Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve (1831-1924) was born in Charleston, South Carolina, the son of Rev. Benjamin Gildersleeve, a white Presbyterian minister, and Emma (Lanneau) Gildersleeve. Although Rev. Gildersleeve was originally from Connecticut, he moved to South Carolina and married into a white family from Charleston (Lupher and Vandiver, 322). According to United States Census records, he enslaved people in 1840, 1850 and 1860. Basil Gildersleeve thus grew up in a slaveholding household. The Gildersleeve family later moved to Richmond, Virginia.

Basil Gildersleeve studied classical languages from an early age, and he continued his education briefly at Jefferson College in Cannonsburg, PA. After a year he moved to Princeton University, and he graduated in 1849. Gildersleeve went to Europe for graduate work and was one of several American students at the University of Gottingen in Germany, from which he received his doctoral degree in 1853.

Gildersleeve was Professor of Greek at the University of Virginia from 1856-1876, and he was also Professor of Latin from 1861-1866. Gildersleeve’s primary interest was the grammar and structure of the Greek language, though he spoke, wrote, and taught several additional classical and modern languages, including German. Though he eventually left Charlottesville, Gildersleeve’s connection to UVA remained strong. He was buried in the Faculty Cemetery there upon his death in 1924, despite having lived in Baltimore for more than 40 years.

During the Civil War, Gildersleeve (along with his father and brothers) was an enthusiastic supporter of the Confederacy (Lupher and Vandiver, 323), and he served in the Confederate Army before he was wounded in 1864. Gildersleeve also wrote a series of articles for the Richmond Examiner during the war, which the Johns Hopkins University Classics Department says, “even considering their time and place, stand out for their racism.” (https://classics.jhu.edu/about/gildersleeve/). As Professor Simon Gikandi of Princeton University notes, in one editorial titled “Miscegenation,” Gildersleeve “argued…that the ‘supremacy of the white man’ had saved the continent from the fate of its neighbors to the south – ‘the mixed population of Mexico and the twenty-two cross breeds of Lima’" (https://slavery.princeton.edu/stories/gildersleeve). Classicist Ward Briggs also notes the anti-Semitism in Gildersleeve's Examiner articles, saying that in Gildersleeve's mind, "The chief villains [of the Confederacy] are the Jews and Jefferson Davis (3 December 1863)" ("Introduction," Soldier and Scholar, 16).

In 1876, Johns Hopkins University’s first president Daniel Coit Gilman recruited Gildersleeve as one of the first faculty members for the new institution. Gildersleeve established the Greek Seminary at Hopkins, and he had a great deal of influence on the teaching and research done in the humanities in the first few decades. Librarian John C. French says that of the early faculty at Hopkins, President Gilman “particularly relied on the judgement of Gildersleeve and Remsen. He was closest of all, perhaps, to Gildersleeve” (135). He quotes a letter (located in Box 6 of the Gildersleeve papers) from Gilman to Gildersleeve in which Gilman writes, “I lay down my office with a constant remembrance that you and Remsen have been my chief counsellors – the one in all that pertained to science, the other in all that pertained to letters” (French, 136). Gildersleeve also started the American Journal of Philology in 1880 while at Hopkins, and he remained its editor until 1919.

In his later years, long after the defeat of the Confederacy, Gildersleeve wrote a widely-read essay in defense of white Southerners’ position during the Civil War, “The Creed of the Old South,” that was originally published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1892 and republished by Johns Hopkins University in 1915. Gikandi calls Gildersleeve an “unrepentant Confederate apologist” (“Princeton and Slavery,” https://slavery.princeton.edu/stories/gildersleeve). Similarly, classicists David Lupher and Elizabeth Vandiver argue that “Gildersleeve’s late work…and his republication of ‘The Creed of the Old South and ‘A Southerner in the Peloponnesian War’ in 1915 clearly demonstrate that the passage of years and the supposedly mellowing period of old age never changed his mind about the justice of the ‘cause’ for which he had fought and been maimed” (345). Gildersleeve retired from his professorship at Johns Hopkins in 1915, and he died in 1924 at age 92.

Gildersleeve married Elizabeth Colston, the daughter of Raleigh Colston, a white plantation owner and enslaver, in 1866 (Lupher and Vandiver, 326). They had two children together who survived to adulthood, Raleigh Colston Gildersleeve and Emma Gildersleeve Lane. In addition to these two children with his wife, Gildersleeve is also listed as the father of Fannie Manning Gildersleeve Tonsler of Charlottesville, VA on her State of Virginia Death Certificate. Fannie Tonsler, a Black woman, was born in approximately 1859 or 1860 (while Gildersleeve was Professor of Greek at the University of Virginia), and she married Benjamin Tonsler, a Black man, in 1876. On their marriage certificate, Fannie’s mother is listed as Emily Monroe. Benjamin Tonsler taught at and was principal of the Jefferson School, the first school in Charlottesville for Black students, and he educated generations of Black children and youth in the decades after the Civil War. The Tonslers had several children, including two sons named Basil Tonsler and Gildersleeve Tonsler. Benjamin and Fannie Tonsler and some of their children are buried in the Daughters of Zion Cemetery in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Sources: Briggs, Ward W., Jr., ed. The Letters of Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.

Briggs, Ward W., Jr., ed. Soldier and Scholar: Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve and the Civil War. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1998.

Commonwealth of Virginia. Certificate of Death for Fannie Manning Tonsler. "Virginia, Death Certificates, 1912-1987," database with images. FamilySearch. https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QVR4-2R8X , accessed January 24, 2023.

Daughters of Zion Cemetery. "Tonsler, Benjamin Ellis." https://daughtersofzioncemetery.org/the-people/tonsler-benjamin-ellis/, accessed January 25, 2023.

French, John C. A History of the University Founded by Johns Hopkins. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1946.

Gikandi, Simon. "Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve." Princeton and Slavery. https://slavery.princeton.edu/stories/gildersleeve, accessed January 24, 2023.

Johns Hopkins University. Department of Classics. "Gildersleeve." https://classics.jhu.edu/about/gildersleeve/, accessed January 25, 2023.

Lupher, David and Elizabeth Vandiver. “Yankee She-Men and Octoroon Electra: Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve on Slavery, Race, and Abolition.” Ancient Slavery and Abolition: From Hobbes to Hollywood. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Marriage License, Benjamin Tonsler and Fannie Monroe, "Tonsler" Vertical File, Albermarle Charlottesville Historical Society Library.

U.S. Census Bureau. Benjamin Gildersleeve in Charleston, South Carolina, United States, " United States Census, 1840," database with images. FamilySearch.https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:33S7-9YB7-XZD?i=183&personaUrl=%2Fark%3A%2F61903%2F1%3A1%3AXHY1-ZD3, accessed January 27, 2023.

U.S. Census Bureau, Fannie Tonsler in household of Benjamin Tonsler, Charlottesville, Albemarle, Virginia, United States, "United States Census, 1880," database with images, FamilySearch, https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:33SQ-GYBF-99?cc=1417683&wc=X43K-HZ9%3A1589415431%2C1589415592%2C1589401065%2C1589395245, accessed January 24, 2023.

U.S. Census Bureau, Gildersleeve Tonsler and Basil Tonsler in household of Benjamin Tonsler, Charlottesville, Albemarle, Virginia, United States, "United States Census, 1900," database with images, FamilySearch, https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:MMJJ-9W8, accessed January 25, 2023.

U.S. Census Bureau. Rev. B. Gildersleeve in Richmond, Henrico, Virginia, United States, "United States Census (Slave Schedule), 1850", database with images. FamilySearch. https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:HRWL-MK3Z, accessed January 27, 2023.

U.S. Census Bureau. Rev. B. Gildersleeve in Henrico, Virginia, United States, "United States Census (Slave Schedule), 1860", database with images. FamilySearch. https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:W2XL-11MM, accessed January 24, 2023.