the field, they were convinced that this was a focal point where a permanent central university ought to be planted for the higher education of the freed people—to equip their ministers and teachers, and to give their leaders in all departments of the life now opening before them a Christian training for their work.
As the capital city of Tennessee, and as the base of some of the most extensive and decisive military operations of the war, Nashville was not only a point of great business, social and political importance, but the centre of a large coloured population. Eight of the thirteen formerly slave-holding States surround and actually border upon Tennessee, and in it and them four-fifths of the freed people have their homes.
To aid in starting such an important enterprise there were, providentially, two other efficient friends of the freed people at hand—General Clinton B. Fisk, the distinguished Christian soldier then in charge of the Freedmen's Bureau in the District of Kentucky and Tennessee; and Professor John Ogden, formerly Principal of the Minnesota State Normal School, and afterwards an officer in the Union army, but now resident in Nashville as the agent of the Western Freedmen's Aid Commission. This society was then the almoner of large sums contributed by English friends of the Freedmen through the agency of Levi Coffin, the veteran manager of the "Underground Railway," but was afterwards merged into the American Missionary Association.
