Origins of the State Normal College of Tennessee

Founded in 1875, the State Normal College of Tennessee was the result of a post-Civil War gift from George Peabody. Born in Danvers (now Peabody), Massachusetts, in 1795, he became an incredibly-wealthy merchant and international financier. (His one-time junior partner was Junius Spencer Morgan, father of J. P. Morgan. In fact, the House of Morgan was successor to the firm built by George Peabody).[1] In 1837, he had moved to London, a center of world banking. Alarmed by reports and personal letters sent to him at the end of the war, Peabody established a fund designed to enable the American South to rebuild and develop its educational system. In a letter he wrote to a friend in February 1867, he said it was "the duty and privilege of the more favored and wealthy . . . to assist those who are less fortunate."[2] He called together a board of sixteen American leaders, two of whom were General Ulysses S. Grant and Admiral David G. Farragut, and entrusted to them $1 million. The proceeds of the endowment were to be used "for the promotion and encouragement of intellectual, moral, or industrial education among the young of the more destitute portion of the Southern and Southwestern States of our Union."[3] In time, the board would determine that this meant the eleven states of the former Confederacy plus West Virginia. 

Notes

[1] Paul K. Conkin, Peabody College, 103.

[2] Ibid., 104.

[3] Ibid.

Outlaws and Lawmen in Indian Territory after 1866

The story of lawlessness in America stems in part from the delayed arrival of law and order. The history of Indian Territory and early Oklahoma certainly fits this pattern. Following the war, neither the federal government with its few active army posts, nor the Indian nations with their undermanned units of law enforcement, could do much to effectively police Indian Territory. Government at the local level hardly existed. Organized criminals held free rein in many parts of I.T., which came to be known as Robbers Roost.

The United States provided some relief beginning 1871, when it brought the territory under the federal jurisdiction of the Western District of Arkansas. In 1875, President Grant appointed Isaac C. Parker to the bench at Fort Smith. Over the next two decades, Parker, the so-called "hanging judge," heard nearly 9,000 cases and issued the death sentence to approximately 160 convicts, only about seventy of whom were executed.[1] The legend of the supposedly hard-nosed Judge Parker is well known. Yet the larger story involves the deadly business of bringing order to the territory. That the U.S. Marshals Museum is in Fort Smith, the place from which hundreds of lawmen were sent out, is no accident. In the years that followed 1875, approximately sixty-five deputy U.S. marshals lost their lives in Indian Territory.[2]

Notes

[1] W. David Baird and Danney Goble, Oklahoma: A History (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), 126-27. See also John R. Lovett, "Lawmen and Outlaws in Indian Territory, 1866-1907," in Historical Atlas of Oklahoma, 4th ed., ed. by Charles Robert Goins and Danney Goble (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006), 134-35.

[2] Glenn Shirley, Law West of Fort Smith: A History of Frontier Justice in the Indian Territory, 1834-1896 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968), ix; H. D. "Dee" Cordry, Jr., "Deadly Business: The Early Years of the Crime Bureau," Chronicles of Oklahoma 63, no. 3 (Fall 1985): 250. See also Frank R. Prassel, "marshal, federal," in New Encyclopedia of the American West, ed. Howard R. Lamar (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 678-79.