William Mecklenburg Polk
Doctor of Laws 1890
Polk also received his honorary degree in 1890. The son of Sewanee founder Leonidas Polk, William Mecklenburg achieved the rank of Captain and served under his father during the war. He was the first dean of Cornell Medical School. In chronicling his father's life and legacy, Polk made excuses for the institution of slavery, arguing that while it was fundamentally unjust, Black people had ceased under slavery to be "savages" and could not be returned to Africa, although they were also unfit to live as freedmen in the United States:
"It will always be difficult for those who had no personal acquaintance with the minds of conscientious slaveholders to understand the absolute fact that, from first to last, Bishop {Leonidas) Polk expected the negro population to be, indirectly but really, the largest beneficiaries of the university. His consideration of slavery as an institution was entirely practical. That African slavery was in its origin a crime, and that the slave-trade was an atrocity, there could be no kind of doubt; but for the origin of slavery he was no more responsible than for the tricks and frauds by which so many land titles were originally required from the aborigines of this continent...To return the slaves to Africa was impossible; and if if had been possible, he now saw that it would be a cruelty...They were no longer savages; they were docile, kindly, Christian people, who might in time become fit for freedom; but they still seemed to be very insufficiently prepared for the state of liberty."
-William Mecklenburg Polk, Leonidas Polk, Bishop and General.