Albert Taylor Bledsoe

Albert Taylor Bledsoe (1809–1877) was an American philosopher, mathematician and polemicist. A graduate of West Point, he served briefly in the army, was ordained an Episcopal clergyman, and practiced law in Springfield, Illinois, before teaching mathematics at the Universities of Mississippi and Virginia. His Theodicy of 1854 defended free will against the doctrine of necessity. He also wrote a defense of slavery, served as an assistant secretary of war in the Confederacy, argued in Is Davis a Traitor? that secession had been lawful, and edited the Southern Review in Baltimore after the war.