Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry

Background

Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry was born on June 5, 1825, in Lincoln County, Georgia. He was the second son of William Curry of Georgia and Susan Winn Curry. In 1838 his father removed with his family to Talladega County, Alabama, where fresh Currylands invited slave labor.

Education

Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry attended coeducational private academies and then Franklin College (now the University of Georgia), graduating in 1843 as one of the most distinguished students in his class. From September 1843 to February 1845, Curry attended the Dane Law School of Harvard University (present-day Harvard Law School) and graduated with an LL.B. degree.

Career

Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry then attempted to serve as a sergeant in the Mexican War (1846-48), but his regiment was not accepted. He continued to read law and was admitted to the bar. Curry practiced until 1850 when he lost interest in that career choice.

In 1847 he ran successfully for the Alabama legislature and would serve there for a decade. Curry chaired the Committee on Internal Improvements, where he championed funding of the state's roads and railroads and supported a bill to establish a public school system. In the early 1850s, Curry bought his brother's plantation near Talladega and resumed his law practice. In 1857, Curry was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he served until 1861 and sought to limit federal powers to those specifically named in the Constitution. He also worked to reduce the appropriations for many federal offices, opposed high tariffs, and defended slavery and the right of secession.

Curry traveled to Maryland in December 1860 in an attempt to persuade state leaders to secede. He sat on the platform at the Alabama Secession Convention in January 1861 and after secession was elected to the Confederate Congress, where he championed tax restrictions and state autonomy and opposed the use of paper money. His largely anti-secession district defeated him for reelection, and his term expired on February 18, 1864. A member of the Home Guards, he joined General Joseph E. Johnston's Army of Northern Virginia as it retreated from Richmond toward Atlanta, and in October 1864, he served as Judge Advocate in the military courts in Atlanta, after which he was appointed a lieutenant colonel and given command of the Fifth Alabama Regiment. His forces engaged in numerous skirmishes in Alabama until he left the army on April 17, 1865, after learning his wife had died. In October, he traveled to Washington, D.C., and was pardoned by the federal government for his participation in the Confederacy, although he was not allowed to run for political office until the passage of federal law in 1877.

In November 1865, he presided over the Alabama Baptist Convention and became president of Howard College (now Samford University) in Marion. He was ordained a Baptist minister in January 1866, and although he declined the number of pastorates, he gave more than 100 sermons during the year. In June 1867, he married Mary W. Thomas, daughter of a prominent Richmond businessman. Despairing of raising funds for Howard College and disheartened by the pro-Unionist control of the Alabama government, he accepted a professorship at Richmond College in 1868. During the 1870s and 1880s, Curry rebuffed numerous offers of positions from other prominent colleges and churches. In his capacity as a professor, Curry met and befriended many educational leaders of the recently established Peabody Education Fund, which was founded by philanthropist George Peabody to promote education among both blacks and whites in the former Confederacy. When its General Agent, Barnas Sears, died in 1881, Curry was chosen to succeed him.

In the fall of 1885, he was named as the U.S. representative to Spain as a political honor for his work and strove to promote free trade. In 1888, he resigned and resumed his role as an agent for the Peabody Fund. In 1890, Curry also became the head of the Slater Fund, which worked to promote industrial education for African Americans and poor whites in the South. Former president Rutherford B. Hayes, a Harvard classmate, accompanied him on visits to southern schools in 1891. Curry realized public backing was essential for his work and strongly supported the Conference for Education in the South, which began in 1898. The organization played a role in the emergence in 1901 of the Southern Education Board, which worked effectively to promote universal public education in the South. The same year, Curry became its first supervising director. In 1902, Curry attended the meeting at which the General Education Board was created with an initial gift of $1 million from northern industrialist John D. Rockefeller.

Also in 1902, Curry served as a special envoy to Spain to celebrate the king's coming of age ceremony, although his ill health required that he be accompanied by a nurse.

Achievements

• Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry was a prominent politician who served as envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to Spain from 1885-1888 and as ambassador extraordinary to Spain on the coming of age of King Alfonso XIII in 1902. His publications include works on education, American government, and Spanish history. He was awarded the Royal Order of Charles III.
  
  Curry received much posthumous acclaim. He was chosen by Alabama as one of two people to be represented in the U.S. Capitol's National Statuary Hall until November 2009, when the statue was relocated to Samford University, and in 1905 the University of Virginia established the Curry Memorial School of Education after the Peabody Fund donated $100,000 in his honor.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Constitutional Government in Spain: A Sketch 1889
  • Civil History of the Government of the Confiderate States with some Personal Reminiscences 1901
  • Diplomatic Services of George William Erving 1890
  • Education of the Negroes Since 1860 1894
  • William Ewart Gladstone 1891
  • The Southern States of the American Union 1894 1894
  • The Southern States of the American Union: Considered in Their Relations to the Constitutions of the United States and to the Resulting Union 1894
  • Civil History of the Government of the Confederate States: With Some Personal Reminiscences, Volume 2 1900
  • Civil History of the Government of the Confederate States: With Some Personal Reminiscences 1900
  • The South in the Olden Time 1901

Religion

Curry wrote and spoke about the painful history of the Baptists in England and colonial America, beginning in the 1600s, when the British government had fused with the Anglican Church and “established” it as the Church of England, the only official body. The situation that Curry depicted paralleled the State religion created by Washington in the former Confederacy.

All this represented a more centralized, despotic State to Jabez Curry, so he wrote two books based on his sermons and articles in Baptist publications. In Establishment and Disestablishment, Curry detailed the entire history of the Christian religion and its entrapment and fusion with civil government, from its earliest roots in the Roman Empire, in Struggles and Triumphs of Virginia Baptists, he focused on religious persecutions in colonial Virginia and how the Baptists severed their relationship with the government of Great Britain.

Curry's religious zeal had grown during the war, and he often addressed religious gatherings. In November 1865, he presided over the Alabama Baptist Convention. He was ordained a Baptist minister in January 1866, and although he declined the number of pastorates, he gave more than 100 sermons during the year.

Politics

Dissatisfied with farming and the law and fired by sectional controversies, Curry entered politics as a member of the states' rights wing of the Alabama Democratic Party.

On behalf of the Peabody Fund, Curry worked tirelessly to establish public school systems, develop teacher education programs, and include African Americans in the educational system. He addressed numerous legislatures and other concerned bodies, traveling 17,000 miles in 1884 alone.

Views

Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry delivered several addresses that asserted slavery's central importance to the national, and not just the southern, economy, blasted northern Republicans for their attempts to bar the spread of slavery, and predicted that abolition would result in a decline of character and productivity among southern blacks.

Quotations: "In all my political career I was an adherent of the Calhoun school of politics."

"I can hardly call myself an Anglo-Saxon as in my veins flow English blood, Scotch, Welsh, and French."

"Mann’s glowing periods, earnest enthusiasm and democratic ideas fired my young mind and heart, and since that time I have been an enthusiastic and consistent advocate of universal education."

"An Establishment fosters notions of arbitrary government, cultivates opposition to liberal principles. The pulpit often reflects the caprice and will and cause of the court. The advocates of the divine right of kings, of passive obedience, the opponents of revolution, of civil reform, of popular liberty, have uniformly been the adherents of the Establishment. The rightness of a union of Church and State, by an inevitable logic, leads to the rightness of Absolutism, of despotism, to the denial of individual liberty."

"There is a strong tendency in individuals, sects, and parties to arrogate superior wisdom and to condemn dissenters for not accepting their judgments. This is a kind of Sir Oracle presumption. 'When I open my mouth, let no dog bark.' We are accustomed to having sections assume a kind of exclusive patriotism and devotion to human rights. Men often boast of their liberty of conscience, freedom of thought, but are reluctant to concede the same privileges to others. With certain people, 'the church’ is used to signify their special communion, including a class of the select or the superior, and excluding ‘the masses,' the 'great unwashed.'"

"In the matter of religious tests, the Mother Country claimed to control the colonies. Bigoted feeling under Queen Anne was strong, and in 1702 she issued an order directing that all those who held any public office in any colony, whether the colony was royal, chartered or proprietary, should take the tests and make declarations required by the Imperial Toleration Act."

"Ireland is a paradox. It is claimed that rules and motives applicable to other peoples cannot be adjusted to the Irish. The North and South do not harmonize. Catholics and Protestants are like alien races. Hates and antipathies rather than friendships and agreements have dominated. Loyalty, law and order, intelligible terms, have been misapplied. Loyalty to the sovereign and imperial patriotism have been the exception. Secret leagues have taken the place of open political warfare. Assassinations, boycotting, proscription, absenteeism, governmental distrust, oppressive discrimination, coercion, shadowing, have been varying aspects of the mobile kaleidoscope."

Membership

Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry was a member of the Phi Kappa Literary Society.

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  Phi Kappa Literary Society , United States

Personality

Curry was a man of leonine type, both in appearance and in energy. As an orator he was fervent, but his main power as a speaker was due to his personality fused with principle. In his presence before an audience, there was, indeed, something of the “daemonic” quality which Goethe describes.

Quotes from others about the person

• "There was no man in the country more deeply interested in the higher welfare of the Negro, than Dr. Curry." - Booker T. Washington

Interests

• Politicians

  Horace Mann

Connections

On March 4, 1847, Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry married Ann Alexander Bowie. They had three children-Susan Lamar, Manly Bowie, and Jackson Thomas. Two years after the death of his wife, Ann, he married Mary W. Thomas of Virginia on June 25, 1867.

Father:

William Curry

Mother:

Susan Winn Curry

late wife:

Ann Bowie

Wife:

Mary Wortham Thomas

Daughter:

Susan Lamar Curry

Daughter:

Manly Bowie Curry

Son:

Jackson Thomas Curry

colleague:

Hollis Frissell

colleague:

Charles Dabney

colleague:

Albert Shaw

colleague:

Walter Page

colleague:

Rutherford Hayes

colleague:

Edwin Alderman

colleague:

George Peabody

References

• J. L. M. Curry; A Biography
  2016
• Destroying the Republic: Jabez Curry and the Re-education of the Old South
  2005
• J.L.M. Curry, southerner, statesman and educator
  1949