Honoris Causa

Sewanee, The Lost Cause, and Honorary Degrees

Events throughout the year were planned, including a visit from the Archbishop of Canterbury, a “Founder's Day” which dedicated a tablet at Lookout Mountain in Chattanooga, Tennessee,  commemorating the first meeting of the Board of Trustees on July 4, 1857 and a commemoration of the laying of the first cornerstone. The festivities stretched into 1958. It was a time of reflection and celebration for Sewanee, a period in which the University community considered what was most important to Sewanee’s heritage.

In the midst of the revelry, an issue of Sewanee Alumni News published the names of every individual who had received an honorary degree from the University of the South to date. Many of these individuals were clergymen from across the south, and many of the early honorees served on Sewanee’s Board of Trustees or taught at the school. For over forty honorees who received their degrees between 1874 and 1917, there was another commonality: a history of service in the Confederate Army. 

Dozens of these men, many of whom were born into slaveholding, plantation-owning families, had risen through the ranks of the Confederate military–serving as chaplains, surgeons, brigadier generals and even Confederate newspaper editors–and gone on to prestigious careers as educators, legislators, and clergy. Sewanee, erected as a shrine to the Confederacy designed to educate the scions of Southern plantations, reinforced its idolization of the Lost Cause through the men it honored with degrees like Doctor of Divinity and Doctor of Law.

This exhibit, while it shows the faces and stories of these Confederates, is not about the 1860s. Rather, it is about 1957, Sewanee's centennial, and the ways in which recording the Confederate veterans honored by the University reaffirmed Sewanee's historic connections to the Old South. The list of Confederate honorees, lauded for their military service, effectively states that Secession and the Confederacy were honorable causes worthy of remembrance. Meanwhile, the role of these men as slaveholders and their complicity in human bondage is omitted, further demonstrating the University's goal in the 1950s of arguing solely for the nobility and gallantry of the Lost Cause. In 1957, these men–enslavers, secessionists, even Klansmen–were still considered heroes at this University.

Click on a Confederate below to learn more about those who Sewanee chose to bestow honorary degrees upon and exalt as heroes of the Lost Cause.

In 1957, the University of the South celebrated the centennial of its founding and underscored the Confederate credentials of the men who received the University’s highest honor.

Over the course of its first century, the University of the South awarded 507 honorary degrees. Forty-one of them were conferred on men who had served the Confederacy in some capacity.

A survey of those awarded degrees honoris causa says much–and much of it expected–about the recipients who rose to power and distinction in the South after the Civil War’s end.

More important, though, is that the list of honorees published in 1957 reveals the University’s pride, nearly a century after the end of the Civil War, in the legacies of those who had risked their lives in defense of the Confederacy.

Honorees 1874 to 1889

Honorees 1890-1899

Honorees 1900-1917