Author: Woody Register

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In Their Own Words: An introduction John Henry Hopkins — first Bishop of Vermont, artist and architect, and defender of slavery

Hopkins’ watercolor of the Natural Bridge

For every candid observer agrees that the negro is happier and better as a slave than as a free man, and no individual belonging to the Anglo-Saxon stock would acknowledge that the intellect of the negro is equal to his own.

John Henry Hopkins, 1861

The series of watercolor landscapes that Bishop John Henry Hopkins (1792-1868) of Vermont executed during his brief sojourn in Sewanee in the winter of 1858-1859 are among the most treasured artifacts in the archival collections of the University of the South. Only five of the two dozen or more watercolors survive, and four depict the mountain’s natural charms, such as the “Chalybeate Spring” and the “Natural Bridge” (shown here). Today the originals are locked away in the University’s Special Collections, but excellent reproductions are on public display at the Sewanee Inn.

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In Their Own Words: Stephen Elliott, “That the Past May be Vindicated”

The Burial of Latané painted by William Dickinson Washington in 1864 shows the solidarity of white women and children and their slaves as they bury and mourn the death of a Confederate cavalry officer. For generations after the war, this depiction of white women’s devotion and the “faithful slave” served white Americans as a history lesson on the “Lost Cause” of the antebellum South. Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.

But for [the emancipated slaves] I see no future in this country. Avarice and cupidity and interest will do for their extinction what they have always done for an unprotected inferior race. Poverty, disease, intemperance will follow in their train and do the rest.

Stephen Elliott, May 1866

In February we published (in two parts) an 1862 sermon by the Rt. Rev. Stephen Elliott, bishop of Georgia, that lays out his understanding and defense of slavery as “a divine arrangement.” Elliott placed the godly purpose of slavery at the heart of the Civil War, another historical instrument by which, he believed, the Christian god was advancing his will in the world. God, he explained, “has caused the African race to be planted here under our political protection and under our christian nurture, for his own ultimate designs, and he will keep it here under that culture until the fulness of his own times.”

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In Their Own Words: Stephen Elliott, “Our cause in harmony with the purposes of God in Christ Jesus” (Part 2)

Today we publish the second part of the sermon by the Right Rev. Stephen Elliott. Here, in his own words, he defends the institution of slavery as “a sacred trust from God,” the cause the Confederacy was founded to defend and protect, and the cause of the Civil War that had killed more than 200,000 by the time he spoke these words in September 1862. The bracketed numbers in the text here refer to the pages in the published sermon, which may be read in its entirety on this website.

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In Their Own Words: Stephen Elliott, “Our cause in harmony with the purposes of God in Christ Jesus” (Part 1)

The Rt. Rev. Stephen Elliott. He was the first Bishop of Georgia and the first and only Presiding Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Confederate States of America.

The great revolution [of Civil War] through which we are passing certainly turns upon this point of slavery, and our future destiny is bound up with it.

Stephen Elliott, September 4, 1862

Of the three Episcopal bishops who launched the campaign in 1856 to found a “Southern university,” Georgia’s Stephen Elliott has received less recognition than Leonidas Polk of Louisiana and James Hervey Otey of Tennessee. But Elliott deserves greater attention especially for his eloquence in articulating a Christian mission for human bondage and for his influence in designing the University of the South as an instrument in the realization of that mission.

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INTRODUCING: In Their Own Words …

“Simply put, American history cannot be understood without slavery.” — Ira Berlin, late professor of history, University of Maryland

From the Editors: 

Many of us today have difficulty fathoming the central importance of slavery to the founding of the University of the South in the years from 1856 to 1861. This difficulty is not surprising. Our resistance to understanding that chattel bondage was fundamental to the origins of the Sewanee we know and love differs little from the ways most Americans react to the history of slavery in general. “Americans see themselves as a freedom-loving people,” the historian James Oliver Horton has observed. The history of slavery in the United States does not comport with that. “For a nation steeped in this self-image,” Horton continues, “it is embarrassing, guilt-producing, and disillusioning to consider the role that race and slavery played in shaping the national narrative.” It should come as no surprise, then, that many of us resist knowing or believing that slavery shaped the history of our own university or the Episcopal Church. Continue reading “INTRODUCING: In Their Own Words …”

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‘Within the Pale of the Plantation States’: Slavery and the Governance of the University of the South in 1860

Map showing the distribution of the slave population of the southern states and the United States (1861).

[Click here to go directly to the interactive map.]

Across the United States today, many of the nation’s oldest universities and colleges have, for the first time, begun researching their historical ties to slavery and uncovering the ways  their institutions relied on enslaved persons for the labor performed on their campuses or as the basis of fortunes they tapped for funding.

The University of the South is at the start of its own six-year investigation, led by its Project on Slavery, Race, and Reconciliation. Today the Project shares part of the research it has amassed by introducing an interactive map feature entitled ‘Within the Pale of the Plantation States’: Slavery and the Governance of the University of the South in 1860.

Our aim with the publication of this map is to gain a better understanding of the significance of slavery in the campaign to establish the University of the South. The Episcopal Bishop of Louisiana, Leonidas Polk, launched that drive in July 1856, when he wrote a letter to nine of his fellow southern bishops, rallying them to join forces in founding a southern and Episcopal university. This great center of learning would be the equal of any other in the world and centrally located, he explained, “within the pale of the plantation states.”

With that telling phrase, Polk rooted the identity of the planned university in the region defined by slave-based plantation agriculture, its enslaved population numbering some 4 million persons, and the phenomenal wealth it generated. Polk’s bold proposal later materialized as The University of the South, chartered in 1858.

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CLOSER LOOKS: The Thompson Union Story

By Tanner Potts
Research Associate
Sewanee Project on Slavery, Race, and Reconciliation

How well do we really know our campus landmarks?

For example, take Thompson Union. Standing on University Avenue directly across from All Saints’ Chapel, it is one of the Sewanee campus’s legendary and most recognizable buildings. Originally a science hall and later the storied student union and still the location of the SUT (Sewanee’s movie theater), it has served the last two decades or more as the home of the university’s fundraising arm.

But how did it come about? And whom does its name honor?

In this interactive slideshow  (available at this link), the Project’s researcher Tanner Potts, C’15, shows why we need to follow his lead in taking much “closer looks” at this building and our campus as a whole to understand the histories of the memorials it retains to the leaders of the antebellum slaveholding order and to their resurgence to wealth, power, and influence as they succeeded in defeating Reconstruction.

Please email us (slaveryproject@sewanee.edu) with comments or questions.