize formal logical reasoning.

He enlisted in the Confederate States Army and served under General Richard Taylor, eventually attaining the rank of lieutenant.

Another account suggests that he was assigned as an aide to Confederate General William Beall and accompanied him to Port Hudson, Louisiana, which was besieged and captured by Union troops in 1863.

As practically all Confederate soldiers of enlisted rank of the Port Hudson garrison were paroled, and officers sent to prison in New Orleans and later to Johnson's Island, Ohio, this account is likely not true.

When White was paroled, he supposedly returned to the family plantation to find it abandoned, the canefields barren, and the place nearly empty of most of its former slaves.

The only documented evidence of White's Confederate service consists of an account of his capture on March 12, 1865, in an action in Morganza in Pointe Coupee Parish, which is contained in the Official Records of the American Civil War, and his service records in the National Archives, noting his subsequent imprisonment in New Orleans and parole in April 1865.

These records confirm his service as a lieutenant in Captain W. B. Barrow's company of a Louisiana cavalry regiment, for all practical purposes a loosely organized band of irregulars or "scouts" (guerrillas).

According to another account, after White was paroled in April 1865 and following the surrender of the western Confederate forces, he ended his military career by walking (his clothing in rags) to a comrade's family home in Livonia in Pointe Coupee Parish.

The Court's other ex-Confederate, Associate Justice Howell Edmunds Jackson, had held a civil position under the Confederate government.

"[13] Other reports question whether there is enough evidence to support that claim, though noting that membership in secret societies such as the KKK can be difficult to document.

The Knights' Mardi Gras parade was an attack on Reconstruction so extreme that it was widely condemned, and even denounced by the Krewe of Rex.

He was also mentored as a young attorney by Edouard Bermudez, a New Orleans lawyer who later served as chief justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court.

[18] White served in the Louisiana State Senate in 1874,[19] a year marked by interracial violence in political campaigns and elections.

[20] White was nominated by President Grover Cleveland to be an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States on February 19, 1894,[21] after the Senate had rejected his first two nominees: William B. Hornblower and Wheeler Hazard Peckham.

"[24] On December 12, 1910, President William Howard Taft nominated White to become Chief Justice of the United States,[21] following the death of Melville Fuller.

However, White also wrote the 1916 decision upholding the constitutionality of the Adamson Act, which mandated a maximum eight-hour work day for railroad employees.

White's background as a Democrat, Confederate veteran and Southern lawyer might have predicted legal positions that would have sought to curtail federal power.

"[26] Nevertheless, Southern states quickly devised other methods to continue their disfranchisement of blacks (and in some cases, many poor whites) that withstood Court scrutiny.