that the people were illiterate or uneducated. For the forty 

 years immediately prior to 1860 there was a great amount of val- 

 uable instruction open to all the people through the public speak- 

 ing and preaching of all kinds by which Tennessee has always 

 been distinguished. There is no other state which, during this 

 period, can point to so large and brilliant a galaxy of orators as 

 graced the hustings of the Volunteer State in those days. 



There were Andrew Jackson, Sam Houston, William Car- 

 roll, Hugh Lawson White, Ephriam H. Foster, Neil S. Brown, 

 Meredith P. Gentry, Phillip Lindsley, "Lean Jimmy" Jones, 

 James K. Polk, Gustavus Henry, John Bell, Isham G. Harris, 

 Andrew Johnson, Aaron V. Brown, Cave Johnson and many 

 others whose eloquence and information instructed while evok- 

 ing admiration and applause. 



Moreover, the experience encountered in the making of such 

 a State as Tennessee were in themselves a school even with books 

 and pedagogues left out. A people who removed from the wil- 

 derness the treacherous savages and brought it into a condition 

 fit for occupancy by civilized white men, who established a com- 

 monwealth like Tennessee, who built beautiful and flourishing 

 cities out of unoccupied fields and woods, and at the same time 

 defeated a foreign foe at King's Mountain, at New Orleans and 

 in Mexico; who furnished more than 100,000 troops, some on 

 each side, in a great fratricidal war ; who, then, accepting the ar- 

 bitrament of arms, proceeded to recoup its fortunes and to reha- 

 bilitate its local affairs on better bases than ever before in an in- 

 credibly short space of time — such a people can be trusted to 

 secure to its future generations the blessings of education in ful- 

 ness and adequacy. And this Tennessee has done. 



bo 



