Mel Bradford although a professor of English literature, he was perhaps the best defender of the
Constitution of the Framers that this Century has yet to have known. Of particular interest to
students of the Constitution is his Original Intentions (Univ of Ga Press, 1994). In this book,
Bradford posits his understanding of how one is to understand the original intentions of the
Framers. Bradford insists that there were several intentions to be found in the Framers,
representing the various and different political and social experiences of the various American
colonies and not a single unifying intention as is argued by some students of the Constitution.
Bradford was also a defender of the southern tradition. Following Richard Weaver's death in the
60's, Bradford took up the banner of southern traditionalism, not only in Politics but also in
Literature. He was a student of Donald Davidson, one of the original Vanderbilt agrarians. After Davidson's
death, he sought to pass on Davidson's twist on the agrarianism. Following Davidson [and also Weaver],
Mel Bradford studied not only literature and culture, as agarians tended only to concern themselves with,
but also politics, and the politics of the his rooted heritage, the south. Mel saw himself as generally
a student of rhetoric, in the classical understading of that term; and as a student of rhetoric, he tended
in his understanding of great literature, to argue that we must understand the literary works within the
specific cultural-political frame that the story is set within. Mel made his mark in English literature,
early in his career, writing a ground breaking reading of the works of Faulkner, which stressed Faulkner's
deeply Southern nomocentric construction of narrative. But being a student of Donald Davidson, made
him far more political than most students of literature.
Mel understood himself to be primarily a student of Rhetoric, which allowed him to be a very astute student of political
speech, be it found in official document or public orations. His understanding of the differing modes of political rhetoric led him to see
the fundamental danger of Abe Lincoln's political rhetoric to the Original Regime of the Framers. Bradford
ultimately argues that Lincoln does not in fact preserve the Constitution as he claims but rather Reconstructs
itunder the Framework of the Equality Clause of the Deceleration of Independence. This has led him to be
targeted as an enemy of equality, but his rejection of equality is to be strictly understood as a defense of
republican government which cannot survive in the toxic ideological wasteland that a dogmatic adherence to
equality creates.