Christopher Bishop

By the time he became a delegate to the 1870 General Conference, held in Memphis, Landon Garland was the most well-known educator in the South. A proud native Virginian, he received a B. A. from Hampden-Sydney in 1829 at the age of 19. Garland briefly taught at Washington College (now Washington and Lee). Soon, his Methodist faith inspired him to accept a faculty position at a struggling new denominational school, Randolph-Macon College, in 1834 to teach chemistry and natural history. Two years later, the twenty-six year old became the president of the college, a position he held for ten years. It was at Randolph-Macon that Garland met a promising young ministerial student from South Carolina named Holland Nimmons McTyeire. Their careers would be intertwined. 

           

In 1847, Garland turned down an offer of the presidency of William and Mary College for a faculty position at the University of Alabama. He was a professor of physics and astronomy in Tuscaloosa for eight years. In 1855, he became the president of the university. Ever the faithful Methodist, he believed that the primary goal of any university was to develop sound character in its students. The young men at Tuscaloosa were clearly lacking. They were notorious for drunken carousing, riots, and gunfights. In hopes of reigning in the young men, Garland received legislative approval to turn Alabama into a military college. Many of Garland's cadets served as officers in the Confederate Army once the war broke out. The conflict forced Alabama to close but the university earned a reputation as a training ground for officers. Just days before Lee's surrender, Union troops who recognized the connection between the school and the Confederate officers corps burned the campus to the ground. According to university lore, Garland himself confronted northern soldiers to prevent them from torching the president's home, which still stands in Tuscaloosa. 

 

Although his antebellum career was illustrious, in the postwar period, Garland assumed his role as a leader among middle class Methodists who valued education. Garland spent a year trying to rebuild Alabama before taking a faculty position at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. While teaching science at Oxford, McTyeire (by this time a bishop) and Thomas Summers, the editor the Methodist newspaper, urged Garland to write a series of letters to the Christian Advocate promoting an educated ministry (see primary sources). Here, Garland staked his claim as the number one lay advocate of expanded education among Methodist preachers. Long frustrated by a rural model of pious but uneducated circuit riders, Garland argued that if Methodism was to take its place of respectability along other denominations, then its preachers needed to become experts in theology. Southern Methodists thus needed a theological seminary. To conservative Methodists, the idea was incendiary and sinful. The acrimonious debate raged publicly for years in the pages of the Methodist press.  Garland found himself on the frontlines of an inner-denominational fight that pitted urban middle class professionals like himself against rural Methodists who looked suspiciously at the pretensions of city worship. Garland bluntly admitted that greater education would enhance the social status of Methodist preachers, “There are a great many collateral advantages which a minister would derive from high intellectual culture and from an extensive and varied store of knowledge. Nothing gives more respectability of character, or more weight to opinion; and these are the principal grounds of influence. The social position of such a minister would be greatly elevated.” 

 

His reputation as an advocate of education grew throughout the postbellum South. At the 1870 General Conference, Garland chaired the education committee and drafted a controversial majority reporting insisting that the MECS commit to funding a first-rate theological seminary with all possible haste (see primary sources). The conference rejected his proposal but continued in the fight for expanded educational access to southerners in general and Methodists in particular. When Bishop McTyeire secured a massive donation from Cornelius Vanderbilt to found a southern Methodist university, he called on his old teacher for help. The sixty-five year old became the first chancellor of Vanderbilt University. Although Bishop McTyeire was clearly in charge, Garland's pious influence pervaded the campus. He was known to preach long moralistic sermons at Wednesday chapel services and he opposed dormitories as dens of iniquity. He famously clashed with Vanderbilt law students, who loudly protested when Garland invited Senator John Sherman - the brother of General William Tecumseh Sherman – to speak at chapel. Under the leadership of McTyeire and Garland, Vanderbilt never gained the prestige it would acquire in the twentieth century. Theirs was a vision that focused in instilling scriptural values and eschewed the radical potential of education. But they provided consistent leadership during tumultuous years at the new university.

 

McTyeire died in 1889 and the seventy-nine year old Garland tendered his resignation to the Board of Trust. The board stalled and he stayed on until 1893, ending a legendary career. He is buried in Nashville on the campus of Vanderbilt. 

 

Read more about Garland here.