Longstreet Hall

Longstreet Hall. . This building was dedicated in honor of Augustus Baldwin Longstreet (1790-1870), second president of the University of Mississippi., Born in Augusta, Georgia, Longstreet graduated from Yale and studied at Tapping Reeve's Litchfield, Connecticut, law school, before being admitted to the Georgia bar in 1815. He entered politics briefly, was elected to the Georgia legislature, but was soon appointed judge of a state superior court. Throughout this period, Longstreet was an author and newspaper editor, with his most renowned work, Georgia Scenes, published in 1835., In 1838, he retired from law to become an itinerant minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Six years later he played an important role in fostering the split among Methodists over the issue of slavery. Longstreet presented to the national conference a petition from slaveholding states decrying the continuing agitation of northern Methodists on slavery and its abolition. Such policy, the petition stated, threatened division by embracing policy inconsistent with Methodist ministry as practiced in the South. The Methodist Episcopal Church split over the issue of slavery in 1844., In 1840, Longstreet embraced another career when he was elected president of Emory College. He served there until 1848, when he became president of Centenary College in Jackson, Louisiana. Less than a year later, he was elected the second president of the University of Mississippi in 1849. Longstreet also taught and in 1853 was listed as professor of mental and moral science, rhetoric, logic, political economy, international law, and evidences of christianity. Among his responsibilities as president, Longstreet, a slaveowner, managed a number of enslaved laborers, both on the University campus and on a farm near Abbeville, the latter owned by his son-in-law, L. Q. C. Lamar. Resigning from the University in 1856, he returned to administration when elected president of the University of South Carolina the following year, a position he held until the Civil War. In 1861, he returned to Oxford, Mississippi, to reside with family until his death in 1870.