In Their Own Words – Page 2

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.

“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 …”

About This Site

The Roberson Project on Slavery, Race, and Reconciliation aims to bring together the Sewanee community — students, staff, faculty, alumni, and area residents — to pursue a comprehensive examination and thoughtful consideration of our university’s historic entanglement in the institution of slavery and its legacies in the long century of racial injustice after the end of the Civil War.

The title of our blog – the Latin for “of the South” – is drawn from the formal name that appears on diplomas awarded at Sewanee: Universitas Meridiana. Adopting this prepositional phrase for our online publication expresses our position that this investigation and the understanding that we derive from it are essential in determining what it means to be a leading university of and for the twenty-first century South.

This blog will publish features drawn from our research and sponsored events in order to share with the larger public the work we are pursuing.

About our header image: The chief founders of the University of the South, including the Episcopal Bishop of Louisiana, the Rt. Rev. Leonidas Polk, all had long histories as both slaveholders and defenders of the slaveholding order when they launched the campaign for a university “of the South” in 1856. The header image of our blog is a stark indicator of these southern histories. It is cropped from an 1855 bill of sale for landed and enslaved property in Bolivar County, Mississippi, belonging to Bishop Polk and his son Alexander Hamilton Polk. The Polks liquidated their 2,700-acre plantation and its enslaved labor force to cover personal debts owed to a pair of merchants out of New Orleans. The buyer of the land and persons in this case was James H. Yerger, the sheriff of Washington County, Mississippi. The sale document shown here itemizes the names and ages of the enslaved persons sold by the Polks.

Category: In Their Own Words

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

INTRODUCING: In Their Own Words …