Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve

Gildersleeve served as a Confederate staff officer during the Civil War. After emancipation, he was a stalwart and outspoken defender of slavery and the Lost Cause. Gildersleeve railed against the dangers of “miscegenation” (reproductive relationships between races of people) and disdained mixed-race cultures in Latin and South America. He also expressed antisemitic views. Gildersleeve taught at Sewanee and lived in “the little house across from the cemetery,” which is now Stirling’s Coffee House. He received his honorary degree from Sewanee in 1884.

"Here let me say that the bearing of the Confederates is not to be understood without taking into account the deep religious feeling of the army and its great leaders. It is an historical element, like any other, and is not to be passed over in summing up the forces of the conflict." -Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, The Creed of the Old South

"A jealousy natural to our English blood...has prevented the intrusion of mongrels, even of the third and fourth generations, into the society and the privileges of the white race. In no other part of the world, in which the two races have existed, side by side, has this exclusion been so absolute; and it is to this watchful care...that we owe the supremacy of the white man on the continent..." -Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, Miscegenation

https://slavery.princeton.edu/stories/gildersleeve

https://www.jstor.org/stable/4233606?seq=3

M.G. Kirby Koski to Arthur Ben Chitty, 1964.