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10 1 eduCAtIon And VoCAtIon The Origins of a Southern Intellectual albert taylor bledsoe was a Kentuckian by birth yet spent much of his early adult life in the North. The social and cultural contexts in which he was raised, educated, and first pursued a durable vocation represent a littleknown but important period in his life. Between 1825 and 1839 he attended the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York; briefly read law at Richmond, Virginia; studied divinity at the Theological Seminary of the Protestant Episcopal Church at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio; and cast about for a profession as a teacher and clergyman in Ohio. His education and early experiences did not predict his later life and thought. Yet they do make them far more intelligible. Notable continuities exist between his early years at West Point and the Kenyon theological seminary and his later writings on theology, moral philosophy, mathematics, and education. Those years of intellectual and spiritual awakening proved profound. They provide important insights into the leading traits of his mind and character, incipient intellectual interests, and the beginnings of important lifelong associations. Many West Pointers, moreover, later found their allegiances and sense of duty at crosspurposes . They struggled with the sectional crisis of the 1850s, fought the Civil War, and spent the rest of their lives coming to grips with the conflict’s personal meaning and the verdict of history as to the sanctity of their respective sides. Bledsoe was prominent among them. Albert Taylor Bledsoe was born in Frankfort, Kentucky, on November 9, 1809. He was the eldest of the five children of Moses Owsley Bledsoe (1788– 1851) and Sophia Childress Taylor (1792–1879). His parents had four other children: Emily (1811), Eliza (1813), Samuel Taylor (1815), and William (1817). Albert’s father began his versatile career in the state capital of Frankfort. Moses was briefly associated from 1808 to 1809 with Willard Gerard in publishing the Argus of Western America, an “Independent Republican” newspaper published weekly in Frankfort. Moses subsequently became the proprietor, editor, and publisher of the Commentator—another weekly paper first published on January 3, 1817.1 He later became a Whig, but his political affiliation before 11 education and vocation the 1840s is uncertain. It is likely, however, that he remained an “Independent Republican” during his years in Kentucky. The Commentator identified itself in 1828 as a paper of the National Republican Party, a short-lived party that joined other anti-Jackson groups in forming the Whig Party in 1834. Moses was a community leader and man of some means. He owned a large amount of land, a small number of slaves, and had political connections. His childhood friend Robert Perkins Letcher served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1823 to 1833. Recognizing the intellectual abilities of Moses’s son, Albert Taylor Bledsoe, Congressman Letcher nominated him in 1825 for admission to West Point.2 Moses married Sophia Childress Taylor in Frankfort, Kentucky, on January 4, 1809. She too was a Kentuckian and a daughter of Samuel and Elizabeth Taylor, a Virginia lawyer, planter, and slaveholder who moved his family to Harrodsburg, Kentucky. A member of the Virginia gentry class, Samuel represented Mercer County in the Virginia legislature and later served as a delegate to the Kentucky constitutional conventions of 1792 and 1797. Sophia had a distinguished lineage that included Chancellor Creed Taylor (1766–1836), a judge of the Superior Court of Chancery for Richmond, Virginia, and the founder of the Needham Law School (1821–42). Albert Taylor Bledsoe would later read law in the Richmond law office of Sophia’s brother Samuel Taylor Jr. in preparation for a vocation as an attorney.3 Little more is known of Sophia other than that she inherited a small number of slaves whom she allowed to purchase their freedom with a portion of the money earned from hiring them out to work for other families.4 The manumissions probably occurred sometime prior to the removal of Sophia and her family to Carrollton, Illinois, around 1826. Sophia outlived her husband and eldest son, Albert, and died in Chicago in 1879 at eighty-seven years of age. Bledsoe was a precocious and curious boy who reportedly manifested an indomitable will at an early age. We know virtually nothing about his education before his admission to the United States Military Academy. His daughter Sophia attests that before entering the academy he possessed only the rudiments of an education.5 When the young Kentuckian...

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