Joseph S. Baker, a prominent Southern Baptist minister serving in Thomasville, Georgia, offers his perspective on the state of the Confederacy in a letter printed in the Christian Index: ….We need religious papers more now than ever. The war is not only laying waste our country; it is desolating Zion. From every quarter of the…
With the South’s race-based culture, social structures and economy at stake in what has become a lingering war, white Southern thinkers, politicians, writers and elites spend no little energy philosophically defending Southern life and speculating about the future. Defeat, at least in public discourse, is an impossible outcome of the war, for it would signal…
A number of Baptist newspapers existed during the Civil War era, both North and South. Few were in business for the duration of the war, however. Among Baptists, denominational-specific newspapers in the South were seemingly somewhat more common than in the North by the time of the war. Some earlier Northern Baptist newspapers, by the…