Albert Taylor Bledsoe: Defender of the Old South and Architect of the Lost Cause by Terry A. Barnhart (review)

The study of the Lost Cause ideology remains an area of intense interest for Civil War–era historians. Noted scholars such as David Blight, Karen Cox, Caroline Janney, Kevin Levin, and John Neff, to name only a few, have examined it in monographs, while biographical studies of leading individuals associated with the Lost Cause, such as Nathan Bedford Forrest, Stonewall Jackson, and Robert E. Lee, have also appeared. Terry Barnhart, professor of history at Eastern Illinois University, adds to the latter category in explaining the contributions of Albert Taylor Bledsoe in creating and furthering the Lost Cause mythology.

Barnhart presents Bledsoe, a Kentucky-born theologian, intellectual, and editor, as “a very representative figure . . . [who] personified the unrepentant and unreconstructed southerner” (6, 7). After studying theology at Kenyon College, Bledsoe spent stints on the faculty at Miami University, the University of Mississippi, and the University of Virginia prior to the Civil War. His years in Oxford and Charlottesville were particularly important in shaping his views on sectional issues, although Barnhart admits that the lack of evidence makes it necessary to infer Bledsoe’s opinions during this period.

Prior to the Civil War, Bledsoe encapsulated his views on slavery in his An Essay on Liberty and Slavery (1856), in which he argued that slavery was moral, necessary, and constitutional. These views placed him within the moderate and mainstream segment of white southern society, according to Barnhart. Like many white southerners, Bledsoe was not a secessionist, however, until after Lincoln’s call for southern troops in response to Fort Sumter. This action crystallized his support for, and defense of, southern nationalism, which he displayed practically in working as part of the Confederate bureaucracy.

The fullest exemplification of Bledsoe’s interpretation of the Civil War and its causes appeared in Is Davis a Traitor: Or Was Secession a Constitutional Right Previous to the War of 1861? The ideas contained within it had been coalescing for years but did not appear collectively until the work’s publication in 1866. Bledsoe argued that while slavery played a part in inducing the southern states to secede, it had only a minor role. Rather, the imbalance of power held by northern states allowed them to exploit southern wealth via the tariff and other means, thus forcing the South to exercise its constitutional right to leave the Union that it had voluntarily joined. “Bledsoe’s interpretation of the Civil War was instrumental,” Barnhart contends, in allowing southerners to shift primary responsibility from slavery to “allegedly loftier motives—states’ rights, the defense of hearth and home, and libertarian ideals” (159). Bledsoe continued advocating this interpretation during his time as editor of the Southern Review, a literary journal that he founded in 1867 and ran until his death in 1877.

One notable aspect of this book is the evidentiary gymnastics that Barnhart undertook to help reconstruct Bledsoe’s life. While historians have an embarrassing wealth of source material to write the lives of figures such as Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee, the same is not true of Bledsoe. Barnhart explains the lack of extant correspondence written by Bledsoe and outlines the available papers he was able to track down. His note on sources should serve as a model for other scholars who are writing biographies of lesser-known individuals, reminding them that the chase after sources is often one of the most frustrating, as well as rewarding, aspects of the historical profession.

Barnhart’s explication of Bledsoe’s life is honest and revealing. He does not shy away from exposing the southern intellectual’s inconsistencies and logical evasions when it came to defending slavery. He makes a convincing case that Bledsoe is as much responsible for creating the southern defense of slavery and the subsequent Lost Cause mythology as any of the southerners, such as George Fitzhugh and Jefferson...