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Seeing the challenges as "the duty next me" and feeling that his health
was now equal to the rigors of frontier travel, Polk accepted. He spent
only four of the next eighteen months with his family, which now included
three of his eight children. He made only two trips (1830 and 1844) through
the whole area, another in 1942 omitting Texas. His recommendations for
added episcopal supervision were answered by elenctions in 1844 of Nucholas
Hamner Cobbs in Alabama and George Washingto Freeman in Arkansas. Mississippi
did not have a bishop of its own until 1850 and poor Texas issued four un-
successful calls before Alexander Gregg began his work in 1959. Polk remained
de facto head of the original vast missionary charge until 1844, though in
1841 he had been elected bishop of Louisiana.

He predicted that Texas held a future of enourmous promise for the first
Protestant communion to enter it in strenght. Alas, the Episcopal Church
did not frasp that opportunity. He vainly urged the purchase of key sites
for parishes, and a tract for a school and college. Still, the congregations
started in his episcopate survived and provided the nucleus around which
Bishop George W. Freeman of Arkansas built foundations for the diocese of
Texas.

The bishop did buy some church property, in Texas, and elsewhere, while
in the first fifteen years of his episcopate he received no stipend. A man
of great wealth in the beginning, he never attempted to liquidate his property
holdings for the sake of the church. The family fortune was in slaves.
Polk never regarded them as mere property, did not consider selling the,.
He saw himself as a slaveholder an opportunity for Christian witness,
a chance to prove how happy and fruitful their dependent lives could be made
by wise oversight. In 1849 at his model plantation, "Leighton," in Louisiana,
cholera took the lives of a hundred slaves. By 1854, a tornado and an

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