Sledd first received national recognition after he wrote a 1902 magazine article advocating better legal and social treatment of African-Americans, some of whom faced lynching by white mobs.

[3][4] Andrew received his early education in the Petersburg school of W. Gordon McCabe, a former Confederate captain and veteran of the U.S. Civil War.

[3] While at Randolph–Macon, he was a member of Phi Delta Theta Fraternity (Virginia Gamma chapter); he was also the college's outstanding student-athlete and was particularly known as the baseball team's first baseman and star hitter.

[6] Sledd left the college without finishing his undergraduate degree requirements, first accepting a position as a teacher in Durant, Mississippi,[5] and then as the principal of a high school in Arkadelphia, Arkansas.

[10] After completing his graduate studies at Harvard, Sledd briefly served as a Latin instructor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

[13] Candler was impressed with the character and academic credentials of the young scholar, and assisted him in becoming a professor of Latin language and literature at Emory College, a position Sledd held from 1898 to 1902.

"[16] Even though Sledd's essay condoned the continued racial segregation of white and black Southerners as a necessary social expedient,[21] a public firestorm ensued in Georgia over Sledd's criticism of the South's treatment of its black citizens, with the controversy stoked by the vitriolic letters and editorial attacks of agrarian populist Rebecca Felton[22] in The Atlanta Constitution newspaper.

[28] After resigning from the Emory College faculty, Sledd entered the graduate school of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, where he began work in the advanced classics doctoral program, specializing in Latin.

[32] After completing his doctorate, Sledd obtained an appointment as a professor of Greek at Methodist-affiliated Southern University (now known as Birmingham–Southern College) in Greensboro, Alabama.

[33][34] At the time of his appointment, the University of Florida at Lake City was experiencing a controversy of its own: its administration and faculty were hopelessly fractured by personality conflicts and its unpopular president's failed attempts at improving the small school's instruction and academic standing.

[35] When Sledd arrived in Lake City, it was a school with a new name, a faculty fractured by contentious personalities, an unknown number of returning students and an uncertain future.

[38] By a vote of six to four, the new Board of Control charged with the governance of the consolidated institutions selected Gainesville as the location for the new men's state university.

[39] Sledd had not anticipated that the Lake City campus would be abandoned, and had assumed that it would be selected as the location of the newly consolidated men's university, placing him in a strong position to become the first president of the new institution.

[42] Sledd nominated all of the original faculty members,[43] a majority of whom he had previously selected to be professors at the University of Florida at Lake City.

[35][36] The new University of the State of Florida operated in Lake City during the first academic year of its existence (1905–06), while the buildings of the new Gainesville campus were being erected.

[39] Sledd managed the move of the school's assets from Lake City to Gainesville during the late summer of 1906, and participated in the official dedication of the campus on September 27, 1906.

[44] Sledd received a $2,250 annual salary in his first year as the head of the new state university[45] and, together with his wife and their young children, moved into the still incomplete Buckman Hall dormitory on the Gainesville campus.

[59] Sledd became a recognized New Testament scholar and a significant voice of educational, social and ecclesiastical reform within the Methodist Episcopal Church, South.

[53] For nearly twenty-five years, he remained a professor at Emory University's Candler School of Theology, until his death from a heart attack on March 16, 1939.

[62] In his 1960 History of Methodism in Alabama and West Florida, Marion Elias Lazenby remembered Sledd as "one of the [Methodist] Church's most scholarly and reverent teachers.

[63] Sledd died deep in debt, having lost the family home to foreclosure after the salaries of Candler professors were cut when financial support of the school fell during the Great Depression in the 1930s.