Albert Taylor Bledsoe, controversialist, was born at Frankfort, Kentucky, November 9, 1809, the son of a journalist. He was appointed from Kentucky to West Point and was graduated in 1830, after which he served in the army in Indian territory until the last day of August, 1832, when he resigned to enter upon the study of law. A year later Bledsoe abandoned law to become a tutor in Kenyon College, Ohio, where he later studied theology and was ordained a clergyman in the Protestant Episcopal church. He was connected with various Ohio churches from 1835 to 1838, but in the latter year he quit the ministry to resume his legal studies and he removed to Springfield, Illinois, where he formed a partnership with the afterwards celebrated statesman and soldier, Colonel Edward D. Baker. Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas were practicing law in Springfield at this time, and Bledsoe knew both of them intimately; but because of his subsequent connection with the Southern Confederacy none of the biographies of these men mention him. For the following ten years Bledsoe practiced his profession at Springfield and Washington, D. C. His first book, An Examination of Edwards's Inquiry into the Freedom of the Will (Philadelphia, 1845), showed that his interest in theological subjects had not waned. In 1848 Bledsoe was elected professor of mathematics in the University of Mississippi, which position he held for the ensuing six years. His next volume, A Theodicy, or Vindication of the Divine Glory (New York, 1853), gave him a place among theologians. In 1854 Dr. Bledsoe was elected to the chair of mathematics in the University of Virginia, and this he occupied until 1861. While at the University he published An Essay on Liberty and Slavery (Philadelphia, 1856), which anticipated his subsequent action of entering the Confederate army, which he did in 1861, and he was commissioned as a colonel. Dr. Bledsoe was speedily made assistant secretary of war, but this work proved most uncongenial, and he gladly accepted the joint invitation of Davis and Lee to run the blockade, in 1863, and go to England to gather materials for a constitutional argument on the right of secession. He spent three years in London and upon his return to the United States, in February, 1866, he brought his vast researches together in his best known work, Is Davis a Traitor? or was Secession a Constitutional Right Previous to the War of 1861? (Baltimore, 1866). Dr. Bledsoe now took up his residence at Baltimore, and some months later he became editor of a quarterly periodical, The Southern Review, which he conducted for the final years of his life. In 1868 he added the principalship of a Baltimore school to his burdens; and in the same year his last volume appeared, The Philosophy of Mathematics (Philadelphia, 1868). In 1871 Dr. Bledsoe was ordained a minister in the Methodist church, and his Review became the recognized organ of his church. He died at Alexandria, Virginia, December 8, 1877. Dr. Bledsoe was always a student and scholar, but he was essentially a controversialist, often bitter in his statements, but time has mellowed much of this, and he now stands forth as a very remarkable man. Consider him from a dozen angles, and one will not find his like in the whole range of American history.

Bibliography. Appletons' Cyclopaedia of American Biography (New York, 1887, v. i); Library of Southern Literature, sketch by his daughter, Mrs. Sophie Herrick (Atlanta, 1909, v. i).

SEVEN CRISES CAUSED THE CIVIL WAR

[From The Southern Review (Baltimore, April, 1867)]

This history consists of seven great crises. The first of these convulsed the Union, and threatened its dissolution before the new Constitution was formed, or conceived. For how little soever its history may be known, the North and the South, like Jacob and Esau, struggled together, and that, too, with almost fatal desperation, in the womb of the old Union. Slavery had nothing at all to do with that struggle between the North and the South, the dramatis personÆ in the tragedy of 1861. It was solely and simply a contest for power.

The second crisis was the formation and adoption of the new Constitution. Much has been said about that event, as the most wonderful revolution in the history of the world; because the government of a great people was then radically changed by purely peaceable means, and without shedding a drop of blood. But if that was a bloodless revolution in itself, no one, who has maturely considered it in all its bearings, can deny that it was, in the end, the occasion of the most sanguinary strife in the annals of a fallen world.

The revolution of 1801, by which the radical notions and doctrines of the infidel philosophers of the eighteenth century gained the ascendency in this country, never more to abate in their onward march, constituted the third great crisis in the political history of the United States. In passing through this crisis, the Republic of 1787 became in practice the Democracy of the following generation; and, finally, the rabid radicalism of 1861. It was then that the democratic, or predominant, element in the Republic, began to swallow up the others, and so became the most odious of all the forms of absolute power or despotism. It was then that the reign of "King Demos," the unchecked and the unlimited power of mere numbers, was inaugurated, and his throne established on the ruins of American freedom. But, while history will show this, it will also administer the consoling reflection, that American freedom was doomed, from the first, by the operation of other causes, and that the revolution of 1801 only precipitated its fall. If so, then the sooner its fall the better for the world; as in that case its destruction would involve a smaller portion of the human family in its ruins.

The desperate struggle of 1820-21, between the North and the South, relative to the admission of Missouri into the Union; the equally fierce contest respecting the Tariff in 1832-33; the Mexican War, and the acquisition of vast territory, by the dismemberment of a foreign empire, which led to the most violent and angry of all the quarrels between the two sections; constitute the fourth, fifth and sixth crises in the stormy history of the United Sections. The seventh and last great crisis, grew out of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the rise of the Republican party, as it is called; and consisted in the secession of the Southern States, and the war of coercion. Each of these seven crises had, of course, its prelude and its sequel, without which it cannot be comprehended, or seen how it followed the preceding, and how it led to the succeeding crises in the chain of events. Now some of these crises are most imperfectly understood by the public, and, in some respects, most perfectly misunderstood, such as the first two for example; others, and especially the fourth, or the great Compromise of 1820, are overlaid with a mass of lying traditions such as the world has seldom seen; traditions invented by politicians, and industriously propagated by the press and the pulpit. If these traditions were cleared away, and the facts which lie beneath them in the silent records of the country brought to view, the revelation would be sufficient to teach both sections of the Union the profoundest lessons of humiliation and sorrow. If patiently and properly studied, the history of the United States is, perhaps, fraught with as many valuable lessons for the warning and instruction of mankind, as that of any other age or nation since the fall of Rome, since the Flood, or since the fall of man.