Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 1.djvu/707

 Rh bestowed, however, and he engaged in business at New Orleans. During Grant's presidency he was appointed surveyor of the port of that city, and afterward he was appointed United States minister to Turkey, and under President Garfield he was United States marshal for the district of Georgia, in which State he has made his residence of recent years, at the town of Gainesville. In October, 1897, he was appointed United States railroad commissioner to succeed General Wade Hampton resigned.

Lieutenant-General Leonidas Polk was born at Raleigh, N. C., April 10, 1806, the son of Colonel William Polk, the latest survivor of the field officers of the North Carolina line, and grandson of Thomas Polk, a leader in the Mecklenburg convention. He received a literary education at the university of North Carolina, and then determining to embrace a military career, was appointed to the United States military academy, where he was graduated with a lieutenancy in the artillery in 1827. Through the influence of a new chaplain at West Point, afterward known as Bishop McIlvaine, of Ohio, he became impressed with a sense of religious duty which led him to resign his commission in the same year, and enter the Theological seminary at Alexandria. In December, 1827, he became a deacon in the Protestant Episcopal church and in 1831 he was ordained priest. On account of his delicate health his labors in this field were relieved by foreign travel and partial occupation as a farmer, until 1838, when he received the degree of S. T. D. and was appointed missionary bishop in Arkansas and Indian territory, with provisional charge of the dioceses of Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, and missions in Texas. The incessant travel required soon restored his physical condition to health, and he subsequently resigned the charge of this boundless field except the diocese of