Person:Samuel McCorkle (4)

Disambiguation

NOT to be confused with Samuel McCorkle (abt. 1729-1788) of Augusta County, Virginia. Some researchers have confused the two Samuel McCorkle's who are first cousins, once-removed.

Notes

http://www.marshahuie.com/old_mccorkle_letters.htm

II.1 Samuel Eusebius McCorkle, D.D., 23 August 1746-died 21 June 1811. This is overkill, for much has been written about this Presbyterian divine. But here goes nevertheless: He married Margaret Gillespie in 1776. Born in what was then the environs of Harris Ferry, now in Dauphin but then in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, on 23 August 1746, Samuel was educated at a precursor of Princteon College, and received a Doctor of Divinity degree (honorary, I think) from Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. –He founded a classics school in Rowan Co., NC, which he named Zion Parnassus, and was a founder of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Look there on the campus of U.N.C. for a memorial to him. -- Samuel's wife Margaret Gillespie McCorkle was a daughter of Elizabeth Maxwell (Gillespie)(Steele), heroine of the Revolutionary War in North Carolina, in that she is credited with having rallied Gen. Nathaniel Green at a low military point by giving him all of her coinage. Elizabeth Steele's 1st husband (Gillespie) had been killed at Fort Dobbs during a Cherokee Indian uprising. -- A 2004 article about Samuel Eusebius McCorkle examines his reactions to the emotionalism of the Great Revival: Peter N. Moore; Journal of Southern History, Vol. 70, 2004, entitled : Family Dynamics and the Great Revival: Religious Conversion in the South Carolina Piedmont . Also, there’s a “Steele Creek Presbyterian Church” in the vicinity of Salisbury, NC.

http://www.bookrags.com/biography/samuel-eusebius-mccorkle-dlb/

Name: Samuel Eusebius McCorkle Birth Date: August 23, 1746 Death Date: June 21, 1811 Nationality: American Gender: Male

Samuel McCorkle, who was to become one of North Carolina's most prominent preachers and educators in the revolutionary and early national period, was born in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. His family moved South when he was nine years old and settled in Rowan County, near Salisbury, North Carolina. Young McCorkle received his early education in the classical school of David Caldwell in Guilford County, North Carolina, and eventually attended the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University), from which he graduated in 1772. He immediately began the study of theology and was licensed to preached by the Presbytery of New York. In 1776 he was invited to become the pastor of the Presbyterian church in his home village of Thyatira, North Carolina, a post he was to fill for the rest of his life. During the Revolution, he ardently supported the American cause and became recognized throughout the region as a forceful and learned preacher. He married Margaret Gillespie Steele on 2 July 1776 and with her raised a family of ten children.

McCorkle opened his own classical school in 1785. With its twin emphasis on Christianity and classical scholarship, Zion-Parnassus Academy was well known for its high standards. During the ten years the school was in operation, forty-five future ministers were educated, including six out of seven of the first graduates of the University of North Carolina, which McCorkle, who received a Doctor of Divinity degree from Dickinson College in 1792, was instrumental in founding. He was one of the first trustees and at one time was considered for the office of president. In his A Charity Sermon (1795), both a plea for funds for the new university and a statement of his educational principles, he argues that moral society is based on the education of the young, which is the responsibility of the Christian community.

His great sermons of the 1790s are mainly concerned with the moral fabric of the new republic and the Christian's duties in shaping the New World democracy. Though he was a conservative Presbyterian, he did not engage in sectarian squabbles, but instead seemed to address the general Christian community in his battle with external enemies. Particularly he attacked deism, which he saw as the root of social evil in France. In The Work of God for the French Republic, and Then Her Reformation or Ruin; or, the Novel and Useful Experiment of National Deism (1798) he concludes that God's cause is ironically furthered by the French government's atrocities, through which the Christian world is made aware of the deficiencies of deistic moral doctrine. The libertinism resulting from deism is also condemned in his A Sermon, on the Comparative Happiness and Duty of the United States of America (1795), a patriotic discourse appealing to "revelation and reason." In Four Discourses on the General, First Principles of Deism (1797), McCorkle confronts, among others, Thomas Paine, whose Age of Reason had just been published. He charges that Paine's book is full of inconsistencies and argues that Christianity is more of a religion of reason than deism is.

McCorkle's fervor for publishing his sermons tapered off toward the end of the century. Perhaps he realized that his closely reasoned discourses with their classical allusions and frequent references to modern historical, ethical, and religious writings were no longer in fashion. An emotional revival, much like the Great Awakening of the previous century, swept through the Carolinas and Tennessee in the early nineteenth century, and the sometimes bizarre "exercises" of this movement were tolerated more than encouraged by the aging McCorkle, who, true to his Scots-Irish heritage, tended to be an "Old Side" Presbyterian. His health failed early in the century, and he died and was buried in Thyatira in 1811.