Knox County academic aided Abe Lincoln in duel, was fixture in Confederate cabinet during Civil War

MOUNT VERNON — It’s interesting to see how the prevailing philosophies of institutions take shape.

Knox County’s Kenyon College became a notable outpost for anti-slavery progressive movements in the years leading up to the Civil War. But it wasn’t always that way.

It turns out that one of the major architects of the Southern mythology popularly known as ‘The Lost Cause’ got his education and his start as an academic at Kenyon.

Albert Taylor Bledsoe (1809-1877) first caught my eye because that surname is not a common one, and I recognized it from my own family tree. It turns out that this man is indeed a distant cousin of mine, as we both are descendants of George Bledsoe, who came from England and settled on the Virginia frontier in the late 1600s.

The surname was then (and is still, in the south, today) pronounced “BLED- saw.” But, as families so often do, I’m glad to declare my distance from Albert’s beliefs.

A large family with many branches, some of the Bledsoes became wealthy landowners. As was typical in the old American south, wealthy land ownership was almost always paralleled by a different kind of ownership: slavery.

Albert Taylor Bledsoe’s parents were prominent and wealthy, his mother being a cousin of future U.S. president Zachary Taylor. Albert’s father owned slaves in Frankfort, Kentucky, though he did later emancipate those slaves in his will, something it seems likely his son would never have done.

Growing up in a family that owned other human beings, Albert was socially conditioned to support slavery and to do the mental calisthenics necessary to bend over backwards to justify it as somehow moral and righteous. And he moved in circles where these beliefs were vigorously defended.

Albert was sent to attend the U.S. military academy at West Point from 1825 to 1830, where he was close with classmates such as Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, relationships that were destined to continue far into the future.

After serving for two years in the U.S. Army, Bledsoe enrolled at Kenyon College, where he studied law and theology. Graduating in 1836, he was such an impressive student, he was immediately hired as a professor, teaching mathematics and French.

He was later to teach at Miami University, the University of Mississippi, and the University of Virginia.

It isn’t known exactly how soon he began demonstrating his spectacular skills for mental gymnastics, but by the time he was teaching in Virginia, students documented that he would often insert his outspoken views about slavery in his mathematics lectures, trying to argue “logical” proofs for his assertions.

It seems that even dyed-in-the-wool southern students sometimes had difficulty accepting Bledsoe’s twisted justifications. One of his tenets was that, despite its name, nature was not the natural state of human beings.

Rather, in his view, civilization was the natural state of humans, but the give-and-take required to structure and stabilize civilization meant that freedom couldn’t be distributed freely. Only certain, worthy people should be given the freedom to order and control that civilization.

Yeah, you can see where this is going.

No prizes if you can guess who he thought did not deserve freedom, and should be controlled by superior folk, of whom he just happened to be one. He saw that as the natural order.

Not surprisingly, Bledsoe did not thrive in the north, where abolitionism was on the upswing. In-between spells in academia, Bledsoe worked as a lawyer, including one stint in Illinois, where he became friends with Abraham Lincoln, though their diverging philosophies would soon put distance between them.

He is remembered as a footnote in Lincoln’s history because of the time that Lincoln ended up challenged to a duel. Given the option to choose his weapons, Lincoln asked Bledsoe for advice. Bledsoe told Lincoln to choose something so outlandish that it would force the challenger, James Shields, to forfeit the duel.

Lincoln used Bledsoe’s suggestion of choosing broadswords as the weapon for the duel. Shields took one look at Lincoln’s height advantage and called for a truce.

Long before Lincoln was on his way to the White House, Bledsoe was publishing his views in support of slavery in a high-handed, pseudo-intellectual manner, which made him very popular in some quarters.

When the country split, and Bledsoe’s old friend Jefferson Davis became the president of the Confederate States of America, Bledsoe found himself appointed to Davis’ cabinet.

In 1863, Bledsoe was sent on a diplomatic mission to England, to shore up support for the South in British society. Bledsoe tried to do so, without any spectacular success, and he was still trying when his other old friend, General Robert E. Lee, surrendered at Appomattox Court House, bringing the war to a close in 1865.

Bledsoe waited until it was clear that he would not be prosecuted as a war criminal before he returned to the U.S.

But he was for from finished with his mission. He became one of the most outspoken writers and speakers on the issue of the Southern cause, casting it in sentimental, mythical terms.

Though the term didn’t originate with Bledsoe, the popular tag “The Lost Cause” soon became associated with the Southern, states’ rights, pro-slavery, white supremacist movement.

It has managed to rear its ugly head every other generation or so since then.

Bledsoe spent his final decade as a newspaper editor, succeeded by his daughter, Sophia McIlvaine Herrick, who had been born in Gambier. She eventually left the world of ‘Lost Cause’ polemics and became known for her writings about biology.

Today, both are largely forgotten as curious historical footnotes. Their books can be seen in the permanent collection at the Knox County Historical Society.