of Georgia (UGA) in Athens. He became the fifth president and served from 1819 until his resignation in August 1829. Waddel found the school "nearly extinct, consisting of only seven students with three professors." With great industry he scoured the state and soon built enrollment to one hundred students. He acquired money for the library, garnered state funding, and raised three new buildings: Philosophical Hall (1821), New College (1823) and Demosthenian Hall (1824). As said by Longstreet, "The effect of his coming to this Institution was magical. It rose instantly to a rank which it had never held before, and which, I am happy to add, it has maintained ever since." Waddel was said to possess an ordinary intellect, but he combined it with an iron will. This 'Cromwell of the Classroom' produced a generation of Southern leaders including William H. Crawford, Madison's Secretary of the Treasury and 1824 US Presidential candidate; Hugh S. Legaré, editor of the Southern Review; Governor and U.S. Senator George McDuffie of South Carolina; Judge James L. Petigru, the Unionist who famously stated that South Carolina was too small to be a nation and too large for an insane asylum; Governor George Rockingham Gilmer of Georgia; Judge Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, author of Georgia Scenes and president of two universities, and John C. Calhoun. Andrew Jackson is said to have (perhaps mistakenly) claimed Waddel's influence. According to Dr James McLeod's book The Great Doctor Waddel (page 8), the list of students from all of Waddel's schools includes: two Vice-Presidents, three Secretaries of State, three Secretaries of War, one Assistant Secretary of War, one US Attorney-general, ministers to France, Spain and Russia, one US Supreme Court Justice, eleven governors, seven US Senators, thirty-two members of the US House of Representatives, twenty-two judges, eight college presidents, seventeen editors of newspapers or authors, five members of the Confederate Congress, two bishops, three Brigadier-generals, and one authentic Christian martyr. At one time, five SC governors in a row had been his students. In the Presidential election of 1824, three of the five candidates were his students; and when the electoral dust settled, the winning President and Vice-President were both South Carolinians who had studied under Waddel – Andrew Jackson and John C Calhoun. Waddel died on July 21, 1840, in Athens, Georgia. His granddaughter, Elizabeth Howard West would become the State Librarian of Texas, the first woman to lead a