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The Pulpit and the Sword

Originally aired on March 06, 1998 - In part 153 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson profiles the career of Leonidas Polk, the Episcopal Bishop of the Diocese of Louisiana who became a Confederate general.

#184 – General Leonidas Polk

It is sometimes said that religion and war do not mix well in an individual. Stonewall Jackson disproved that axiom. But another Confederate general gave it credibility. His name was Leonidas Polk. Born in Raleigh I 1806, he was a member of a prominent North Carolina family. Polk attended West Point. There he formed a close friendship with fellow cadet Jefferson Davis.

Commissioned an artillery officer upon graduation, Polk resigned after six months in the Army in order to study for the Episcopal ministry. By 1841, he was Bishop of the Diocese of Louisiana. He also married into wealth and acquired an extensive sugar plantation.

Polk was a leader in the movement to create a college where Southern boys would be educated without what he called, “the contaminating influence of Yankee ideas”. The University of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee was the result.    

In 1861, Polk offered his services to the Confederacy. His old friend, now President, Jefferson Davis, appointed him a Major General and gave Polk command of the military department comprising western Tennessee and eastern Arkansas. All of this for a man who had spent a half year in a peace-time army.

Polk wasted no time in demonstrating his incompetence. Early in September, 1861, acting without the approval or knowledge of the Confederate government, Polk led a force into Kentucky and occupied the high bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River at Columbus. This unauthorized move has been called “one of the most decisive catastrophes the Confederacy ever suffered”.

Polk’s presence drove the vital border state of Kentucky, which had been trying to remain neutral in the war, straight into the arms of the Union government. Polk squatted at Columbus until the February, 1862, Federal seizures of Forts Henry and Donelson forced him to withdraw.

Thereafter, thanks to Davis’ protective care, Polk rose to core command in the Confederate Army of Tennessee came to the forefront. To the casual observer, he was an impressive, humble, bishop, who had buckled the sword over clerical robes from a sense of Southern duty. That was not so. Polk was a man of little military knowledge. Worse he was consistently stubborn, aloof, and quarrelsome.    

As a Bishop, Polk had been trained to lead. As a soldier, he never learned how to follow. He treated superior officers with various degrees of insubordination. Polk chose to obey a commander only when it pleased him to do so. One historian writing of the first year of the war in the West called Polk, “the most dangerous man in the Confederate army”.

He developed a consuming hatred for General Braxton Bragg and for a year Polk waged an open campaign of criticism and innuendo against the former army commander. Bragg finally succeeded in getting Polk transferred, before he himself was removed from command. Polk rejoined the Army of Tennessee as it retired toward Atlanta in the face of Sherman’s Union advance.

On June 14, 1864, Polk and a group of officers went to the top of Pine Mountain, near present-day Marietta, to observe Federal movements. A Union artillery battery saw the party and opened fire. The second shell hit Polk and killed him instantly.

The Bishop-General was initially buried in Augusta, Georgia, then removed in 1945, to New Orleans. Leonidas Polk was comfortable in the pulpit. But as a Confederate general he left discomfort wherever he went.