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LEONIDAS POLK (1806-1864)

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Originally appearing in Volume V21, Page 984 of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.
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LEONIDAS POLK (1806-1864)  ,
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American soldier, was born at Raleigh, North Carolina, on the loth of
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April 1806, and was a cousin of James Knox Polk, president of the
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United States . He was educated at West Point, but afterwards studied
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theology and took orders in the
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Protestant Episcopal Church in 1831 . In 1838 he became missionary bishop of the South-West,
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Arkansas,
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Indian Territory,
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Louisiana,
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Alabama and
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Mississippi, and in 1841 he was consecrated bishop of Louisiana . His
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work in the Church was largely of an educational kind, and he played a prominent
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part in movements for the establishment of higher educational institutions in the South . At the outbreak of the
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Civil War in 1861 he resigned his bishopric and, like many other clergymen and ministers of religion, entered the army which was raised to defend the Confederacy . His rank in the hierarchy and the universal respect in which he was held in the South, rather than his early military
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education, caused him to be appointed to the important rank of major-general . He fortified the
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post of Columbus,
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Kentucky, the foremost
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line of defence on the Mississippi, against which Brigadier-General U . S . Grant directed the offensive reconnaissance of Belmont in the autumn . In the following spring, the first line of defence having fallen, Polk commanded a corps at Shiloh in the field army commanded by Albert Sidney Johnston and Beauregard . In
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October 1862 he was promoted
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lieutenant-general, and thenceforward he commanded one of the three corps of the army of
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Tennessee under Bragg and afterwards was in charge of the Department of Alabama, Mississippi and East Louisiana . He was killed in the fighting in front of
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Marietta, while reconnoitring near Pine Mountain,
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Georgia, on the 14th of
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June 1864 .

See

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Life, by his son W . M . Polk, (1893) .

End of Article: LEONIDAS POLK (1806-1864)
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