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Religion, War, Education, and Leonidas Polk
Jefferson Davis said that after the death of Albert Sidney Johnston at Shiloh and of Stonewall Jackson at Chancellorsville, the Confederacy suffered its greatest loss when Leonidas Polk, Episcopal bishop of Louisiana and three-star general, was killed near Atlanta in 1864.
A modern evaluation of Polk by Dr. W. Cabell Greet of Barnard College stated, "After Alfred the Great, there has lived no man who achieved such stature in religion, war, and education than Leonidas Polk." He was the first Episcopal bishop in America to hold jurisdiction over foreign soil -- the Republic of Texas; he was a lieutenant-general of the Confederate army, and he projected a university whose comprehensiveness still is unfulfilled anywhere a hundred years after his death. In this Civil War Centennial, let us first look at what was really the anti-climax of Polk's life, the years of the War Between the States.
In June, 1861, there was issued by President Davis the commission of major-general, C.S.A., to Leonidas Polk. After repeated urgings from all over the South, Polk accepted reluctantly a duty which he hoped "God will allow me to get through without delay, that I may return to my chosen and usual work." His commission was to command water and land defense of the Mississippi and above the Red River. In November, 1861, when his West Point roomate Albert Sidney Johnston returned from California and assumed command of the Mississippi, Polk resigned his commission but the Confederate president refused to accept his resignation.
Never before in North America had a bishop accepted military service, though the practice was not uncommon in the Middle Ages, and one Confederate general, young brigadier Ellison Capers, became Bishop of South Carolina
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twenty-nine years later. May factors blended to produce the Polk phenomenon. He had been a fellow cadet at West Point with Davis and Robert E. Lee. He had a military heritage. He was superbly equipped for the Mississippi duty, having travelled since 1838 by steamer, horse-back, and stage to nearly every part of Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama in the conduct of his episcopal functions. He was a planter, a slave-owner, and a believer in the integrity of state government. In short, he had the confidence of a vital segment of southern leadership. His selection was one of the most promising made by Jefferson Davis.
The cheers which greeted the appointment in the South were countererd by jeers in the North. Some few friends - Bishops Horatio Potter of New York and John Henry Hopkins of Vermont - wrote understanding letters, but the general press and the church press were outraged. A priest of God leading fellow rebels in slaughter? How could he do it?
Polk's agonies of decision are reflected in letters collected by his wife and published by his son. He reasoned that the political division of the formerly united states was a fact. He drew a parallel between the position of the Anglican Church in the colonies during the Revolution and the Southern church after the Montgomery congress which established the Confederacy. He took first the public stand which all Southern bishops later took, that a church in one country, the Confederate States of Ameria, could not possibly maintain a primary loyalty to another country, the United States of America, particularly if the two countries were at war. He pointed out that the leadership of the Episcopal church had done much to preserve unity. Indeed, such outspoken defenders of the Union as Bishop James H. Otey of Tennessee had brave censure, if not scorn, at the hands of the fire-breathers. The drum-beating which came from other Protestant pulpits in the late 1850's was
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not characteristic of Episcopal clergy. There were hardly a true secessionist among the Southern bishops until after South Carolina's disunion legislation.
The reasoning by which Polk followed the injunction, "Render unto Caesar," was accompanied by emotion too. The South was to Polk a dear and native land. Its principles were his own. The slaves he tended with much sacrifice were a yoke and a burden, but still they must be cared for. He did not favor slavery as an institution. He predicted its gradual collapse by economic unfeasibility. Meantime, the only attitude for the church and churchmen in the South was Christian concern for the slaves' physical and spiritual well-being. Half of the Episcopalains in his diocese of Louisiana were Negro.
An incident just before his acceptance of a thrice-offered commission has led to an emotion which was understandable, if not pardonable. His taking up arms for the "defense of fireside and family" had pseronal validity. Mrs. Polk and the children barely escaped with their lives when their homes at Sewanee, and that of their episcopal neighbors, the Stephen Elliotts, of Georgia, had been destroyed by fires set simultaneously by unknown persons, thought to be Union sympathizers from the Tennessee hills.
One can only speculate on the part Polk might have played in the Confederacty if he had not "buckled his sword over his gown." He and Stephen Elliott had in March, 1861, issued from Sewanee a letter to the bishops whose dioceses were in the Confederate States, calling a convention in Montgomery in July, to consider the relationship of the Southern dioceses to the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America. Before the convention met, Polk was in uniform. His diocese of Louisiana and the diocese of Tennessee were early occupied by federal troops. Neither officially became part of the Confederate church, as neither diocesan
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convention was able to meet and ratify the constitution.
After the death of the Confederate Presiding Bishop, William Meade, of Virginia, in 1862, and of James Hervey Otey of Tennesse in 1863, Polk was the senior bishop in the Condederacy, but the title went to Stephen Elliott of Georgia, whose diocese had fulfilled the canonical requirements of association with the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Confederate States of America.
Other Southern bishops became Confederate chaplains or frequently visited the camps, but Polk exercised his ministry only a few times. He performed the marriage ceremony for the raider General John Hunt Morgan and baptized Generals John Bell Hood, Joseph E. Johnston, and William J. Hardee in their tents near Atlanta.
Since an evaluation of Polk as a military man is about to appear as a full-length biography by Dr. Joseph H. Parks, head of the history department at the University of Georgia, no detail is necessary here. Polk exerted full command of a fighting force only once, at Belmont in Missouri. There he decisively defeated a short, cigar-smoking, whiskey-drinking exsalesman with oddly prophetic initials--U. S. Grant. At Perryville, had Polk, Hardee, or Kirby Smith had their way, Braxton Bragg's raid into Kentucky could have become a spectacularly successful campaign.
These two victories cost him a boon he seems ardently to have wished, the right to return to his churches, his clergy, and his people. His early record made his continuance in military service necessary to the morale of the new nation. His desire to go back to ecclesiastical life lessened progressively as General "Beast" Butler tightened his grip on Louisiana. Polk as wartime bishop could only have chosen between headinh a rump diocese and being a virtual prisoner.
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If Polk could have forseen the decline of his personal fortunes in the military, if he could have faced sooner the pathetic inadequacy of the man who was his commanding officer for the greater part of the war, he might have insisted on the resignation. Geveral Braxton Bragg was a great organizer and trainer of men. His Army of Tennessee was always ready to fight, but invariably the commander let pass the opportunity for attack. His frustated lieutenants, included Forrest, Wheeler, Hardee, Polk, Cheatham, and KirbySmith, contended with varying degrees of feeling that the favoritism shown Bragg by Davis was a tragic mistake. Generals Polk and Bragg, after disagreeing in Kentucky, had an open argument at Chickamauga in 1863. Bragg preferred charges. Polk, supported by fellow generals, was vindicated. Bragg resigned after the unexpected and disasterous defeat at Missionary Ridge where he thought his defenses impregnable.
Polk comanded the Army of Mississippi in its various junctions with the Army Tennessee, taking part in the actions at Stone's River, Tullahoma, Chickamauga, Meridian, and finally Atlanta, where on a summer morning in 1864, observing the federal lines near Kennesaw, he was struck down.
William Mecklenburg Polk's two-volume biography of his father has a curious emphasis: one volume for fifty-five years of Polk's life and one volume for the final three. His father had been grievously misused in the war. The son's purpose was to make a case for Polk's military genius. After reading his evidence, one feels that Leonidas Polk as head of the Army of Tennessee might have done what Lee did in Northern Virginia.
The massive argument, however, leaves one still asking the question, "So what?" Polk's military career can only be called a blunder in an otherwise near-perfect life. He might well have won battles, or even a war, but Leonidas Polk deserves a better fate than to be the patron saint of schism.
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