Lincoln Memorial University and the Shaping of Appalachia

Conclusion

concLUsion More than 110 years of service allows us to gauge how well the founders of lincoln Memorial University accomplished their goals and how well their successors followed through over time to sustain the original aims of the school. At least until the presidency of robert l. Kincaid ended in 1958, university administrators were highly aware of the consistency evident in the school’s mission and in the constancy with which their predecessors had dealt with the six major themes in the history of the institution. Even after 1958, several of those themes continued to be a vital part of the school’s reason for existence. Mountain loyalists The only idea behind the creation of lincoln Memorial University that came directly from Abraham lincoln was a desire to help those hardy mountaineers of East Tennessee who had remained loyal to the Union during the Civil War. lincoln had planted this seed in oliver otis Howard’s mind in 1863; the general extended aid to Christopher r. robert’s school on lookout Mountain three years later, a project that lasted no more than a few years in its effort to offer educational opportunities to the children of mountain loyalists. Then the idea remained dormant for three decades until Arthur A. Myers offered an opportunity , and Cyrus Kehr reinforced it with an idea of his own to name a school after the sixteenth president. Howard saw lincoln Memorial University as a chance to honor Lincoln, fulfill the president’s last injunction to him, and use Lincoln’s image as a publicity tool in fund raising among northern donors. Even though Myers had used the mountain loyalty theme at least once in his promotional literature for the Harrow school, in the same year as the meeting on the porch, Howard remained the champion of this theme in promoting the new institution. indeed, no one else took it up in any serious way. in part, this was due to Howard’s personal experience with mountain loyalists during the Civil War, especially during the relief march to Knoxville. it was a cause that already had a place in his heart. But the robert school had been founded only one year after Appomattox , when the East Tennessee loyalists were dominant in state politics. By 1897, very few people, even in East Tennessee, seem to have remembered their wartime sacrifices. Public awareness of mountain loyalty weakened after the white conclusion 226 conservative reaction to the fall of reconstruction state governments in the south. When Howard passed away in 1909, the theme of mountain loyalty also died away in the promotional literature of the university. Moreover, lincoln Memorial University had been established in a place that was surprisingly strong in its Confederate sympathies. Although Claiborne County as a whole had voted against secession, a hard core of southern supporters lived on the very spot the university would later occupy as its campus. The county raised a company for the Twenty-ninth Tennessee and some troops for the sixty-third Tennessee later in the war. The theme of sectional reconciliation, which Howard publicized much more than that of mountain loyalty, came to overwhelm the theme that lay at the heart of lincoln’s last commission to the general. reconciling sectional differences became a major effort, north and south, by the 1890s, and it had more power to attract attention to the university than did the needs of mountain loyalist families . in fact, the Cumberland Gap institution prominently symbolized sectional reconciliation through its choice of school colors, blue and gray, and the naming of its first building, Grant-Lee Hall. Robert Patterson, the former captain of Company C, Twenty-ninth Tennessee, served on the first Board of Directors. robert Kincaid, student, staff member, director, vice-president, and president of the university, was the grandson of a Confederate veteran. it should also be noted that the university never made a sustained effort to identify and recruit sons and daughters of Union veterans. Howard merely proclaimed that this was one part of the school’s early mission and left it at that. in 1928, 1930, and 1932, college administrators offered scholarships to the descendants of Union soldiers and, apparently, Confederate soldiers. of forty surviving student applications, twenty-four (60 percent) were by descendants of Union soldiers and six (15 percent) by descendants of rebel soldiers. The other applicants could not specify for which side their ancestors had fought or they had ancestors who had worn the uniforms of both belligerents.1 Lincoln...