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when he lost his slaves and his home, Yellow Jack stalked his diocese,
his fortune disappeared.

Polk was then preparing a plan, yet unmatched, for an educational
center under the sole and perpetual direction of the Episcopal Church. It
would gain support from a large number of dioceses, with a broad geographical
spread and from civic-minded citizens as well as Episcopalians. It would
stand for basic Christian principles, with the Bible and Prayer Book as
keystones. The endowment corpus would be of such magnitued that income
only would be used for construction and operating expenses with more than
ten time the anual subsidy of the "next best" in the area, the University
of Virginia. The academic level would be above that of state universities, which would
send their graduates for further study. It would be a community of fellows
and scholars with adequate stipends and a salary for the president comparable
to that of a state governor. Oxford provided the best pattern for the
agrarian and aristocratic South. Polk specidied thirty-two schools or
colleges which would comprise his edicational complex.

Since President Eliot of Harvard in 1875 was still insisting that his
professors confine themselves principally to undergraduate teaching and
since the first modern university in America -- John Hopkins -- was projected
in the 1870's, Polk;s ideas of the early 1850's were revolutionary indeed.
Had they died in blueprint, Polk might have been discounted as visionary.
However, between 1856, when he invited other Southern bishops to join the
enterprise, and 1860, when a cornerstone was laid for a never-finished building "not unlike
the capitol at Washington," his plans provided in their execition that his
intuitive grasp of the tenor of the times was correct.

The highwater mark of Polk's achievement came on October 10, 1860, when
five thousand people came to an isolated mountaintop in Tennessee to witness

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