Albert Taylor Bledsoe

Background

Albert Bledsoe was born on November 9, 1809, in Frankfort, Kentucky, United States. He was the grandson of William Bledsoe, who, because of the persecution of the Baptists in Virginia by the then established church, removed from Orange County into the wilds of Kentucky in the later years of the eighteenth century. William's son, Moses Ousley Bledsoe, in 1816 founded and edited in Frankfort, Kentucky, the Commonwealth. He married Sophia Childress Taylor, who was related to President Taylor. Of their union, Albert Taylor Bledsoe was the first-born.

Education

Albert graduated in 1830 at West Point Military Academy, where he was a fellow student of Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee. For a while, he was stationed at the Indian forts in the West but returned east to study law, theology, and philosophy in Kenyon College, Ohio.

Career

Bledsoe was an adjunct professor of mathematics and teacher of French in Kenyon College, 1833-1834, and was a professor of mathematics at Miami University, 1835-1836. In 1838 he moved to Springfield, where for ten years he practiced law in the same courts with Lincoln and Douglas. His continued interest in theology led to the writing of an Examination of President Edwards' "Inquiry into the Freedom of the Will" (1845). From 1848 till 1854 he was a professor of mathematics at the University of Mississippi and from 1854 to 1861 he held the same chair at the University of Virginia. The results of his studies during those years are found in "A Theodicy: or Vindication of the Divine Glory" (1853) and "the Essay on Liberty and Slavery" (1856).

On account of his training at West Point, he entered the Confederate army as a colonel in 1861 and then became an assistant secretary of war. Believing that Bledsoe's brain could be of more service than his arm, President Davis sent him to London to investigate certain historical problems involved in the issues between the North and the South and perhaps to influence English public opinion. When he returned in February 1865, he had collected the material which he soon used in his volume, "Is Davis a Traitor? or Was Secession a Constitutional Right Previous to the War of 1861?" (1866). In this book, which proved to be a mine of material for the lawyers who were defending Davis, Bledsoe restated with real clearness and force the position of Calhoun and other Southern leaders and laid the basis for much of his future writing.

Ever a fighter, Bledsoe was engaged in continuous controversy, not only with other editors and authors but, in his later years, with various denominational leaders in the South over such questions as infant baptism, predestination, the mode of baptism. It is little wonder that he gave way under the strain of financial burdens, excessive work, and bitter disputation.

Achievements

• Albert Bledsoe was the founder and editor of the Southern Review. The magazine was dedicated to the despised and disfranchised people of the S. In this spirit he toiled unceasingly, writing nearly always three to five articles for each number, and for one number of 250 pages all but one article. The historical significance of Bledsoe's writings, now buried in the files of the old Review, is that they represent the attitude of the unreconstructed Southerner in the ten years after the Civil War. He was also famous for his work, "Liberty, and Slavery" (1856), which defended slavery laws as ensuring proper societal order.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Is Secession Treason?

    (General Robert E. Lee uttered to Albert Bledsoe these imp...)

  • An essay on liberty and slavery. By Albert Taylor Bledsoe, LL. D., professor of mathematics in the University of Virginia. 1856
  • An Examination of President Edwards' Inquiry into the Freedom of the Will 1845
  • A Theodicy or Vindication of the Divine Glory 1853
  • The Philosophy of Mathematics: With Special Reference to the Elements of Geometry 1868
  • A Theodicy; Or, Vindication of the Divine Glory, as Manifested in the Constitution and Government of the Moral World 1854
  • The Southern Review, Volume 4
  • The War Between the States; Or, Was Secession a Constitutional Right Previous to the War of 1861-65? 1866
  • Cotton Is King And Pro-Slavery Arguments V1: Slavery In The Light Of Political Economy And Liberty And Slavery

Religion

Bledsoe was an Episcopal minister and became an assistant to Bishop Smith of Kentucky. Though he abandoned his clerical career in 1838 because of his opposition to infant baptism. Later in life, he was ordained a Methodist minister in 1871, but he never took charge of a church.

Politics

Bledsoe was a member of the Whig Party.

Views

Bledsoe interpreted the war as a conflict between principle and brute force. He justified secession as a constitutional right and slavery as a moral right sanctioned by the Bible. He seemed like a Titan fighting against all the tendencies of modern life and thought. Democracy, he contended, is an impossible form of government because it enthrones the tyranny of the mob; it is the result of the infidel doctrinaires of the eighteenth century, including Jefferson, whom he bitterly denounced as the source of the South's woes; instead of being the last hope of the world, it is the last madness of a self-idolizing nation. Industrialism is the enemy of chivalry and beauty, and science is the enemy of faith. The new doctrine of Evolution destroys the story of the Fall of Man, which is the cornerstone of theology. German philosophy and higher criticism are responsible for the reign of rationalism, which can only be overthrown by the religious faith of the South. The South must maintain its higher education against the whole tendency toward the uniformity and standardization of the infidel and utilitarian public school system. All along the line, there must be "a renewal of the old fortifications," "a return to the old paths."

Quotations: "Shall we bury in the grave of the grandest cause that has ever perished on earth all the little stores of history and philosophy which a not altogether idle life has enabled us to amass, and so leave the just cause merely because it is fallen to go without our humble advocacy? We would rather die."

"To abandon the Review would be like the pang of death to me. It is the child of my affection. Money is not my object. I am willing to be a slave for the South."

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• "When one turns to a subject of special sacredness to Bledsoe, one feels precisely as if one were walking in the Round Church of the Templars, and a knight suddenly rose from the floor and brandished his blade."

Connections

In 1836 Bledsoe married Harriet Coxe of Burlington, New Jersey. The couple had three children.

Father:

Moses Owsley Bledsoe

1788-1851

Mother:

Sophia Childress Taylor Bledsoe

1792-1879

Sister:

Emily F. Bledsoe Heaton

1811-1842

Brother:

Samuel T. Bledsoe

1813-1879

Sister:

Elizabeth H. Bledsoe Condell

1817-1876

Wife:

Harriet Coxe Bledsoe

1811-1887

Daughter:

Sophia McIlvaine Bledsoe Herrick

1836-1919

Daughter:

Emily Albertine Bledsoe Dinwiddie

1840-1913

Daughter:

Elizabeth McMurtrie Bledsoe Wayland

1846-1932

classmate:

Jefferson Davis

classmate:

Robert Lee

References

• The South to Posterity : An Introduction to the Writing of Confederate History
  1998
• Albert Taylor Bledsoe: Defender of the Old South and Architect of the Lost Cause
  2011
• The South in American Literature , 1607-1900
  1954
• Biographical Dictionary of the Confederacy
  1977