Landon Garland

Landon Garland was born March 21, 1810, in Nelson County, Virginia.[1][2][3][4] He graduated with first honors from Hampden–Sydney College in 1829.[2][5][6] His older brother, Hugh A. Garland, who was one of the lawyers involved in the Dred Scott case and author of a biography of John Randolph of Roanoke, was also a Hampden-Sydney graduate.[7] Their parents were Alexander Spotswood Garland and Lucinda Rose. Confederate Army General Samuel Garland, Jr. was the son of his only sister, Caroline Garland (1807-1901), and United States Founding Father and fourth President of the United States James Madison was his great uncle.

Garland taught chemistry and natural philosophy at Washington College in Lexington, Virginia, from 1829 to 1830.[2][5]

Garland taught chemistry and natural history at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia, from 1833 to 1834, eventually being elected chair of the department.[2][5] From 1836 to 1846, he served as the second president of Randolph-Macon College.[2][6]

Garland moved to the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in 1847, where he taught English literature, rhetoric, and history.[2] He served as its third president from 1857 to 1867 (the university campus was destroyed in the last days of the Civil War in the spring of 1865).[4][8] Concerned about a lack of discipline among students, he tried to turn it into a military institution.[2][4] At the end of the American Civil War of 1861–1865; the University of Alabama campus was burned to the ground by Union cavalry forces in the same week in 1865 that the Civil War was effectively ended by Johnson's surrender in South Carolina of the southern command's Confederacy forces.[2][3]

After a year of trying to rebuild the university, Garland's dream of making it an institution of discipline and honor (a central theme of the historical south) died along with the Confederacy. Only a single student enrolled for classes in 1866; Garland resigned and accepted the chair of philosophy and astronomy at the University of Mississippi in 1867.[2][3][5] There, Methodist Bishop Holland Nimmons McTyeire (1824–1889) sought out his former teacher and enlisted him in the campaign to build a Methodist university in Nashville, Tennessee.[3] Garland, a highly respected academic in Southern education and in Methodism, wrote essay after essay in church publications on the need for an "educated ministry". With Garland on board, the bishop now needed the money, and for that he turned to Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt. Garland became chancellor of Vanderbilt University in 1875.[9]

Garland had definite ideas about the rules that would govern the university's place in this world. Under Garland's plan, Vanderbilt would have four departments: Biblical Studies and Literature, Science and Philosophy, Law, and Medical. Though Bishop McTyeire usually was there looking over his shoulder, Chancellor Garland clearly set the mood of the campus.[2] Steeped in Scottish moral philosophy, he believed that the development of character was the central purpose of a true university.[5] He did his part to mold character each Wednesday when he preached sermons to the student body in chapel, and he was staunch in his opposition to dormitories, claiming they were "injurious to both morals and manners."

In the early days, the closest thing to campus radicals were the law students.[5] In fact, the law students provided the first challenge to the chancellor over the concept of an open forum.[5] Garland had invited John Sherman (1823–1900), brother of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman (1820–1891), to address the students in chapel.[5] For the law students, it was more than they could bear to sit through a speech by the brother of the Yankee general who had burned a wide swath from Atlanta to the sea.[5] The law students held a protest meeting, then marched single file out of the building, some playing Dixie on their harmonicas.[5]

In 1889, Bishop McTyeire died.[5] Two years later, in 1891, Garland tendered his resignation to the board of trustees, but they kept it in abeyance until 1893 when the board named James Hampton Kirkland (1798–1868) as chancellor.[5]

Garland owned "up to 60 slaves" before the Civil War; the first few were given to his bride and him by their parents as marriage gifts. Later, he purchased slaves as families (to keep them together), but also as source of income by then renting them as house servants to others (to also keep them relatively safe).[10][11] Moreover, "he claimed that he did not own them as property, but he instead owned their labor."[10] In this "ownership" claim, he was trying to make the distinction between "owning the person and owning their work product" since he was in a region of the country where outspoken opposition to ownership slavery was a death sentence. This was also his actual practice. He attempted, subtly, to make this point many times, including in an 1860 lecture at the University of Alabama, where he said, "The negro has, through slavery, been taken up from a condition of grossest barbarity and ignorance, made serviceable to himself and to the world, and elevated and improved socially, morally, intellectually, and physically."[11] and as such , could provide acceptable work that could generate value to the slave and to their "work owner" (and were not just animals, but who instead could be taught to read, write, and do tasks of worth). After the Civil War, when it became possible to do so, he became an outspoken opponent to ownership slavery through his Methodist Church channels of communications, including many documented sermons on the evils of ownership slavery.

Garland was married to Louisa Frances (1812-1889).[4] They had several children, including:

• Annie Rose Garland Fulton (1843-1893: She married Robert Burwell Fulton (1849-1919), who served as the seventh chancellor of the University of Mississippi from 1892 to 1906; they had two sons and one daughter who died in infancy and one son who survived:
  • Landon Garland Fulton (1872-1874)[1]
  • Louise Garland Fulton (1873-1874)[1]
  • Robert Garland Fulton (1875-1877)[1]
  • Maurice Garland Fulton (1877–1955; professor of English and history at New Mexico Military Institute in Roswell, New Mexico)[12][13]
• maybe Carrie Matilda Garland Thompson (1852-1880)[1]
• Alice Virginia Garland (1856-1872)[1]
• Lucinda Rose Garland Lewis: She married Burwell Boykin Lewis, Confederate cavalry officer, lawyer, and congressman from Alabama, who was also a president of the University of Alabama; they had seven daughters, including Bertha Lewis Miller, who married Hugh Barr Miller, and whose son, Hugh Barr Miller, Jr, is considered an important figure during WWII[14]
• Louise Frances Garland: She married Milton W. Humphreys (1844-1928), who had been recruited by Garland as the first professor of Greek and Latin at Vanderbilt University.[15][16]

Garland died on February 13, 1895, in Nashville.[1][2][3][5] He was buried alongside Bishops McTyeire, Joshua Soule (1781–1867), and William McKendree (1757–1835) in a fenced grave in the Vanderbilt University Divinity Cemetery.[1][2][3][5]

Garland Hall on the campus of Vanderbilt University

His papers, the Landon Cabell Garland Papers, 1830-1893, include correspondence, diaries, speeches, sermons, a report to the Vanderbilt University Board of Trust, and personal and biographical materials. The collection is small, only 1/3 of a cubic foot. These are personal papers of Chancellor Garland and are not to be confused with his university papers, which are housed in the University Archives. This collection provides a small snapshot of Chancellor Garland's personal life, with the family correspondence providing the main interest.[17]

Garland Hall on the Vanderbilt University campus is named in his honor.[18] Also, Landon Cabell Garland Hall on the University of Alabama campus is named after him,[19] as is a dorm at Randolph-Macon College.

His portrait, painted by great-granddaughter Louise Lewis in 1907-1908, hangs in a family home in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Copies painted by Louise Lewis of the original hang in Kirkland Hall on the Vanderbilt University campus[3] and in the archives of the University of Alabama.