Leonidas Polk Family Papers

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his preparatory schooling at Chapel Hill and entered West Point in the year 1823. The story of how, while he was being trained to be a soldier of his country, he became a soldier of Christ has happily been preserved for us by an eye-witness. It must be remembered that, following the Revolution, the Episcopal Church had been almost totally inactive in North Carolina. While not an open scoffer at Christianity, Leonidas Polk's father seems to have made no effort to provide his children with a religious upbringing. West Point was modelled after the Military Institute of France; most of the textbooks were in French; and the influence of the current Gallic Deism and Rationalism was strong.

In the year 1825 the [Reverend Charles Pettit McIlvaine]], who was later to become Bishop of Ohio, accepted an appointment as chaplain and instructor in mathematics at West Point. He found the officers polite but unwilling to profess the slightest interest in religion, and he found a similar shyness on the part of the cadets. Toward the end of his first year a cadet finally did come to see him -- not because

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chosen as clerical delegate to General Convention and as trustee of the General Theological Seminary. At the General Convention of that year he was appointed to the special committee charged with drafting a canon on missionary bishops. Clearly his worth was becoming known to the Church at large, for at the following General Convention in 1838 he was chosen to the missionary jurisdiction in the Southwest with "impressive unanimity". Despite his persistent ill health and his wish to stay quietly on his plantation with his wife and growing family, he accepted the charge and was consecrated bishop in Christ Church, Cincinnati, on December 9, 1838, one of his consecrators being the man who had baptized him, Charles Pettit McIlvaine, who had become Bishop of Ohio.

In their history of the Church in Louisiana (So Great a Good) Hodding and Betty Carter justly observe, "The arduousness of this charge the American Church had entrusted to a 32-year-old man of frail health is not fully comprehended even by the knowledge that it meant the supervision of