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by Polk's standards, but it can claim in 1961 the largest endowment
per student in the southeastern states, the highest proportionate
production in the South of Rhodes Scholars, Fulbright award winners,
and Woodrow Wilson fellows. The university press which Polk envisioned
has far to go but has, a century later, credit for publishing the
oldest continuously printed literary critical quarterly in America,
The Sewanee Review. Even more arresting is the fact that the very
yellow fever which laid low the fortunes of Polk himself, as well as
his church, was ultimately conquered by a graduate of the university
he planned--by WIlliam Crawford Gorgas, the great sanitarian. To go
farther and say the Panama Canal owes its existence, in part, to Polk
is tenuous but not enitrely frivolous.

There was a postlude in the drama of Polk's life. In the fall
of 1865 the General Convention met in Baltimore. On the morning of
that fateful meeting the chances of amelioration were slight. True,
the presiding bishop John Henry Hopkins of Vermont was probably the
best disposed of all Northern bishops toward the broken but unbowed
rebels. He had asked fellow bishops to join him in a letter inviting
them to the convention. So chill was the response that the invitation
had gone out over his solitary signature.

Richard Hooker WIlmer of Alabama had been consecrated during the
war without Northern canonical consents and it was suspected that the
Southerners would balk at a reconsecration. Stephen Elliot, presiding
bishop of the Confederacy, had decided that he could not in good
conscience attend the convention. His stature in history was thereby
damaged. Only two bishops came, Atkinson of North Carolina and Lay
of Arkansas, and one bishop-elect, Quintard of Tennessee.