Albert Taylor Bledsoe was certainly among the most versatile men of his generation. An 1830 graduate of West Point, Bledsoe was a soldier, college professor, preacher, lawyer, minor Confederate bureaucrat, and, finally, a magazine editor. He wrote extensively, especially as editor of the Southern Review, but was also the author of an historical and philosophical treatise on mathematics that one scholar concluded was still worth reading one hundred years after Bledsoe published The Philosophy of Mathematics, with Special Reference to the Elements of Geometry and the Infinitesimal Method (1868). Bledsoe also wrote a volume on religion, but he is best remembered for his defense of slavery and the Southern cause, embodied in An Essay on Liberty and Slavery (1856) and Is Davis a Traitor; or, Was Secession a Constitutional Right Previous to the War of 1861" (1866). In dozens of articles in the Southern Review, Bledsoe continued his arguments for the Southern way...