THE OTEY ERA -  Inspiration of 1832 to 1856

Epoch of Otey 1832 - 1856

"The accumulation of wealth [in the southern part of the Mississippi Valley] from the cultivation of the ground, is without parallel..." 

[Vice-President John C. Calhoun and the Nullification Crisis of 1832 until Hon. Preston Smith Brooks (1, 2) of South Carolina and the Caning of Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, May 22, 1856]

THE POLK ERA -  Action of 1856 to 1868

The Sewanee Easter Story of Birth, Death, and Resurrection

Epoch of Founding 1856 - 1860
     
"I believe now is the time..."

 (Quintard reclaims Domain until arrival of first students)

THE QUINTARD ERA- Success of 1869 until the end of THE UNIVERSITY OF THE SOUTH

Epoch of the Twelve Decades of Gratitude 1869 - 1989

"Never shall be forgotten the day when the noble Bishop of Louisiana..."     

"They must be encouraged to learn about people whose lives are different from their own...  We offer an inferior educational experience without such diversity."

(The 1989 Report)


Current Epoch of June 1, 2003

"The Leonidas Polk portrait will be unveiled immediately following the service."
     
(The Polk Family Reunion and Archives Project)


Future Epoch of the Sesqui-Centennial -  April 10, 2006 to October 10, 2010

"Save the date now"

(Leonidas Polk's Bi-Centennial birthday celebration until 150th Cornerstone ceremony)


Future Epoch of Reflection -  begins October 11, 2010

June 14, 2003

Mr. Bob Schwoch
Editor at the Diocese of Milwaukee
804 East Juneau Avenue
Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53202

Dear Editor:

Milwaukee into Sewanee...

The Rev. Jay Lambert’s May 2003 Covenant article on Bishop Leonidas Polk must have introduced some of your readers to the leading founder of THE UNIVERSITY OF THE SOUTH for the first time.  While the peculiarities of the first Bishop of Louisiana’s ante-bellum lifestyle may inconveniently aggravate our shared contemporary sensibilities, he remains a man who continues to be lauded for his great works in Louisiana and Tennessee.  Many folks in New Orleans and Sewanee even consider him to be a Christian martyr.

The Diocese of Milwaukee vicariously participated in a recent ceremony in Sewanee through an appreciatively spoken reference made to the Covenant article by the 10th Bishop of Louisiana.  On June 1, 2003, the Rt. Rev. Charles Jenkins co-officiated an historical 1789 Booke of Common Prayer corporate communion service, during which the recently commissioned copy of the Bishop-General Leonidas Polk “Sword Over the Gown” portrait was unveiled.  (The the destruction of Sewanee's original 1900 portrait was begun by vandalism in 1998.)  During Bishop Jenkin’s sermon, the congregation was surprised to hear that our beloved Bishop Polk had been noted in the Diocese of Milwaukee’s newspaper in connection with the then upcoming election of your new bishop.   Our astonishment was not in that he was considered a model bishop, but in the irony that such a far removed place from Sewanee as is Milwaukee would recognize his ministry deep down in Louisiana and Tennessee.  We welcome your examination of the prime mover of our heritage, and commend to you his example of service and leadership.

As our Church calendar is shaped by the ephemeris calculation of our celebrated Easter, good Episcopalians know how to understand a hallowed birth, death, and resurrection story.  Only a portion of Sewanee’s Second Era enchantment is revealed through its own triadic legacy, but what Bishop Polk set into motion with his July 1, 1856, letter from New Orleans to his fellow Southern bishops began an astonishing 12-year saga of the glorious founding, vengeful destruction, and miraculous revival of THE UNIVERSITY OF THE SOUTH; his prophetic project still continues to this day.

The educational aspiration that Leonidas Polk and his assisting regional bishops so fervently nurtured from 1856 until the beginning of the War Between the States was destroyed by occupying Federal troops in July 1863 when they exploded the University’s sacred 1860 Cornerstone and torched its first wooden buildings.  Eleven months later during the Atlanta Campaign, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman ordered assailing fire from a battery of ordnance cannons, known to be rifled for accuracy, directly at the Bishop-General as he stood on the distant crest of Pine Mountain, Georgia.   The cruelly sabotted shell viciously torpedoed through his sanguine chest, and Leonidas Polk was dead on earth and alive in Heaven before his head had even hit the ground.  Both the University proper and the heart of its founder were finished before the War was yet over.

Shortly after the War ended, and in spite of the South’s being in a condition of despairing desolation, the second Bishop of Tennessee, the Rt. Rev. Dr. Charles Todd Quintard, reclaimed the University’s Domain in 1866.  Erecting a simple wooden cross on top of the Cumberland Plateau, he faithfully accessed the restorative provision of Grace that had been bestowed upon Sewanee by God when Bishop Polk had, six years prior, solemnly consecrated the Cornerstone with worshipful praises to the Holy Trinity.  Aided by the first Bishop of Georgia, the Rt. Rev. Stephen Elliott, Bishop Quintard’s righteously rewarded trust revived the University’s true mission.  Thanks to blessed funds and books donated by loyal and well-resourced Southern Episcopalian and Anglican patrons in England, the University was prepared for its first matriculating students in 1868.

During the 1869 Chancellor’s Address to the Board of Trustees at University Place, the progenitor of the name “The University of the South” and first Bishop of Mississippi, the Rt. Rev. William Mercer Green, reflected on his having been touched by the inspirational zeal of Leonidas Polk:

Never shall be forgotten the day when the noble Bishop of Louisiana called together his Brother Bishops of the ten Southern Dioceses, and unfolded to them the magnificent scheme which he had desired, for the education and religious training of the sons of the South. Well do I remember the holy animation which kindled in his eye, and brightened every feature, and gave an irresistible eloquence to his tongue as he successively detailed the features of his plan, set forth the needs of our people, and showed how well adapted was such an Institution to meet their wants.  And never should we forget the untiring labor with which he followed up the inception of this noble scheme; his unparalleled success in obtaining in a few weeks an endowment of nearly half a million dollars; his judicious selection of this spot, among many rival claimants, as the seat of our University, his securing to us a princely domain, his obtaining for us a most liberal charter, and assisted by the ripe judgments of an Otey and Elliott, marking out a course of instruction not surpassed by that of any Literary Institution in either our own or other lands.

THE UNIVERSITY OF THE SOUTH will soon begin preparing for its upcoming 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2010 Sesqui-Centennial anniversaries of Leonidas Polk’s famed promulgations.  Just as expected, our Bishop-General is now being keenly studied and broadly discussed, as you have witnessed there in Milwaukee, and as are the daily visitors to www.leonidaspolk.org.   Even though Leonidas Polk will continue to be ungraciously shunned because of the anathematic image that his Old South persona imparts upon Sewanee, nonetheless, his perpetually admirable example of visionary, passionate, and persuasively bold leadership makes him the ideal model for those within whose charge it is to get things done.

Sincerely,

John F. Evans
University Lay Trustee, Diocese of Atlanta, 2000 - 2003

Cc aliis quibus refert