Palmer, Benjamin Morgan
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- Connection to Legacies of American Slavery Database
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Palmer, Benjamin Morgan
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Benjamin M. Palmer was a Presbyterian minister important in the formation of Rhodes College after the Civil War.
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Benjamin Morgan (1818-1902) was a staunch advocate of Presbyterian higher education after the Civil War and was instrumental in the re-founding of Stewart College in Clarksville, Tennessee as Southwestern Presbyterian University (later Southwestern at Memphis, later Rhodes College) in 1875. He served on the SPU Board of Directors for many years.
Palmer was mainly known, however, as pastor of First Presbyterian Church in New Orleans, where he served beginning in 1855. He was a vociferous advocate of secession and was a co-founder of the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America in 1861.
Before and during the Civil War Palmer defended slavery as a God-ordained institution, preaching that the preservation of slavery was Southerners' "divine trust." After the War, he became an advocate of racial separation and white supremacy and a leading exponent of the Lost Cause.
From the beginning of his public career in the 1850s to his death in 1902 he offered a series of biblical defenses of racial hierarchy that supported white supremacy.
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1818
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1902
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Southern Historical Association
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Southwestern Presbyterian University
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First Presbyterian Church of New Orleans
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