Leonidas Polk Family Papers

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with the weak, his skill in administering a needed rebuke.

In the years from 1848 to 1854 came a succession of disasters which destroyed the Bishop's personal estate. The first to strike was cholera: the Bishop himself sickened of it, and on "Leighton" 100 slaves died of it. In 1850 a tornado struck and destroyed the sugar house, stables and cabins of the slaves. An early frost cut the sugar crop to a third of normal. The next year the Bishop's misplaced trust in a Tennessee friend ended in the loss of a large sum of money. During 1853 two of his own children died by yellow fever, and again the epidemic carried off a large number of his slaves. By the spring of 1854 he realized his debts had grown to the point where he would have to turn the plantation over to his creditors, and, to provide temporarily for his family, he would have to take the rectorship of a parish church. And yet it was precisely during these years that he was industriously planning his great project of a university for the Southern states that would rival the establishment at Harvard or Yale. Where,