Chief among the intellectual defenders of the South on the subject of slavery and secession was Albert Taylor Bledsoe, a man who wrote the most brilliant, concise Southern apologia after the Civil War and who for ten years published the Southern Review, a quarterly magazine whose purpose was to vindicate the South. The most versatile of the early Southern philosophers, Bled soe was a soldier, minister, lawyer, teacher, and head of a bureau in the Confederate War Department before he became an editor. His life brought him into close relationship with many of the intellectual leaders of the South and with some of the most prominent military and political figures of both North and South.

Bledsoe was born in 1809 in Frankfort, Kentucky, to Moses Bledsoe, a newspaper publisher, and Sophia Childress Taylor Bledsoe, a relative of President Zachary Taylor. As a child he was educated at home and...