author
Albert Taylor Bledsoe
1809–1877
A restless 19th-century thinker who moved through the worlds of teaching, law, ministry, and public debate, he became one of the Confederacy’s most forceful intellectual defenders. His life traces how scholarship and polemic could intertwine in the years before and after the Civil War.
2 Audiobooks
An Examination of President Edwards' Inquiry into the Freedom of the Will
by Albert Taylor Bledsoe
A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory
by Albert Taylor Bledsoe
About the author
Born in Frankfort, Kentucky, in 1809, Albert Taylor Bledsoe studied at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and later worked in a striking range of roles, including army officer, mathematics teacher, lawyer, and Episcopal clergyman. He taught at institutions such as Kenyon College and the University of Virginia, building a reputation as an able scholar and public writer.
Bledsoe is remembered less for his early academic career than for his political and religious arguments. Before the Civil War, he wrote in defense of slavery, most notably in Liberty and Slavery (1856). During and after the war, he became closely associated with Confederate thought and later edited the Southern Review, helping shape and spread arguments that defended the Confederacy after its defeat.
He died in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1877. For modern readers, Bledsoe remains a revealing and controversial figure: a learned man whose writings show how intellectual authority was used to justify slavery and later to promote the Lost Cause view of the Civil War.