In Hopkins, South Carolina the white Beulah Baptist Church today ordains William Weston Adams to the ministry. Adams is a former slave, one of three who are ordained in the post-war months of 1865 by Beulah’s pastor, James Lawrence Reynolds. Like many Baptist churches in South Carolina, the Beulah Baptist Church has far more black…
During the antebellum and Civil War years most, but not all, Southern Baptist ministers harbored loyalties for the Confederacy. Of those who were Unionists, sympathies with the Union remained buried, or at least subdued. James Ryland Kendrick is one such example. Born in Poultney, Virginia in 1821, he graduated from Hamilton Seminary (New York) and…
Today’s edition of Harper’s Weekly summarizes South Carolina’s Constitutional Convention, which took place in the First Baptist Church of Columbia, the same site of the opening of the 1860 South Carolina Secession Convention: The South Carolina State Convention was convened in the Baptist Church at Columbia at noon September 13. The Convention consisted of 124…