The epitome of an unreconstructed Southerner, Bledsoe was born in Kentucky on November 9, 1809, the eldest son of Moses Ousley Bledsoe and Sophia Childress Taylor, a relation of Zachary Taylor. After studying at the United States Military Academy, where he was a fellow student of Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, he graduated in 1830 and was stationed along the western frontier as a lieutenant in the 7th Infantry. Resigning his post in 1832, he headed east to study law, theology and philosophy at Kenyon College in Ohio, where from 1833 to 1834 he held the joint post of professor of mathematics and instructor of French. In 1835, he became professor of mathematics at Miami University, but three years later moved to Springfield, Illinois, to become a lawyer, practicing in the same courts as Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas.

In 1848, Bledsoe was appointed professor of mathematics at the University of Mississippi, a chair he resigned in 1854 for the one left vacant at the University of Virginia by the death of Courtenay. While at Virginia, he wrote An Essay on Liberty and Slavery (1856) in which he justified secession as a constitutional right and slavery as a moral right sanctioned by the Bible. On the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, he resigned his chair and joined the Confederate Army at the rank of colonel. Bledsoe was soon appointed assistant secretary of war by Jefferson Davis and so saw little action on the battlefield. He was sent to London for the purpose of researching various historical problems relating to the North-South conflict, as well as guiding British public opinion in favor of the Confederate cause.

Although by February 1865, when he returned from Britain, the war was almost over, the volume which resulted from his research, Is Davis a Traitor? or Was Secession a Constitutional Right Previous to the War of 1861? (1866) formed the basis of much of the case for the defense in Davis’s trial immediately after the war. In 1867, Bledsoe founded the Southern Review, serving as editor and dominant contributor for the next ten years. He thus spent the rest of his life engaged in the publication of articles and reviews in justification of the old, unreconstructed Southern attitudes, dedicating the journal to “the despised, disenfranchised, and down-trodden people of the South.” [1, 365] As he said in an editorial on the question of abandoning the Southern cause: “We would rather die.” [1, 365] This he did at Alexandria, Virginia, on December 8, 1877.
 

REFERENCES:

1. Allen Johnson, ed., Dictionary of American Biography, vol.2, New York: Scribner's, 1929, 364-365.
2. Sophia Bledsoe Herrick, “Albert Taylor Bledsoe (1809-1877),” in Edwin Anderson Alderman and Joel Chandler Harris, eds., Library of Southern Literature, vol.1, New Orleans, Atlanta, Dallas: The Martin and Hoyt Company, 1907, 395-399.
3. Florian Cajori, The Teaching and History of Mathematics in the United States, Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1890, 197-198.
4. Francis S. Drake, Dictionary of American Biography, Boston: James R. Osgood, 1872, 97.

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