His uncle was John C. Breckinridge, the fourteenth Vice President of the United States, and a Confederate general in the American Civil War.

A fourth cousin twice removed of his was Wallis Warfield Simpson, for whom Great Britain's King Edward VIII abdicated his throne in order to marry.

After three years at Miami, he accepted an appointment as president of Lafayette College where he served from 1891 until 1914.

[4] He retired from Lafayette, moved to Los Angeles, California, where he took up private law practice until his final appointment, as president of Wilson College in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, succeeding Anna Jane McKeag, the first woman president of Wilson.

Warfield was an elder in the Presbyterian Church, a director of the Princeton Theological Seminary and an officer in the Sons of the American Revolution.