South Carolina Confederate Flag
In the state where southern treason against the United States began, South Carolina’s Southern Baptists convene in Spartanburg for the second day of their annual meeting.
Most white southerners, however, consider the rebellion not as treason, but rather as the proper response of slaveholding states to the perceived hostility of non-slaveholding states and northern abolitionists at large. The Baptist delegates today assembled, mostly wealthy slaveholders, are in agreement. Despite the financial blow to foreign missions caused by the war, the South’s war against the North is righteous and divinely-mandated, they feel certain. Victory at Manassas merely confirms God’s hand upon the southern cause.
Unanimously, they pass a resolution endorsing the Confederacy and affirming God’s direction and blessing upon the new nation:
Resolved, That, in the present peculiar condition of our political affairs, it becomes us thus to assure our beloved country of our sympathies, prayers and thanksgiving on her behalf; that so far as we can understand the remarkable openings and guidance of Divine Providence, we have but received, in almost every instance, the merciful blessing of our God, as approbation upon the plans our State and Southern Confederacy have deemed it best to adopt; that now, especially, in the unprecedented, vindictive and deadly strife against us, to which those who but recently spoke of us as brethren are urging one another, we can but rejoice in the oneness of our brethren of this State in prayer and effort to defend our homes, our liberties and our Churches, and encourage them to be assured that, as hitherto, putting our faith in God, though each of us may have much to bear, yet the rod will not finally rest upon us, but that in this most unrighteous and most wicked attack upon our otherwise peaceful homes, the wickedness of the wicked will return on their own heads.
Source: “Minutes of the Forty-first Anniversary of the State Convention of the Baptist Denomination in S. C., Held at Spartanburg, July 26th-28th, 1861″ (link)
