author
William A. (William Andrew) Smith
1802–1870
A Methodist minister and college president in 19th-century America, he wrote on religion, education, and public life from within the turbulent world of the antebellum South. His best-known work is now read as a revealing historical document because it openly defended slavery.
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About the author
Born in Fredericksburg, Virginia, in 1802, William Andrew Smith became a minister in the Methodist Episcopal Church and later built a career as an educator as well as a clergyman. He was chosen president of Randolph–Macon College in 1846, where he also taught moral and intellectual philosophy.
Smith is chiefly remembered today for Lectures on the Philosophy and Practice of Slavery (1856), a book drawn from lectures he delivered at Randolph–Macon. Because that work argued in favor of slavery, it stands less as a timeless literary achievement than as an important and troubling record of ideas that shaped its era.
After leaving Randolph–Macon in 1866, he served as a pastor in St. Louis and was later selected to lead Central College in Fayette, Missouri, as the school resumed operations after the Civil War. He died in Richmond, Virginia, in 1870.