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 CHAPTER II.

AN IDEA TAKES SHAPE.

The first steps towards the establishment of Fisk University were taken in the autumn of 1865. Rev. E. P. Smith, after rendering invaluable service to the Union army during the war as the Field Agent of the United States Christian Commission (the society which, under the presidency of Hon. George H. Stuart, was such a ministering angel to the soldiers in their social and physical as well as spiritual needs), had just taken up the work of Secretary of the American Missionary Association at Cincinnati.

Rev. E. M. Cravath, early in the war, had exchanged the ministrations of an Ohio parish for those of an army chaplaincy. The son of a pioneer Abolitionist, whose home was a busy station on the "Underground Railway," and whose children were thus inoculated from their earliest days with anti-slavery convictions and a special interest in the coloured race, his army experience had brought him into such acquaintance with the needs of the Freedmen, that, at the close of the war, he was commissioned by the Association for special service in organising its schools in the same department to which Mr. Smith had been assigned.

The two met at Nashville. Carefully surveying