Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 16.djvu/19

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Heroes of the old Camden District, S. C. 13

indigent parents in the remote parts of the State." In the list of its members will be found, for the first time in the history of the State, commingled the names of the upper and lower country Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, Huguenots, and Churchmen combining in the midst of war in the cause of education.

Its first president was Colonel John Winn, and its directors were General William Strother and Captain Robert Ellison. Colonel Thomas Taylor and Captain Thomas Woodward were among the first signers of the Constitution. Among the names of its members were Andrew Pickens, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, and four sons of Anthony Hampton Henry, Edward, Richard, and Wade and the brother of Anthony, John Hampton. The teacher at this time was, it is believed, Mr. William Humphreys. Dr. Howe, in his His- tory of the Presbyterian Church, says : " At what time this school was discontinued is not known, but it was probably about the time when Lord Cornwallis moved his headquarters to Winnsboro, in 1780." Two years after the end of the war, z. <?., in 1783, a committee of the Society reported " that the temporary school had been broken up by the enemy, but the buildings were safe and in the custody of Colonel Richard Winn." Lands were given by Colonel Winn and Colonel John Vanderhorst in the year 1784, and the school placed under the charge of the Rev. Thomas Harris McCaule, and enlarged into a college. The Mount Zion College, the Charleston College, and the College at Cambridge, Ninety-Six, were incorporated by the same act in 1785. Jackson went to school to Dr. Humphreys in the Waxhaws during the Revolution, and Dr. Joseph Alexander kept one open there, and there was another at Bullock's Creek, York county, during this period ; and there was also a school at Fishing Creek, kept open by Mrs. Gaston, the wife of Justice John Gaston. Inter arma leges silent, but letters were not allowed to sleep even though war was waging around the school-houses. Is it any wonder that the old Waxhaws have produced Andrew Jackson; Stephen D. Miller, the great jurist and statesman; James H. Thornwell, the great theo- logian; and J. Marion Sims, the greatest surgeon of this country? Judge William Smith, who succeeded Judge Gaillard in the United States Senate, was educated with Andrew Jackson at this time by Dr. Alexander at the Bullock's Creek school.

Surely, my comrades, you who were born and bred amidst the scenes of the historic events to which we have alluded, and who must have heard of them at your mother's knees and imbibed their les-