Moses
Waddel’s school at Lillington, South Carolina “was a simple frontier
academy of the period which taught grammar, syntax, antiques of Greece
and Rome, geography of the ancients, Greek and Latin. Waddel’s
graduates included many governors and future statesmen to include John
C. Calhoun, William H. Crawford, Hugh S. Legare, A.B. Longstreet, James
L. Petigru, George Crawford, Preston Brooks, Thomas W. Cobb, Pierce M.
Butler, and George R. Gilmer. It was later said of Waddel’s reason for
taking the presidency of the University of Georgia was first to “raise
the University and give it a respectability and usefulness in the State;
and second, to communicate to public education the spirit of
Christianity.”
Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"
Public Education and the Spirit of Christianity:
“In
an article printed in the Atlantic Monthly, November, 1929, Count
Hermann Keyserling expressed the belief that the South is the only
section of America where a real culture can be produced. Only in this
region have complete individuals lived. Here and only here can a
uniqueness, an individuality which leads to a development of complete
souls, flourish.
Writing
in a similar vein John Crowe Ransom, a Nashville poet, says, “The South
is unique on this continent for having founded and defended a culture
which was according to European principles of culture; and the European
principles had better look to the South if they are to be perpetuated in
this country.”
The
same point of view characterizes a symposium entitled “I’ll Take My
Stand, by Twelve Southerners,” which has lately been published by
Harpers. In the field of education these thinkers criticize our public
schools, and desire a return to the ante-bellum system of formal
training. Indeed, a great glorification of the academy, which was the
most characteristic school of the pre-war South, is presented. With the
lapse of the educational system of the Colonial Period…
“the
South found a means of transmitting to its own people the essential of a
good classical education, by the growth of an institution that never,
to the same degree, affected the North. This institution was the
academy. It was by its means and operation that the older Southern life
and culture became what it was, and remained until the catastrophe of
1861-5…..The academies solved the problem of the gap between the mere
acquisition of mere knowledge and the “acquisition of power for
independent work” by putting the pupils into direct contact, not with
undisputed masses of information and up-to-date apparatus, but with such
teachers as could be found.
Their
object was to teach nothing that the teacher himself had not mastered,
and could not convey to his pupils. Their training was therefore
classical and humanistic, rather than scientific and technical – as most
of the available teachers were products of the older European and
American schools.”
In
America the academy was a “product of the frontier period of national
development and the laisse faire theory of government.” Frequently it
was motivated by “denominational interest and sectarian pride.” In the
South the academies were of two types, the modest local institution
which was sometimes called the “old field school,” and the more
pretentious, more permanent school with a wider patronage. While fees
were commonly charged, the academies were democratic in character, and
usually the idea of individual development was dominant. Generally
speaking the schools served the educational needs of the entire
community.”
(Moses Waddel and the Lillington Academy, Ralph M. Lyon, North Carolina
Historical Review, Volume VIII, Number 1, January, 1931, pp. 284-285)
