Christopher Rhinelander Robert, the son of Daniel and Mary Tangier (Smith) Robert, was born near Brook Haven, Suffolk County, Long Island, on the estate of his father, a physician educated at Columbia College and at Edinburgh University. His great-grandfather, also Daniel Robert, was a Huguenot of La Rochelle who reached New York in 1686.
Becoming a New York shipping clerk at the age of fifteen, Christopher five years later entered business on his own account, first in New Orleans and later in Galena, Illinois.
Establishing in 1835 the firm of Robert & Williams, importers of sugar, cotton, and tea, he had made a considerable fortune by 1862, when the partnership was dissolved.
Active in many other business enterprises, he was from 1858 to 1863 president of the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad Company.
Always deeply religious, he served for nearly thirty years as superintendent of the Sunday school and elder of the Laight Street Presbyterian Church and supported financially a German congregation on Rivington Street. His appeal to the Home Missionary Society in 1828 led to the establishment in Galena of the first church in Northern Illinois. Henceforth Robert was closely connected with this society, a member of its executive committee after 1838, and treasurer from 1855 to 1870. To its work, to Beloit and Hamilton colleges, and to Auburn Theological Seminary he made substantial anonymous gifts.
At the close of the Civil War he bought from the government its hospital buildings at Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, and established there in 1866 a college for the "poor whites" of the South, but local opposition to its Yankee origin led him soon to abandon the experiment. While visiting Constantinople during the Crimean War he became acquainted with the educational work which Cyrus Hamlin was doing under the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions.
After the war he became interested in the scheme of James H. and William B. Dwight for founding a purely secular college at Constantinople but he believed that little financial support could be obtained in the United States without a definitely Christian basis. When this plan fell through, he offered in 1859 the task of establishing an institution in accordance with his own ideas to Hamlin.
The latter accepted the offer and on September 16, 1863, opened at Bebek, a suburb of Constantinople, Robert College, adopting this name despite repeated objections from the founder. In the following year the state of New York granted a charter providing for an American board of trustees, whose dominating personality was Robert. Eventually Hamlin secured a magnificent site above Rumeli Hissar on the Bosphorus and supervised the construction of a building.
In 1870 when the new quarters were occupied, Robert visited the college, which had over a hundred students. On this visit as on another in 1875 he investigated in detail every phase of the work, giving freely both advice and criticism, and obtained an intimate understanding of the situation. When campaigns for endowment by Hamlin and his successor, George Washburn, proved unsuccessful, practically the whole burden of supporting the institution fell upon Robert, who covered the yearly deficit of $10, 000 or more until his death in Paris while seeking to mend his broken health by European travel.
One-fifth of his estate was left to the college, raising the amount of his gifts to at least $600, 000.
Robert cherished such democratic austerity that he refused a decoration offered by the Ottoman government.
He was a cultured and unassuming gentleman of unusual ability and most decided character.
In 1830 he returned to New York and married Anna Maria, daughter of William Shaw of that city.
