Moses Waddel taught many future leaders

It is the birthday of antebellum educator Moses Waddel (1770), who is credited with saving from extinction the University of Georgia, and educating numerous Southern leaders at Willington Academy, which he founded in South Carolina in 1804. Georgia was said to have had seven students and three professors when he took it over, serving as its fifth president. He built the enrollment to 100 students and built three new buildings. His students at Willington included Andrew Jackson, John C. Calhoun, Judge Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Secretary of the Treasury William H. Crawford, U.S. Senator George McDuffie, and Georgia Governor George Gilmer. Waddel wrote a bestseller, Memoirs of the Life of Miss Caroline E. Smelt (1820), a highly moralistic account a pious girl who died at the age of 17.