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near the seminary. He wrote Dr. McIlvaine of all he was doing, of the "little meetings in the neighborhood" and the "neat brick chapel" to be built for these services. To his father he wrote of attending the annual meeting of the American Colonization Society in Washington. The Society was busily engaged in obtaining freedom for Negro slaves and encouraging their resettlement in Africa. Polk spoke of the flourishing state of the Society in Virginia and expressed confidence that "in the course of not many years one State after another will be willing to abolish slavery. This is proved by the state of things in Maryland and Virginia, the slave States farthest north."
CONSUMMATION OF A DESIGN
On April 9, 1830, Polk was ordained deacon in Richmond by the Rt. Rev. Richard Channing Moore. "Thus has been consummated the design," the young deacon wrote, "which I humbly trust was formed with an eye single to my duty as a servant of Christ." A month later he married Miss Devereux at Raleigh (her family, like his, were long time members of Christ Church) and entered on his first ministerial charge, that of assistant to Bishop Moore at Monumental Church, Richmond. That summer, in the Bishop's absence, he had the entire responsibility of the parish. Although keenly conscious of his youth and inexperience, he reflected that "all power is of God" and persevered. So unsparing was he of himself that by the end of the summer he had worked himself into a serious illness.
Scarcely recovered, he went in September to be with his brother Hamilton who had come home from Yale College with a fatal sickness. He cared for his
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brother night and day, instructed him in the faith, baptized him and, when the end came, read the burial service over his grave. Polk's own health continued so poor that in April, 1831, he felt compelled to resign his post in Richmond. He attended the diocesan convention at Norfolk in May, however, and was ordained priest. Then, on the insistence of his doctors he went on a leisurely trip to Europe and England, where, his diaries and letters reveal, he devoted himself to a considerable amount of theological reflection and active study of the religious habits and institutions of the countries visited. He returned home in 1832, at the age of twenty-six, greatly improved in spirits and appearance and free of all signs of the threatened consumption that had caused one doctor to assure him in 1831 that he had only a few months to live.
In April, 1833, Polk and his wife went to Maury County, Tennessee, and settled on part of a tract of five thousand acres given to Leonidas and his three surviving brothers by their father. Living at first in a four-room log house, he soon had a larger house built, land cleared, and a mill and other building erected. Thus supporting himself by farming, he continued his work as priest, instructing and holding services regularly for his own Negroes and for other whites and Negroes in the neighborhood.
Eventually a "neat brick church of simple Gothic architecture, " St. Johns, Ashwood, was erected on land given by Polk. Whites and Negroes worshiped there together, as was the custom in the antebellum South. A visitor from Philadelphia, observing the Polks' concern for the Negroes of the community, commented, "Thus does the enlarged benevolence of these men em-
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brace a class hitherto too much neglected, a class which, in our good city of brotherly love, are suffered to grovel in ignorance, degradation, and sin." In 1835, at the request of the Rt. Rev. James Hervey Otey, Bishop of Tennessee, Polk added to his charge the care of St. Peter's Church, Columbia, and also helped Bishop Otey raise the funds to establish the Columbia Institute, a girl's school.
MISSIONARY BISHOP OF THE SOUTHWEST
POLK supposed, Dr. McIlvaine later said, "that he had settled himself for the rest of his life as a preacher and pastor to a humble and obscure congregation of Negroes, whom he had collected together from neighboring plantations; to whom, living entirely upon his own pecuniary means, he appropriated a part of his own house for a church; and to whose eternal interests he had chosen cheerfully and happily to devote himself as their spiritual father, with no emolument but their salvation." But such was not to be. The General Convention, meeting in the fall of 1838, elected Polk as Missionary Bishop of the Southwest, a vast, thinly populated region, including Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, the Republic of Texas, and a portion of the Indian Territory.
Both Polk and his wife courageously faced the austerities and prolonged separations implicit in this new work. "I told him," Mrs. Polk wrote, "he was God's servant and soldier, and I had not even the right to have an opinion. There was no struggle in his mind; he never felt anything hard he was called upon to do for God, who had done so much for him." Polk's wife and his mother accompanied him to Cincinnati, where,
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on December 9, 1838, he was consecrated by Bishops Smith of Kentucky, Meade of Virginia, Otey of Tennessee, and Polk's mentor and spiritual guide since West Point days, Bishop McIlvaine of Ohio.
The country of which Polk now became bishop had a long and colorful history, had been under the flags of Spain, France, and England before coming under American control. A portion was still a foreign land, the Republic of Texas, and Polk thus became in one sense the Church's first foreign military bishop. His jurisdiction included such wealthy and long established churches, as Mobile, Natchez, and New Orleans. In addition to these centers, there were a great many scattered towns and small settlements, together with vast tracts of wilderness occupied only by an occasional hunger, trapper or isolated family. It was an area of 500,000 square miles with a population of 1,500,000 people.
The new bishop's first visitation of his vast diocese required six months. He found, what other early frontier bishops found, that much of his work was simply that of a missionary, taking the message of the Church to individuals and introducing the services of the Church to communities that had never had them. He traveled by foot and on horseback ("several streams to swim" was a common notation in his journal), by steamer and less dignified craft, gathering congregations, preaching, baptizing, confirming, celebrating the Holy Communion, wherever and whenever he could find an opportunity. His route on this first visitation consisted of a great, irregular circle around his diocese ---across north Alabama and Mississippi into Arkansas,
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down along the rivers into Mississippi and Louisiana, along the shores of the Gulf of Mexico into Texas, back along the Gulf of New Orleans, then northward to his starting point in Tennessee.
He had traveled five thousand miles, preached fortyfour sermons, baptized fourteen, confirmed forty-one, consecrated one church, and laid the cornerstone of another. In addition to the normal discomforts and fatigues of this long journey, the Bishop not only experienced a narrow escape from death on a sinking riverboat, but also suffered threats of mob violence. In one community he was informed: "We have never had any preaching here and we don't want any."
FIRST BISHOP OF LOUISIANA
Bishop Polk made several subsequent trips over his diocese, and in every part, under his zealous and understanding care, the Church took hold and grew. It was obvious, however, that one bishop could not adequately supervise this great and growing region. In 1841, at the General Convention, he was invited by the deputies from the Diocese of Louisiana to become bishop of that diocese. The Convention consenting, on October 16, Leonidas Polk became the first Bishop of Louisiana. Bishop Otey took over the supervision of part of Polk's former field, and Polk himself continued to visit a portion. Within a few years, however, each of the States over which Polk had held jurisdiction was able to have its own bishop, evidence of his effective leadership in the establishment and strengthening of the Church.
Even before his election to the bishopric of Louisiana, Polk had decided that for reasons of convenience, it would be better to move his home to that State from
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