Steamboat Minnesota, descending Red River, La., August 3,
1859.
Sir: I have
the gratification to inform you, in advance probably of your official
notification by Gov. Wickliffe, that the Board of Supervisors of the Seminary
of Learning, State of Louisiana, yesterday elected you to the chair of
engineering, architecture, and drawing in that institution, and to the post of
superintendent thereof. . .
I am now en route to join my family at Beer-Sheba Springs,
Tennessee, where I shall remain until the last days of August and thence to
Washington City all the month of September. My address there will be to “care
Richard Smith, Esq., cashier, Bank of the Metropolis.” Hope to be at home by
first of November, where from the 1st to the 10th, shall be glad if you can
join me, making the headquarters of your family at my house, where we have
abundant room, but are nine miles distant from Alexandria, thirteen from the
Seminary.
If entirely convenient and comfortable to your family,
however, to remain behind, it would be wisest for you to come down alone at
first, as there are no residences yet provided, and you will all have to
quarter at first in the building. Yourself and Dr. Vallas are the only two
married men on the Academic Board, and the Board of Supervisors has taken the
initiatory for the creation of two dwellings, but it requires the authorization
of the legislature, which assembles on the 3rd Monday in January.
It will be necessary for you to be here as soon as possible
after my own return, as the preparation for, and the starting of, the whole
machinery has been devolved mostly on you and myself, including the
furnishments of the building, as you will see from the published accounts of
our proceedings which will be forwarded to you (apropos: the statement in the
governor's advertisement that “furnished apartments will be provided the
professors in the building” was an error of our secretary's. It should have
read “Apartments will be furnished the professors in the building free of
charge therefor” le meublant of them however to be left to themselves).
I enclose to your address at Leavenworth, to be mailed with
this in New Orleans, a packet containing four publications from the Virginia
Military Institute, one of them a copy of its “Rules and Regulations,” so that
in devoting in advance, what leisure moments you may have to the preparation of
your plans, you may have the experience of our model before you.
If an article in the Daily National Intelligencer of
Monday, July 4th, headed “Louisiana Seminary” met your eye, you will have
gathered from it a pretty exact idea of its locale. A little ground plan
which I have endeavored to make amidst the tremulous motion of the boat, and
enclose here, will enable you to form some idea of the capacity of the
Building.
Doctor Vallas is an Episcopal clergyman (which quality he
sinks entirely, that is, in the exercise of it, so far as the institution is
concerned), an Hungarian, an accomplished gentleman, an erudite scholar, a
profound and practised mathematician and doctor of philosophy. Has occupied
various chairs in the colleges of Vienna and at the time of the establishment
of the Revolutionary Government in Hungary, was professor of mathematics in the
University at Pesth, in which capacity he was ordered by that Government to
organize a military department to the University in which he superintended the
instruction of about five hundred young men for two years, when the Austrians
recovering possession of Pesth he was dismissed from the Military school and
was himself court-martialed. Saving his head, they only removed his body from
the office of professor of the university, and altho’ there is satisfactory
evidence that he might have been restored to that position, he preferred a
voluntary expatriation. He resides in New Orleans, readily at hand.
Monsieur St. Ange seems to be a gentleman and well educated
scholar-has served in the Marine Corps of France. Is in Alexandria.
David F. Boyd, an eleve of the University of Virginia
and native of that state, is now teacher in a school in the northerly part of
Louisiana. He, too, is therefore readily at hand.
Francis W. Smith, native of Virginia and eleve of its
military institute, is a very young man, a nephew of both Col. Smith, the
superintendent, and of Major Williamson, one of the professors in the V.M.I. He
comes strenuously recommended as eminently qualified to fill any chair in our
school, except that of modern languages, being only a French scholar. Is now at
Lexington, Virginia or Norfolk, where his family reside.
In concluding this long, and to me wearying paper, I beg to
say to you that much is expected of you - that a great deal will devolve upon
you, and to add that at our Board dinner yesterday, Governor Wickliffe with
great cordiality and kind feeling proposed your health and success, and that it
was responded to by the other members in brimming glasses.
P.S. If you know Mr. and Mrs. A. I. Isaacs, now I think
residing in Leavenworth, they can tell you all about our country here.
SOURCE: Walter L. Flemming, Editor, General W.T.
Sherman as College President, p. 29-33
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