The Path to Coleman Hill: Mercer Law School's 150-year Journey
| Publication year | 2023 |
The Path to Coleman Hill: Mercer Law School's 150-Year Journey
Neil Skene
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It was a time for entrepreneurs, and Walter B. Hill quickly proved to be one after he finished his studies at the University of Georgia Law School and joined his father's law practice in Macon, Georgia. Before his first year in Macon ended, he joined Superior Court Judge Carlton B. Cole and Macon's leading lawyer, Clifford Anderson, to launch a new law school at Mercer, the second in the state.1 They were the professors. They started with sixteen students.2
It was 1873. The Civil War was eight years in the past, but Georgia had been restored to statehood for only three years. Just two years
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earlier, Mercer University had uprooted itself from Penfield, seventy-two miles away, in favor of a six-acre campus in Macon.
A law school never would have happened in tiny Penfield. It was a remote location with no railroad, no newspaper, really nothing much besides Mercer and the Georgia Baptist Association.3 The Baptists' original concept of Mercer as a "labor school," where students performed the non-faculty chores on the school's 460-acre plantation, lasted only five years. Mercer's move to Macon in 1871, thirty-eight years after its founding in 1833, was a result of two decades of continuous debate among Georgia Baptists about leaving Penfield.
Macon had been spared in 1864 when Union General William T. Sherman's army of 62,000 troops burned Atlanta and proceeded on its "March to the Sea" at Savannah. Macon held a Confederate arsenal and was a major transportation hub,4 but the more politically salient target for Sherman was the state capital at Milledgeville, thirty miles northeast of Macon. In fact, Georgia's governor and legislators in Milledgeville sought refuge in Macon and took state records along with them.5
In April 1868, the first election since the Civil War ended was conducted under a federally imposed Reconstruction governor. A large turnout of freed slaves, who now had the right to vote, helped elect Republican Rufus Bullock as governor. A report to Mercer's trustees later that month observed that the state's "political condition has been involved in chaotic gloom."6 It proved to be the start of a "southern civil war." On one side were Reconstruction-minded Republicans like Bullock, who wanted to implement the principles of the three new constitutional
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amendments—the Thirteenth abolishing slavery,7 the Fourteenth declaring that everyone born in the United States was a citizen and entitled to "due process and equal protection of the laws,"8 and the Fifteenth giving all adult males the right to vote.9 On the other side were the unreconstructed Democrats, who before the war had promoted states' rights and secession, and after the war wanted to restore as much as possible of the Old South.
The "gloom" of unrepentant, white southerners did not last. Democrats "redeemed" the state, focused on restoring business prosperity for planters and merchants, and began instituting segregation in every aspect of public life.10 Bullock, after an exile from the state, became a business leader and president of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce.11 He kept quiet about the principles of Reconstruction. So did just about anyone else who wanted to succeed in business or politics.
By 1873, the entrepreneurial comeback seemed to be everywhere—in new machines, in railroads, in oil and mining, in higher wages, and in higher wealth. Atlanta, which became the capital in 1868, was regaining its role as a major transportation hub and even had horse-drawn streetcars, introduced in 1871. The Morrill Land Grants, created by congressional Republicans in 1862 while secessionist Democrats were out of the national government, bolstered university expansion.
It was the start of the Gilded Age, with its industry barons like Vanderbilt and Rockefeller. The gun manufacturer, E. Remington & Sons, signed a contract that year to produce a newly invented typewriter with a QWERTY keyboard.12 The first Preakness horse race was run in 1873 in Baltimore.13 In 1870, Christopher Columbus Langdell, the dean
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of Harvard Law School, had introduced his "case method" of teaching law through Socratic dialogue rather than lectures, though his method was initially viewed as an abomination.
The very model of the post-war comeback in Georgia was a businessman named George Waldo Woodruff. His father had moved him and his brothers from Virginia to Macon in 1834 and then to Columbus in 1842. Woodruff and a partner had a thriving sawmill and grain operation called Empire Mills. When secession came, Woodruff loyally put all his liquid assets into Confederate money and lost almost everything. After the war, he borrowed money and bootstrapped his way to restoring and enlarging the mill.
His son Ernest Woodruff, born during the war, grew up even more earnest as an entrepreneur. He married into a prominent Atlanta family and began to invest in other businesses. He raised his own sons, Robert and George Woodruff, as investors and businessmen just like their father. In 1904, Ernest Woodruff became president of the Trust Company of Georgia (later SunTrust Banks and eventually Truist). In 1919, at the age of fifty-six, he and Trust Company of Georgia would create a business syndicate to buy the Coca-Cola Company for $25 million. His son Robert would soon become CEO of Coca-Cola, while his other son George continued to run his growing Continental Gin Company and sit on the Coca-Cola board of directors. That younger George Waldo Woodruff, born August 27, 1895, and named for the grandfather who had once lost everything, would become Mercer School of Law's largest benefactor of its first 150 years.14
Education was part of the post-war entrepreneurial spirit, and so was civic boosterism through financial enticement, known today as "economic development." When Mercer decided to abandon Penfield, Macon aggressively sought to be its choice for relocation. So did other Georgia cities. Atlantans petitioned their council to offer $50,000 to Mercer. Other cities raised money for similar offers. "Every Baptist wanted to take it to his town," said a letter-writer in the Macon newspaper after a train trip through northern Georgia.15
Macon already had Wesleyan College, chartered in 1836 as the first college in America granting degrees to women. Wesleyan had a one-block
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campus on College Street, where Macon's United States Post Office stands today. Macon's boosters wanted Mercer too, and they needed a winning inducement.
At the end of a meeting of civic leaders in the summer of 1870, lawyer Clifford Anderson summarized the consensus: the city would provide Mercer a six-acre site next to Tattnall Square Park, about a mile down College Street from Wesleyan. The city would also provide Mercer with $125,000 in long-term municipal bonds, paying 7% interest, and a $30,000 endowment for a professorship.16
Anderson was perhaps the most influential and well-connected lawyer in Macon at the time. Born in Virginia in 1833, he was orphaned at the age of twelve and moved to Macon to join his much older brother, William Henry Anderson, born in 1819. The brother was practicing law with Robert Sampson Lanier, who had been born into a hotel family in Athens and met Anderson in college in Virginia. Lanier married William and Clifford's sister in 1840, and in 1842, their son Sidney Lanier was born (Sidney would make a stab at practicing law but found greater happiness and fame as a poet). After William Anderson died suddenly in 1847, Clifford "read law" with Robert Lanier and was admitted to the bar at age nineteen. He became a judge in Macon in 1856, then a member of the Confederate Congress. Later, in 1880, he would become attorney general of Georgia.17
The civic leaders' recommendation went to the city council, which included Anderson. The council approved the offer on July 19, 1870.
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Mercer wired back its acceptance on August 15, 1870.18 By the end of 1870, most students and faculty had left Penfield. Mercer suspended classes for the first half of 1871, but faculty members offered classes on their own in Macon.19 Mercer relinquished all its land in Penfield except the four-acre cemetery, where Jesse Mercer and other university icons are buried.
Then, in 1873, Walter Hill arrived in Macon. A native of Talbotton, sixty miles west of Macon, Hill undertook an annotation of the Georgia Code of 1873 that is considered the first annotated code in America. Ten years later, in 1883, Hill and Macon lawyer Lewis N. Whittle would be among a group of eleven Georgia lawyers who founded the Georgia Bar Association, with Whittle as president and Hill as secretary-treasurer. Clifford Anderson became the second president, and Hill the third.20 Macon was the Georgia Bar's headquarters for ninety years.21
In 1899, Hill would become chancellor of the University of Georgia in a time of leadership and political crisis, as Emory and Mercer persistently objected that the university with its state funding was unfairly competing with them. Hill, with connections to both private schools by then, was seen as someone who could mend fences. His expansion at UGA included a college of agriculture, a college of education, a school of pharmacy, and a school of forestry, and he expanded the law curriculum to two years. Hill Hall at Savannah State University, completed in 1901, would be named for him.
But all of that was later. Hill's first educational initiative, in his first year in Macon in 1873, was to create a law school at Mercer. "It may truly be said," remarked the Georgia Weekly Telegraph, "that few men of his years have earned so enviable a reputation for forensic ability and legal scholarship."22 He would bring to the law school "superior abilities . . . and the ambition and fire of youth."23
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