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Title: Letter from Samuel E. McCorkle to John Haywood, December 20, 1799: Electronic Edition.
Author: McCorkle, Samuel Eusebius, 1746-1811
Funding from the University Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill supported the electronic publication of this title.
Text transcribed by Bari Helms
Images scanned by Bari Helms
Text encoded by Risa Mulligan
First Edition, 2005
Size of electronic edition: ca. 9K
Publisher: The University Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
2005

No Copyright in US

The electronic edition is a part of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill digital library, Documenting the American South.
Languages used in the text: English
Revision history:
2005-07-27, Risa Mulligan finished TEI/XML encoding.
Source(s):
Title of collection: Ernest Haywood Collection of Haywood Family Papers (#1290), Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Title of document: Letter from Samuel E. McCorkle to John Haywood, December 20, 1799
Author: Saml McCorkle
Description: 3 pages, 4 page images
Note: Call number 1290 (Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Editorial practices
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Originals are in the Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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Letter from Samuel E. McCorkle to John Haywood , December 20, 1799
McCorkle, Samuel Eusebius, 1746-1811



Page 1
Westfield Dec 20 1799

Dear Sir,

Your very polite and obliging letter of Dec 12 came yesterday, and I hasten to give you my sentiments freely and without reserve on its contents.
My former objections against engaging in the service of the Board are rather multiplyed by time and reflection. The moment I was informed that the Board had determined immediately to call for a president, I that moment foresaw that my salary would immediately be less than that of a subordinate teacher who had no family to provide for. I therefore demanded the additional salary of a house-rent whenever I should be turned out of doors.
This demand you yourself pronounced inadmissable. I judged and still do judge it a reasonable and admissable demand.

Page 2
We differed in opinion. No change has taken place in the judgment of the Board. No change has taken place in my judgment. And this alone is a sufficient objection, or an obstacle that never has and perhaps cannot be removed.
There are other obstructions. The most leading members of the Board have not the same views that I have of that Education, Morality, and Religion which should be laid at the bottom of the Institution.
I reprobate the modern French Jacobine system of Education which would govern wholly by Reason without the Rod of correction. I do assert that Reason is too weak to govern without coercion, and I would never take the charge of any Institution without express liberty to correct scholars or students whenever it might appear to be salutary, being accountable to Trustees only for the abuse of that power.
I reprobate the Jacobine Morality which

Page 3
judges the virtue or vice of an action by its utility alone and its utility by our limited and often erroneous conceptions, or that Morality which teaches that Motives sanctify measures, and measures sanctify the end. I would leave out a chapter in Doley, and teach in its place that there is a Moral Sense and in their very nature an essential distinction between virtue and vice. See the Encyclopedia on the word Promise.
I reprobate the discarding or banishing of examinations on Divinity every Sabbath evening. This important exercise I labour to page torn dine. But it seems as if religion and for page torn [morality] had both abandoned the University. page torn you notice the Jacobine defence of the students. It is that their expelled friends were "activated by the purest motives" [purest] motives to violate the laws when redress was otherwise so easy. Who will undertake to govern such young men? Without a change of principles and measures the University might fall. What effect the prospect of such a change might produce in my mind I know not. But to approach it at present is to approach a bursting bomb. I am with personal respect

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