The 10th president of the university, Thomas Humes graduated from the university in 1830 (at the age of 15) and received the master’s degree in 1833. He studied theology at the university with Professor Stephen Foster and then spent a term (1835) at Princeton Theological Seminary. He left the pursuit of theology upon finding that he was unable to subscribe to the Presbyterian Westminster Confession of Faith.
He returned to Knoxville and joined the firm of Cowan, Dickinson, and Company, but found he did not like business. He then turned to journalism and edited the Knoxville Times (1839), the Knoxville Register (1840), and the Watch Tower, a Whig campaign paper. In 1845 he was ordained a minister in the Protestant Episcopal Church and held Knoxville’s first Episcopal Church service in 1845 in the sitting room of Sunnyside, which was razed for construction of the Jessie Harris Building. In 1846 he became rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church.
In 1858 Reverend Humes declined the presidency of East Tennessee University. In 1861 he resigned from St. John’s because of his sympathy with the Union cause, but resumed the pulpit in 1863 at the request of General Burnside, whose forces occupied Knoxville. In 1865 he accepted the presidency of East Tennessee University. The institution reopened a year later in the Deaf and Dumb Asylum (later Boyd Junior High School and then City Hall) because of the destruction on campus due to the Civil War. It operated in that location for a year.
During his administration, the campus was reorganized and rehabilitated, new buildings were built, the numbers of faculty and students increased, medical and dental departments (at Nashville) were established, the Agricultural Experiment Station (now AgResearch) was established, and the name of the institution was changed by the legislature to the University of Tennessee.
Humes was a controversial president, refusing to allow a eulogy for General R. E. Lee to be delivered at the Junior Exhibition, and overruling faculty. He sided with traditionalists who would retain the academic framework of classics and humanities as the central mission of the university, although the institution was clearly changing to a curricular emphasis on agriculture and the mechanic arts, in accord with its land-grant mission. He was asked to resign by the trustees on August 23, 1883, as was the entire faculty.
Students commonly called Humes (behind his back) “Limping Jesus.” It was reported that while he was delivering a prayer at St. John’s, a secessionist shot him. As a result of the wound, he was lame enough to need to use a cane.
He was the author of The Loyal Mountaineers (1888); president of the Knoxville Bible Society; a member of the Sons of Temperance; and a missionary of the Protestant Episcopal Church in East Tennessee, 1884–86. During the last six years of his life, he served as librarian of the Lawson McGhee Library in Knoxville. He married twice. In 1835 he married Cornelia Williams of Grainger County, who died in 1847. In 1849 he married Anne Betsy Williams of New Hartford, Connecticut, who was teaching at Knoxville Female Seminary at the time. She died in 1879.