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Photo of Leonidas Polk

A carillon is neither a timid nor a neutral creation. It speaks with a clear voice. It means to be heard. This carillon with singular suitability is dedicated to Leonidas Polk.
The man destined to hold Episcopal jurisdiction over Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas, Louisiana, The Indian Territory and Alabama was born on April 10, 1806. He died, pierced by an artillery ball, on June 14, 1864. In those intervening fifty-eight years there developed a career described as follows by Dr. W. Cabell Greet, who is to be Orator at Sewanee's 1959 Commencement: "After Alfred the Great, there has lived no none man who achieved such stature in the [fields?] of religion, of the military, and of education as Leonidas Polk." He was bishop of the Episcopal Church, a lieutenant-general of the Confederacy, and the projector of the idea for a university of a comprehensiveness still unrealized anywhere in the world a hundred years after his death.
Leonidas Polk's grandfather was a general. His father served at Valley Forge. His cousin was president of the United States. He was born in North Carolina, educated at Chapel Hill, West Point, and Alexandria. He was the first Episcopal bishop in America with ecclesiastical authority over foreign [soil?]--the Republic of Texas. He combined zeal, energy and capacity for research with an ethusiasm which could not be quenched. It was his letter to fellow Southern bishops on July 1, 1856, which gave immediate impetus to the founding of the Univeristy of the South. He was the first trustee to visit the site at Sewanee. Ironically, as second chancellor of the University, he was the only one never to preside over a meeting of the trustees.
For an evaluation of his role in the founding of the University, his contemporaries on the Board of Trustees spoke in this manner in 1867: "If the great beneficials results which our University was founded to secure shall ever be accomplished, the praise, under God, will be mainly due to the wisdom and forethought, the hopeful confidence and indefatigable labors of its founder, the magnanimous and self-sacrificing Bishop Polk."

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