[1][4][5] His older brother, Hugh A. Garland, who was one of the lawyers involved in the Dred Scott case and author of a biography of John Randolph of Roanoke, was also a Hampden-Sydney graduate.

[1][4] Garland taught chemistry and natural history at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia, from 1833 to 1834, eventually being elected chair of the department.

[1][2] After a year of trying to rebuild the university, Garland's dream of making it an institution of discipline and honor (a central theme of the historical south) died along with the Confederacy.

Only a single student enrolled for classes in 1866; Garland resigned and accepted the chair of philosophy and astronomy at the University of Mississippi in 1867.

[4] He did his part to mold character each Wednesday when he preached sermons to the student body in chapel, and he was staunch in his opposition to dormitories, claiming they were "injurious to both morals and manners."

[4] For the law students, it was more than they could bear to sit through a speech by the brother of the Yankee general who had burned a wide swath from Atlanta to the sea.

Garland gave a pro-slavery lecture in Tuscaloosa in 1860 where he said, "The negro has, through slavery, been taken up from a condition of grossest barbarity and ignorance, made serviceable to himself and to the world, and elevated and improved socially, morally, intellectually, and physically.

During the Civil War, Garland doubled-down on his pro-slavery ideology, writing to the Governor of Alabama about his fears of former slaves being organized "into bands of midnight assassins" by the United States army following the Emancipation Proclamation.

He believed that ending slavery would result in "midnight Conflagrations of our houses and the butchery of our wives and children," a classic white supremacist fantasy.

To prevent these imagined attacks, Garland advised moving all enslaved men aged between 15 and 60 into holding areas "far in the interior" of the state "where they may be guarded by comparatively few soldiers, & if necessary marched out of the reach of Lincoln's troopes."

[1][2][4] He was buried alongside Bishops McTyeire, Joshua Soule, and William McKendree in a fenced grave in the Vanderbilt University Divinity Cemetery.