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1 IntroduCtIon Albert Taylor Bledsoe and the Intellectual History of the Old South writing in the autumn of life, Albert Taylor Bledsoe lamented that his solitary devotion to intellectual pursuits had largely alienated him from the world about which he so earnestly thought and wrote. Bledsoe grappled with several perplexing problems connected with causality, Christian theology, moral philosophy, political theory, and mathematics. He was the author of An Examination of President Edwards’ Inquiry into the Freedom of the Will (1845) and A Theodicy; Or, Vindication of the Divine Glory, As Manifested in the Constitution and Government of the Moral World (1853)—works that earned him a respectable reputation as a metaphysician and speculative theologian. Yet Bledsoe is best remembered today as a stalwart vindicator of southern slavery, the constitutional right of secession, and the “Lost Cause” of southern independence. He assailed egalitarianism and defended the southern institution of slavery in An Essay on Liberty and Slavery (1856), justified the contested right of secession in Is Davis a Traitor; Or Was Secession a Constitutional Right Previous to the War of 1861? (1866), and upheld the sanctity of the Lost Cause as the editor of the Southern Review between 1867 and his death in 1877. He was also an accomplished mathematician, both as a teacher and as a theoretician. His major contribution in this field was The Philosophy of Mathematics, with Special Reference to the Elements of Geometry and the Infinitesimal Method (1868). Students of Bledsoe’s life have invariably commented on his unusual abilities , the breadth and depth of his intellectual attainments, and the force of his personality and writings. As he was at various times a soldier, mathematician, clergyman, lawyer, journalist, theologian, political theorist, and historian, his career has been called “a remarkable example of American versatility of character.”1 John Wilson Townsend, the literary historian and author of Kentucky in American Letters, described Bledsoe’s intriguing qualities and diverse accomplishments in this manner: “Consider him from a dozen angles and one will not find his like again in the whole range of American history.”2 Perhaps Townsend exaggerates, but by no means did Bledsoe live an idle or aimless life. albert taylor bledsoe 2 He treasured the companionship of his wife, Harriet, and their four daughters but was largely a prisoner of his manifold pursuits. He spent much of his life lost in thought and controversy—communing with the great minds of the past and formulating his own ideas about the great issues of time and eternity. “I have lived apart from the world. Its pleasures have been unknown to me. They have, indeed, never entered into my imagination till these life-long labors were completed. Would that I had never dreamed of them! Those who have tried them say they are full of vanity and vexation of spirit, and no doubt they say truly.”3 Vanity and vexation were, indeed, constant companions in Bledsoe ’s embattled life. He was, and remains, a complex and engaging figure. Bledsoe’s wide-ranging interests and disputatious nature embroiled him in many of the theological and political debates of the mid- and late nineteenth century. He was first and last a controversialist, who, in a very real sense, lived for the fight. While Bledsoe’s larger significance is as a “southern” intellectual , he did not emerge as a spokesperson for the South until the height of the sectional crisis. After leaving his native Kentucky in his fifteenth year to attend West Point, Bledsoe spent most of his early adult life in the North. His interests and activities cut across sections, disciplines, religion, and politics, even though he exclusively and ardently identified himself as a southerner after 1856. Yet Bledsoe’s previous educational and vocational experiences in Ohio and Illinois as a teacher, clergyman, and attorney shaped his attitudes, propensities, and talents as a polemicist in significant ways. Bledsoe spoke of sectional issues in muted tones as a Whig newspaper editor in the 1840s. But during the sectional crisis of the following decade, he resolutely aligned his own destiny with that of the South—its self-conscious conservatism, its educational and cultural aspirations, and its social and political imperatives as a slaveholding society. The seedtime in the development of Bledsoe’s sectionalism occurred during his tenures at the University of Mississippi and the University of Virginia. He served as chair of mathematics and astronomy at the University of Mississippi from 1848 to 1854 and as chair of mathematics at the University of Virginia...

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