Today off the coast of France the Confederate’s prize naval warship, the CSS Alabama, is sunk by the USS Kearsarge in the Battle of Cherbourg. With the sinking of the Alabama, what little hope the Confederacy had left on the high seas is gone, as virtually the entire Southern coast is effectively blockaded by the…
In the midst of secession fever in January 1861, the (white) First Baptist Church of Nashville, Tennessee established a “Second Colored Baptist Mission” in Edgefield, east of Nashville’s downtown, on Fatherland Street. The mission church was supervised by a white committee and pastored by George Dardis, a free black preacher. Nelson G. Merry, free black…
Peter Barrow was born a slave near Petersburg, Virginia in 1840. As a child he was taken to a plantation in Alabama. Earlier this year, perhaps when Union naval and army forces invaded and gained control over the Mobile Bay area in February, Barrow, now a young man, managed to escape. Fleeing to Vicksburg, this…