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Transcription
The Rt. Rev. Daniel Corrigan
September 19, 1963
Page 3.
more. The University of the South, as he conceived it, would have
been by a safe margin of two decades the first modern university in
America, a title now held by Johns Hopkins with Leland Stanford
University in second place. There were, occasionally, Episcopalians
in the early nineteenth century who "thought big." There is not one
of them however who thought with long perspective and who labored
successfully to effectuate his ideas. Polk is not to be blamed for the
failure of the University of the South to open as the first modern
university in America anymore than the original architect of Coventry
Cathedral is to be blamed for its having been leveled during World
War II. Circumstances beyond the control of either were responsible
for the destruction.
When I give talks on Leonidas Polk, which I do every now and
then, I do not dwell on this defensive attitude, but it has been very im-
portant for me in my own mind to be able to defend him. He really does
not need an apology, but he is, on occasion, attacked by those who do
not understand the context of the times and who are not disciplined by
his alternatives.
Do come to see us when you can.
With best wishes, I am
Sincerely yours,
Arthur Chitty
ABC:pg
Notes and Questions
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At first glance, this letter from Arthur Ben Chitty might seem like just another typical apologistic defense of pre-Civil War slavery and slaveholders. (One can imagine how it would be received by social media today in 2019.) However, he does make an irrefutable point when he says that it would have been cruel to dump a large number of illiterate and untrained slaves onto a labor market that would have had no place for them. They certainly could not have found much employment in agriculture when slaves were still available to do that type of work. There was no formal support mechanism to assist freed and former slaves until the establishment of the Freedman's Bureau in 1865. Of course, ideally there would have been no slavery in the first place, but that is not the world that Leonidas Polk inherited.