Polk Family Papers Box 1 Document 23

[underscored]General Leonidas Polk, C.S.A., The Fighting Bishop.[end underscore] By Joseph H. Parks. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 1962. Pp 395. Illustrations, Maps, Critical Essay on Authorities, and Index. $7.50)

"After Alfred the Great," says Barnard's professor Cabell Greet, "there has lived no man who has achieved such stature in the fields of religion, of the military, and of education as Leonidas Polk. He was a bishop of the Episcopal Church, a lietenant-general of the Confederacy, and the projector of an idea for a university whose comprehensiveness is still unrealized anywhere in teh world a century after his death."

In his book about this man, Dr. Joseph H.Parks, head of the history department at the University of Georgia, and summer resident in Winchester, Tennessee, has emerged as one of the most prolific as well as one of the most scholarly and lucid of all Tennessee biographers. His three other major works also deal with men prominent in the history of the sixteenth state, namely Felix Grundy, John Bell, and Kirby-Smith--all by LSU press. Parks' [underscore] General Edmund Kirby-Smith [close underscore] won the Sydnor prize at Duke University for Southern historical writing and has just been re-printed. Parks' [underscore] Polk [close underscore] is based primarily on the Leonidas Polk papers in the Sewanee archives. Illustrations in the volume are all portraits and photographs at the University of the South, of which Polk was briefly the second chancellor.

Dr. Parks uses a fine geneological background to demonstrate that Polk's decision to study for the ministry was a sharp break with family tradition. His father William asserted that he was the first colonist to shed blood south of Lexington in 1776. Leonidas' grandfather, Tomas,

had recently become a revolutionary general. The father too was interested in adulation, having been credited with establishing a college in Nashville, which later became Peabody, and he was President of the Board at Chapel Hill, where Leonidas was briefly a student before going to West Point.

Parks candidly mentions that one of the reasons for Polk's election as Bishop of the Southwest was that there were few candidates for a post which paid only $2500 a year and required virtual divorcefrom {sic} one's family. The two families of the young couple, however, were generous with plantations and slaves and Polk embarked upon the Episcopate which lasted twenty-three years until he entered the Confederate services as major-general.

In 1841,, having been elected Bishop of Louisiana, he sold his Tennessee properties and moved some three hundred slaves to a new plantation,ccalled {sic} Leighton, near Tullahoma. The epidemics and hailstorms which wiped him out in the early fifties also turned the part-time planter into a fulltime Bishop. The two chapters devoted to the University of the South are distinguished not only for skillful handling of known material, but also for introduction of new sources from Tennessee newspaper files. The importance of the close collaboration of Bishop Steven {sic} Elliott of Georgia is made clear, and a possible neglect of Bishop James H. Otey of Tennessee is understandable in view of the paucity of material on "the first Episcopal clergymen west of the Appalachians."

Hidden away by the modest Dr. Parks in the recessed of the biography is a revelation of sensational interest to the southern historian. The two-volume life of the bishop-general "written" by hos some William Mecklenburg Polk and long admired for its commendable (under the circumstances) objectivity, is revealed by Parks to have been largely ghost-written. Furthermore Parks' painstaking check of that work against its original sources turned some regrettable, even shameful, distortions. Nothing is shown to alter the essential evaluation of Polk, but his biographer-son suffers from exposure.

One of the finest parts of the book is Parks' handling of the controversy at Chickamauga. There, after General Braxton Bragg's increasingly bitter arguments with his generals at Perryvile and Murfreesboro, Polk was singled out for censure. Park handled very carefully and fairly the many-sided controversy in which Polk was vindicated and Bragg relieved of command.

Polk's death on June 14, 1864, near Atlanta was referred to by Jefferson Davis later as one of the three darkest days of the Confederacy, the other two beingsthe {sic} deaths of Albert Sidney Johnson and Stonewall Jackson. Parks says that Polk was "much beloved by his officers and men for his personal qualities; he was respected for his bravery and industry and his competence in inspiring troops to their best effort...He was a powerful influence in the development of Christianity and education."

Parks is not one to over-rate his subject. He knows he is dealing with a remarkable man and he is determined not to over-state his case. The book is a splendid production and will be a delight to southern historians, particularly to those of Louisiana and Tennessee.

Arthur Ben Chitty