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Religion, War, Education, and Leonidas Polk

Jefferson Davis said that after the death of Albert Sidney Johnston at Shiloh and of Stonewall Jackson at Chancellorsville, the Confederacy suffered its greatest loss when Leonidas Polk, Episcopal bishop of Louisiana and three-star general, was killed near Atlanta in 1864.

A modern evaluation of Polk by Dr. W. Cabell Greet of Barnard College stated, "After Alfred the Great, there has lived no man who achieved such stature in religion, war, and education than Leonidas Polk." He was the first Episcopal bishop in America to hold jurisdiction over foreign soil -- the Republic of Texas; he was a lieutenant-general of the Confederate army, and he projected a university whose comprehensiveness still is unfulfilled anywhere a hundred years after his death. In this Civil War Centennial, let us first look at what was really the anti-climax of Polk's life, the years of the War Between the States.

In June, 1861, there was issued by President Davis the commission of major-general, C.S.A., to Leonidas Polk. After repeated urgings from all over the South, Polk accepted reluctantly a duty which he hoped "God will allow me to get through without delay, that I may return to my chosen and usual work." His commission was to command water and land defense of the Mississippi and above the Red River. In November, 1861, when his West Point roomate Albert Sidney Johnston returned from California and assumed command of the Mississippi, Polk resigned his commission but the Confederate president refused to accept his resignation.

Never before in North America had a bishop accepted military service, though the practice was not uncommon in the Middle Ages, and one Confederate general, young brigadier Ellison Capers, became Bishop of South Carolina