Shoup, Francis A.
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Shoup, Francis A.
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Francis Asbury Shoup (1834-1896), a professor of ecclesiastical studies, mathematics, engineering, and philosophy at the University of the South and an Episcopal priest, was a West Point graduate who during the Civil War rose rapidly to the rank of brigadier general in the Confederate military.
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Born and reared in Indiana, Shoup served in the U.S. Army fighting the Seminole tribe in the late 1850s. In 1860, he resigned his commission to practice law, then moved to St. Augustine, Fla., and sided with the Confederacy, reportedly declaring his "aristocratic inclinations and admiration for the South." During the war, Shoup distinguished himself as an innovative engineer of military fortifications; with the Confederacy in peril in early 1865, he also proposed training and arming slaves in order to save slavery. He also became an Episcopalian during the war; Bishop Stephen Elliott, University founder and presiding bishop of the Confederate church, baptized him on the battlefield. After the war, Shoup briefly taught mathematics at the University of Mississippi, then moved to Sewanee in 1869 to teach; he also served briefly as acting chaplain. In 1871, he married Esther Habersham Elliott, daughter of the late bishop and scion of the powerful South Carolina family. The Sewanee chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy installed a monument to Shoup in 1903 in the University Cemetery. Speaking at the dedication, the Bishop of Tennessee and future University Chancellor, Thomas Frank Gailor, praised Shoup as “one of the truest and noblest spirits that ever blessed Sewanee with his devotion” and “a Confederate Soldier, who, to the day of his death, was not ashamed nor afraid of the principles which for four years he had gallantly defended upon the field of battle.” Indeed, during his years at Sewanee, Shoup was an articulate and admired defender of the “Lost Cause,” maintaining his belief in the rightness of the Confederate political and military cause, the racial inferiority of Black persons, and the benevolent character of slavery. The true sufferers under slavery, he contended, were the white master class. There also is a UDC "Shoup" monument in Shoup Park on what is today Tennessee Avenue (opposite Tuckaway dormitory). Its date of installation is unknown.
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22 March 1834
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4 September 1896
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