Friday, August 3, 2018

From The Madison Democrat, November, 1859

[The State Seminary] is to be conducted upon a plan similar to that of the Virginia Institute at Lexington. . . This is a move in the right direction. Our legislators have, for once, at least, acted with a view of promoting the moral as well as the intellectual advancement of the people of the state.

Every father in the Parish of Madison, who has a son over fifteen years of age, that can read and write well, and can perform with facility and accuracy the various operations of the four general rules of arithmetic . . . should at once send him to the Louisiana Seminary of Learning, even if he should be compelled to mortgage his plantation to pay the annual expense of four hundred dollars. . .

We heartily rejoice that a military school of a high grade has been established in our state, because we know that military discipline only can make a school effective for good in this, our perverted age, when almost every youth scarcely out of his teens considers himself independent of all moral restraint, and at liberty to do as he pleases.

Military schools make the pupil not only a soldier, ready to defend our rights and our institutions, but they impart, by the principle of subordination upon which they are conducted, a moral training, which will impress him with the conviction that in order to be able, at some future day, to command, it is indispensably necessary to learn first how to obey.

SOURCES: The article is abstracted in Walter L. Fleming’s, General W.T. Sherman as College President, p. 65-6

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