Leonidas Polk
From Dixiepedia: The PC-Free Encyclopedia
Leonidas Polk (10 April 1806 – 14 June 1864) was born in Raleigh, North Carolina. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill briefly before entering the United States Military Academy at West Point. During his senior year, he joined the Episcopal Church and resigned his commission. He was ordained as a deacon in 1830. That year, he married Frances Ann Deveraux and became assistant to Bishop Richard Channing Moore in Richmond, Virginia.
In 1832, Polk moved his family to the vast Polk "Rattle and Snap" tract in Maury County, Tennessee, and constructed a massive Greek Revival home he called "Ashwood Hall." With his four brothers in Maury County, he built a family chapel, St. John's Church, at Ashwood. He also served as priest of St. Peter's Church in Columbia, Tennessee. He was appointed Missionary Bishop of the Southwest in 1838 and was elected Bishop of Louisiana in 1841.
Bishop Polk was the leading founder of the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, which he envisioned as a national university for the South and a New World equivalent to Oxford and Cambridge.
At the outbreak of the War Between the States, Polk pulled the Louisiana Convention out of the Episcopal Church of the United States. Jefferson Davis, his friend and former roommate at West Point, convinced Polk to accept a commission in the Confederate States Army. Polk agreed and was commissioned Major General commanding Department No. 2 (roughly, the area between the Mississippi River and the Tennessee River) in 1861. He committed one of the great blunders of the war by dispatching troops to occupy Columbus, Kentucky in September of 1861. The State of Kentucky had declared its neutrality, but Polk's action ended that neutrality and the State quickly fell under Union control.
He organized the Army of Mississippi and a part of the Army of Tennessee, in which he later served as lieutenant general. Polk designed his own battle flag for his brigades; a blue field with a red St. George's cross, emblazoned with 11 stars for each of the Confederate States. Polk led a corps during the Battle of Shiloh.
Following disagreements with the army's commander, Braxton Bragg, Polk was transferred to Mississippi and later took charge of the Department of Alabama, Mississippi, and East Louisiana. Ordered by Bragg's successor, Joseph E. Johnston, to join his forces with the Army of Tennessee in the Atlanta campaign, Polk was killed by an artillery shell at Pine Mountain near Marietta, Georgia on 14 June 1864. Although his record as a field commander was poor, Polk was immensely popular with rank and file soldiers and his death was deeply mourned in the Army of Tennessee. He was buried in Augusta, Georgia, and in 1945, his remains and those of his wife were reinterred at Christ Church Cathedral in New Orleans, Louisiana.
