Holcombe did not long remain in China, but Chester Hol- combe continued in Peking, making one of his principal activities the conduct of a school for boys, and also doing some literary work in Chi- nese—preparing a mental arithmetic (1873) and' a life of Christ (1875). Jn 1871, though he still kept up his missionary work, he became an in- terpreter for the legation of the United States in Peking. In 1876, when Samuel Wells Williams [q.v.~\ retired from the secretaryship of the lega- tion, Holcombe resigned his position with the American Board and succeeded him, formally taking over duties which he had apparently been performing during Williams' frequent absences. He served as secretary of the legation until 1885, and three times during that period was charge d'affaires. He assisted in drafting the Amer- ican-Chinese treaty of 1880, which dealt with the question of Chinese immigration to the United States, and in negotiating the first American treaty with Korea, in 1882. While in Peking, he declined an appointment to the United States legation in Colombia. After retiring from the legation, he continued to devote much of his at- tention to China and Chinese affairs, at one time working out a project for a large Chinese gov- ernment loan (1896), and at another, detailed plans for the construction, financing, and man- aging of about three thousand miles of railway. He hoped for, but was disappointed in obtaining, appointment as American minister to China. Af- ter his return to America he eked out a some- what precarious living by dealing in Chinese curios, and by lecturing and writing on Chinese subjects. He was a Lowell Institute lecturer in 1902. Among his numerous books were The Practical Effect of Confucianism 'Upon the Chi- nese Nation (1882), .4 Catalogue and Handbook of Antique Chinese Porcelains (1890), The Real Chinaman (1895), and The Real Chinese Ques- tion (1899), revised and republished as China's Past and Future (1904). None of these was es- pecially notable or made any very great contri- bution to Western knowledge of China. In his last years Holcombe made his home at Rochester, N. Y. His first wife having died during his residence in Peking, he was married a second time, Mar, 21, 1906, to Alice Reeves. He had no children. [Jesse Seaver, "The Holcomb(e) Genealogy" * mimeographed copies in N. Y. Pub. Lib. and Lib. of Cong. ; Ann. Reports of the Am. Board of Commission- ers of Foreign Missions , 1869-77 ; MSS. in files of the Am. Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions; Who's Who in America, 1912-13; Congregationalist, May 4, 1912; Union Alumni Bull., May 1912; Demo- crat and Chronicle (Rochester, N. Y.), Apr. 26, 1912; letters frpjn acquaintances and relatives.] K.S.L. Holcombe HOLCOMBE, HENRY (Sept. 22, i762-May 22, 1824), Baptist minister, the son of Grimes and Elizabeth (Buzbee, or Busby) Holcombe, was born in Prince Edward County, Va., and died in Philadelphia. His ancestor, Andrew Hol- combe, came to Virginia from England by way of Barbados, and his father left Virginia and settled in South Carolina while Henry was still a boy. There, Henry later said of himself, "at eleven years of age he completed all the educa- tion he ever had from a living preceptor" (Camp- bell, post, p. 185). He enlisted early in the Revo- lutionary army and is said to have become an officer by the time he was twenty-one. About then he was converted to Baptist doctrines, and, failing in a search of the Bible undertaken with his father to find sanction for the baptism he had received as a child, he did not rest till he had been baptized again and given a license to preach. It is said that soon, mounted on horseback, he pronounced fervid homilies among his troops. In 1785 he took charge of Pike Creek Church in South Carolina, the first of a series of small churches with which he was occupied for ten years. In April 1786 he married Frances Tan- ner of North Carolina, and a few months later baptized her, her brother, her mother, and his own father, who under the force of his son's argument had relinquished his Presbyterianism. In 1788, he was a member of the South Carolina convention which adopted the federal Constitu- tion. In 1795 he went to Savannah and for five years preached acceptably before a congregation so non-exclusively Baptist that the meeting- house, owned by Baptists, was rented to Presby- terians. After 1800, that inchoate state of affairs was remedied, the church was regularly consti- tuted, and he was able to preach to his own people exclusively. In 1800 the College of Rhode Island (Brown University) conferred upon him the de- gree of doctor of divinity. About that time he published an address designed to show that re- ligion and civic interest are not incompatible and, as if by way of illustrating his thesis, he founded in 1801 the Savannah Female Asylum, an orphanage, and launched schemes which re- sulted in ameliorating the state's penal code. He belligerently opposed deism and the theatre, but he conducted in Savannah a partly literary, part- ly religious magazine, the Georgia Analytical Repository, and he was instrumental in estab- lishing and sustaining near Augusta a school called the Mount Enon Academy. Many of the Baptists "entertained a prejudice against edu- cation and took no interest in institutions of learning except to oppose them" (R. J. Massey in Northen, post, 1,165), and when ill health in '33