[3][4] Waddel (pronounced Waddle) began his ministry in the South Carolina Lowcountry; but coming to view Charleston's sophistication as sinful, he departed for the backwoods Upcountry.

These college-preparatory schools trained the future elite of Georgia and South Carolina with a strict classical education, in an environment shrewdly calculated by Waddel to foster self-reliance and self-motivation.

The 1820 United States Federal Census lists sixteen enslaved people in the household of Moses Waddel, eight females, and nine males, including nine children under the age of fourteen.

Considered the foremost educator in the South, Waddel "received an urgent and persistent invitation" to revitalize the University of Georgia (UGA) in Athens.

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.

[8][9] According to Dr James McLeod's book The Great Doctor Waddel,[10][full citation needed] 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.

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.