07.08.01 Wade, John Donald, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet: A Study of the Development of Culture in the South, published in 1925
Notes Concerning the Author
A noted biographer, essayist, and literary-review editor, John Donald Wade (1892-1963) is best remembered for his participation in the Vanderbilt Agrarian movement of the 1930s and especially his contribution to the symposium that was to become that movement’s manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930). Wade, a Macon County, Georgia native who spent much of his life in the state , was not as prolific as some of his Agrarian colleagues, notably Donald Davidson, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren, and as a result did not attain their fame. Still, he exerted an influence over the Agrarian movement, as well as the larger sphere of American letters, that belies his relative obscurity. (Source: New Georgia Encyclopedia)
Abstract
Augustus Baldwin Longstreet (1790—1870), of Georgia and Mississippi, was a lawyer, a judge, a writer, an active newspaper editor, a Methodist clergyman, and president of several Southern colleges. He was also the uncle of General James Longstreet and the father-in-law of Lucius Q. C. Lamar. In 1808 he enrolled in Moses Waddel’s famous academy in Willington, South Carolina, and in 1811 he matriculated at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.
Longstreet’s brief career as a full-time Methodist minister ended when he became president of Emory College in Oxford, Georgia in January 1840. In 1844 he came to national prominence when he played a central role in the division of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Four years later, in 1848, he resigned his post at Emory, and the following year he served briefly as president of Centenary College in Jackson, Louisiana. He was president of the University of Mississippi from 1849 to 1856. After resigning his post in Mississippi, the sixty-five-year-old Longstreet considered himself retired. He left retirement in 1857, however, when he was offered the presidency of South Carolina College (later the University of South Carolina).
Longstreet served South Carolina College until late 1861, by which time most of his students had left school to join the Confederate effort in the War Between the States. Longstreet then moved to Oxford, Mississippi, where his ill wife had been living with one of their daughters. In December 1862 Federal troops reached Oxford and, using Longstreet’s papers as kindling, burned his house. The Longstreet’s relocated to Oxford, Georgia, and then to Columbus. After the war Longstreet returned to Oxford, Mississippi, to be near is daughter and son-in-law, Lamar. He died there July 9, 1870.
He is best known today, however, for a literary effort, Georgia Scenes, which was more like an afterthought in the life and missions of this great Southerner. (Source for much of this review was the New Georgia Encyclopedia)
Availability of this Book.
Reprints have been produced of late. Also, see Amazon for used copies of the original 1925 book. This book is available on line at the following address:
http://www.questia.com/library/4465302/augustus-baldwin-longstreet-a-study-of-the-development
CNW and HRW