educator lecturer mathematician
George was born on May 14, 1834 at Barrington, New York, the second son of Ebenezer and Cornelia Elizabeth (Hogeboom) Soule. His father died in 1838, and in 1842 his mother took the family to Illinois, settling some fifty miles west of Chicago. For the next ten years George lived on a farm.
In 1853 he was graduated from an academy at Sycamore, Illinois, and went to St. Louis, where he attended some lectures on medicine and law.
Financial considerations forced him to abandon professional study, however, and he entered Jones' Commercial College, from which he graduated in 1856.
Tulane University conferred the degree of LL. D. on him in 1918.
In 1856 Soulé went to New Orleans, where, discovering that there was no business school, he opened Soule College in a single room. Almost from the first the institution prospered; in 1861 it was chartered.
He entered the Confederate army March 5, 1862, as captain of Company A, Crescent Regiment, Louisiana Infantry, was captured at Pittsburg Landing April 7, and was exchanged November 10. He then served in General Kirby-Smith's army as chief of the labor bureau.
He was paroled in June 1865, at which time he was lieutenant-colonel of the Crescent Regiment. Returning to New Orleans, he took personal charge of Soule College.
He was active in the National Commercial Teachers' Federation, before which he often spoke in behalf of better and more ethical standards. His success in commercial education was reflected in the rapid and steady growth of his college; during the seventy years of his presidency, some forty thousand students were enrolled. In the life of New Orleans he took a prominent part.
He was king of the carnival in 1887 and wrote the history of the carnival for the golden anniversary of 1922. In addition to annual addresses at Soule College, he lectured frequently and widely.
Active in public affairs almost to the end of his life, he died after a brief illness in 1926.
A pioneer in business education in the South, George Soulé tried to give his students something more than shorthand and book-keeping. His own interest in arithmetical processes and in systems of accounting led him to devise and to publish many textbooks. Among his most famous works were Soule's Analytic and Philosophic Commercial and Exchange Calculator (1872); Soule's Intermediate Philosophic Arithmetic (1874); Soule's New Science and Practice of Accounts (1881) and others.
He was a leader in Masonic activities, a prominent member of the Unitarian Church, and a most active and valuable member of the Rex carnival organization.
He opposed child labor, favored more hygienic conditions for workers, and rebuked the city authorities for what he considered the shameful violation of architectural beauty and of hygienic principles and laws.
